Liberty in France and Britain, 1159–1789: Restoring Human Rights

Documents the influence Britain and France had on the ideas of liberty and human rights from the twelfth century to the French Revolution.

This book innovatively challenges the widely held perception that the idea of Human Rights and their protection was invented in the long eighteenth century. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the motto of the French Republic, encapsulates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The authors trace the history of each article in that Declaration to the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In that period French-speaking Norman rulers in England introduced the common law based on reason and natural rights, government by limited monarchy and habeas corpus; and in both France and England the right to a fair trial or due process replaced trials by ordeal and battle, chattel slavery disappeared, and the rule of law and republican government were developed.

The authors show that the ideas the French and British shared in that period were deployed to justify the rebellions and revolutions in the Netherlands and Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in France and America in the eighteenth century. These ideas inspired human rights declarations, treaties and national laws in the twentieth century.

The authors draw on the Policraticus (1159) of John of Salisbury and (among others) Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic (1576), John Locke’s Treatises on Government (c.1689), Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69).