The sovereign people? During the French Revolution, it was the order of the day as a political principle before its meaning was defined sociologically: in this concept, indissociably imperious and vague, the life-giving principle of democracy can be found. It is imperious because all power must flow from it. But it is vague because it is anonymous. And this anonymity is striking already in the iconography of the revolutionary period. Only rarely do the people appear in it as a collection of individuals or of identifiable groups. Faceless, the people most often take the form of compact mass, ordered according to a geometrical principle or symbolized by an action.
In all the representations of the Festival of the Federation, in July 1790, commemorating the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, it is simply one among other elements of the picture, which attempts more to express a feeling—that of a peaceful force—than to stage a population. In a number of the engravings that depict the taking of the Bastille, the people becomes an actor erased by the movement that animates it, reduced to a forest of rifles or brandished pikes, a direct force, wholly identified with its materiality. As the Revolution progressed, indeed, the abstraction of the representations of the people continuously grew. In the end it was evoked only symbolically or allegorically: the strength of a Hercules with his uplifted club,1 the haughty presence of the inquisitorial eye, or the display of a Phrygian cap on the end of a pike.2 An obscure principle from which everything nevertheless derived, it ultimately became unrepresentable: it became “the Yahweh of the French,” as a famous engraving proclaimed.3 It is thus available simply as a word, a pure inscription given over to the meditation of its readers, the silent evocation of an impenetrable mystery. From 1792 or 1793, a growing number of placards limited themselves to inscribing in the triangle of equality the words “sovereign people” that shine with a thousand rays of light, in the manner of those dazzling stars that are too bright to observe except through their reflected effects.
In 1793, the painter Jacques-Louis David threw the permanent gap between the people and its representation into extraordinary relief.4 On the 17th Brumaire of the Year II, he invited the Convention to erect on the Pont Neuf a giant statue of the French people. In order to symbolize the advent of a new sovereign and the destruction of the old order, David suggested that all the remnants of the statues of the kings that used to adorn the Cathedral of Notre-Dame be gathered to form the base of the new statue. But his allegory would not end with the image of a giant standing and treading with his feet upon the debris of the monarchy. David multiplied the dimensions of his project in order to afford this effigy of the people all of the symbolic density it required: it is armed with a club to suggest its power; it is outfitted with images of liberty and equality gripped in its other hand to recall its republican attachments; there are references to outmoded superstitions to stress the triumph of reason; it is posed on a soil of medals commemorating great events; the texts of the Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen are reproduced, and so forth. Even the very substance of the statue, bronze, added to this symbology, since the metal of the colossus was supposed to be forged from the cannonballs of the enemy. The super-accumulation of allegories, however, did not suffice for David to represent the people. “This image, imposing by its forceful yet simple character,” he added, “should have engraved in large characters the words light (on its forehead), nature and truth (on its chest), and strength and courage (on its arms).”5 It is as if the words had to be added to the signs in order for the people truly to be seen, the work of the imagination admitting its powerlessness to accomplish the task on its own. David’s project—which the Convention adopted but that never came to fruition except in the ephemeral form of a plaster model—shows in an exemplary fashion how the concept of the people struggled to incarnate itself in the revolutionary years.
The challenge of figuration traversed the entire period. It is to be noticed just as much in the theater as in the organization of festivals. When Marie-Joseph Chénier wanted to make himself the playwright of the Revolution, he hoped first of all to illustrate and celebrate the appearance of the people as the central actor of history. But though everyone on stage in his plays refers to the people, the people never appears. In most of his tragedies, the people is only evoked or invoked by other characters. While in two or three plays the list of the dramatis personae even includes “the People,” the books lack directions for staging the protagonist. The people is simply an abstract and collective character, deprived of life and of theatrical plausibility.6 The same defect marked the organization of the revolutionary festivals consecrated to the new sovereign: the Festival of the French People instituted in 1793 by the Convention and the Festivals of the Sovereignty of the French People and of the Regeneration of the French People put in place by the Directory in 1798 and 1799. The authorities, one senses, were preoccupied by the difficulty. “The goal of the Festival of the Sovereignty of the People involves political and metaphysical notions that it is important to make tangible,” François de Neufchâteau, then minister of the interior, noted in the Year VII, in a circular sent to prepare the celebrations.7 But the programming for the festivals shows the difficulty of living up to this order. Though it was planned for the statue of the People to be constructed as a crowned adolescent, the circular says nothing about the statue of the Sovereignty of the People, supposed to tower above it. Words, in this case too, were the fallback, since one finds the suggestion to create banners with citations from The Social Contract and to throw Edmund Burke’s works on the ground to be trampled.
