Megan+Howard

__**Declaration of the Rights of Man**__
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a document that the National Assembly adopted. This document showed the "basic principles of the Revolution" which were "liberty, equality, and fraterity." the equality portion stated that all men were equal and also equal in accordance to the law which allowed more people to vote and to be tried more fairly. The writers of this document based it on the English Bill of Rights, the American Declaration of Independance, the US Bill of Righs, and the ideas recorded by Enlightenment philosophes. As the Declaration of the Rights of Man was based off of the above documents, many of the rights in this Declaration were also the same as those in the documents listed above. Similarity comes into play when you look at the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of press. These same rights which can be found in the US Bill of Rights are also found in Declaration of the Rights of Man. The problem with these rights is that they didn't extend to women. A Parisian playwright wrote a declaration stating the rights of women and presented it to the National Assembly which turned it down.

When this document first came out violence in mobs increased as they tried to protect the power of the monarchy which the National Assembly worked to decline. At this point the National Assembly was controlled by radicals, people who wanted extreme change, which elected a new legislature called the National Convention which abolished the monarcy and said that France was a republic.