Democracy Past and Future

In France, there is a way of thinking about freedom that often impedes its realization. To understand it fully, one can begin with what appears to be a foundational contradiction in French political culture: the encounter between political rationalism and popular sovereignty.

France’s Enlightenment heritage is not comparable to English liberalism. In France, the struggle against arbitrary rule and the protection of liberties took place through tribute to rational government and not by the establishment of representative procedures. The French Revolution’s great contribution, for its part, was to affirm, earlier than anywhere else, the principle of popular sovereignty. A cult of reason on the one side and tribute to the will on the other—the fundamental contradiction of French political culture—lies in this duality. In order to retrace briefly the ways in which this tension manifested itself during the Revolution and in the nineteenth century, it is first necessary to emphasize that law and freedom do not have the same meaning in France as they do in England. To understand why, one must begin by recalling that there are two ways of conceptualizing freedom and the limitation of power: by establishing a network of opposing checks (the balance of powers) and by subordinating power to the rule of law. In England, representative government became the historical means for articulating these two conceptions, a process that made them inseparable. But the French case shows that there is another way to think about protective rule: the erection of a “good” power, a rational power, one grounded in science. Defined in this perspective, the rule-bound state presupposes neither representative government nor even the rule of law in the classic liberal sense; it is in no way tied to the notion of constitutional checks and balances.

In most countries, the expansion of voting rights was historically correlated with the progress of representative government. The history of universal suffrage, in other words, was inscribed in a history of the expansion and extension of freedoms. In seventeenth-century England, for example, the struggle against absolutism came to be expressed as a demand to improve the procedures of political representation. Nothing of the sort occurred in eighteenth-century France. It was primarily in the name of an imperative for rationalization that the case against absolute monarchy was built.

The work of the physiocrats in the middle of the eighteenth century reveals in remarkable fashion the nature and foundations of political rationalism, the political sentiment that the Baron Turgot and the Marquis de Condorcet would later incarnate. To see why, one must look beyond their strictly economic theory. For the physiocrat François Quesnay and his disciples, men do not have to invent anything to be free: they have only to observe the laws of nature and conform to them. “Legislation,” wrote G.-F. Le Trosne, another physiocrat, in De L’ordre social, “is written in tender letters in the great book of nature.”¹ Politics is, accordingly, an art of observation and a science of deduction; it creates nothing original and institutes nothing novel. In his Maximes, Quesnay puts it thus:

Men and their governments do not at all make their laws, indeed they cannot do so. They recognize laws as consonant with the supreme reason that governs the universe and then declare them; they bring them into society…. It is for this reason that the words are legislator (bearer of the law) and legislation (bodies of transmitted law) and that no one has ever dared to use the word legisfactor—lawmaker.²

The book that most brilliantly expresses this physiocratic vision of the political is Le Mercier de la Rivière’s L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, published in 1767. Le Mercier de la Rivière did not have the intellectual fecundity of a Quesnay, but it is he who best succeeded in expressing the essence of French-style political rationalism. A barrister at the parlement of Paris, then Intendant (regional governor) of the Antilles, he is wholly representative of the cadre of enlightened administrators who, after 1750, ushered in state modernization.³

Legislative power, Le Mercier explains, cannot be defined as the power to invent laws. “Making bad laws,” he writes, “is a misfortune, an accident of mankind, and in no way a right, a prerogative of authority…. Legislative power is not the power to make obviously bad laws for no good reason.”⁴ Freedom consists, in other words, in conformity to nature, while oppression comes only from a wayward human will. This vision of the relationship between freedom and law rests on an epistemology centered on the notion of evidence. The point is fundamental. It is in fact the source accounting for the originality of French-style liberalism, as a political rationalism radically different from English-style liberalism.

For the physiocrats, evidence constitutes the guarantee of freedom. Evidence, in effect, expresses generality, beyond all strife, equivocation, indeterminacy, and particularity. “When men have the misfortune of being deprived of evidence,” writes Le Mercier,

opinion in the strict sense becomes the principle of all moral authorities: then we can no longer know any authority, nor count on any. In this perforce disorderly state, the idea of establishing checks to prevent the arbitrary abuses of the sovereign power is obviously fanciful: the opposite of arbitrariness is evidence; and it is only the irresistible force of evidence that can counter that of arbitrariness and opinion.⁵

On this point, the physiocrats are disciples of Nicolas de Malebranche, the seventeenth-century rationalist.⁶ They read and meditated upon De la recherche de la vérité and relied on its author to disqualify will and opinion.

