Theories of representative government against democracy during the French Revolution

ABSTRACT

During the French Revolution, both advocates of a constitutional monarchy and proponents of a representative republic firmly rejected “democracy,” considering it not merely as an impractical but also as an undesirable form of governance for modern France. However, the rationale and methods employed in opposing and evading “democracy” remain insufficiently elucidated. Historical understanding of this rejection of democracy can be refined significantly if careful attention is paid to preventing the conflation of past terminology with that of our current era. Instead of lamenting the mystic empty core of democracy and the absence of representative principles therein, this article endeavors to approach the eighteenth-century and revolutionary dichotomy of democracy and representation through a historical lens, incorporating insights from the history of historiography. This analysis of representative government theorists seeks to illuminate their apprehensions and aversion to democracy, as well as their conceptualization of a viable path toward liberty under modern conditions. Two strands of thought in revolutionary France will be sketched out that locate the hope for liberty either in the model of British monarchy or in the French revolutionary republic neither monarchical nor democratic. This study thereby attempts to show why and how the notion of representative government was pitted against that of democracy in the French Revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• French Revolution
• democracy
• representative government

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Nathan Alexander, James A. Harris, Adrian O’Connor, Pierre Serna, Richard Whatmore, and the anonymous readers for The Historian for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also Jean L. Cohen, “The Self-Institution of Society and Representative Government: Can the Circle be Squared?” Thesis Eleven 80, no. 1 (2005): 9–37; Ian Shapiro, Susan C. Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and Alexander S. Kirshner, eds., Political Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sonia Alonso, John Keane, Wolfgang Merkel, and Maria Fotou, eds., The Future of Representative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Pasquale Pasquino, “Modern Representative Democracy: Intellectual Genealogy and Drawbacks,” in Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus A. Reinert, and Richard Whatmore, eds., Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 111–35.

² Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76; James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Likewise, James Kloppenberg employs “democracy” in a broader sense closer to its meaning in the twentieth century than that in eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. He thus claims that in 1799 Sieyès “gave up on the institutions of representative democracy that he had worked to establish,” when in fact Sieyès was always a professed enemy of the project of “representative democracy,” which he wanted to bring to a halt. In this he succeeded by using the military arm of Bonaparte. James Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 560. In this sense, it is equally problematic for Oliver Lembcke and Florian Weber to label the thoughts of Sieyès as “democratic constitutionalism.” Oliver Lembcke and Florian Weber, “Introduction to Sieyès’ Political Theory,” in Oliver Lembcke and Florian Weber, eds., Sieyès, The Essential Political (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 21.

³ Mogens Herman Hansen, “The Tradition of the Athenian Democracy A. D. 1750–1990,” Greece & Rome 39, no. 1 (1992): 14–30; and R. R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy’ 1789–1799,” Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1953), 203–26.

⁴ René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement, a critical edition, with Other Political Texts, ed. Andrew Jainchill (Oxford: Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, 2019).

⁵ Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie: étude sur la connaissance historique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 168–76.

⁶ Letter from Voltaire to Frederick II, King of Prussia, October 28, 1773, Digital correspondence of Voltaire, D18601 (Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence, henceforth “EESEC,” https://doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/voltfrVF1240159a1c).

⁷ Letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to François Coindet, February 9, 1768 (EESEC, https://doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/rousjeVF0350091a1c).

⁸ Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, Série I: 1787–1799, ed. Françoise Brunel and Philippe Gut (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1867–2016), vol. 62 (1793), 575.

⁹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in Donald Cress, trans., The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 195–220.

¹⁰ Gordon S. Wood, Representation in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008[1969]).

¹¹ James Madison, “The Federalist No. 10 (November 22, 1787),” in Terence Ball, ed., The Federalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40–46.

¹² G. Usher, Republican Letters, Or an Essay, Shewing the Evil Tendency of the Popular Principle (London, 1778), 74–75; and Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001[1973]), 126–28.

¹³ Wyger Velema, Republicans: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

¹⁴ Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 457.

