A REVOLUTIONARY ASSERTION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
LATE IN THE EVENING of August 9, 1792, church bells began to peal across Paris, to signal an imminent uprising. In front of the Hôtel de Ville, a palatial structure that housed the city’s municipal council, a crowd gathered in the pale moonlight, filling the grand plaza where the French monarchy had long staged public executions.
Shortly after midnight, a large number of designated citizens deliberately mounted the steps to city hall, in order to occupy the council chambers. They represented a cross section of ordinary Parisians: clerks and shopkeepers, lawyers and surgeons, jewelers and cabinetmakers, water carriers and domestic servants. Most were “sans-culottes,” laborers without fancy britches (or culottes), proud of their fighting mettle.
Declaring an “Insurrectionary Commune,” the new occupants took charge of the National Guard and ordered the arrest of its commander, the Marquis de Mandat. Escorted down the steps of the town hall en route to prison, the nobleman was set upon by someone in the seething crowd and killed on the spot.
In his pioneering 1847 History of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet claimed that the people gathered that night were acting spontaneously, that “there was no other perpetrator of August 10 than public indignation, the anger caused by prolonged poverty, a feeling that invaders were approaching, and that France had been betrayed.” But the historian Albert Mathiez, writing almost a century later, told a different tale: “No insurrection has ever been more openly prepared. They conspired in broad daylight. They declared what they hoped to accomplish.”
And so these sans-culottes did. But because they had done so in their own voice, in local assemblies held throughout the city, the insurrectionists were also taking a leap into the unknown. Only one nationally prominent political figure, the imposing orator Danton, made a fleeting appearance at the Hôtel de Ville that night, but he was alone—and he promptly went back to bed.
There was blood in the air. The people of Paris knew that a Prussian army was marching toward the city, and they knew that these forces hoped to crush the French revolution that had begun in 1789. In response, militants in early August had already proposed an armed uprising to unseat King Louis XVI, the country’s constitutional monarch, who was suspected of collusion with the invading army. But cooler heads had prevailed, tabling these petitions and giving the nation’s Legislative Assembly a chance to deliberate at their next scheduled meeting, on the afternoon of August 9. The pause also gave the city’s network of neighborhood assemblies (or “sections”) a bit more time to debate the future of the new republic—and to prepare for a possible insurrection.
By 1792, these assemblies had become to Paris what the Pnyx had been to classical Athens—laboratories of direct democracy, and a place where ordinary citizens met to wield political power directly. They had their roots in the local assemblies originally convened for elections to the Estates General in 1789. After the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789—the symbolic start of the French Revolution—these assemblies continued to meet, producing an impromptu network within Paris. In many neighborhoods, Parisians who had assembled to form a local militia also began to discuss the forms in which popular sovereignty might best be realized in France.
The constitutional monarchy the French had adopted in 1791 had been designed, in part, to harness the power of the capital city’s local assemblies. Under the new constitution, they were tasked with electing delegates to the Paris municipal government, or “Commune”—and to the newly formed Legislative Assembly, which met in Paris but represented the nation as a whole.
The right to vote was restricted to so-called active citizens, men owning a minimum amount of property. (In that era it was a truism that men with no property were too dependent on others to have a mind of their own, and too busy working to ponder public affairs.) The king, who no longer enjoyed absolute authority under the new constitution, retained the power to veto laws that had been passed by the Assembly (unless it overrode his veto at three consecutive sessions).
Despite the limited duties the new constitution gave the sectional assemblies of Paris, and a subsequent legislative decree that these assemblies should discuss only local affairs, activists in the capital continued to debate abstract political principles and matters of national concern. And by the summer of 1792, the Parisian sectional assemblies had emerged more unruly than ever.
By law, their meetings were open to all “active” citizens, regardless of their political views. In practice, by August 9, most Parisian sections had come to welcome even so-called passive citizens, those who were too poor to pay taxes—one reason why radical democrats had come to dominate in the majority of the sections.
For the Parisian insurgents, the great prophet of this fraught political moment was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Geneva-born sage who had died fourteen years earlier. “You trust in the present order of society without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions,” Rousseau had written in Émile, first published in 1762: “The great become small, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes subject; are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempted from them? We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions.”
“Nobody has proposed a more just idea of the people than Rousseau, because he loved them,” declared Robespierre, perhaps the most prominent proponent of democracy in France in these years; he was speaking on January 2, 1792, to the Jacobin Club, one of the voluntary civic associations that had sprung up like mushrooms throughout Paris. In these months, Parisians who were interested could easily learn the views of orators like Robespierre and philosophers like Rousseau by reading pamphlets and newspapers. Eighteenth-century Paris had a predominantly literate population, and radical journals had proliferated since the fall of the Bastille. By the start of 1792, almost every self-respecting political figure needed to have a print outlet of his own, and all the popular political societies, including the Jacobins, routinely published the major speeches of their members. Made famous by the widespread popular press coverage, Robespierre became a hero in the eyes of many militants, giving neighborhood orators an example to emulate. In his January speech, Robespierre had gone on to quote Rousseau directly: ‘The people always want the good, but by itself does not always see it.”
Inspired by such rhetoric, some in the Parisian sections grew impatient to force the issue of making all organs of the French government more genuinely “democratic or popular,” as radical journalists had been demanding since the fall of the Bastille. Some also argued that ceding power to elected representatives was undemocratic, just as Rousseau had implied in the Social Contract, and as the ancient Athenians had believed as well. For the most militant among these activists, sovereignty resided not in a distant body of legislators but only in the primary, local assemblies, where the people met face-to-face. By the early summer of 1792, in some districts of Paris, the sectional assemblies had begun to meet daily, and not just to debate the principles of “the Immortal Rousseau.”
Meanwhile, France’s Legislative Assembly was torn between constitutional monarchists fearful of rocking the boat; moderate republicans in favor of gradual reforms; and an increasingly vocal group of avowed democrats demanding that ordinary citizens play a more direct role in making political decisions. Throughout the summer, the legislature had been sending mixed signals, veering between bold declarations and indecisive dithering. By the time August 9 arrived, the body was hopelessly divided; despite unrelenting pressure from the radicals in the sectional assemblies, the national Assembly narrowly voted to reject the Parisian petitions demanding that the king step down immediately.