The overall strategy is a convenient way to displace or avoid the problem of the self-institution of the social. In the light of evidence, necessity and volition are in fact fused. “Evidence must be the very principle of authority because it is the principle of the union of wills,” Le Mercier says.⁷ It is equivalent to the principle of unanimity, the form of universal reason. It is a means of accessing truth and the general interest that in no way requires deliberation or experimentation. It is a means of immediacy (much like faith, its neighbor).⁸ Later Diderot would give enthusiastic approval to this philosophy of liberty. “Montesquieu, before anyone else, diagnosed the illness; [evidence] prescribes the cure,” he wrote.⁹

French-style liberalism found a unique and very particular way, then, of yoking the cult of the law to the praise of the rationalizing state, the notion of the rule of law with that of administrative power. Echoing the physiocrats’ political theory, the Italian Cesare Beccaria would later extend this approach to the field of legal theory, thereby returning to the pioneering reflections of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. For Beccaria, too, the law has two inseparable functions: it is a way of guaranteeing liberty (by enacting a general rule, it reduces the possibility of arbitrariness) and an instrument for the construction of the state.¹⁰ In this perspective, the advent of the rational state is a condition of freedom: the law, the state, and general rules will overlap.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, this political rationalism did not only count as a doctrine; it also found a place and a means of implementation in the actual transformations of the administrative apparatus. Indeed, after 1750, the old world of notables began to recede as bureaucrats became more important, signaling a decisive turn in the evolution of the administration toward a modern form of organization. Enlightened despotism and French-style liberalism found an ambiguous meeting-ground in such a process of the rationalization of the state apparatus, leaving empty the intellectual space occupied by English liberalism.

If, in France, political rationalism prevailed over traditional, English-style liberalism (that of representative and intermediary bodies, of mixed government and pluralism), one may not, however, conclude that this latter way of opposing despotism completely disappeared. In fact, there remained a strong aristocratic liberalism in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Marquis de Voyer d’Argenson is an excellent example of it. In his Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France (1764), he could still write, for instance, that “the venality of offices is the great obstacle to the designs of despotism … The progress of the aristocracy must always be taken as a sure sign of the weakness of despotism, and the progress of democracy as an important result of its vigor.”¹¹ Certain contemporary historians, Denis Richet most especially, have insisted upon the importance of aristocratic liberalism.¹² Though Voltaire and many others disparaged the parlements for their conservatism and their pretension to speak in the name of the nation, it is certainly true that their suppression in 1771 by René Nicolas de Maupeou stirred up a veritable campaign of indignation among elites. Even the Baron d’Holbach, one of the most virulent adversaries of privileged orders, thought that, at least in the absence of other forms of representation, they were “the ever-needed buffer between supreme Authority and the liberty of the subjects.”¹³ Nevertheless, such qualifications should not mask what really mattered: the unmistakable emergence and progression of political rationalism. It is on this basis that one must interpret the latent hostility to Montesquieu, whom many reproached as relying on “gothic” principles for fighting absolutism.¹⁴ It also offers the premises for analyzing the relationship between the French Enlightenment and England or America.

If the fruits of the English regime—tolerance and liberty—were unanimously appreciated, the principles on which they rested enjoyed no such approbation. It is important not to misunderstand the Anglophilia of the Enlightenment: it was political rather than philosophical, as Voltaire’s Lettres anglaises attest.¹⁵ In the same vein, Enlightenment thinkers supported American colonial emancipation, even as they immediately distanced themselves from the American constitutional endeavor, criticizing it as excessively influenced by the spirit of English common law and the balance of powers. Thus, in his notorious letter to Dr. Richard Price of March 22, 1778, Turgot criticized his correspondent for remaining captive to the “mistaken foundations of a very outmoded and very vulgar politics.”¹⁶

