Abstract
" Men are born and remain free and equal in rights ". Could there be a more universal formulation of modern values ? The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the French National Assembly onAugust 26 1789, is generally regarded as the apotheosis of Enlightenment universalism.
We shall see, however, that this is perhaps an optical illusion, which overlooks the political issues at stake in the first months of the Revolution.
To understand what was at stake in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it is useful to go back upstream, to the 18th century debates on human rights, not only among the theorists of natural law, but also, as the historian Lynn Hunt has proposed, to the heart of the sentimental culture of the Enlightenment. Then, by studying the debates of the summer of 1789, we discover that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is caught, from the outset, in a contradiction between the affirmation of natural, and therefore universal, rights and the construction of national sovereignty. In the words of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the deputies " hallucinated humanity in the nation ". Not without lasting consequences for the tensions inherent in human rights in a world ofnation-states, as diagnosed by Hannah Arendt after the Second World War.