That night, political activists convened in their neighborhood assemblies throughout Paris to decide what to do next. As they met, couriers crisscrossed the city, to convey the results of votes occurring in the various sectional assemblies.
For example, at the Gobelins section, citizens gathered at 10:00 p.m. in the Left Bank church of Saint-Marcel. A series of speakers rose to demand the dissolution of both the Commune and the Legislative Assembly. If, as a majority now agreed, sovereignty belonged to the people themselves (and not to their king, nor to their elected representatives), then only an insurrection—an armed revolt—would assure that the people were truly sovereign. The Assembly duly dispatched three armed delegates to the Hôtel de Ville. (The Commune comprised 144 delegates, with the forty-eight official sections electing three delegates each.) At the same time, the Gobelins section sent a messenger to let other Parisian assemblies promptly know of their resolution.
As midnight approached, the designated citizens from the sectional assemblies began to arrive in threes at city hall. “Swift now, therefore,” the nineteenth-century British essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in his lyrical account of that Thursday night. “Let these actual old municipals, on sight of the full powers, and mandate of the sovereign people, lay down their functions; and this new hundred and forty-four take them up!”
When the insurgents en masse finally entered the chambers, they were challenged by one of the few sitting members present at that hour. His protest was sharply answered: “When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection,” one of the new delegates replied, “they withdraw all power from other authorities and assume it themselves.”
As the new Communards formally declared the next day, an “assembly of delegates from the majority of the sections” had gathered overnight “with full power to rescue the Republic.” Popular sovereignty was “an indefeasible right, an inalienable right, a right that cannot be delegated.” The insurrectionists had simply exercised their sovereign powers.
These modern-day democrats took political ideas very seriously—but many were also driven by sheer rage. As one eyewitness, a commander of a sectional battalion, recalled, events that night were “propelled by an impulse so violent that, wherever it arose, it was impossible to stop, or to anticipate the outcome.”
Out of this explosive melee of political passions and interests there appeared a critical mass of people fiercely devoted to forging a radically egalitarian new form of self-government. For the first time since ancient Athens, direct democracy had become a concrete, collective goal—at least in the minds of the Parisian commoners defiantly convened that night at the Hôtel de Ville.
* * *
A NUMBER OF COMPLEX FACTORS lay behind the dramatic events that unfolded in Paris on August 9 and 10, 1792. Some of them involved recent events in France. But others involved more abstract factors, such as the idea of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of new ways of thinking about how to create a modern republic in eighteenth-century contexts as different as Britain’s American colonies and the Francophone city-state of Geneva. This was Rousseau’s hometown, and throughout the eighteenth century the Calvinist republic had experienced a series of sharp conflicts over the right of ordinary citizens to participate in its political institutions; armed revolts had erupted in Geneva in 1737, 1762, and then in 1783.
After the eclipse of direct self-rule in the ancient world, the idea of democracy had survived, barely, and mainly as a term of art deployed by legal scholars, generally in two contradictory usages. On the one hand, democracy became a virtual synonym for violent anarchy: as the influential Roman historian Polybius summed up his own views, “the license and lawlessness” of democracy inevitably “produces mob rule,” to complete a cycle through which all governments had to pass, going from best (monarchy) to worst (democracy, or rule by the many, turning into mob rule). On the other hand, Polybius, who claimed (not very plausibly) that the Roman Republic was his model, also argued that democracy had a potentially constructive role to play. He suggested that the most durable political regime would be a mixed constitution: a republic that combined the three pure forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) into interlinked branches that would check and balance each other, enabling a well-ordered republic to navigate the winds of time “like a well-trimmed boat.”
In the centuries that followed, and working with a conception of a good regime similar to that elaborated by Polybius, a tradition of republican thought emerged, based on the example of ancient Rome. The word itself derives from the Latin res publica, literally “public thing,” or something held in common by many people. Used by Roman scholars as a Latin translation for the Greek word politeia, “republic” also was used to refer to the system of government that emerged in Rome following the expulsion of the kings in the sixth century B.C., and that had fallen apart in the first century B.C. with the rise of the Roman Empire under the emperor Augustus.
In the Renaissance, some theorists working within the republican tradition cautiously suggested that ordinary people might have an especially useful role to play, especially as watchdogs and as soldiers. Because they were jealous of their freedom, they would be vigilant spectators of executive and administrative conduct, on guard against malfeasance. The very passions of the people, which could generate a certain esprit de corps, could also be harnessed for the enhancement of a republic’s military might. The Florentine author Machiavelli, dreaming of a resurgence of Italian glory in the Renaissance, was eager to exploit popular ardor: “The best armies are those of armed peoples,” not paid mercenaries. Some modern scholars have even argued that one can find in his work a justification for a kind of “Machiavellian democracy.”
At the same time, republican writers tended to agree that the chief danger to a mixed constitution came from the democratic element, because of its tendency to degenerate into anarchy. Machiavelli warned that the people, left to their own devices, were “promoters of license.” Algernon Sydney, an English republican beheaded for expressing treasonous political views in 1683, vigorously denied being a proponent of pure democracy. So did the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who pointedly worried about the “spirit of extreme equality” he assumed was typical of democracies.
Even in the United States, in the wake of a war against colonial rule by a distant monarch, and in the context of expansive new assertions of the legitimate power of the people, serious political theorists gingerly handled the idea of democracy, if they acknowledged it at all. Still, some Americans, swept away by popular enthusiasm, began to conflate the ideal of a free republic and democracy, not unlike some of the writers of late antiquity. It was in order to avoid such confusion that James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution, took pains to explain that the framers had meant to create a (mixed) republic, not a (pure) democracy.
In the context of conventional republican theories about the superior value of mixed forms of government, the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau came as a shock, largely because of the audacious way he redefined sovereignty in terms of democracy. Before Rousseau, “sovereignty” had implied brute force, empire, and the ability to command: in the learned political treatises of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, it had primarily defined the dominion of monarchs, not the power of a people. After Rousseau, the prerogative of kings had become an unambiguous byword for democratic self-rule, as readers of the Social Contract in his native city of Geneva immediately understood.