The opposition between French-style rationalism and English liberalism achieved its classic formulation somewhat later, in the notes added in 1789 by Condorcet and Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours to the French translation of Richard Livingston’s Observations on the Government.¹⁷ The two French philosophers clearly lay out, in this material, the basis for their hostility to English-style parliamentarism. The existence of Parliament, they argue, in no way guarantees the protection of individuals. “What is wrong with arbitrary government,” they insist, “is not who controls it, but the arbitrariness itself.”¹⁸ In fact, they contend, the Parliament can make damaging resolutions as easily as any absolute monarchy can. Certainly, England has excellent laws, “but they are accidental. They do not depend on the British constitution.”¹⁹ In their eyes, legislative authority must be strictly limited. “Nations and philosophers alike still have very confused notions about legislative authority,” they note. “The authority to make all sorts of laws, even those that would be absurd and unjust, can be delegated to no one; for it does not even belong to the social body as a whole.”²⁰

These lines resume the basic arguments of Quesnay and Le Mercier de la Rivière. For them, the production of law comes down to two things really: the achievement of a good declaration of rights, on the one hand, and the promulgation of regulations, on the other. There is no room for a parliamentary space in this scheme. The declaration of rights is part of the institution of society, and it is drafted once and for all time. For their part, regulations are decreed by the government, and their conformity to the declaration of rights is guaranteed because freedom of the press allows discussion to occur without interference. In other words, there is nothing in between the acts of the government and the constitution. The legislative body’s sole prerogative is to exercise certain governmental functions, such as setting the tax rate or declaring war and peace; but it cannot produce general rules. In this conception, the liberal principle of the protection of persons and goods in no way depends on the development of representative procedures; it is sufficiently rooted in the erection of an authority at once unique and rational.

Logically, in this scheme, public education plays a determinative role in the formation of enlightened public opinion. In France, from the mid-eighteenth century on, schooling was endowed with a mission that went far beyond the goal of providing useful knowledge, and a whole train of utopian projects came to be grafted upon it. For the Enlightenment, schooling, along with the freedom of the press, counted as the principal means of the diffusion of reason, which spreads through imitation. It is too often forgotten that the physiocrats wrote extensively on the importance of the state’s task of public education. In his Despotisme de la Chine, Quesnay thus explained that “the capital object of a prosperous and durable government must be … the extensive study and continual general teaching of natural law,” while the Abbé Baudeau made the teaching of economics the primary condition of progress.²¹ Le Mercier de la Rivière also devoted an important work to the question: De l’instruction publique ou considérations morales sur la nécessité, la nature et la source de cette instruction (1775). “A government must be the principal teacher of its subjects,” he notes in his introduction.²² The properly civic dimension of public education is given special emphasis by Le Mercier de la Rivière. To create a real political body, he explains, it is necessary “to create and maintain a unified will, a unified direction, and a unified strength.”²³ Whence the exigency for uniformity in the teaching methods and programs he recommends, one that markedly prefigured the large reform projects elaborated during the French Revolution.

There is scarcely room at all for representation in such a model. The idea of voting rights is completely foreign to this world. Discussions among the enlightened, where Reason germinates, suffice to produce the conditions of liberty. “What does this noun representation mean?” asked Jean-Baptiste Suard, for example. “What can representatives represent if not public opinion? Debates can arise and continue so long as this opinion is uncertain…. But nobody divides into parties to decide who wins a game of chess, nor to decide which of two solutions to the same geometry problem is correct.”²⁴ Louis Sébastien Mercier also addressed this theme in L’an 2440. “The Estates-General that we have lost,” he writes, “have been replaced by that crowd of citizens who speak, write, and deny to despotism the power to alter the free and ancient constitution of the French too much.”²⁵

In the eighteenth century, in sum, a French-style model of political rationalism developed in opposition to the English model protecting liberties by according political representation to the country’s principal social forces and allowing them to check one another. But how, then, did France pass from this political rationalism to the French Revolution’s song of the general will? How could the notion of the right to vote become an essential part of this framework? If a rupture occurred in France with the Enlightenment tradition, when and how did it take place? The understanding of this mutation motivates the following analysis of French democracy and citizenship.

In the autumn of 1789, everything conspired to make social unity the cardinal value. Men wanted to come together and destroy everything that had separated them.

