Summer project with the Maison française

Manuscript of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen superimposed with Quill icons

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. By including it in the Quill portfolio, we will be able to offer a comparative perspective on the way in which fundamental rights were debated on each side of the Atlantic in 1789.  

Like the 1787 Constitutional Convention in America, the journals of the French National Conventions during the Revolutionary period are extant and printed, although the corpus of material is much, much larger.  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.  

We are pleased to have been able to collaborate with the Maison française d’Oxford in this project. Interns recruited by the Maison began modelling the work of the Assemblée nationale constituante as part of a collaboration with the Maison Française d’Oxford in 2018.  A further team of interns is working on the material this summer and we hope to be able to publish the pilot project, which focuses just on the writing of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, later this summer. 

Putting a fuller model of the work of these assemblies online would 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. We are working with the Maison Française d’Oxford and seeking other partners to try to secure funding to support a major research project in this area.