He had been born in 1712. His father was a watchmaker and his mother died in childbirth. A voracious reader, he consumed the heroic Lives of the Greek and Roman statesmen by Plutarch, the Republic of Plato, and the romantic eighteenth-century epistolary novels that his father enjoyed reading as well. Self-taught, Rousseau mastered the key works in the Western tradition of political thought, paying special attention to the republican tradition, and the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu. But Rousseau, unlike those authors, grew up in a small city-state, one among a number of fiercely independent Swiss city-states that had a tradition of direct self-government (denizens of the Alps were also renowned for their martial virtues, one reason why Swiss Guards were employed by the French monarchy to protect the king).
Geneva was an anomaly in eighteenth-century Europe, a Protestant city-state in the midst of Catholic kingdoms, its borders confined, its population no more than twenty-five thousand people—and its form of government an unstable amalgam of aristocratic and democratic elements. The democratic element was the city’s General Council, consisting of the male heads of households that were long established in the city—excluded were children, women, resident aliens, and male heads of households more recently settled in the city. About fifteen hundred citizens were entitled to attend the General Council’s annual meeting.
But in Rousseau’s day, political power in Geneva effectively belonged not to the General Council but to a much smaller group consisting of four executives, called Syndics, and a Small Council with twenty members. The Syndics were elected at a General Council meeting from a slate of eight candidates picked by the Small Council; and the members of the Small Council were elected by the wealthiest citizens organized in a Council of Two Hundred; new members of the Council of Two Hundred were in turn appointed by the Small Council.
The resulting regime had been formally decreed an “aristo-democracy” by civic officials in 1734. Scoffing at the neologism, the proponents of giving more power to ordinary citizens argued that “our government is purely democratic”—and in 1737, these dissenters staged an abortive insurrection to demand strengthening the powers of the General Council.
Rousseau is superficially circumspect about democracy in the Social Contract. In one famous passage, he remarks that a democracy is a form of government suited only to gods, not mere mortals. But Rousseau also notes in passing “the peculiar advantage of a democratic government,” which “can be established in reality by a simple act of the general will.”
According to Rousseau, all human beings have a free will, expressed in whatever wants and interests an individual may choose to pursue. The general will, in contrast, designates a much smaller number of wants and interests that all the individuals in a group happen to share; in some contexts, these common interests can move each one of us to say “we,” and to act in accordance with that identification. For example, Rousseau asserts that people generally want to be treated with respect in institutions that enhance, rather than inhibit, their autonomy: “If one seeks what precisely comprises the greatest good of all, which ought to be the end of every system of legislation, one will find that it comes down to these two principal objects: freedom and equality.”
In principle, the general will is neither universal nor inborn, but instead is a potential—call it solidarity or fellow feeling—that is developed only through association with others. Although in a genuine community the general will, like the feeling of “We want,” is a familiar phenomenon, in other, less cohesive societies, it may appear as a more remote ideal, associated with a dutiful sense that “I ought” to be concerned with my fellows, whatever my spontaneous inclinations.
Rousseau goes on to define various aspects of the body politic that embodies a general will, “which its members call State when it is passive, Sovereign when active … As for the associates, they collectively take the name the people; and individually are called Citizens as participants in the sovereign authority, and Subjects as subject to the laws of the State.” The only legitimate state, according to the stringent criteria of the Social Contract, is a Republic in which the Citizens are Sovereign, and the laws are formed according to the general will.
These were incendiary ideas—especially in Geneva, where Rousseau was implicitly allying himself with democrats who wanted the ordinary citizens to exercise more political power. Shortly after the Social Contract was published, the Small Council, in consultation with legal experts, declared that the book’s contents were “destructive of society and of all government, and very dangerous for our Constitution.” Geneva’s magistrates issued a warrant for Rousseau’s arrest and ordered that all copies of the book be seized.
Rousseau was defiant. In 1764, he defended his political theories in a work addressed explicitly to the citizens of Geneva. “The democratic constitution,” he now wrote, “has up till now been poorly examined. All those who have spoken of it either have not understood it, or have taken too little interest in it, or have an interest to show it in a false light.” Some, raised on the classical image of Athens, “imagine that a democracy is a government where the whole people is magistrate and judge,” only to be repelled by the prospect of anarchy; others, who have always been “subjected to princes,” see “freedom only in the right to elect leaders”; they have been given the false impression that “whoever commands is always the sovereign,” when in fact the only legitimate sovereign is a people animated by a general will. “The democratic constitution is certainly the masterpiece of the political art,” Rousseau concludes, “but the more admirable its artifice, the less it belongs to all eyes to see through it.”
After the publication of this fierce democratic broadside in Geneva, events there spun briefly out of control, as a slight majority of the ordinary citizens refused to vote for a single Syndic from the slate offered that year by the Small Council. It took several months before a tenuous calm was restored.
Rousseau subsequently retired from political theorizing, exiled himself to England, and eventually died in 1778—but Geneva remained a political tinderbox. In 1782, after the ordinary citizens tried to expand unilaterally the power of the General Council at its annual meeting, the city’s chief magistrate declared that the acts of the Council would no longer be considered binding. In response, armed citizens took to the streets and took into custody members of the city’s ruling class.
Alarmed by this turn of events, the rulers of neighboring France, Sardinia, Berne, and Zurich mustered armed forces to enter the city, suppress the rebellion, and restore Geneva’s lawful rulers to power. Observing events on the spot was Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who would subsequently emerge as a proponent of democracy during the French Revolution. And from afar, Mme Roland, a Rousseau enthusiast who would also subsequently emerge as a prominent radical, exclaimed that “virtue and freedom find refuge only in the hearts of a handful of honorable men; a fig for the rest and for all the thrones of the world!”
* * *
ONE FRENCH MINISTER in 1782 warned that Geneva’s rebels showed the dangers of Rousseau’s abstract argument that “sovereignty lies with the people, who alone can give it or take it away.” At the same time, the Genevan uprising, coming in the wake of the American Revolution, heartened French republicans and offered them a precedent when the people of France rose in rebellion in 1789.
