Expanding Who Counts as a Citizen

The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) said rights came from reason and nature, not birth or rank. That sounded universal, but 'man' in practice meant propertying-owning men. Women couldn't vote or hold office. Poor men without property were 'passive citizens' who had rights to protection but not full political rights. Enslaved people in French colonies like Saint-Domingue weren't citizens at all. The gap between the language of universal rights and the reality of a narrow citizenry wasn't an oversight; it reflected who held power and who the revolutionaries actually pictured as capable of reason and self-rule.

The circle still moved outward step by step, often pushed by the excluded rather than granted from above. In 1789 citizenship belonged to propertied men. By 1792-1794, under pressure from popular uprisings and the Haitian Revolution, France extended voting rights to all men and abolished slavery in its colonies. By 1848, after revolution swept Europe, France declared universal manhood suffrage, dropping the property requirement for good. Women still waited: Olympe de Gouges wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791, mirroring the men's document almost line for line, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that if reason justified rights for men, it gave no principled reason to deny them to women.

This pattern repeats far beyond France. Each group left out of 'the rights of man' later borrowed the same reasoning to demand inclusion: universal suffrage movements, abolitionists, and twentieth-century civil rights and women's suffrage campaigns all argued that declared principles of equality and reason applied to them too. The expanding circle of 5.1 sets up the rest of Unit 5, where revolutions in Haiti, Latin America, and elsewhere test whether 'liberty, equality, fraternity' could include enslaved people and colonized populations.