The French Idea of FreedomThe Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 is the French Revolutions best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of