On May 5 of that year, King Louis XVI, under pressure from a growing number of disaffected Frenchmen, had opened the nation’s Estates General for the first time since 1614, bringing together elected delegates from the clergy, the aristocracy, and the “third estate,” representing commoners. On June 20, the members of the third estate, with support from a number of parish priests, took an oath not to disperse until they had given France a new constitution. On July 9, bowing again to popular pressure, the king announced that the Estates General would be transformed into a National Constituent Assembly, to begin an orderly transition to a constitutional monarchy. On July 14, a crowd of Parisians stormed the Bastille, a medieval state prison, to protest the king’s abuse of power—and to hunt for weapons. On August 4, the Constituent Assembly declared the abolition of feudalism. A few weeks later, delegates passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, proclaiming that “men are born free and remain equal in rights.”
In the months that followed, France entered a tense and protracted period of political negotiations. The uneasy peace was broken on the night of June 20–21, 1791, when King Louis XVI and his retinue, anticipating that a new constitution would drastically curtail his authority, attempted to flee Paris. The escape had been planned with the help of royalist officers and troops that had gathered near the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands, in order to launch a counterrevolution. The king was quickly captured and forced to return to Paris, where he was confined to the Tuileries Palace, under virtual house arrest. In the months that followed, fear gripped the capital, as it became clear that war with Austria and Prussia was a real possibility. The majority of representatives in the National Constituent Assembly were nevertheless willing to forgive Louis for his treachery, in part out of fear that abolishing the monarchy would open the door to a widening of the citizenry to include male residents who were too poor to pay any taxes. In September 1791, an elected Constituent Assembly tasked with drafting new laws for France presented a republican plan for a constitutional monarchy to the king, who reluctantly approved it.
Elections held according to the restricted franchise stipulated in the new constitution produced a new Legislative Assembly consisting of 745 members, many of them young and with no previous political experience. In Paris, meanwhile, members of the city’s political elite—including some key delegates to the Legislative Assembly, such as Brissot and his friend Condorcet, an eminent philosopher already well-known as an expert on voting procedures—were growing more militantly democratic. The views of such leaders were in turn widely disseminated in Paris through a burgeoning number of political clubs. The largest and most influential of these clubs, the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, was renamed in 1792 the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality (the new name derived from the monastery of the Jacobins, where the club met).
By then, the Jacobins had forged a national network of some six thousand affiliated clubs, with branches in cities from Marseille to Rouen. To start, club members shared a general esprit révolutionnaire, a patriotic élan with widespread appeal. Historians estimate that “as many perhaps as one adult French male in six or seven was at some moment committed to Jacobinism, an extraordinary figure for the time, and one that prefigures the mass political commitments of our own day.” Like the Parisian sectional assemblies, the network of Jacobin clubs functioned as local laboratories in direct democracy.
The leading members of the Parisian Jacobin club at first held varied political views. Pragmatists like Condorcet were active alongside political puritans like Robespierre and cunning careerists like Danton. As time passed and battle lines became more clearly drawn between royalists and democratic republicans, the views of the club’s dominant members grew fiercer and its national appeal narrowed, even as its political power in Paris slowly expanded.
That winter, Brissot and Condorcet, previously staunch defenders of constitutional law and order, began to qualify their views in the face of ongoing agitation by the sans-culottes in the Parisian sectional assemblies. Writing in the Chronique de Paris on February 21, 1792, Condorcet argued that “so long as a revolution is not complete, respect for the law depends upon the state of the people’s confidence in its representatives and executive agents, and the sole means of giving power to the law is to secure this confidence and maintain it.”
In the weeks that followed, some members of the Jacobins, led by Brissot and Condorcet, tried to convince their colleagues that the Legislative Assembly should declare war on the Holy Roman Emperor in a preemptive strike, assuming (correctly) that the royal family was still secretly scheming with foreign forces. Other members of the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, argued that without the prior formation of a true people’s army, consisting entirely of citizen volunteers and led by officers who were not holdovers from the Ancien Régime, a war would simply empower a fighting force that held monarchist views.
When Queen Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, began to muster his troops on the French frontier in April, Brissot’s fears seemed to be vindicated. If only for the sake of appearances, the king felt compelled to declare war on Austria. Yet when the Legislative Assembly in turn resolved to raise a people’s army consisting of twenty thousand volunteers, or fédérés, pledged to protect Paris, the king balked and vetoed the idea.
A huge demonstration followed. On June 20, 1792, a crowd of pike-wielding sans-culottes marched first to the Legislative Assembly and then to the Tuileries Palace, where they found a side door they could enter. Mounting stairs with a cannon in tow, and breaking through locked doors with their pikes, the crowd cornered the king with cries of “Vive la nation!”
“Oui,” the king agreed, “vive la nation!” “Prove it,” a protester shouted, holding out a red liberty cap, a popular emblem of revolutionary commitment. The king donned the cap. Another protester demanded he drink a toast to his visitors and handed him a bottle of wine. “People of Paris,” the king said, “I drink to your health and that of the French nation.” The protesters then dispersed—but the political atmosphere was now toxic.
Condorcet had become unabashed in his praise of the sans-culottes: “Each day,” he exclaimed, “public opinion grows more enlightened and expresses itself more vigorously.” He welcomed the events of June 20, calculating, along with Brissot, that the threat of a popular uprising might hasten a peaceful collapse of the monarchy. Drafting an aggressive message demanding that the king choose between his subjects and the nation’s foreign enemies, Condorcet persuaded the Legislative Assembly to publish it. Robespierre publicly called for the dismissal of royalist generals. In an operatic gesture, Brissot and his allies in the Assembly persuaded the delegates to open its doors on July 1, and to invite ordinary Frenchmen to watch their lawmakers in action—the government was now under the surveillance of the sovereign people! The next day, the Assembly worked around the king’s veto by inviting the fédérés from all regions of France to visit Paris in order to celebrate Bastille Day: delegates agreed to pay the troops’ expenses, and to provide lodging as well.
On July 6, the king informed the Assembly that Prussian forces were advancing toward Paris.
On July 11, the French Legislative Assembly issued a proclamation that the country was in danger, and that all political organs of the republic were to remain in constant session. The Parisian National Guard was called to arms. The first fédérés from Marseille arrived in Paris with their famous marching song (which would become the French national anthem). Fresh volunteers rushed to join the citizen soldiers—nearly fifteen thousand Parisians enlisted within a few days. The Legislative Assembly decreed that all citizens should be supplied with weapons. Sectional assemblies meeting day and night welcomed the poorest of “passive” citizens to join their meetings and to grab a weapon, too, just in case. The city was now an armed camp, packed with soldiers and citizens brandishing muskets and pikes.
