What tyrants have always known: that the prettiest promises make the strongest chains.
Few events have seized human history by the scruff of the neck and shaken it into a new, grotesque shape quite like the French Revolution. France, of course, has been no stranger to popular rage. Over the centuries it has racked up a résumé of revolts, mutinies, barricade-theatres, and full-scale revolutions that would make even the most politically unstable nations blush. But say the words French Revolution and there’s no confusion about which blood-soaked episode we mean. The mental picture forms instantly: mobs in the streets, the Bastille under siege in 1789, and the long shadow of an upheaval that would ripple through the next century and beyond.
Together with the Great English Revolution and that other crowd-pleaser—the Russian Revolution that put the Romanov dynasty out of its misery—it stands as one of the trinity of transformative cataclysms that have defined the modern political imagination. Three very different explosions, but all alike in the way they remade their worlds, leaving behind both monuments and mass graves.
And the French Revolution was no polite, neatly scheduled affair. It wasn’t one of those three-day uprisings that get a plaque on a city wall and a paragraph in a school textbook. Historians, who can never resist squabbling over dates, still argue about where exactly to draw its starting and finishing lines. But the general consensus is that it churned and mutated for roughly a decade—sometimes simmering, sometimes boiling over, sometimes eating its own. At its ugliest, it birthed the Great Terror, during which thousands of people were relieved of their heads courtesy of the guillotine—an invention whose efficiency was matched only by its appetite.
This post first appeared in 2024, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
Yet the Revolution wasn’t all blades and blood. On August 26, 1789, the National Assembly—swollen with self-importance and drunk on the notion that history was watching—proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This was not merely a political pamphlet; it was intended as the very cornerstone of France’s new constitutional order, a gospel for the brave new world the revolutionaries believed they were birthing.
It was hardly the first attempt to distill the “fundamental rights of all humans” into a neat, universal catalogue. In fact, the United Nations likes to trace the family tree of human rights all the way back to the so-called Cyrus Cylinder. This clay relic, inscribed in cuneiform some 2,500 years ago, is touted as the original “declaration of human rights” by people who haven’t thought too hard about what those words would have meant in the sixth century BC. Spoiler: they didn’t.
Ancient Persia, like every ancient society, operated without the faintest concept of “universal personhood.” Rights were privileges, and privileges were the exclusive toys of the elite: the wealthy, the free, the politically useful. For slaves—millions of them in every great empire—the only “right” was to remain property until death.
As for Cyrus the Great, let’s skip the children’s-book version. He was not some proto-liberal who conquered with kindness and signed freedom charters between peace conferences. He was the archetypal strongman of antiquity: ruthless, ambitious, and adept at using both sword and spectacle. Like Alexander, Genghis, and every other “great” conqueror in the schoolroom pantheon, he paved his route to glory with bodies. Entire cities were wiped from the map; populations were slaughtered or chained. He was a man of his time, which is to say, a predator.
By the time he set his gaze on Babylon, Cyrus had already stitched together the largest empire the world had yet seen—stitched, of course, with sinew and blood. Babylon, though past its golden age, was still wealthy, proud, and dangerous to approach head-on. Cyrus needed not only a military victory but a psychological one—a way to break the city’s will before it could resist.
The first act of his two-part plan unfolded at Opis, just north of Babylon, where he met and annihilated the Babylonian army. This was not a tidy military engagement; it was a massacre designed to send a message to the city’s elite: resist, and your streets will run red. The second act was political theatre. Cyrus offered terms under which Babylon could keep its gods, its rituals, even some of its autonomy—so long as it accepted Persian supremacy and paid tribute.
The Cyrus Cylinder records that the Babylonians opened their gates and welcomed him as a liberator. The truth, stripped of propaganda, is that they chose submission over obliteration. The text itself was not Cyrus’s personal memoir, but a crafted communiqué from Babylon’s own high priests—men with a vested interest in surviving the change of management. It was insurance, not idealism.
