[Skybird]

the bill of rights would have been impossible to imagine without the intellectual input from European and especially French mentors who preceded it, and whose thoughts formed a basis on which Am e rica'S ideas then based on and owed to. This influence usually gets completely ignored or denied (telling by experience), but French iontellectual culture has been popular to be debated amongst American intellectuals and politicians of the very early American era.

On the declaration of human and civil rights, I thought the context in which I wqrote it made it clear that I meant the series of French constitutions there have been. The declaration preceded them all. It was written in 1798, the first French constitution is from 1791.

It's not a competetion running for who had the first written document, however. I talked about the general intellectual influence that some Frenchmen had on the minds in the New World. It's about a cultural climate in which ideas blossom and get developed further due to the climate being what it is, and not being somehow repressive. I assume that the beginning of a nation had plenty of freedom left to allow such ideas blossoming that in established regimes in the old world faced tougher resistence. Therefore, the formal race of who wrote his historic papyrus scrolls first, was "won" not by France, by America. But that simply does not mean that much and is of academic interest only.

Britain until today has no formal constitution, as far as I know, and nevertheless its tradition of moral philosophers did fine and influenced great parts of the world back then, and even in modern time (except those stubborn, emotional Germans who were too irrational for that sane reasonability). As follow historians' arguments that trace that German speciality back to the social-cultural losses during the 30-years-war and see that as the reason why in Germany was no real enlightenment but the era of Romantik, and later the Nazis.

Schwülstige Emotionen. Mörderisch. I prefer the British enlightenment and the cultural and intellectual climate it created over the German Romantik any time. It just appeals more to my head-heaviness and desire to have reasonable explanations instead of instincts and collective emotions deciding my actions.