On July 25, an ultimatum had arrived from the advancing Prussian armies, the so-called Brunswick Manifesto, warning against attacks on the king and promising that any rebels would face “an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance.”
While Brissot urged calm and adherence to constitutional norms, Robespierre had other ideas. On July 29, he delivered a major speech to the Jacobins, titled “Wrongs and Resources of the State.”
Acknowledging the views of the sans-culottes in the sectional assemblies, he questioned the legitimacy of the Legislative Assembly and called for new elections, with the stipulation that no current deputies could be reelected (Brissot, who was a current deputy, promptly quit the Jacobins in protest). At the same time, Robespierre justified this scheme in terms of the inalienable sovereignty of the people: “Where then to find love of the homeland and the general will if not in the people itself? Where to find arrogance, intrigue and corruption, if not in the powerful bodies that substitute their particular will for the general will, and that are always tempted to impose their authority on those who entrusted it to them?” In this context, Robespierre unswervingly upheld “the truth of the thunderous anathema” pronounced by Rousseau against the very idea of representation. Rousseau had famously declared that “the instant a people chooses representatives,” a sovereign people “is no longer free, it no longer exists”—and Robespierre concurred, though in carefully qualified terms. “It follows,” Robespierre said, “that the people is oppressed whenever its mandataries act independently of it.” Robespierre was here observing a scruple of revolutionary rhetoric: by referring to all delegates as “mandataries,” everyone was reminded that none of them were independent representatives but rather served only at the pleasure of the people, according to a mandate that could be revoked at any time. Robespierre concluded that “the primary assemblies have the power to evaluate the conduct of their representatives, and they are able to revoke it,” if any had abused the people’s trust.
Throughout Paris, debate raged in the sectional assemblies. In the Section Roi-de-Sicile (soon to be renamed Droit-de-l’Homme), located in the Marais district, moderates tried to outwit Jean Varlet, a militant who favored direct democracy and the redistribution of wealth (along with the priest Jacques Roux, he wore the epithet Enragés, the “enraged ones,” as a badge of pride). The political maneuvering in this sectional assembly gives a vivid sense of how direct democracy in practice worked in Paris in these tense days.
On the night of August 5, Varlet had introduced a motion to dethrone the king: “The country is in danger; these terrible words meant that we are betrayed.” He went on to argue that the people, after deposing Louis XVI, should, among other things, convoke the sectional assemblies and take the unprecedented step of introducing universal manhood suffrage (it should be noted that the Enragés hoped to quickly give women more political power too—women played a leading part in the group’s activities). Varlet’s motion carried, along with a motion to convey the results of sectional deliberations to other sectional assemblies.
But moderates in the Section Roi-de-Sicile fought back. The following night, they showed up in numbers. One of them implied that the previous night’s meeting had been illegitimate. Although the neighborhood contained 2,000 active citizens, only 100 to 130 had participated in the voting, and some of those included nonresidents. This speaker also charged the radicals with trying to intimidate the constitutional monarchists, in order to keep them from attending meetings, so that radicals could jam through their own resolutions without opposition. The next day, moderates forced the section’s president, a radical, to resign; he was replaced with a constitutional monarchist.
On the eve of the planned uprising on August 9, both sides arrived at the Section Roi-de-Sicile with the outcome in doubt. The section’s new moderate president tried to block a vote by abruptly adjourning the evening session and going home with the official register of proceedings. Ignoring his directive, the radicals stayed in session and elected a new president. Belatedly, at 3:00 a.m., on August 10, the sectional assembly voted to send three delegates to join the insurrectionists already gathered at the Hôtel de Ville.
* * *
AS THE SUN rose on another unseasonably hot and humid day, Paris was teeming with people, many of them drowsy thanks to the thrum of drums and pealing bells throughout the previous night, when the Parisian sections had seized control of the Commune. In preparation for an armed approach to the king’s quarters, the fédérés in the streets around the Tuileries joined battalions of sans-culottes from the sections. This stage of the insurrection had been planned, in part, by a forty-three-member committee of fédérés, led by a five-man “Secret Directory of the Insurrection.”
National Guards who had previously been loyal to the monarchy began to switch sides. The king and his ministers were by now largely isolated and without any real protection, apart from the Swiss Guards who stood ready to defend the monarchy to the death.
Anticipating an assault on the Tuileries and hoping to avoid bloodshed, a sympathetic municipal official early in the day had warned the king that Paris was in arms. He convinced the royal family to seek refuge in the Legislative Assembly, a short walk from the Tuileries, where a handful of representatives were still in session in the Salle de Manège, a repurposed indoor riding academy.
After the king had departed from his palace, and even though the majority of the National Guards stationed at the Tuileries now joined the insurrection, the Swiss Guards stood their ground. Efforts at a peaceful surrender of the palace ended with pushing and shoving—and the Swiss opening fire. Fédérés and sans-culottes fell in numbers, and the insurgents were forced to retreat.
But the insurrection by now had force on its side. As the Swiss Guards prepared to stand down under belated orders from the king, fédérés and sans-culottes stormed the palace, quickly creating a mountain of corpses in the entrance. Some of the Swiss Guards leapt from windows in an effort to escape; others fled as a unit toward the Champs-Élysées. They were pursued by soldiers and sans-culottes wielding muskets and pikes, their red uniforms making them easy targets (and also making targets of fédérés who happened to be wearing red, so indiscriminate was the crowd’s murderous rage).
As one eyewitness to the slaughter in the Tuileries later recalled, “I remained … until four o’clock in the afternoon, having before my eyes a view of all the horrors that were being perpetrated. Some of the men were still continuing the slaughter; others were cutting off the heads of those already slain; while the women, lost to all sense of shame, were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph … Toward evening I took the road to Versailles … [and] crossed the Pont Louis Seize, which was covered with the naked carcasses of men already in a state of putrefaction from the intense heat of the weather.”
The most radically democratic phase of the French Revolution thus began with a carnival of atrocities.
* * *
THE HISTORIAN Simon Schama has argued that the “bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.” In effect, the threat of violence gave ordinary citizens an unfamiliar, and therefore intoxicating, power to challenge constituted authority. If Schama is correct—and I believe he is—then previous scholars have been wrong to imply that the ardent desire of ordinary people for public freedom can be separated, in fact, from their willingness to use force in its pursuit.
