Curran on Disentangling the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

Vivian Grosswald Curran, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published Disentangling the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It is forthcoming in the Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law. Here is the abstract.

The American Declaration of Independence and Revolution are linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and its Revolution through the mutual, strong influences of the Enlightenment philosophes whom both the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionaries read. They also were linked through acquaintance and ongoing communication, with the American Declaration serving as a model for the first, but not final, draft of the French one. Both Declarations and Revolutions were to follow divergent paths through time, however, a cause for great concern in nineteenth-century France when intellectuals such as Laboulaye, Tocqueville and Taine, fearful for France’s future in yet another new régime, looked to America’s foundational documents and governmental system to uncover the secrets of America’s stability and of France’s failure to safeguard the principles of 1789. This article proposes that the answers were far less to be found in the U.S. documents or bicameral legislative structure than in a comparative, contextual examination of the two societies, their populations and their political histories. Those were the differences which led France to sink into a Reign of Terror within a few years of its Revolution and to proceed to seesaw among various forms of government thereafter, while the United States was able to enjoy a single Constitution and general political stability. The aims of each Revolution differed, as did the consequences of those differences, including how each nation perceived and dealt with freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery and the struggle for women’s equality. In France, the Revolution was intended to achieve a total rupture with the past, but France unwittingly fell prey to its past, as the absolutist tradition of the monarchy permeated its ranks in new ways, transforming egalitarianism into repression. In America, the colonists’ chief complaint had been their lack of representation in the British Parliament, not a wish to change a constitutional form of government which allowed for freedom of representation and had a king who bowed to the will of Parliament. After the American Revolution, the French looked to the new country overseas, often both idealizing and distorting it, with a view to how it could be a model for a new France. The two nations had a common point of departure in the literature of the philosophes which had deeply inspired and captured the imagination of the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionary thinkers alike. Even a written text, however, is interpretive, such that the texts themselves were a function of what they meant to their readers. Some have thought that the Founding Fathers understood Montesquieu’s intentions better than the French. This article hopes to illuminate twists and turns from a shared point of departure, and to address ongoing debates concerning their nature.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Second Amendment and European Human Rights

Stephen P. Halbrook has published Why Can’t We Be Like France? How the Right to Bear Arms Got Left Out of the Declaration of Rights and How Gun Registration Was Decreed Just in Time for the Nazi Occupation. Here is the abstract.

Should the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution be watered down to protect little if any right of the people to keep and bear arms according to European models? Disregarding that the United States originated in its Revolution based on that very right, recent suggestions by some Justices on the Supreme Court appear to think so. This same debate has been played out in Congress, where registration of firearms, supported by arguments in support of European models, have been rejected. This article counsels “be careful what you wish for,” using the experiences of France as the paradigm.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.