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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
tures of the American Constitution, including judicial review. But in the
eighteenth century the French and the Americans had very different ideas
about the role and limits of government, about democracy and republicanism, and especially about constitutionalism.
Probably the widest gulf between them, however, concerned the question of individual rights. The Americans fought for and secured the common law rights of Englishmen, whereas the French, much influenced by
Jean Jacques Rousseau and other radical French philosophers of the Enlightenment, dreamed of the Rights of Man. Deemed to be the natural
rights of all mankind but having no practical base in human experience,
let alone that of France, they were reduced by the French revolutionaries
to the political slogan of ‘‘liberte, egalite et fraternite.’