When Hormuzd Rassam unearthed the cylinder in 1879, in the ruins of Marduk’s temple, the world got its first glimpse of what would later be hailed—wrongly—as humanity’s inaugural rights charter. A replica now sits at the United Nations in New York, thanks to the Shah of Iran, whose own rule was not exactly a model of human rights in action. The irony could choke a donkey.
The modern myth of the cylinder rests on a flawed 19th-century translation. In this garbled version, Cyrus magnanimously declares that no one shall be forced to live under his rule if they don’t want to, that slavery is abolished, and that religious freedom is universal. Which is all very stirring—except it’s nonsense. Ancient Persia, like every ancient empire, was built on slave labor. The concept of “personal freedom” for all was as alien to them as steam engines. As for religion, Cyrus was content to let the Babylonians keep worshipping Marduk—not because he respected pluralism, but because it kept them docile.
So the Cyrus Cylinder is not, and never was, a human rights document. It’s propaganda—much like the lofty declarations that have followed it through the ages. Even the most well-intentioned ones tend to crumble in the harsh light of reality.
Because rights, in practice, come in two very different categories. First, there are the rights that shield the individual from interference: property rights, bodily autonomy, freedom of speech. These are defensive tools—shields you can actually use when the state or anyone else tries to trespass on your life. Then there are the rights of grievance: entitlements that require someone else to provide, correct, or compensate for a perceived injustice. The first set draws a line in the sand; the second invites endless squabbles over where the line should be, who drew it, and whether it’s “fair.”
And grievances are expensive. That’s why modern human rights, in their grievance form, have become both a lucrative business model and a handy diplomatic cudgel. The world’s most repressive regimes now sit on human rights councils, wagging fingers at countries whose greatest crime is actually trying, however imperfectly, to honor the principle of liberty.
It’s a familiar circus. Think of the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials—not the judgments against genuine war criminals, but the selective moralising afterward. The same governments that cheered on the trials were often running their own colonial regimes, complete with torture chambers and massacres, all while proclaiming their devotion to “the rule of law.” Or recall the Magna Carta—celebrated as the foundation of English liberty but originally drafted to protect the privileges of a baronial elite. Noble words have always been easiest to afford when they don’t cost the ruling class anything.
Strip away the ceremony, and the point of rights should be obvious: they exist to arm the citizen against the one enemy they cannot escape—the state. Disputes between private individuals or corporations can, at least in theory, be resolved in court under the same laws. The machinery of justice is far from perfect, but it at least pretends to level the playing field. Against the state, however, the citizen is a fly before a swatter.
You can be taxed, regulated, surveilled, censored, expropriated, or imprisoned with a flick of its pen. Your only real escape is exile—if you’re even allowed to leave. That’s why real rights must bite into the state’s power. The government should wake in cold sweats at the thought of its citizens, not the other way around.
Grand declarations won’t do it. Nor will utopian schemes to sand down every social rough edge. Rights have to grow out of a specific culture, rooted in its history, tempered by the willingness to defend them. The French Revolution’s declaration had weight in France because it emerged from French soil, fertilized by French blood. Drop it into a society with no such tradition and it’s just words on imported parchment—or worse, a new set of chains disguised as liberation.
This is why international human rights bodies are mostly theatre. The UN Human Rights Council? Scrap it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Beautiful on a coffee mug, meaningless in practice. These are not laws backed by living communities with the muscle to enforce them—they are diplomatic wallpaper, hung over the cracks of a crumbling moral order.
What the world actually needs are blunt, enforceable mechanisms for keeping the state on a leash. Radical transparency should be a non-negotiable right: every cent of public money tracked and published. Term limits should be another: no more entrenched political castes feeding endlessly at the public trough.
Lofty, universalist declarations without teeth are not harmless—they are dangerous. They give cover to tyrants, provide tools for the corrupt, and lull citizens into believing that their freedoms are safe because some committee in New York said so.
If rights are to mean anything at all, they must be concrete, enforceable, and local. Not the gauzy promises of diplomats, but the hard, sharp tools of self-defense against the only predator on earth that can tax you into poverty, regulate you into silence, and imprison you for the crime of disagreeing. Anything less is just poetry in a dead language.