In any case, the entire episode certainly casts light on what another modern historian has aptly called “the uneasy coincidence of democracy and fanaticism present at the birth of modern politics.”
At this moment of its eighteenth-century rebirth, this is what democracy looked like.
* * *
ON THE NIGHT of August 10, with fires smoldering in the Tuileries Palace and the stench of death still in the air, Robespierre addressed the Jacobins club. He had been leery of the planned uprising, fearing it would fail. Like Brissot, Condorcet, Marat, and most of the other well-known tribunes of the French people, he had kept himself out of harm’s way during the previous twenty-four hours. But now that the revolt, against all odds, had proved successful, Robespierre, like the other popular orators and journalists, was eager to seize back the political initiative.
There was only one path forward, Robespierre proclaimed before his fellow Jacobins: the Commune had to urge the French people “to make it absolutely impossible for its mandataries to harm the cause of liberty.” Robespierre suggested the dispatch of delegates to every one of the eighty-three regions of France, to explain the situation in Paris, and to garner support for dissolving the Legislative Assembly. He was, in effect, advocating a coup d’état under the cover of a democratic revolt:
The solemn manner in which [the people of Paris] proceeded toward this great action was as sublime as were their motives and objectives … They organized it with a harmony that only the friends of freedom can display. It was not a pointless riot, provoked by a few trouble-makers; it was not a conspiracy shrouded in mystery; they deliberated in full view, before the nation; the day and plan of the insurrection were posted publicly. It was the people as a whole that exercised its right. It acted as a sovereign who despises tyrants too much to fear them, and who is too sure of his power and the holiness of his cause to stoop to conceal his intentions.
Other political leaders, recoiling from the slaughter they had just witnessed, were more cautious in their response. After this unexpected turn of events, Brissot, who had been an ally of the sans-culottes weeks before Robespierre had rallied to their cause, was anxious to restore some semblance of law and order as quickly as possible. So was his colleague Condorcet, arguably the most gifted legal mind of them all.
Sharply disagreeing with Robespierre, both argued that the new Commune should allow the current Legislative Assembly to survive, so long as it was willing to organize fresh national elections. The purpose of these elections would be to establish a convention tasked with creating a new, truly democratic constitution, to replace the mixed, but still monarchic, constitution of 1791.
Those few members of the Legislative Assembly still brave enough to risk coming to work under these new circumstances agreed with understandable alacrity to the compromise proposed by Brissot. So did a majority of the sans-culottes in the Commune and the Parisian sectional assemblies.
The stage was now set for what Condorcet and Brissot hoped would be sober deliberations over what democracy might mean in a modern state like France.
* * *
THE FRENCH CONVENTION met for the first time on September 21, 1792. The delegates convened shortly after the September Massacres, another episode of indiscriminate slaughter, this one leaving thousands of people pulled from Parisian prisons dead, on the unfounded suspicion that they were traitors waiting to join royalist forces (most of the victims were in fact prostitutes and petty criminals).
The context was harrowing—and the challenges facing the Convention were daunting. A new constitution that was genuinely democratic would have to square a circle, somehow reconciling the demands of the sectional assemblies for a direct expression of popular sovereignty with the needs of governing a large nation that consisted of citizens holding diverse—and even divergent—views about what a good society should look like.
France in 1792 was overwhelmingly a rural society of peasants, and many were more or less happily embedded in customary communities regulated by traditional habits and religious beliefs. Even in Paris, the second-largest city in Europe (after London), the activists in the sections comprised a self-selected minority of the city’s population: although many Frenchmen participated in one of the country’s new political clubs at least once in this period, modern historians estimate that on average only a tiny fraction of eligible citizens (15 percent at most, 5 percent more often) participated regularly in the Parisian sectional assemblies, and that “even major political issues could only rarely stir more than a hundred or so citizens out of their political apathy in any section.”
And these were not the only challenges. The very idea of creating a durable framework of laws had just been called into question by the Parisian sans-culottes themselves. Having already nullified one republican constitution through an armed insurrection that they believed was a legitimate expression of direct popular sovereignty, how could the sans-culottes settle for anything less than the right to revolt at will?
And yet how could the rest of France endorse such an outlandish demand from a comparatively small group of armed democrats, when sovereignty properly belonged to the people of France as a whole, according to the very political logic the sans-culottes themselves ostensibly embraced?
On October 11, 1792, the Convention formed a committee to draft a new democratic constitution for France. Among the members were Brissot; the Abbé Sieyès, who had played a leading role in drafting the prior constitution; Danton; and Bertrand Barère, an ally of Robespierre.
But the undisputed intellectual leader of the group was Condorcet, who had already outlined political mechanisms (in his 1785 “Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision Making”) that would rationalize the drafting of laws for the public good, as Rousseau had tried to do in the Social Contract.
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, ci-devant Marquis de Condorcet, was unique among the revolutionary leaders. He was a permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society, and a member of the French Academy—all in addition to his activities as a lawmaker during the revolution. A mathematical prodigy, he was also a speculative philosopher equally comfortable with Cartesian metaphysics and the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. A methodological individualist in the tradition of Adam Smith and his mentor, the French economist Turgot, he was a proponent of “social mathematics” as a source of enlightened public policy, a pioneer in the analysis of collective decision-making processes, “the godfather of modern probability theory”—and also an early advocate of equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery. He held optimistic views about the potential capacities of ordinary human beings, but his faith in human perfectibility was tempered by what the Victorian British writer and statesman John Morley described as his “preeminent distinction,” a “religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege.”
He had been born in 1743 to a cavalry officer and a devout mother who turned him over to the Jesuits to be educated from the age of eight. In a biographical essay read to the Academy of Sciences in 1841, his eulogist summed up two surprising results of this “extraordinary” confluence of circumstances: “In politics a total rejection of any idea of hereditary prerogative; in matters of religion, skepticism pushed to its extreme limits.” Impassioned by abstract ideas, he was outwardly reserved—a “volcano covered with snow,” his friend D’Alembert quipped.
