The Bastille and its capture, the famous revolutionary song "La Marseillaise", the instrument of death and the furniture of justice, the guillotine, the Jacobin club, terror, political repression - this is what most often comes to mind when it comes to the French Revolution.
But the events of that turbulent era are by no means reduced to mere bloody episodes and to an endless series of internal and external wars. Otherwise, what is the greatness of this revolution? And it is that for the first time in history an attempt was made in practice to put into practice ideas that had been considered absolutely utopian for centuries.
In their 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 detailed form they entered world history forever in such a document as the Declaration of Human Rights.
During the Great Revolution in France, several documents with a similar title were published. For example,the first of these 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 talked 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 possession of property, the absence of danger to life and the possibility of resistance to oppression.
Then it was said that today it looks absolutely natural, but then it seemed truly revolutionary - about the equality of all, without regard to class, before the law, about individual freedom, freedom of conscience, speech and the press. Economic and financial mechanisms were not bypassed - the Declaration of Human Rights declared property "an inviolable 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 order of justice, and so on. The provisions of the 15th article on the right of citizens to demand an account from each official are relevant even today.
Of course, proclaimed literally in the first weeks of the revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man had a number of significant shortcomings. They were eliminated to some extent in its subsequent edition. Declaration of rightsman and citizen of 1793 was supplemented by a number of social freedoms: the right to petition, assemble, and even to resist the government in case it violates the legitimate interests of the people.
Society's obligation to care for the poor and the disabled was emphasized, and promotion of education for the broadest segments of the population was emphasized.
More than two centuries have passed since the creation of these historical documents, but even today the Declaration of Human Rights remains one of the most remarkable and important creations of human thought, regulating the rights and obligations of all members of a truly democratic society.