¹⁵ On the question of how representative a specific text is of the entire body of literature on a given topic, certainty is elusive, even with the aid of a quantitative table, owing to the intricate and multifaceted layers of associated contexts. With this in mind, I would simply like to clarify that the qualifiers such as “typical” or “most” in this article have been derived from consulting a significantly broader range of sources pertaining to the subject at hand. On this question, also see Adrian O’Connor, “From Regeneration to Resignation: ‘Crisis’ and Crises in Revolutionary France,” in Cesare Cuttica and László Kontler, eds., Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 149–70, at 150–52.

¹⁶ Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–102.

¹⁷ Pierre Rosanvallon, “L’histoire du mot démocratie à l’époque moderne,” in Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Rosanvallon, eds., Situations de la démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 11–29; Ruth Scurr, “Varieties of Democracy in the French Revolution,” in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, eds., Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–68; and Michael Drolet, “Democracy, Self, and the Problem of the General Will in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought,” in Innes and Philp, eds., Re-imagining Democracy, 69–82.

¹⁸ Stark examples of this, just to name a few, are Pierre Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); and Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée: histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

¹⁹ Bernard Gainot, “La notion de ‘démocratie représentative:’ le legs néo-jacobin de 1799,” in Michel Vovelle, ed., L’image de la Révolution française (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989), 523–29; Pierre Serna, Antonelle: Aristocrate révolutionnaire, 1747–1817 (Paris: Le Felin, 1997); Raymonde Monnier, “‘démocratie représentative’ ou ‘république démocratique:’ de la querelle des mots (République) à la querelle des anciens et des modernes,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 325 (2001), 1–21; Rachel Hammersley, “English Republicanism in Revolutionary France: The Case of the Cordelier Club,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 4 (2004): 471; Christopher Hobson, “Revolution, Representation and the Foundations of Modern Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 4 (2008): 449–71; and Minchul Kim, “Pierre-Antoine Antonelle and Representative Democracy in the French Revolution,” History of European Ideas 44, no. 3 (2018): 344–69.

²⁰ Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (London: Polity, 1988); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, “Claude Lefort: Democracy as the Empty Place of Power,” in Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and Devin Penner, eds., Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-War France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 121–40.

²¹ J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

²² Ariane Viktoria Fichtl, La Radicalisation de l’idéal républicain: modèles antiques et la Révolution française (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), 274–76.

²³ François-Jean de Chastellux, De la Félicité publique, ou Considérations sur le sort des hommes, dans les différentes époques de l’histoire, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1772), vol. 1, 142; Henry Home Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James A. Harris, 3 vols (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007), vol. 2, 375; Dominique Joseph Garat, Eloge de Michel de L’Hôpital, chancelier de France (Paris: Demonville, 1778); Archives parlementaires, vol. 4 (1789), 154; D. Leduc-Fayette, “Un précurseur de Condorcet: J.-F. de Chastellux ou ‘le philosophe tant mieux:’ Etude sur l’essai De la félicité publique (1772),” Les Études philosophiques 4 (1974): 495–508; Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 290–302; id., Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 273–82; and Minchul Kim, “The Historical Politics of Volney’s Leçons d’histoire (1795),” French Studies Bulletin 39, no. 148 (2018): 43–47.

²⁴ Minchul Kim, “Démocratiser le gouvernement représentatif? La pensée politique d’Antoine Français de Nantes sous le Directoire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 396 (2019): 71–93.

²⁵ Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and id., “Jean-Louis Delolme and the Political Science of the English Empire,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 21–44.

²⁶ Jean-Louis de Lolme, Constitution de l’Angleterre (Amsterdam: E. van Harrevelt, 1771).

²⁷ An Answer to Mr. de Lolme’s Observations on the Late National Embarrassment, by Neptune (London: John Stockdale, 1789), 10—cited in David Lieberman, “Introduction,” in Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, ed. David Lieberman (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007), ix.

²⁸ De Lolme, Constitution de l’Angleterre, 145–48; and Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 114–18.

²⁹ De Lolme, Constitution de l’Angleterre, 188.

³⁰ Jean-Louis de Lolme, A Parallel Between the English Constitution and the Former Government of Sweden (London: J. Almon, 1772); Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 118–21.