The perception of the social bond altered completely in 1789. The brutal rejection of the universe of privilege completely redrew the boundaries of the social system. It was the privileged classes who were excluded and symbolized what is exterior to society. “It is an absolute fact that the privileged class look upon themselves as another species of beings,” said Sieyès in his Essay on Privileges.²⁶ A few months later, in What Is the Third Estate?, he extended the argument by inverting it. “Anyone privileged is entitled to be represented only on the basis of his quality as a citizen,” he writes. “But for him that quality has been destroyed. He is outside the civil order and an enemy of common legality.”²⁷ The new social bond is thus defined by the exclusion of the aristocracy.²⁸

Some writers even went so far as to group the privileged classes together with foreigners. In the words of Jean-Baptiste Salaville, to take one example:

The Third Estate is the largest order, and it comprises the nation. It has nothing in common with the others. The others have broken the social compact, they are no longer citizens. It is the wish of the Third Estate that forms the law; sovereignty resides in it. The others have not even the right to vote. They must instead conform to the laws of the Third Estate, like foreigners, who, while sojourning in a land, must conform to its law.²⁹

“Since they want to separate themselves from us, let us separate ourselves from them,” in La Sentinelle du peuple’s summary.³⁰

The Third Estate and the nation redefined themselves through the movement of this exclusion. In 1789, one might say, the exterior of society becomes interior, and vice versa. The privileged classes came to be understood in 1789 as the populace had been viewed earlier: as a being that was completely other, cast out into the shadows of nature, deprived of civil rights, expelled beyond the borders. The privileged absorbed and condensed all social exteriority, and the image of the internal enemy and that of the foreigner coincided in them.

In 1789, civil equality and “civic equality” [égalité du civisme] were superimposed.³¹ The critique of the orders and the corporations, and the refusal to represent their interests, led to the exaltation of the abstract individual, liberated from all determinations, simple member of the social whole. The political sphere, under such conditions, is neither derived nor separated from the sphere of the social, which implies a distinct form of collective existence. Rather, the political sphere is thought to coincide with the social order and can absorb it entirely. One reason this is so is almost mechanical: the suppression of intermediary bodies led to an expansion of the public space, called to become the central site of social interaction. The dynamic of events joined together with institutional logic.

More profoundly, the political and the social were caused to coincide as soon as the specificities, the differences, and the singularities that structure society were denied. In this way, the civic bond came to represent, in its abstraction, the archetype of the social bond. It is the pure representation of the social and incarnates its essence. In a few celebrated pages of What Is the Third Estate?, Sieyès demonstrated the implacable imperative of this process. “To sum up,” he wrote, “it is a matter of principle that everything that falls outside the common attributes of citizenship cannot give rise to an entitlement to exercise political rights.”³² Sieyès had in mind, most immediately, the radical rejection of the notion of privilege. But his logic led him to base political rights on “common status,” that is, simple belonging to the social body.

As a result, the individual as legal person and the individual as a citizen tended to become confused. If no strictly social variable, rooted in the heterogeneity of society, can be taken into account in this definition of the right to vote, then political rights are of the same basic nature as civil rights. They are no longer different in their essence (Burke grasped this point quite well in his analysis of the French Revolution). It is this development that made it so difficult in the period to grasp the distinction between the notions of active and passive citizenship. A distinction among rights-bearing citizens could not be established on the basis of the juridical specificity of each category of rights. A difference between political and civil rights could be secured only by establishing a difference between autonomous and dependent juridical subjects. The only distinction that allowed any abstraction from equality was that of the nature of real juridical subjects (age, sex, and so forth). The absence of political rights always had to be grounded, in one way or another, in the partiality of an individual’s civil rights (as in the cases, at the time, of women, children, and the incompetent).

The propagation of citizenship occurred at the intersection of this equation of civil and political rights with the advent of the principle of collective sovereignty. Thanks to a double process of abstraction, each individual was made part of the sovereign power at the same time that the political sphere was identified with civil society. Political rights originated not in a doctrine of representation—insofar as the latter depends upon the recognition and the validation of the heterogeneous and diverse elements within society—but in the notion of participation in sovereignty. This is the great change. At the beginning of 1789, the question remained that of equality as belonging. For an almost mechanical reason, it quickly became confused with a new conception of equality as sovereignty, for the locus of sovereignty had been identified with the very being of the nation. It would remain so. Accordingly, the right to vote could no longer remain in a logic of representation. Therefore, it came to define a social status, that of the individual member of a people collectively taking the place of the king. French democracy, in other words, is not founded on a deconstruction of absolutism. On the contrary, it consists of its reappropriation.