Temperamentally averse though he was to anarchy and bloodshed, Condorcet was quick to defend the results of the sans-culottes insurrection: “Men who, like the French, love true liberty, who know that it cannot exist without an entire equality, and who acknowledge the sovereignty of the people,” he wrote shortly afterward, “ought to approve the revolution of the 10th of August,” an event in which “a considerable portion of the people, combining by spontaneous impulse and addressing themselves to a legal assembly of the whole,” took care to ensure that “the natural and primitive rights of man” would be “scrupulously respected.”
* * *
THERE WAS WIDESPREAD AGREEMENT in the Convention about what a modern democratic constitution should look like. The delegates’ first act had been to abolish the monarchy. Everyone agreed that a modern democratic state must be unicameral, that is, built around a single national legislature, with no division of powers. Everyone conceded that there would need to be some mechanism to lodge the power of the sovereign in the delegates, and almost everyone agreed that these delegates should not be American-style “representatives” (entrusted with full power for a fixed period by a vote), but mandataries, enjoying a contingent mandate that could be revoked at any time by the sovereign people. Everyone agreed that citizenship must be unrestricted by any kind of property qualification. They agreed that the executive and judiciary should be strictly subordinate to the legislature. They also agreed that the new constitution should uphold human rights, equality, and the sovereignty of the people. And almost everyone assumed that the constitution would need also to embody in some way the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by establishing a real institutional framework for expressing the nation’s general will.
There were nevertheless some important disagreements among the members of Condorcet’s committee. There was no consensus about whether or not to temper the extraordinary power currently wielded by the Parisian sectional assemblies. Some Jacobins favored the status quo, while Condorcet and his allies advocated constitutional reforms that would create a more equitable distribution of political power throughout the nation. A majority disagreed with Condorcet about offering women full citizenship; nor did the majority share his view that the death penalty should be abolished.
Condorcet’s approach to Rousseau was idiosyncratic. Where Rousseau spoke of the general will, Condorcet in 1785 had preferred to use “the common reason” as his key criterion for establishing what was politically right. Unlike Condorcet, Rousseau was notoriously suspicious of the power of subtle reasoning to obfuscate and rationalize unjust institutions. But Rousseau also appreciated the relevance of “common reason” in the context of elaborating his own principles of political right in the Social Contract. In an obscure but important passage in that work, Rousseau had, like Condorcet, suggested that his own criterion of political right might admit of a mathematical formulation: “Take away from these … wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out, and the remaining sum of the differences is the general will.”
Condorcet had gone much farther in his “Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision Making,” offering an argument for the wisdom of the multitude, known today as the “Condorcet Jury Theorem.” Condorcet took for granted Rousseau’s premise, the goodwill of the common people; the problem was showing why a majority of them would be wise in the aggregate. According to Condorcet’s mathematical argument, a group of ordinary people voting on a yes-or-no question are liable more often than a single person, however well educated, to arrive at a “true” decision, as long as three conditions are met: (1) individual voters are generally better than random at choosing true propositions (a condition that obviously suggests the importance of public access to reliable information and improving the capacity of ordinary citizens to reason clearly); (2) everyone votes independently of others; and (3) everyone votes sincerely and not strategically. One counterintuitive implication of this mathematical argument was that the larger the group voting, the more likely it was to arrive at a judicious outcome.
Rousseau himself had oscillated wildly between efforts to bring some measure of reason to bear in public life and his deep suspicion of smooth talkers able to produce apparent reasons for almost anything. Far more emphatically than Condorcet, Rousseau also respected the role that sentiments and the passions played in public life. Rousseau’s ambivalence about reason would eventually reappear—with a vengeance—in the Convention’s debates over Condorcet’s draft constitution, which represented a remarkable attempt to institutionalize what one modern writer has called “the wisdom of crowds.”
* * *
ON JANUARY 21, 1793, thousands of Frenchmen flocked to the largest square in Paris, once the Place de Louis XV, but renamed the Place de la Révolution (and eventually, in a gesture of reconciliation, renamed Place de la Concorde). The crowd had gathered on that wintry day to watch their former king face death. Louis stoically mounted the scaffold, and, after protesting his innocence, was strapped onto a board and pushed under the guillotine that had been installed at the center of the square. After the blade fell, the executioner pulled the king’s severed head from a basket and held it aloft, blood dripping, for all to admire. As one eyewitness recalled, tens of thousands of spectators roared their approval and tossed their hats in the air: “I saw people pass by, arm in arm, laughing, chatting familiarly as if they were at a fête.”
A few weeks later, on February 15, Condorcet had a draft to share on behalf of the constitutional committee with his colleagues in the Convention, which was meeting at the Salle de Manège. The former riding academy was a space ten times as long as it was wide, with a high, vaulted ceiling. Banquettes in six tiers ran the length of the hall, ranged on both sides of the central podium, with the delegates arranged, depending on their political views, to either the left or the right of the podium (this is the origin of the distinction between left and right in modern politics). An upper deck with more seats offered space for the public to view the proceedings, and the rafters were often packed with sans-culottes who jeered and cheered, not unlike the ordinary Greek citizens who had regularly gathered at the Pnyx in ancient Athens.
Condorcet began by laying out the challenge the Convention was facing:
To form a constitution for a territory of twenty-seven thousand square leagues, containing twenty-five millions of inhabitants, which constitution, wholly founded on the principles of reason and justice, shall secure each citizen in the enjoyment of his rights; and to combine the various parts of this constitution, so that the necessary obedience to the laws, and the submission of the will of individuals to the general will, shall be the result; and so that the extent and sovereignty of the people, with equality between man and man, and the exercise of natural freedom, shall be left in their full force; to accomplish all this is the task we are required to perform.
Because Condorcet was hoarse that day, he had to ask Barère to deliver most of his prepared speech to the Convention. In order to ensure that citizens were constantly reminded of their own sovereign power, the committee proposed instituting a nested set of assemblies, starting at a local level, proceeding to a regional level, and issuing in a National Assembly. But it also stressed the importance of “private societies,” like the Jacobins, where men, having had time to read and reflect on current affairs, could refine their political views through face-to-face interaction. And it similarly stressed the freedom of the press: “No man should be deprived of any means of information, and each should be free to use such means at pleasure.” (Elsewhere Condorcet had also made it plain that the provision of universal instruction in public schools was, in his view, another necessary precondition of any viable modern democracy.)
