The French Revolution Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The French Revolution - Essay Example They also cancelled all the special privileges of the many nobles and clergymen they felt were clogging up the system. They then looked at what the Americans had done with their Declaration of Independence from the U.K. in which they had tried to give equal rights to everyone. The French basically copies a lot of this and the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This didn’t have any legal effect, but it was supposed to guide the government in making a new constitution. In the new document, all citizens are supposed to be guaranteed the rights of â€Å"liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.† The Declaration argues that the peoples’ need for laws comes from the fact that â€Å"...the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights.† So the declaration sees law as a kind of â€Å"expression of the general will,† intending to promote equality of rights and to stop â€Å"actions harmful to society.† This was popular with many groups of people who had been disenfranchised under the old system and were looking for a big change which would give them more political power and reduce their tax rate. Previously the nobles had all the power and all the money; people were fed up and wanted things to be more equal. They felt they were a group that could no longer be trampled on by the upper classes, and that they h ad individual rights and should be able to be active French citizens. Two branches of politics can be seen to come out of this period. In the first—the American model—we can see people respecting individual rights and power devolved from government. In the second model we can see a sort of radicalism that destroys the old order and replaces it with a new radical order that wants everyone to be completely equal. This is the basis and foundation of Communism—many of whose