The notion of the people appeared in this framework as wholly absorbed and expressed by the determinants that are associated with it. In 1789, and even more in 1848, it existed only when thought of as a “whole,” an “all,” or a “unity.” The people as totality is not simply celebrated by Alphonse de Lamartine, the great preacher of social unanimity as an ideology, since all opinions united in this concept as the central actor of democratic revolution.8 “The voice of the people is the voice of god,” several posters proclaimed. In his notes from the spring of 1848, Victor Hugo, too, could see the people only as a mass: “great people,” “throng of the people,” “columns of the people,” “flood of the people” were the expressions that come spontaneously to his pen.9 Its face is as if dissimulated and absorbed by what it expresses. Understood in this manner, the people is not simply a political subject, but also a quality of social life: the people is always the emblem and the name of a collectivity redeemed from appearances, saved from all determination, and isolated in its original principles.10
So it is first of all the people as a principle that democratic modernity affirms. A principle and a promise at the same time, one that symbolizes through the simple presence of the word the constitution of society as a bloc and one that universalizes the national entity.11 It is the truth of the social bond: it refers to a political proposition before it is a sociological fact. What results is an inevitable tension between the values that it incarnated and the reality that it evoked, a political density and a sociological flux in combination. It had an evident historical force even as its nature appeared to be problematic. One might almost speak, in this regard, of “the people’s two bodies.”12 As a nation, the people is, whatever its abstraction, a whole and dense body, living according to the principle of unity that it expresses; but as a society, it is, by contrast, without form, a body both fugitive and improbable. The specificity of French democracy can be understood thanks to this tension. French modernity superimposed political abstraction on sociological specificity. It exacerbated the distance between the two peoples, the nation in its abstraction and the society in its indeterminacy, and the political sphere had the permanent tendency to substitute itself for the social one. Hence, too, the ambiguity of this democracy that entered precociously into the attempt to integrate a great number in the abstract body of citizens (through universal suffrage), at the same time as it seemed to blithely accept situations of economic and social exclusion, as if the symbolic affirmation of popular unity alone sufficed for the realization of that unity.
Yet the tension between the order of the symbolic and that of the real remained even more fraught because the semantic content of the term “people” continued to be indeterminate for so long. In the eighteenth century, the article on “the People” in the Encyclopédie, drafted by Louis de Jaucourt, signaled with embarrassment “a collective noun that is difficult to define, since different ideas of it are at work depending on the time, place, and nature of the government.”13 The meaning of the term “people” fluctuated during the era, referring sometimes to the notion of the laboring class (an economic concept), and at other times to that of the populace (both a social and moral concept) or to that of the nation (a political concept). The lack of determinacy remained quite palpable during the revolution. It is evident during the June 1789 debate on the name of the assembly: inherited precautions and instinctive hesitations combined to lead the delegates to avoid the title of “assembly of the French people” and to give preference to “national assembly.” “The word ‘people,’” the Marquis de Mirabeau recognized at the time, “necessarily means too much or too little…. It is a word open to any use.”14 Certain delegates went so far, for such reasons, as to propose controlling the social use of the expression. In July 1791, in L’Ami des patriotes, Adrien Duquesnoy wrote: “If the false use of the word ‘People’ has been for the mischievous a pretext and a means, it has been an excuse for the simple and the credulous. It will soon be time for the Assembly to put an end to this cause of disturbance, and to recall to order with great severity anyone who uses the word ‘people’ in any other meaning than that which it should have.”15