³¹ Marisa Linton, “Ideas of the Future in the French Revolution,” in Malcolm Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest, eds., Enlightenment and Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 153–68.

³² Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: la France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998).

³³ Richard Whatmore, “Enlightenment Political Philosophy,” in George Klosko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 296–318. For an overview of cultural anglomanie, see Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva: Droz, 1985).

³⁴ Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. David Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 1:44, 49.

³⁵ Cicero, On the Republic, 1:45, 50.

³⁶ Polybius, The Histories, ed. Brian McGing, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6:3–10; James Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 24–29; and Brian McGing, Polybius’ Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 170–74. See also Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius’ Political Ideas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1954), 83–90.

³⁷ Robert Finlay, “The Immortal Republic: The Myth of Venice during the Italian Wars (1494–1530),” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (1999): 938–43; Marion Leathers Kuntz, Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century: Bodin, Postel and the Virgin of Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Eco Mulier, Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Gerard Moran (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980); John Eglin, Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660–1797 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); and Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 18–46.

³⁸ Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 121–28.

³⁹ De Lolme, Constitution de l’Angleterre, 200–208.

⁴⁰ Paul-Philippe Gudin de la Brenellerie, Essai sur l’histoire des comices de Rome, des États-Généraux de la France, et du Parlement d’Angleterre (Paris: Maradan, 1789); and Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 313–20.

⁴¹ Jennings, Revolution and the Republic, 76.

⁴² The date of publication (a few days after August 12) is justified in Jean Egret, La Révolution des notables: Mounier et les monarchiens, 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1950), 122. The original speech is found in Archives parlementaires, vol. 8 (1789), 407–22.

⁴³ Jean-Joseph Mounier, Considérations sur les gouvernemens, et principalement sur celui qui convient à la France (Versailles: Ph.-D. Pierres, 1789), 4–9.:

⁴⁴ Mounier, Considérations, 7–9.

⁴⁵ The quote is from Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 9. Sonenscher’s remark was made in relation to the gloomy “prospect raised by the modern system of war finance” by eighteenth-century thinkers, most notably Montesquieu.

⁴⁶ Mounier, Considérations, 5, 9–10.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 10–15.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 16–18.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 21–27, 38–56.

⁵⁰ Mounier, Considérations, 17. Mounier complimented de Lolme for criticizing the Athenian and Roman practice of ostracism that “banned all great men” from the polity.

⁵¹ Mounier, Considérations, 26.

⁵² Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyès et l’invention de la constitution en France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 49–52; Murray Forsyth, “Introduction” in Murray Forsyth, ed and trans., Pierre-Louis Rœderer, The Spirit of the Revolution of 1789 and Other Writings on the Revolutionary Epoch (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), xx – xxii; and Eric Thompson, Popular Sovereignty and the French Constituent Assembly, 1789–91 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952).

⁵³ Jacques Necker, De la Révolution françoise, 4 vols (1796). See also Henri-Ignace Brosius, Catéchisme du bon citoyen (Liège, 1792), 20.

⁵⁴ The quotes are taken from the contemporary English translation: Necker, On the French Revolution, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davis, 1797), vol. 2, 385–86.

⁵⁵ Necker, On the French Revolution, vol. 2, 381.

⁵⁶ Among the new takes on the Directory, see Michel Biard and Pascal Dupuy, La Révolution française: Dynamiques, influences, débats, 1787–1804 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), 105–109; Bernard Gainot, 1799, un nouveau Jacobinisme? La démocratie représentative, une alternative à brumaire (Paris: CTHS, 2001); Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution, 13, 238–39; Serna, Antonelle, 241–43; and id., La république des girouettes: (1789–1815 … et au-delà): une anomalie politique: la France de l’extrême centre (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), 308–12. Placed in this context, the 9th of Thermidor no longer appears as the death of a glorious popular revolution but an opening of the possibility to start anew the French republican experiment on the footing of five years of gained experience.

⁵⁷ Gilles-Gaston Granger, La mathématique sociale du marquis de Condorcet (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1956); and Marcel Dorigny, “Du projet girondin de février 1793 au texte constitutionnel du 24 juin 1793,” in Roger Bourderon, ed., L’an I et l’apprentissage de la démocratie (Paris: PSD Saint-Denis, 1995), 107–118.

