Liberty in France and Britain, 1159-1789: Restoring Human Rights

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the motto of the French Republic, encapsulates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The authors trace the history of each article in that Declaration to the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. That period saw the invention by the French-speaking Norman rulers in England of the common law based on reason and natural rights, of limited monarchy and habeas corpus; and in both France and England the replacement of trials by ordeal and battle with the right to a fair trial or due process, the disappearance of chattel slavery, and the development of the rule of law and republican government. The authors show that the ideas that the French and British held in common from that period were deployed to justify the rebellions and revolutions in the Netherlands and Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in France and the USA in the eighteenth century. That in turn led to the adoption of human rights declarations, treaties and laws in the twentieth century.
The authors trace these ideas from the Policraticus (1159) of John of Salisbury, the Englishman educated in France who dedicated his work to his patron Thomas Becket, through (among others) Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576), John Locke's Treatises on Government (c.1689), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that was widely cited in France and propounds the natural rights of mankind listed in the 1789 Declaration.