In the final analysis, the people is always both a power and an enigma. As a power, it is the source of all legitimacy; as an enigma, it presents no easily identifiable face. The latter dimension, however, remained secondary during the Revolution, so spontaneous was the assimilation of the people to the nation, a necessarily abstract form of the social totality. The people emerged clearly as an enigma only in the nineteenth century, in the double form of a menacing crowd and an unfathomable society. The fear of the people as an inorganic mass, the creature of actions and expressions both unpredictable and unmasterable, traversed the century. It marked the bourgeois of the 1830s, who conjured up the specter of the dangerous classes and barbarians who encircled them in the suburbs,16 and later those of June 1848 or their equivalents at the end of the century, who feared the prospect of a social revolution. But the enigmatic character of the people stemmed also, and more fundamentally, from a kind of sociological uncertainty. The advent of a society of individuals made society difficult to apprehend even in the eyes of its own members. The publicists of the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, all shared the same perplexity facing what they called “society reduced to dust.” “French society is an enigma for the rest of Europe,” Charles de Rémusat noted in 1826, while François Guizot spoke during the same period of the “obscure” dimension of democratic society.17 The idea of the people remained divided between negative references to the mob—which Hugo saw as better understood as “traitor to the people”—and the confrontation with the wholly unrepresentable character of the new individualist universe.18
The people is like Janus: it has two faces. It is at once a danger and a possibility. It menaces the political order at the same time as it grounds it.19 The undecided and vague character of the people in the nineteenth century combined a sociological incertitude and a philosophical perplexity. The sociological confusion made it a subject of obscure contours, which Hugo magnificently evoked in Les Misérables, observing that “the deeper we sink, the more mysterious are the workers.”20 For its part, the philosophical perplexity related to the very meaning of democracy, a regime that simultaneously is given as a solution (to the problem of foundation in a secularized world) and as a problem (the opaque character of this same foundation).
The transition from a corporatist to an individualist society makes society less representable. For how to give a form—one open to description and recognition—to an agglomeration of individuals? Whence the central problem: it is at the very moment that the principle of popular sovereignty triumphs that its face, in a sense, becomes problematic. Paradoxically, it is when representative governments are put into place that the meaning of representation is obscured. A disconnect, as a result, occurs between the right to vote as a personal right and as a condition of the production of social identities. By the same token, the very concept of representation is disarticulated: the two functions of figuration and delegation no longer overlap. Only the latter retains its clarity. Power and formalism work in tandem under these conditions. The unprecedented means of intervention that the collectivity gains are at the same time put in question, as if the newly elusive character of the subject of power secretly undermined its essence.
In this contradiction, democratic disappointment has one of its deepest roots. The French Revolution serves as a privileged terrain of observation for grasping its mechanism. For it in effect exacerbated the tension between the juridical principle of the vote and the sociological principle of identification. But, at the same time, it masked the contours of the tension, since the course of events made an abstracted and fused vision of the social possible and acceptable for a time. The French Revolution, as everyone knows, exalted the principles of unity and indivisibility. Those words—and the preoccupation that disseminated them—were everywhere to be found. The Abbé Sieyès sounded the belief constantly: “France is and must be a single whole.”21 This celebration of unity corresponded to different preoccupations. It participated, doubtlessly, in an imperative of a political order first and foremost: to be unified in order to be strong, to overcome the weight of habit and the maneuvers of enemies. But it also referred, more profoundly, to the entire vision of a break with the old social order. Figuring society in the form of unity allowed radical difference to be thought. The opposition of old and new is most manifest when it is imagined almost physically as the confrontation of the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The principle of unity combined opposition and power. It alone allowed the erection of a force able to reverse what people called in 1789 “the gothic colossus of the ancient constitution.”22
The nation and the National Assembly together incarnated this alternative power. In contrast to the qualification of “third estate” which always implied finitude and subordination, the two new notions of the nation and the National Assembly connoted the advent of a completely new order. “By substituting the phrase ‘National Assembly’ for that of ‘Third Estate,’ Sieyès cut the Gordian knot of ancient privileges,” one member of the Constituent Assembly explained.