⁵⁸ Claudine Wolikow, “1789–an III: l’émergence de la ‘démocratie représentative,’” in Bourderon, ed., L’an I et l’apprentissage de la démocratie, 53–69; Roger Barny, “Démocratie directe en 1793: ambiguïté d’une référence théorique,” in Bourderon, ed., L’an I et l’apprentissage de la démocratie, 71–86; and Raymonde Monnier, Républicanisme, Patriotisme et Révolution française (Paris: Harmattan, 2005).

⁵⁹ Serna, Antonelle; Gainot, 1799; and Minchul Kim, “The Political Economy of Democracy in the French Revolution: Publicola Chaussard and the Democrats under the Directory,” History of Political Thought 43, no. 4 (2022): 729–58.

⁶⁰ L’Écho des cercles patriotiques, par Barbet et Darcet neveu (Paris, 1797–98), No. 3 (p. 5). The group of politicians, merchants, lawyers and writers labeled “moderates” by historians differ to each other in many aspects, but there is a strong common thread in their thoughts: they explicitly advocated “liberty” over “equality” and thereby insisted on the primacy of individual safety and absolute property rights over all other political principles proffered during the Revolution. In most cases this was the cornerstone upon which the edifice of their political arguments were built.

⁶¹ Kant, Political Writings, 99–102.

⁶² Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc, Robespierre. La fabrication d’un mythe (Paris: Ellipses, 2013), 124–29.

⁶³ Edme-Bonaventure Courtois, Réponse aux détracteurs du 9 thermidor l’an II (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1796), 10.

⁶⁴ Courtois, Réponse, 4–6.

⁶⁵ Mette Harder, “A Second Terror: The Purges of French Revolutionary Legislators after Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2015): 33–60; and Laura Mason, “The Culture of Reaction: Demobilizing the People after Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2016): 445–70.

⁶⁶ François-Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas, Projet de Constitution pour la République française. Séance du 5 messidor an III (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1795), 25–28, 78.

⁶⁷ Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Des manuscrits de Sieyès, ed. Christine Fauré, 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999–2007), vol. 1, 457–59.

⁶⁸ Sieyès, Des manuscrits, vol. 1, 462–63.

⁶⁹ Ibid., vol. 1, 463–64.

⁷⁰ Ibid., vol. 1, 470–71, 508–15.

⁷¹ Archives parlementaires, vol. 8 (1789), 594.

⁷² Adrien Lezay-Marnésia, Qu’est-ce que la Constitution de 95? (Paris: Migneret, 1795), vii – viii.

⁷³ National Records of Scotland, GD157/3298/45, Letter from Count d’Einsiedel to Hans Moritz von Brühl, January 23, 1793.

⁷⁴ Germaine de Staël also viewed “democracy” as opposed to “representative government” and endorsed the latter while rejecting the former. See Biancamaria Fontana, Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 118–22.

⁷⁵ Journal de Paris, 17, 18, and 19 prairial, an III (June 5, 6, and 7, 1795), reproduced in Rœderer, Œuvres du comte P. L. Rœderer, ed. A. M. Rœderer, 8 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1853–1859), vol. 5 (1857), 81–86.

⁷⁶ Ibid., vol. 30 (1791), 115.

⁷⁷ Archives parlementaires, vol. 49 (1792), 249.

⁷⁸ Minchul Kim, “Republicanism in the Age of Commerce and Revolutions: Barère’s Reading of Montesquieu,” French History 30, no. 3 (2016): 354–75; id., “Condorcet and the Viability of Democracy in Modern Republics, 1789–1794,” European History Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2019): 179–202. Cf. Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001), 32–53, at 53. A study of the Archives parlementaires indicates that the revolutionaries’ evocation of Antiquity pointed less to their devotion to its political inheritance than their rhetorical strategy of drawing upon the common background of eighteenth-century classical education. See Pierre Serna, “Les révolutionnaires croyaient-ils aux Grecs?” La Révolution française 21 (2021), http://journals.openedition.org/lrf/5767 (accessed November 24, 2023).

⁷⁹ Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Melvin Edelstein, The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).