and processes designed to protect human rights. It speaks of the kingdom's division and citizens' status; the form and role of the National Legislative Assembly; elections; the monarch, his ministers, and the royal family; how legislative power is to be exercised; the relationship between the legislature and the monarch; royal power; the judiciary system; public force and taxes; and foreign relations. The Declaration contains none of these administrative considerations.

The respective Declarations represent in miniature the trajectory of the French Revolution, its hopes, its dreams, its aspirations, its ever-changing priorities, its shifting power relations, its self-image. In examining the precise details of each Declaration we can trace the Revolution's various contortions, allowing us to gauge the state of French national politics at any one time.

The provisions of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were relatively broad in nature. This was so the Declaration could command the widest possible support among those committed to change. The articles contained in the 1789 Declaration were formal in nature, setting out basic rights that could be brought into effect in a number of ways.

Though radical in some respects, the Declaration of 1789 was generally quite a conservative document. For instance, it made a controversial distinction between active and passive citizens. The former were property-owning men over the age of 25 who paid taxes. Only these men could vote. The distinction between active and passive citizens was a source of great tension between the classes. Many now deemed to be nothing more than passive citizens had strongly supported the Revolution, believing that they would now be able to participate in a political process that would promote its interests. The exclusionary nature of the 1789 Declaration forced many Frenchmen and women to conclude that the only way they could agitate for change was outside the system, through protests and acts of violence.

By 1793, France was a Republic, and as such the Revolution needed a new statement of its underlying principles. The 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was much more radical than its predecessor, much more egalitarian. The rights it set out were not simply formal, but substantive. For instance, the first article states that men are not just equal before the law; they're equal by nature too. This represents something of a departure from the previous Declaration, whose understanding of equality was formal and legalistic--all men are equal under the law, but as humans they are profoundly unequal.

In keeping with its spirit of radical egalitarianism, the 1793 Declaration stated that everyone has the right to work and that society has a duty to provide it to those who need it. These so-called second generation rights--social, welfare and economic rights--enabled the central authorities to enact radical policies that would expand the role of government in the running of the economy and the provision of public goods. If the 1789 Declaration had expressed a moderately liberal constitutionalism, not dissimilar to that of the American colonists, the 1793 document had a distinctively quasi-socialist ring to it.

By 1795, the radical phase of the Revolution was over. The Jacobins has been toppled from power, and most of its leaders such as Robespierre packed off to the guillotine. In the place of the feared Committee of Public Safety came the Directory, the new government of France. The Directory was anxious, more than anything else, to restore order and stability to a nation ravaged by the Terror and the radical economic and social experiments of the Jacobins. To that end, the men of the Directory devised a new Constitution of which the preamble was the latest Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Crucially, the new Declaration explicitly links rights with duties. Indeed, the document expressly sets out a number of duties incumbent upon the citizen. The overall tenor is deeply conservative, reflecting a general desire for order among the population as a whole. It's notable that the first article refers to the rights of liberty, fraternity, equality (which is now once again conceived in purely legal, formal terms) and property. Article I is an unequivocal statement that the period of radical government expansion is over. The protection of property must once more become a high priority.

All hint of radicalism from the 1793 Declaration has been systematically expunged. No longer are there any references to substantive economic and social rights such as the right to work or the right to public assistance. In its stead is presented the social vision of men of the haute bourgeoisie, the men of property whose interests were now represented by the Directory. The conservatism of the 1795 document is encapuslated most neatly in Article IV of the Declaration of Duties:

No one is a good citizen unless he is a good son, good father, good brother, good friend, good husband.

The exclusion of women had been a systematic feature of public life since 1789, but the Declaration of 1795, with its formal duties and idealized vision of the patriarchal family, explicitly confirms this underlying principle, one common to all three Declarations.