He separated the present age from those that preceded it; in place of three orders—sometimes divided, sometimes united, but always on the verge of dissolving—he presented the indivisible body of the nation, made indissoluble through the perfect reunion of all individuals in order to make its mass carry everything along. The phrase “National Assembly,” finally, was like one of the words used in magic to alter the appearance of the world, and to make an invincible colossus spring forth from the earth.23
In 1789, the nation designated a homogeneous and complete totality, understood as the perfect antithesis of the corporate society. “The nation,” Toussaint Guiraudet wrote then in a penetrating essay, “is not made up of orders; it is an aggregation of individuals.”24 Elsewhere it is affirmed that “the constitution recognizes only one corporation, that of all Frenchmen together,”25 while Sieyès defined the nation as “the great body of the citizens.” But how to constitute it and make it visible, in order that form and coherence can be given to a simple assemblage of equal individuals? It is to address this problem that the members of the Constituent Assembly assigned a central role to the work of abstraction, understood at once as ascesis and pedagogy. Sieyès well described its direction in stressing three modalities of realizing this unity: adunation, regeneration, and representation.26
Sieyès coined the word “adunation.” It means the process (etymologically, one through which the nation is built) that forges social unity, men making the nation together, sublimating their differences in order to stop viewing one another except as co-equal citizens. It was during the great debate of autumn 1789 on the division of the realm that the term was first used. What Sieyès and the members of the Constituent Assembly wanted to erase were all the former administrative, geographical, or professional distinctions that recalled the old order of things. Hence the extreme importance they accorded to the new departmental partitioning.27 “For a long time I have felt the need to submit the map of France to a new division,” Sieyès wrote at the time. “If we miss this opportunity, it will not return, and the provinces will retain their fraternities, their privileges, their pretensions, and their jealousies eternally. Then France will never achieve that political adunation so necessary for a great people governed by the same laws and the same forms of administration.”28 The object was to discover a purely mechanical rationale for dividing France, one that would imply no real opposition and no actual distinction. It would rely, rather, upon a completely artificial basis, derived almost from an arithmetical principle. The reason, of course, was the need to break with the past, to allow a new perspective on things by erasing the categories that were still obstacles to thought. But the objective served an even greater ambition: it appealed to the utopia of an unprecedented substitution of the whole of society for its fragmentary parts, one that would then permit only instrumental, and wholly neutral, division.29 The goal? It is clearly announced: “to ground the local and particular spirit in a national and public spirit.”30
The citizen came to be newly defined, as part of this process, by his distance from civil society, since the latter gives tangible flesh to differences.31 “Democracy,” Sieyès observed, “is the complete sacrifice of the individual to the common good, that is, the submission of the tangible person to the abstract person.”32 It is not really the purpose of political society, then, to reproduce society—to “represent” it, as it were—but rather to suggest its sublimated image, to constitute it in abstract enough a way that it anticipates a true society of equal individuals. The merit of political society, in other words, is to attain a formalized character as a positive utopia (rather than an unfinished or betrayed version of reality).33
The nation is therefore to be understood in the discourse of the time as a society redeemed from its shadows, one having abolished all of its contingent determinations and finally coinciding with its egalitarian foundations. It is a regenerated society, to use a term constantly deployed during the period itself.34 Camille Desmoulins is one of the actors who best described in effusive language this prospective transfiguration. “Do provincial distinctions exist any longer?” he asked.
Do you want to fragment us, to confine us, to lock us up? Are we not a great family, a great body, all from the same household? Are there hedges and barriers in the springtime field? Do we not find ourselves all under the same tent? … Saint Paul, who was eloquent two or three times in his life, put it admirably somewhere: All you who have been regenerated by baptism, you are no longer Jews, you are no longer Samaritans, you are no longer Romans, you are no longer Greeks, you are all Christians. In the same way, we have been regenerated by the National Assembly, we are no longer from Chartres or Montlhéry, no longer from Picardy or Brittany, no longer from Aix or Arras: we are all French and all brothers.35
The same metaphors and the same Pauline citation are to be found flowing from many pens, implacably testifying of the power of this vision of the nation as the projection and anticipation of a new society.
