The French Constitution of 1791 has a major legacy that overturned many centuries of historical tradition but remains little known outside of France. It ratified the unprecedented transformation of a society based on monarchy-centered government and legal privilege to one based on a sovereign citizenry and legal equality. Its powerful impact served as the inspiration for the wave of constitution-making that engulfed Europe during the nineteenth century and expanded globally thereafter. Furthermore, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as its original preamble, the Constitution of 1791 is associated with the concept of human rights proclaimed by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Drawing on wide-ranging and long-overlooked manuscript sources, The Forgotten Constitution highlights the Constitution of 1791's underappreciated importance and influence in the world. The constitution was the product of a long-term crisis of the Bourbon monarchy grounded in fears of despotism. The idea of a constitution took hold during the 1780s as the means to stabilize the kingdom through a more equitable distribution of power while attempting to accommodate a king. By making a constitution a compact between monarch and people, by its written assurance of civic and natural rights, and by its assertion of legal equality as an essential element of political legitimacy, the Constitution of 1791 codified the principles of the French Revolution. This book shows how it was the French constitutional tradition, inspired by the Constitution of 1791, that drove the Western constitutional ideal, especially in the revolutions of 1848.