How to reconcile the concept of rational government with the affirmation of popular sovereignty? This is the central question of French political history since 1789. But it has never been clearly posed; the French have always avoided it. The way in which the notion of the general will has been understood suggests as much. The concept of the general will is in many ways the principal black box of the revolutionary process.

In the consecration of the general will, two registers are superimposed without wholly intermingling: that of the definition of the political subject, and that of the foundation of the social order. The first of these two senses is the easier one to grasp. The affirmation of the sovereignty of the general will results in the first instance from the awesome transfer of sovereignty of 1789, in which the nation appropriated the attributes of royal authority for itself, at the same time that the principle of the political equality of individuals made the right of suffrage the symbol of social inclusion. One can speak, in this regard, of the veritable “coronation” of the general will, which comes to seem almost a technical condition for the reconstruction of the political order. The figure of the absolute monarch could not be erased without transferring his power directly to the nation; the simple concept of the limitation of sovereignty, in the English style, seemed outmoded and insufficient.

Indeed, the strength of absolutism was such in the eyes of the men of 1789 that they did not consider a simple redefinition of the boundaries of royal authority possible. In their eyes, only an operation of total confiscation and reappropriation would make it possible for it to be reduced. The concepts of national sovereignty and the general will, which are connected, can therefore be understood in a liberal sense: their function is to make radical anti-absolutism feasible. Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is written precisely in this liberal perspective. In affirming that the law is the expression of the general will, the members of the Constituent Assembly meant, first and foremost, that the law can no longer emanate from the particular will of the monarch. But did they not, in exchange, erect the people as a new sovereign subject?

The moment is wholly ambiguous: in 1789, no one yet dreamed of founding an authority entrusted to the people. The nation was the sovereign subject, as Article 3 of the Declaration states (“The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty, nor shall any body of men or any individual exercise authority not expressly derived from it”). As the figure of society as a whole, the nation cannot be reduced to any of its component parts, at the same time that it designates an empty space of power. Irreducibly unified, impossible to decompose into smaller elements, the nation, for the members of the Constituent Assembly, was thus sovereign only as an abstract totality—that is, beyond the reach of human power, inappropriable by any person or faction whatsoever. The new philosophy of law expressed in 1789 derived from these conditions by which royal authority was transmitted to the nation; the general will is, first and foremost, the nation’s will. The advent of a new central political subject thus marked an obvious rupture with respect to absolutism, but it is more a political than sociological break. In summary, the sacralization of the general will did not necessarily imply popular power. The equivocation is fundamental and foundational.

If the ambiguity of the concept of the general will made it possible to mask the contradiction between the governance of reason and the sovereignty of the people, the forms through which citizenship was expressed led to precisely the same result. In setting up a two-tiered voting system, the men of 1789 allowed the universalist civic principle to border on the most elitist practices. Fundamentally, the right to vote belonged to practically all adult males. Of these, the only ones who were not kept from the ballot box were dependent individuals, considered then as nonautonomous (beggars, domestics, the homeless). The nineteenth-century republicans would refer to it as quasi-universal suffrage. However, the only choice the entire populace made is the electors at the upper tier, and the election of deputies occurred only at this latter level. At the base, more than four million individuals had the right to vote, but they decided almost nothing of importance. Their right to vote remained, first and foremost, the sign of belonging. Furthermore, they were not even termed the electors, even if only at an initial tier, that they were; juridically, they were merely “members of a primary assembly.”³³ Only a small number were actually labeled voters: a mere 40,000 men directly elected the deputies. The technical dissociation of the two tiers of the voting system, then, allowed it to play two different functions at once: on the one hand, social affirmation of belonging to the nation (the moment of the sovereignty of the people, tied to the first tier) and, on the other hand, the maintenance of an elitist decision-making process (the moment of rational government, tied to the second level).

The distinctive quality of the revolutionary period is to have to a great extent dissociated the register of citizenship from that of the exercise of popular power. The symbolism of belonging on the one hand, then, and the organization of power, on the other. This duality principally took the form of an equivocacy during the Revolution, one in the notion of the general will, on one side, and one linked to the very modalities of the exercise of the right to vote, on the other.

