Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre Paperback – 22 Sep 2015 by Jonathan Israel ( Princeton University Press)

This is an extraordinary history of the great French revolution.

Jonathan Israel writes of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, “For the first time in history, equality, individual liberty, the right to equal protection by the state, and freedom of thought and expression were enshrined as basic principles declared inherent in all just and rational societies. The bedrock of democratic modernity was in place. The rights the French people adopted for themselves were proclaimed universal rights belonging equally to all of whatever nation, station, faith, or ethnicity.” To nobody’s surprise, Pope Pius VI condemned the Declaration in March 1790.

On 4 August 1789, the French National Assembly proclaimed the feudal regime at an end, a staggering change in a Europe dominated by the nobility for centuries. The Assembly “agreed to abolish serfdom and feudal dues, and suppress all provincial privileges forever … Among the privileges abolished outright were favored access to military, diplomatic and civil posts, hunting ‘rights’, and special status before the law. For the first time in recorded history, all citizens, without distinction of birth, became eligible for all posts, positions, and dignities. The entire system of status, exemptions, and special fiscal privileges, including ecclesiastical immunities, ended.”

These political advances flowed from the general intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment: “the great revolutionary principles and enactments – abolition of aristocracy and eventually the use of all aristocratic titles, equality before the law, democracy, press freedom, equality of all cults and their separation from the state, the Rights of Man (1789), civil divorce (1792), the suppression of monarchy (1792), and the abolition of slavery (1794) – were all manifestly saturated in Enlightenment language, debates, and philosophical categories.”

In 1792, “universal male suffrage was proclaimed the fundamental principle of the Revolution. For the first time anywhere in the modern transatlantic world, democracy was adopted as the basis of political legitimacy, a great landmark.”

There could be no general advance without particular advances. So, “an argued, developed, politically organized feminism that conquered a narrow but real enclave in the public sphere was forged for the first time in human history.” In September 1793 Jean-Baptiste Belley, a freed slave, became the first black deputy in the French National Assembly, another landmark in world history. The Assembly passed the world’s first general edict of slave emancipation on 4 February 1794.