The Bastille Fortress and its capture, the famous revolutionary song "Marseillaise", the instrument of death and the furniture of the guillotine of justice, the Jacobin club, terror, political repression - this is what most often comes to mind when it comes to the Great French Revolution.
But the events of that turbulent era are by no means reduced to bloody episodes alone and to an endless series of internal and external wars. Otherwise, what is the greatness of this revolution? And it lies in the fact that for the first time in history an attempt was made to put into practice ideas that had been considered absolutely utopian for centuries.
In the most concise form, the essence of these ideas is formulated in the immortal motto of the revolution “equality, fraternity and freedom”, and in a more expanded form they have forever entered the history of the world in such a document as the Declaration of Human Rights.
During the period of the Great Revolution, several documents with a similar name were published in France . For example, the first of them is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, adopted by the Constituent Assembly (the so-called revolutionary parliament), article No. 1 proclaimed that people are free from birth and have equal rights.
The second article spoke about the preservation of natural human rights as the main goal of any political union, and the essence of the rights themselves was freedom, the availability of property, the absence of danger to life and the possibility of resistance to oppression.
Further it was said that today it looks absolutely natural, but then it seemed truly revolutionary - about the equality of all, without regard to social status, before the law, on personal freedom, freedom of conscience, speech and press. Economic and financial mechanisms were not circumvented - the declaration of human rights declared property “indestructible and sacred right”, and also established an even distribution of tax payments among all citizens, the procedure for their collection and supervision of their use.
A number of articles proclaimed many new, much more progressive legal norms - on the observance of the rule of law, on the procedure for legal proceedings, and so on. Actual today are the provisions of the 15th article on the right of citizens to require a report from each official.
Of course, proclaimed literally in the first weeks of the revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights had a number of significant shortcomings. They were to some extent eliminated in its subsequent edition. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793 was supplemented by a number of social freedoms: the right to petition, gather, and even to resist the government in case it violates the legitimate interests of the people.
The duty of society to take care of poor and disabled citizens was emphasized, and the promotion of the formation of the broadest sections of the population was also mentioned.
More than two centuries have passed since the creation of these historical documents, but to this day the Declaration of Human Rights remains one of the most remarkable and most important creations of human thought regulating the rights and obligations of all members of a truly democratic society.