declaration of the rights of woman and female citizen

Williams’s almost uncritical revolutionary idealism remained until the time when The Mountain (La Montagne) was established and its terror started to dominate the Revolution. In Paris she immediately succumbed to the Federation Festival charm. As well as many foreign admirers of Revolution also Williams left her native country under the influence of French Revolution events. Helen Maria Williams was known in England as a popular English poet and romantic writer.

The French Revolution had in that time fundamental importance and affected by different intensity also ideological developments in other European countries including the United Kingdom. This article will first deal with the primary importance of individual rights in the European Union, it will then explore the origins of such ideals, mainly in 17 th-century Northern Europe, before addressing the transmission and development of those ideals to the rest of Europe in the 18 th century.

This article will often refer to Jonathan Israel's theory, developed in his essay Radical Enlightenment and will try to show that the influence of this pioneering thought was so far-reaching that it was probably in the French revolutionaries' minds, notably when they wrote the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen in August 1789. Without necessarily endorsing Denis de Rougemont's view according to which Europe has in fact existed for the past twenty-eight centuries 1, one can positively assert that the European Union with its ideal of inalienable individual liberties undeniably corresponds to a specific representation of the human kind, which appeared in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, in Enlightenment Europe.

Of course the European cultural cohesion finds its deepest roots in Europe's rich antique background, made up of Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian legacies, each having contributed in the linguistic, political, philosophical and moral structures of this continent. This article offers to focus on the historical, philosophical and cultural contexts which paved the way for the political and administrative entity that the European Union has become over the last few decades.

Declaration of the rights of woman and female citizen