The first organized form that the relationship between the governance of reason and the sovereignty of the people would take was Bonapartism. In Bonapartism, there is indeed a simultaneous affirmation of the sovereignty of the people and a preeminence of rational administration. The figure of the emperor allows the link between these two moments to be made. Bonapartism is both a populism and a rationalism. It not only represents a political experiment in French history, a caesarist experiment; much more profoundly, it amounts to a specific way of resolving and managing the contradiction between popular sovereignty and rational government. Bonapartism, it has to be said, is a fundamental political model of French democratic organization. This is why it would remain a recurring reference, reincarnated or reappropriated in various diverse ways, from the democratic caesarism of the Second Empire to the liberal caesarism in the Fifth Republic.

The history of the nineteenth century was also that of a search for alternatives to this Bonapartist model. But until the foundation of the Third Republic at least, it is striking that France was capable only of oscillating between these two poles. On the one hand, it paid tribute to meritocratic rights as outlined by François Guizot and liberal Doctrinaires; on the other, it paid tribute to utopian democracy, as in 1848 for example. The meritocratic system as defined by Guizot in the end is nothing more than the extension of the theme of rational government through sociological means. Those called “the meritorious” (les capacitaires) are those who have the intellectual ability to direct the country. The restriction of voting rights, as organized during the Restoration and the July Monarchy—vote by qualification—corresponds to this meritocratic system.³⁴ The Revolution of 1848 represents, on the other side, the triumph of democracy, one defined as a kind of fused expression of popular unity and sovereignty. But in this case, it is clear that the Republic takes a shape much more like a religion than like a regime. The dominant symbols of 1848 are those of fraternity and fusion of different classes. The issue is not one of organizing mass democracy, even with the institution of the regime of universal male suffrage on March 5, 1848; rather, it is the affirmation of the power of the nation.

Utopian democracy on the one hand, meritocratic liberalism on the other hand: French political culture long oscillated between these two poles. The oscillation in many ways reflected the opposition between rational government and popular sovereignty. It seems to me that this opposition makes it possible to provide a fuller explanation of the chaotic character of French history, the fact that French democracy was simultaneously precocious and delayed. Unlike English gradualism, in which the progress of liberty and democracy can be analyzed as cumulative and sedimentary, French history seemed to be forced to shift among beginning anew, groping for synthesis, and dreaming of generous utopias.

How could France finally achieve a kind of equilibrium? What kind of compromise could resolve the fundamental contradiction that I have tried to present? The formula of a modernized Bonapartism, in the foundation of the Gaullist Fifth Republic? It is certainly one part of the answer. But the achievement of equilibrium is not to be understood simply by analyzing supposed continuities between Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle. For wholly beyond such continuities, the problem had also been reconstructed in the meantime. The reconstruction of the French equation has been based primarily, it seems to me, on a dissociation of different registers.

In fact, the forms of social history, administrative history, and political culture have largely been uncoupled from one another in French democracy. From the perspective of administrative history, rational government did indeed win out. Authority residing in technocracy (with a consequent difficulty in defining a genuinely autonomous executive power and high value placed on the formation of elites and high functionaries): the contemporary French technocratic model is indeed, on this point, the heir of the system envisioned by Turgot and Malesherbes.

If one reflects on social history, however, it is easy to see democracy’s role in driving it. But it must be emphasized that democracy is understood in France much more as a social form than as a political model. Democracy as a social formula, that is, democracy implying a system beyond which there is nothing else to demand—the system, then, that would bring to an end all contestations and all quarrels. It is what liberals of the 1870s marvelously termed “the power of the last word.” Democracy is the necessary form of civil peace.

In the optic of cultural forms, finally, it would appear that the education of democracy has proved a major axis of French political culture. In France, obligatory schooling did not simply reflect a need for technical training that a developed country requires. Above all, it followed from the goal of forming rational men and citizens. The state came to be conceived as a pedagogue, as society’s teacher. Its educational activities were expected to bridge the gap between democracy and rationality. In the theme of educating democracy, it is clearly the resolution of the contradiction between the democratic spontaneity of the masses and the rationality of the elites that is in play.

In French history, in summary, there occurred a permanent superimposition of these three registers: the register of democracy as a social form, the register of technocracy as rational power, and the register of educational activity as the condition under which the general will can become, finally, rational.