Michael Wood on the evolution and erosion of universal human rights
I’ve just returned from a trip to Versailles. On a bitterly cold, end-of-winter afternoon, the great symbol of French monarchy, gilded anew for the 2024 Olympics, gleamed against a steel-blue sky. The crowds were huge: it’s one of the biggest tourist draws in France after Disneyland – which is somehow fitting, for Versailles is a fairytale palace, too.
I walked the gardens, browsed the bookshop (stacked with books on Marie Antoinette, of course) and then strolled back through the town to the station. On the way, there was a surprise. In a side street, display boards along an old wall told the story of the National Assembly of the summer of 1789 – the very moment of revolution.
Down a lane, a faded wooden sign over a crumbling gateway marked the site of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, where the scenery, costumes, instruments and props used in royal entertainments were stored; it’s now a centre of baroque music. Inside was a tree-lined courtyard and a rain-filled hollow marking the oval outline of the temporary auditorium where the National Assembly met. Here, affronted by the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and powerful, the representatives of the people voted to “abolish privilege” and create a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
The Rights of Man! Such were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the great 18th-century movement towards rational thought, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, human autonomy, secularism and democracy. That declaration in 1789 came hot on the heels of the American Revolution, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. That, in turn, was inspired by English precedent: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689.
These ideals have been upheld by western thinkers ever since, despite the horrendous deeds of imperialists across the world in the intervening time, colonising and enslaving other cultures, and fighting catastrophic internecine wars. It was the horrors of the Second World War that inspired the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, signed by all except Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Bloc.
Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat. Liberal humanism, we are told, has had its day. In international affairs the rules-based order is gone. From Greenland to Iran there are no constraints on state action save self-interest. The same goes for internal governance. In the US, we’re seeing the tearing-up of the assumptions of American democracy, cherished since 1776. Hillary Clinton has said of President Trump: “He has betrayed the west, he’s betrayed human values… [and] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Universal? Given the deeds of western colonialism over the past couple of centuries, it is not surprising that some have denied that they are. China, for example, now rejects Enlightenment ideas as non-Chinese. Yet many European observers in the 18th century saw the Qing state as a kind of Enlightenment society, with an (admittedly harsh) legal code, charitable institutions, scientific and literary clubs, poetry circles and even a measure of public opinion.
Common human values in the Confucian and European traditions are evident in, for example, the beginnings of a human rights discourse in 17th and 18th-century China, and even discussion of the principle of the rule of law. As Huang Zongxi wrote in 1661, “You cannot have the rule of man without the rule of law.” Those 18th-century French intellectuals would have agreed. (China, incidentally, was one of the original signatories to the UN Declaration, and its constitution guarantees human rights, including of speech and religion – but only so far as they do not endanger the state. In China, the state has always come first.)
But the ideals of the Enlightenment were European. Of course, they weren’t all created in the 18th century. Some go back to classical Greece and Rome, and some to the early medieval world of the great Carolingian thinkers; all three European renaissances played their part. The debate on universal human rights began in earnest in Europe in the mid-16th century. So these ideas are part of the European way of seeing the world – but they are surely also universal.
On the train back into Paris, thinking on our troubled times, I was struck by the contrasts of Versailles. We walk the gilded halls of the king-emperor, but in the rain-filled hollow on the way to the station, history is still readable – the struggles of real people to make the real world a better place.
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Authors
Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester