Ethos

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is a legal document, which means it's basically 100% pure ethos.

Following the logic of popular sovereignty, it gets its power from the men (sorry ladies) who approved it. Those men are the representatives serving in the National Assembly, and they get their power from the men (sorry again, ladies) who voted for them. It assertively claims that it doesn't need power from the king (sorry Louis) because he isn't very good at his job and the people don't respect him (sorrynotsorry).

But it does claim to be written under the guidance of the Supreme Being…which sounds like science fiction, but they really just mean God.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen doesn't include personal stories of people wronged by King Louis. (Although it would have spiced it up if they included lines like: "The same year Marie Antoinette build herself an entire village on the grounds of Versailles to play dress-up shepherd girl, my children starved because there wasn't any bread.")

But don't worry people do plenty of complaining about the royal family in a later stage of the French Revolution…because there was plenty to complain about.

There also aren't any studies that have been done to suggest that these really are the rights that people should have. Although the authors had pretty much spent their whole lives reading Enlightenment philosophers and the last decade watching the Americans experiment with the whole idea of people having rights.

So they were basing it on some research, but none of that is mentioned in the document. It's just a straightforward, this-is-how-it-is-so-deal-with-it type of statement.