The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Natural Law
Downloads
Published
Versions
- 2026-01-28 (2)
- 2025-12-19 (1)
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors retain all rights to the original work without any restrictions.
The issues are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) which allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the conditions that the creator is appropriately credited and that any derivative work is made available under “the same, similar or a compatible license”.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63277/gsc.v50i.4674Keywords:
Natural law, Kelsen, human rights, evidence, arts, emotionAbstract
The interpretation of past institutions depends on the political moment of interpretation and on methodological presuppositions linked to theoretical options. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen has been interpreted, depending on the circumstances, sometimes as a proclamation of natural law without legal consequences, sometimes as the production of a standard of constitutional value. These differences are largely due to circumstances (the development of the control of the constitutionality of laws), but largely to a certain conception of natural law which would only have the function of serving as a criterion of validity of positive law. We will attempt to show that the 1789 declaration is based on another conception of natural law, which has a different function: to provide justification for an authority whose power does not derive from a positive norm. This natural law is far from having disappeared from modern legal systems.
