July 14, Paris: Flashpoint of the French Revolution. The storming of the medieval fortress–prison Bastille, symbol of royal French authority in the center of Paris. 25 Royal French troops die. All seven of the Bastille’s prisoners “liberated.”
August 26: Declaration of the Rights of Man
• Defines a single set of universal (valid in all times and places) individual and collective “rights”
• Eliminates the special rights of the nobility and clergy
• “All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction, other than that of their virtues and of their talents”
• Does not address status of women, slaves
• Does not include the Jews, either, who only gain “emancipation” 15 years later via the Napoleonic Code (1804), which included Emancipation of the Jews in Napoleonic France and within its sphere–of–influence. French Jews were guaranteed full civil rights under the Code.
France remains anti–Semitic right through the Nazi conquest 150 years later. But in 2008, two hundred and twenty years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, France finds itself with both a President and Foreign Minister with significant Jewish blood coursing through their veins. So the country is perhaps, at last, 150 years later, "making progress."