The 250th Anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: An article by François-Henri Briard and Stéphane Bonichot

The United States Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, served as the conceptual and philosophical foundation for the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In their article published in La Nouvelle Revue Politique, the partners of Briard, Bonichot & Associés — attorneys at the Council of State and the Court of Cassation — trace the shared history of these two foundational texts of Western modernity.

When America Invented Human Rights

Drafted in just seventeen days by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Continental Congress of the thirteen rebellious colonies against the British Crown, the United States Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, is one of the foundational texts of Western modernity. It was the first successful political translation of the theories of natural law and the social contract — shaped by John Locke and reimagined by the French Enlightenment philosophers — and it also served as the conceptual framework for the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Its principal author, the staunch Francophile Thomas Jefferson, was only 33 years old when the Congress of Philadelphia invited him to join John Adams, the great Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston on the “Committee of Five” tasked with drafting the first version of the Declaration. A young lawyer steeped in classical culture, an avid reader, and a Virginian plantation owner, Jefferson embodied the ideal of the Southern patrician and the “Renaissance man.” His profile balanced that of Adams, the Massachusetts radical and leader of the independence movement. In a remarkable twist of history, both men died on the same day — July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration they helped create.

Jefferson’s text is a scathing indictment of the King of Great Britain, whose tyranny had broken the social contract and convinced the colonists to free themselves from their duty of obedience: “Just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed.” The 1776 Declaration truly marked a revolution. It overturned the old European theory of absolute obedience to monarchs, replacing it with a political philosophy of liberty and popular sovereignty rooted in natural rights, from which human institutions would flow.

The primacy of inalienable rights is solemnly affirmed in the Declaration’s most famous passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Here, Jefferson makes a fundamental shift from Locke’s original triad — “life, liberty, and property” — replacing “property” with “the pursuit of Happiness.” Far from a hedonistic ideal, this concept reflected the Founding Fathers’ ethical vision: happiness as the ability to live in accordance with reason, conscience, and civic virtue. The phrase sealed the shift from a political order based on privilege and submission to one founded on moral autonomy and responsibility.

Nourished by the spirit of the Founding Fathers and the first constitutional framers, these texts remain a living body of law, continually reinterpreted by the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and the nine members of France’s Constitutional Council to define new boundaries and safeguards for our fundamental rights and freedoms.

Read the full article at the following link: https://nouvellerevuepolitique.fr/me-francois-henri-briard-et-me-stephane-bonichot-4-juillet-1776-quand-lamerique-inventa-les-droits-de-lhomme/