The work of adunation and regeneration for which the members of the Constituent Assembly hoped and prayed could not simply involve the transformation of the habitual forms of education and imagination. A particular task of representation also had to be shouldered, to give meaning and embodiment to the idea of the nation. It alone could produce the desired unity and indivisibility; it alone had the power to effectively incarnate a concept. “Only representation is the reunited people,” Sieyès noted,
since the ensemble of parties to the association cannot achieve a unity any other way. The integrity of the nation is not anterior to the will of the reunited people, which is only available through its representation. Unity begins in it. Nothing, therefore, is above representation, and it is the only organized body. Dispersed, the people is not an organized body, and has neither a singular will nor a singular mind—indeed, nothing singular at all.36
Representation, in other words, is not understood as a mechanical principle, like that authorizing the delegation of elected authority. It has a creative and instituting capacity unto itself. It is the means to unity and identity. If the fact of voting is a personal right, the subject of representation is not the individual considered in isolation, but the nation as a whole, that is to say the collectivity in its irreducible totality. The only identity that representation produces is that of citizenship, that of belonging to the whole. No particular identity is admissible—or even thinkable—in this framework.
Adunation, regeneration, and representation: in each case the objective is to constitute this “invincible colossus” able to dispel the possibility of the Old Regime’s return and to figure the new society of equals. No subtle reasoning is needed to grasp the result: a radical antipluralism, primed to assimilate all differences to the despised category of privilege and to envision all local identities as dangerous causes of division. Hence the problem. For even if the one nation can be imaginatively conceived as a homogeneous totality, or if it can even be supposed that such is its desirable future form, the many divisions and distinctions that still run through society nonetheless remain points of repair—sometimes positive ones—for its members. That one has committed oneself to a vision of a new society does not change society by decree. The French Revolution did not stifle its efforts, outlawing corporations, parties, and all of inherited bodies of the Old Regime, of course. But in spite of trying, it did not realize the utopia of a homogeneous society for which it hankered. For this reason, utopia and reality were to continue their perverse relationship, the order of representations permanently threatening to contradict the immediate data of experience. “The assimilation of men,” Sieyès wrote, “is the first condition of the grand national reunion in a unified people.”37 The difficulty is that the presupposition of this assimilation turned out to make society illegible and unrepresentable in its complexity. It is in this way that the radicalization of the political abstraction to which the Revolution led has to be understood: it completely disincorporated the social, offering no other identity except for communion with the whole.
The negative and destructive character of such a disincorporation was hardly perceived during the Revolution itself. No dissent was raised, for example, against the destruction of the guilds and corporations, no doubts, even in a hesitant tone. The emancipation of the individual and the freedom of the market seemed to be completely open to definition by tearing down old barriers and obstacles. Abstraction became at once a source of power and a vector of liberation. The construction of the nation of the period, it is true, also demanded combat against the external enemy and the analogous internal enemy to which the nobility came to be assimilated. But the cohesion of the struggle allowed only its positive aspects to be perceptible.
The difficulty of representing the people has to be understood in the perspective of these equivocations and ambiguities. It is the fallout of the gap, an almost constitutive gap, between the people as the legitimate sovereign, in its unity in principle, and the people as an existing society, in its actual complexity. Hence too the dimension of modern political identity that one could justly call schizophrenic: it is torn between the practical diversity of the social body and the political unity that the representative process is charged with producing. “We are a we to which reality does not correspond,” as Robert Musil very suggestively puts it.38 To this extent, the people is always marked by an internal tension: it always appears separated from itself.39 There is thus a permanent risk that the abstract unity of the popular nation, as the legislature is intended to incarnate it, will be contradicted by the divisions and the differences that practically structure society. Fiction and reality are continuously confronted in the representative process, forming the two poles of a founding and ineliminable tension. It is a tension between a juridical and a sociological principle and at the same time the necessary distance between the figuration of reality and reality itself. It is the difference between the one and the many. Understood on this basis, the crisis of representation results neither from dysfunction nor betrayal: it is consubstantial with its very object.40
Only the incandescence of the event allows this tension to seem to relax. When the people or the nation were celebrated in 1789—the distinction between the two is not important for these purposes, since the referent is not a sociological reality but rather a historical and political force—there occurred a genuine metallurgy thanks to an event. Under its auspices the people was revealed, for the event allowed it to leave behind ambiguity and obscurity to become pure positivity, practical power. For a moment, the visible and symbolic orders coincided. The people as event can seem to resolve, for a time, the constitutive aporia of representation. In action, as indissociably lived and narrated, the people is given tangibility by what it makes happen; sociological doubts are silenced by the evidence of behaviors and activities on the move. This explains to a great extent why the crisis of representation was not exacerbated during the revolution: the visibility of the people as actor, whether in the tumult of the street or in the good behavior of patriotic festivals, periodically allowed the possibility of postponing the conceptual and practical difficulties posed by the distance between the representatives and those they represented.
