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Extract from Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, painted by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier
RIGHTS OF MAN AND the CITIZEN 1789
The Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789) is a document profoundly influenced by the American Revolution, and which provides an important contrast to the American Bill of Rights. This project will offer both a comparative perspective on the way in which fundamental rights were debated on each side of the Atlantic in 1789 and also an opportunity to formally evaluate the divergent approach to data-modelling and visualization that we have taken to the same texts.
We have partially completed a model of the work of the Assemblée nationale constituante as part of a collaboration with the Maison Française d’Oxford and academics and librarians at Stanford University. Like the 1787 Constitutional Convention in America, the journals of the French National Conventions during the Revolutionary period are extant and printed, and describe a formal parliamentary procedure of exactly the kind that our platform targets. As far as we know they have never been translated in to English, and they suffer from all of the same problems that we identified in the American records and that make Quill worthwhile — without the assistance of a computer to reconstruct the state of the texts under discussion, they are extremely hard to follow. Unlike the American records, the corpus of material is much, much larger.
Putting a model of the work of these assemblies online will open up new avenues for research (and, indeed, for comparative work on France and America in this period); it would also provide an excellent opportunity to provide translations, and we could look at what technologies we could build into our platform to assist with that process. Our database is already capable of storing parallel language texts if required.
The initial pilot for this project was conducted by three French interns recruited by the Maison Française in 2018. In 2020 we hosted a further intern recruited by the Maison Française, Carmen Malignon. We are also working with the Maison Française d’Oxford to try to secure funding for a PhD studentship to support a major research project in this area.