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11 - The Image of Rights in the French Revolution

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Adam Lebovitz
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter calls attention to the dream world of aesthetic representations that almost immediately engulfed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as its 1793 successor. These representations played an important political role, notably by legitimating and disseminating the foundations of the new regime. This visual language, widely viewed as more popular and (after 1792) republican, also influenced the meaning of the Declaration, by emphasizing both its universal applicability to all (including, eventually, enslaved) peoples, and its “lethality” for both internal enemies and foreign tyrants.

Keywords

universal rightsdroits de l’hommecoloniesSaint-DomingueFrench RevolutionabolitionAnacharsis ClootsCommittee of Public Safetypolitical prints
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 260 - 296
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Abramowicz, L., and Alcouffe, D. (eds.), La Révolution française et l’Europe: 1789–1799: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 16 mars–26 juin 1989, 3 vols. (Paris, Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989).Google Scholar
Agulhon, M., Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, [1979] 1981).Google Scholar
Agulhon, M., and Bordes, P. (eds.), Droits de l’homme & conquête des libertés (Vizille, Musée de la Révolution Française, 1986).Google Scholar
Arrizoli-Clémentel, P., Bordes, P., and Régis, M. (eds.), Aux armes & aux arts! Les Arts de la Révolution, 1789–1799 (A. Biro, Paris, 1988).Google Scholar
Huet, M.-H., Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, L., Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Jourdan, A., Les Monuments de la Révolution, 1770–1804 (Paris, Honoré Champion, 1997).Google Scholar
Kohle, H., and Reichardt, R., Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-century France (London, Reaktion Books, 2008).Google Scholar
Martin, J.-C. (ed.), La Révolution à l’œuvre: Perspectives actuelles dans l’histoire de la Révolution française (Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, M. Ashburn, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Ozouf, M., Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, [1976] 1988).Google Scholar
Schechter, R., A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scholz, N., and Schröer, C. (eds.), Répresentation et pouvoir: La Politique symbolique en France (1789–1850) (Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schröer, C., Republik im Experiment. Symbolische Politik im revolutionären Frankreich 1792–1799 (Vienna, Böhlau Verlag, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starobinski, J., 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. B. Bray (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, [1973] 1982).Google Scholar
Vovelle, M. (ed.), Les Images de la Révolution française: Actes du colloque des 25–26–27 oct. 1985 tenu en Sorbonne (Paris, Sorbonne, 1988).Google Scholar

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