But the saving availability of the people as an event also made possible disaster, a fictional and violent claim of unified representation, as in the Terror’s culture of insurrection. In the Terror, politics came to be hostage of an exclusive alternative between an ordinary center and an extreme fringe. It came to seem, in other words, as if there were no space of intervention, negotiation, or conflict between submission to the established order and revolt. Indeed, the very term “insurrection” became wholly banal during the period. As a result of its invocation as a “sacred duty,” insurrection became almost an ordinary political category.41 Albert Soboul showed very usefully that insurrection as the sans-culottes spoke about it in the Year II did not necessarily refer to the force of arms, since it could also mean, more vaguely, a whole ensemble of actions of resistance, diverse initiatives, calls to awareness, and attitudes of vigilance, some going so far as to speak of “peaceful insurrection.”42
Beyond all the semantic variations, there was a general de-institutionalization of the political at work, and it is indeed in this sense that one may best understand the Terror as a whole. When, on October 10, 1793 (19 Vendémiaire, Year II), the Convention decreed that “the government of France is revolutionary unto peace,” it legalized—if one may use that term—this process. “In the circumstances in which the Republic finds itself,” Saint-Just remarked, “the constitution cannot be established; it would be immolated by means of itself.”43 In this framework, political life found itself emancipated from all constraint and all form. It became pure action, unmediated expression of a directly palpable will. It incarnated almost perfectly the spirit of the Revolution as Jules Michelet exalted it, “transcending space and time,” condensing like a lightning bolt the energy of the whole universe and allowing a dimension of eternity to be perceived in the fugitive moment. It is to such a utopia that the culture of insurrection of these years related.
No one emphasized its burning exigency better than the Marquis de Sade. Through a scandalous and inspiring metaphor, the writer hoped to suggest how the radical transgression of established moral rules alone gives freedom its meaning, likening the shattering of moral customs to that of political institutions. One must read Philosophy in the Bedroom (along with its appendix, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans!) to best grasp the appeal that a radically de-institutionalized politics exerted and the meaning that it bore. As much as Jacques René Hébert and his enragés, Sade is the great theorist of insurrection. He wrote:
Insurrection … has got to be a republic’s permanent condition. Hence it would be no less absurd than dangerous to require that those who are to insure the perpetual immoral upheaval in the machinery of state themselves be very moral beings, for the moral state of man is one of peace and tranquility, whereas the immoral state of a man is one of perpetual unrest that brings him nearer to that necessary state of insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member.44
In this subversion, the Revolution is ready to devour itself, expiring from a radicalism that consumes it.
