We came to a church, where a podium had been set up.… [After] a prayer calling upon Heaven to bestow its blessing on the United States…a

Two Declarations | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-27 21:30:06

We came to a church, where a podium had been set up.… [After] a prayer calling upon Heaven to bestow its blessing on the United States…a young man then went to the podium and began the customary reading of the déclaration des droits . This was truly a beautiful sight.... In this reading of the promises of independence, which have been so well kept; in this remembrance by an entire people of their nation’s inception; in this union of the present generation with a generation that has passed away…there was something deeply felt and truly grand.

So observed Alexis de Tocqueville on July 4, 1831, in a letter from Albany, New York, on his tour of the young nation that would result in the classic two-volume study, Democracy in America. Though referring to the American Declaration of Independence, Tocqueville used the name of another document with which he was more familiar—the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed by the French National Assembly in 1789 when it established the short-lived constitutional monarchy. The revolutionaries soon dissolved that arrangement and sent the ill-starred Louis XVI to the scaffold, but the document endured, in the words of the great French historian Jules Michelet, as “the credo of the new age.”

Of course, it is possible that Tocqueville was referring to yet a third document, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, penned by George Mason in June of 1776. Proclaiming that all men are by nature equally free, possess inherent rights, and are entitled to the enjoyment of life and liberty, it also stipulated that all power derives from the people—formulations that directly influenced Thomas Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence. But the likelihood that the twenty-five-year-old Tocqueville was alluding to Mason’s document is slim. He knew virtually nothing about American history, his English was limited, and he was learning on the go. Only after leaving Albany, did he meet the New York state legislator John Spencer, who, having helped revise his own state’s constitution, gave the inquiring Frenchman his first lesson on US constitutional matters.