This text was drafted by French revolutionaries. The French Revolution had an ambivalent set of attitudes toward religion; use of "Supreme Being" in this text was intended to avoid a direct reference to God as conceived by Christians of the time and by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, even though many members of the self-proclaimed National Assembly were clerics.

The promised rights were liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Almost exactly a century earlier, in his famous Second Treatise of Government, English philosopher John Locke had identified preservation of life, liberty and protection of property as the reasons humans left the "state of nature" to form a "ruling power." In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson provided the memorable wording, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The famous painting at left actually dates from 1830. It is by Eugène Delacroix, and is entitled "Liberty Leading the People."

The text of the Déclaration was taken from the ABU web site (Association des bibliophiles universels) and was edited for that site by Luc Borot.