3. When could we have had the first European revolution where the revolutionaries made a universal declaration of the rights of man like the French one? To my knowledge, the French were the first to do this. If I am wrong and somebody else did, well nobody paid much attention for some reason.
Err... lists of protected rights predate the French declaration by quite a few decades at least. You had the
1689 English Bill of Rights, as well as the
1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights (which is still in effect as part of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia to this day), and you also had the Natural Rights sections of the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787. And, of course, concurrent with the French the US adopted it's
Bill of Rights, which is much in the same vein.
All of these are quite influential documents in their own right, and have had considerable influence on things. In point of fact, the Virginia Declaration of Rights likely had direct influence upon the
French declaration, as noted by Wikipedia the French document was written by the Marquis de Lafayette, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, who was from Virginia and governor of the State under the very state Constitution which incorporated the Virginia Declaration of Rights as Article 1.
Finally, of course, you have the discussion of the natural rights in the
US Declaration of Independence, also in large part written by Jefferson, and still quite remembered and influential.
As to why these documents aren't as remembered? Well, I think that depends on which world you live in. In the English speaking world, the French Declaration is actually almost never talked about outside of it being one of the era's many documents regarding natural rights. Especially in the United States, it's basically a footnote since, as I've shown here, we had a long history of documents that outline the various natural rights and discuss their place and relation to government. This of course makes sense, since the very concept of Natural Rights is very much tied to the English legal tradition and goes all the way back to the
Magna Carta in 1215 with a constantly evolving, maturing and expanding understanding of the concept. However when it comes to Continental politics, that is, European centric viewpoints, the Universal Declaration is a major milestone in that it represents the first time a major continental power put forward the idea of Natural Rights in such a strong manner. They didn't have this long history of writings and philosophy regarding Natural Rights, and most of the major documents and such had been developed by those backwater English colonies that had broken away, so weren't paid much attention to among the European elites (outside of some
silly German secret society), and so Europe kinda sees the Universal Declaration as a big watershed moment.
In fact, the French Revolution in general is seen as a much bigger deal by Europeans than by Americans. To American, the French Revolution was really derivative of our own, they basically took all our ideas, turned them up to elven, and then proceeded to make a mockery of them via The Terror, and failed to even make a stable Republic due to that Napoleon guy. Meanwhile I've encountered people who think the French revolution predated or inspired the American one, or that it was the French Revolution that pushed the ideas of natural rights and such that the American Revolution then adopted, not realizing the American Revolution predated the French by some ten years and that it was the American Revolution and thinkers who influenced the French.
Or, TLDR, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens is only considered to be so important by Eurocentrics whom like to ignore the actual history of ideas and write off things that originated not from the continent as unimportant and not influential.