In late December 1789, the French National Assembly confronted the practical implications of its abstract Declaration of Rights. On December 21, Pierre Brunet de Latuque raised the issue of voting rights for non-Catholics, primarily Protestants. Two days later, Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre expanded the question to include Jewish people, actors, and executioners, arguing that neither religious belief nor profession should exclude anyone from political participation. These debates revealed a tendency for rights claims to expand outward: Once one group’s exclusion was questioned, similar groups inevitably came under discussion.

The text compares this pattern to John Adams’s 1776 fears that extending suffrage to propertyless men would lead to demands from women and children. Both France and the United States had proclaimed universal rights while maintaining property qualifications, religious tests, and exclusions based on race and sex. In October 1789, French deputies established voting requirements based on age, residency, and tax payment, but said nothing explicit about religion, race, or sex.

On December 24, 1789, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to grant political rights to Protestants and all professions but postponed the question of Jewish rights. This marked a dramatic reversal for Protestants, who, before the 1787 Edict of Toleration, had been unable to legally practice their religion or pass on property. The transformation occurred through both principle and practice: The Declaration’s abstract universalism made exclusions harder to justify, while Protestant participation in local and national politics demonstrated their civic capacity. Even the conservative cleric abbé Jean Maury supported Protestant rights while attempting to exclude Jewish people from the discussion.

Jewish rights proved more contentious. France’s approximately 40,000 Jewish people were legally organized into separate communities with restricted professions and residences. In January 1790, Spanish and Portuguese Jews from southern France petitioned the Assembly, claiming that they already exercised political rights in cities like Bordeaux. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord endorsed their petition as merely recognizing existing practice. Despite fierce opposition from Alsatian deputies who argued that exceptions would inevitably expand, the Assembly granted rights to Portuguese, Spanish, and Avignonese Jewish communities. On September 27, 1791, the Assembly granted equal rights to all Jewish people on the principle that they must renounce corporate privileges to become individual French citizens.

The extension of rights to enslaved people and free people of color demonstrated even more forcefully what the text calls the revolutionary logic of rights. The French Society of the Friends of Blacks, whose members included prominent figures like abbé Henri Grégoire, campaigned against colonial racism. Yet on March 8, 1790, the Assembly excluded the colonies from the Declaration, with spokesman Antoine Barnave arguing that universal principles were unsuitable for colonial conditions. The decree also criminalized incitement to unrest in the colonies.

Rights discourse nonetheless spread through the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Vincent Ogé, representing free people of color, unsuccessfully sought an alliance with white planters. When his appeals to both planters and the Friends of Blacks failed, he led a revolt in the fall of 1790 and was broken on the wheel. In May 1791, the Assembly granted political rights to free men of color born of free parents. A massive revolt among enslaved people erupted in August 1791, involving tens of thousands and featuring widespread destruction. The Assembly rescinded the May decree but then passed more generous legislation in April 1792.

Deputy Armand-Guy Kersaint argued that the rights of man were fundamentally incompatible with slavery and that granting rights to free people of color was necessary to preserve French control. By August 1793, with French authority collapsing amid war with Britain and Spain, commissioners in Saint-Domingue began offering emancipation to enslaved people who fought for France, then to their families, and finally to entire provinces. Their decree opened with Article 1 of the Declaration of Rights. The formerly enslaved Toussaint Louverture adopted the language of liberty and equality in rallying insurgents. In February 1794, the Assembly voted to abolish slavery in all colonies and declared all residents French citizens with equal rights.

The decision resulted from military necessity, but the ideology of rights made maintaining slavery increasingly untenable. Colonial authorities had privately urged suppressing any mention of liberty. Napoleon sent an army in 1802 to capture Louverture and restore slavery. Though Louverture died in a French prison, eulogized by British Romantic poet William Wordsworth, Napoleon’s forces could not reconquer Saint-Domingue, which became the independent nation of Haiti. Slavery was not definitively abolished in French colonies until 1848. For comparison, Britain abolished slavery in 1833, while the United States did not do so until the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Women’s rights ranked lowest on the conceivability scale of rights claims. Unlike other excluded groups, women had not been the subject of pre-revolutionary debates, government commissions, or advocacy organizations. Women were not persecuted minorities seeking recognition of their identity but constituted half the population. In July 1790, however, Condorcet published an editorial arguing that since women were reasoning beings capable of acquiring moral ideas, they necessarily possessed equal rights with men. He explicitly stated that voting against anyone’s rights based on religion, color, or sex meant abjuring one’s own rights.

In September 1791, Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, which directly inverted the official declaration’s language by asserting women’s equality with men from birth. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, linking women’s emancipation to the overthrow of all social hierarchies. Both writers faced public vilification, and de Gouges was guillotined as an unnatural counterrevolutionary.

Between 1791 and 1793, women established political clubs in Paris and at least 50 provincial towns. In April 1793, one deputy argued at length for women’s political rights, explicitly comparing sexual prejudice to racial prejudice. The Convention rejected his position and, in October 1793, voted to suppress all women’s political clubs, declaring that women lacked the necessary qualities for governing and should confine themselves to domestic duties.

Despite this rejection of political rights, women gained significant civil rights. In 1792, they won equal inheritance with brothers and the right to divorce on the same grounds as men. Divorce had never been legal under French law; the restored monarchy abolished it in 1816, and it was not reinstated until 1884. Women immediately exercised their new civil rights through publishing and lawsuits. In 1800, Constance Pipelet published a review arguing that the revolutionary logic of rights applied to women and that, as education spread, women’s merit would be recognized. Though she stopped short of demanding political rights, she demonstrated that the promise of rights, once articulated, continued to shape discussion and expectation.