The Terror could imagine the deinstitutionalization of the political only in pretending to ground itself sociologically and morally by compensation through an unprecedented kind of fusion between the people and its representatives, one that would lead beyond the tension between representative government and direct democracy. The critique of the dysfunctionality of the representative system led the identification of the people and power to seem like the condition of the full achievement of sovereignty. If in 1792 Maximilien Robespierre indicted representative despotism, in 1794 he legitimated his action based on the presupposition of the fusion between the people and the Convention, the latter defined a priori as a simple “abridged people.” The Mountain went so far as to note, in this vein, that they counted as the “living body of public opinion.”45 The organicist metaphors are, indeed, continuously present in the political texts of the period. The Committee of Public Safety addressed the revolutionary committees, for instance, by saying: “You are like the hands of the political body of which the Convention is the head and whose eyes we are.”46 It was thus thanks to a conception of representation as incarnation that the founding aporias of representative government were overcome.47 Robespierre, as François Furet justly put it,
mythically reconciled direct democracy and the representative principle, by placing himself at the very pinnacle of a pyramid of equivalences whose maintenance his word guaranteed day after day. He was the people in the sections, the people for the Jacobins, the people in national representation; and it was this transparency between the people and all the places where one spoke in their name … that it is constantly necessary to institute, control, and reestablish, as the condition of legitimate power.48
The thought allowed Robespierre to propose, on the eve of May 31, 1793, “that the people, in the National Convention, rise in insurrection against all of the corrupted deputies”—as if the people and the Convention were henceforth a single thing.49 In the course of the constitutional debate of June 1793, a group of deputies of the Mountain cried out, in this spirit, that “the people is here,” pointing to the rows of the assembly.50
The people? It is sovereign. One and indivisible, therefore, just like sovereignty is. It existed for the Mountain solely as totality in action, perfectly adequate proxy for the concept of the general will and social practice. It was neither an aggregation of individuals nor a conglomerate of corporations or sections. Saint-Just went so far as to wish that national representation could be elected by the whole people as a body, and accused the Marquis de Condorcet’s electoral project of attaining only a “speculative general will.”51 The electoral principle, obligatorily grounded on the expression of a choice or preference by individuals, is thus not central for the Mountain. They tend to transform it into a whole series of dispositions—vote by acclamation or the organization of great assemblies—whose function is to socialize its material organization, with the result that at the limit individual opinions are erased, melting into one single voice. What Condorcet understood as resulting from a meticulously organized deliberative process Robespierre and Saint-Just viewed simply as the expression of a fused people.
Hence the evident impossibility for the members of the Convention to reduce the notion of the people to some sociological definition. It designates neither a group nor a class, but a moral principle. For them, democracy draws its coherence and efficiency from a double process of moral conversion of the representatives and of regeneration of the people. “If the representative body is not pure and almost identified with the people, liberty is abolished,” Robespierre says.52 For him, the virtue of the deputies is at once the condition of their resemblance to the people (since the latter is virtuous by nature), and hence of adequate representation, and the corrective factor of potential malfunction of the political system.53 But the democratic achievement also presupposed, for the Mountain, the existence of a people who deserve their new power. The centrality of the theme of regeneration in their discourse and the call for the advent of a “new man” followed.54 “It is necessary, in a fundamental sense, to recreate the people in order to render liberty to them,” according to Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne’s celebrated formula.55 The Terror therefore came to be understood as the means for “creating a national character that, more and more, identifies the people with its constitution.”56 In this perspective, the people had to be remodeled in a ceaseless double campaign, political exclusion of everything alien from its body and moral regeneration of what remained.
The coalescence of the people in event and insurrection, of course, transcended and outlived the Terror. It is also what gave the revolutionary days of July 1830 or February 1848 their particular tone, allowing the sentiment of a reabsorption of all distinctions in the actions of a unified people—the perfect incarnation of its concept—to re-emerge. Eugène Delacroix expressed it very well in the famous painting of 1830, Liberty Leading the People. The people as reality and the people as idea fuse in this painting, suggesting a situation in which the social becomes a pure principle of action. The three features of the symbol of unity (liberty carrying its flag), the representation of classes (the three figures of the street urchin, the worker, and the student), and the undifferentiated mass are in fact superimposed on one another harmoniously, allowing reality to rejoin its representation.57 One has the impression, before this image, that the people comes into existence through collective action, somehow emerging as both the director and actor of its own destiny. No one has better described this people that accedes to the plenitude of itself in the movement of history than Victor Hugo, when he celebrated in Les Misérables the instaurating power of the insurrection, depicted as a “volcano,” opposed to the uniquely negative energy of the riot. “It is then,” he writes, “that the social masses, the very foundation of civilization, the consolidated group of superimposed and cohering interests, the venerable profile of old France, constantly appear and disappear through the stormy clouds of systems, passions, and theories.”58 It is in the event that the people gathers together to take on a recognizable face and gives itself an audible voice. Many contemporaries celebrated its tangible presence in the springtime of 1848. “The French,” so Victor Lefranc summed up, “are the people of the mass uprising. When they act in a mass, a wind kicks them up, a spark electrifies them, a light shines on them, a voice speaks through them.”59 The people is indeed in this case truly universal, a realized promise of social totality, and an immediately active force of sovereignty. But how can it retain a recognizable form, and how to hear its disappeared voice when the event is over and done? There is the whole question of democratic politics.