The Fourth of July, often known as Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States that honours the Second Continental Congress’s ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Pauline Maier claims that many French Revolutionary leaders were intrigued by the new American state constitutions while also admiring the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution’s ideas served as a major source of inspiration for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), as well as its content. Working closely with his friend Thomas Jefferson in Paris, Lafayette drafted the document’s primary draughts. The Virginia Declaration of Rights by George Mason was also referenced in it. The Decembrist uprising and other Russian philosophers were particularly affected by the proclamation, which also had an impact on the Russian Empire.
The Declaration of Independence’s text itself had an immediate impact on other French leaders. The first foreign version of the Declaration was the Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (1790); there have since been 113 others, such as the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811), the Liberian Declaration of Independence (1847), the Confederate States of America’s secession declarations (1860–1861), and the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence (1945). Without necessarily supporting the political ideology of the original, these declarations announced the independence of a new state in a manner reminiscent of the United States Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence did have an impact on the world, but not as a proclamation of human rights, claims historian David Armitage. According to Armitage, the Declaration of Independence marked the start of a new category of declarations of independence that heralded the formation of new states.
Other nations have directly replicated portions of the Declaration or used it as inspiration. The American Declaration of Independence, which was ratified in November 1965, served as a model for the Rhodesian Declaration of Independence. However, it omits the clauses “all men are created equal” and “the consent of the governed.” The U.S. Statement of Independence is mentioned in the South Carolina Declaration of Secession from December 1860.