Trying to strike a balance between robust popular participation and the production of rational laws, Condorcet’s prepared text stated that “it would be equally dangerous for the people either to refuse to delegate their power, or in any manner to abandon that power.”
On the one hand, “primary assemblies,” convened locally, would be granted the power to discuss whatever they liked. Any citizen would have a right “to propose, that his primary assembly should demand any law, whatever, to be submitted anew to examination” by his community. If enough primary assemblies concurred, then the issue—even if it involved rewriting the constitution itself—must be discussed by regional assemblies. If enough regional assemblies concurred, then the issue must be addressed by the National Assembly. “Should the majority” of primary and regional assemblies “require a convention, the National Assembly will be obliged to call one. Its refusal to convoke the primary assemblies is, therefore, the only case in which the right of insurrection can be justly executed.”
To ensure the ongoing, democratic legitimacy of these institutions, Condorcet’s draft called for a periodic national constituent assembly that could meet, in order to submit “the constitution to reform, at a determined epoch, independent of any request from the people.” (In later years, Thomas Jefferson famously lamented that the Americans had neglected to include similar provisions for making ongoing improvements to their Constitution.)
On the other hand, Condorcet took pains to point out that no primary assembly in itself could possibly claim sovereign powers, for such “sovereignty can only appertain to the whole.”
He also thought that insurrections should be rare, not a routine occurrence, as they were threatening to become in Paris. Constant armed uprisings jeopardized public safety. Even more alarming, the centralization of these revolts in the capital city undermined the democratic principle of equality of political access, by giving the Parisian sans-culottes much more political power than citizens in other cities and rural regions. Such disproportional influence was “contrary to that equality between the parts of the whole, which the rights of nature, justice, the common good, and the general prosperity, so powerfully require.”
At one point, Barère, reading Condorcet’s prepared remarks, reminded his listeners that the committee’s proposals were not unprecedented: democracy “is no new institution,” he remarked. “It was established and long subsisted in the republic of Athens.”
Barère concluded by reiterating the committee’s conviction that “a constitution expressly adopted by the citizens, and including the regular means of correcting and changing itself, is the only one by which a people, understanding their rights, jealous of preserving, after having lately recovered them, and still fearing they may be lost, can be subjected to permanent order.”
* * *
CONDORCET’S DRAFT of a democratic constitution, and the speech justifying it, are both remarkable documents. But inside the Convention, the committee’s work met with a frosty reception. The details of Condorcet’s proposal were both subtle and complex. Given the low rates of participation in the Parisian sectional assemblies, it was not self-evident how many Frenchmen, if given the opportunity, would actually want to participate regularly in primary assembly meetings, in the calm and deliberative manner that Condorcet was clearly hoping to facilitate through his proposed constitution.
One of the most radical delegates, Marat, the self-proclaimed ami du peuple (people’s friend) and a man of bloodthirsty instincts—he had defended the September Massacres in print—immediately grasped that the constitution’s new, nationwide network of primarily assemblies had been explicitly designed to diminish the concentrated power of the Parisian sectional assemblies. “Everything the sectional assemblies do so well voluntarily,” Marat complained, the new constitution would turn into an onerous duty in the primary assemblies. He went on to deplore the draft’s “monstrous vices” and to denounce Condorcet and his friends as a “criminal faction.” (By this point, measured deliberation was not a salient feature of the Convention’s meetings.)
The delegates prevaricated, by ordering that Condorcet’s plan be published and distributed throughout France; by dissolving the committee that had drafted it, on the grounds its work was done; and then by delaying debate for two months, so that alternative proposals could be prepared and distributed before debate over the draft constitution resumed.
The political situation in these months was grave, with deteriorating economic conditions, ongoing popular unrest in Paris, and resistance to revolutionary taxation provoking a bloody uprising in the rural region of the Vendée, even as French troops suffered a series of reversals abroad, fighting in Holland and Belgium.
The Convention had become the scene of a pitched power struggle between rival factions, and the constitution itself was a bone of contention. Radicals like Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat vehemently questioned the democratic good faith of Condorcet and his allies. (As one modern historian has quipped, “The power of ideas can inflame ideas of power.”)
Inside the cavernous Salle de Manège, some participants in these debates began to articulate an authoritarian conception of the emergency means necessary to attain an ultimate goal everyone nominally agreed on, a regime in which the “sovereignty of the people, with equality between man and man, and the exercise of natural freedom, shall be left in their full force.”
Meanwhile, the Parisian sans-culottes were by now regularly taking democracy into the streets—and into the halls of the National Convention, where militants monitored their mandataries and submitted petitions demanding cheaper bread, equalization of income, and the arrest and swift punishment of aristocrats suspected of hoarding grain.
By April 17, when the Convention resumed debate over the constitution, Condorcet found himself isolated politically. His pleas for the Convention to ratify the February draft constitution were met with invective and ad hominem attacks on him as an aristocrat. A week later, Saint-Just, the most dashing of the deputies elected to the Convention, homed in on Condorcet’s treatment of the general will, which he found to be too “intellectual.” Rousseau, he reminded his audience, had “written from the heart,” whereas Condorcet was a cunning casuist, angling to keep himself and his cronies in power.
The debate over the constitution continued, but was constantly interrupted, as delegates were forced to deal with an increasingly brutal civil war in the Vendée and daily petitions from the Parisian sections, never mind the jockeying for power inside the Salle de Manège.
On May 10, Robespierre addressed the Convention. The challenge faced by every great legislator, he declared, is “to give to government the force necessary to have citizens always respect the rights of citizens and to do it in such a manner that government is never able to violate these rights itself.” Rarely had this challenge been met; as Rousseau had shown, history was generally a saga of “government devouring sovereignty,” and of the rich exploiting the poor. “The interest of the office holder” is always a “private interest,” whereas “the interest of the people is the public good.” In order to ensure that “the interest of the people” will prevail, Robespierre urged the Convention to pay a per diem to ordinary citizens to enable them to participate in political meetings (just as Athens had done in the fourth century B.C.). He urged the Convention to “render to individual freedom all that does not belong naturally to public authority, and you will have left that much less of a prize for ambition and imperiousness. Above all, respect the freedom of the sovereign in primary assemblies.”
Such safeguards—many of them already included by Condorcet in his draft constitution—still did not strike Robespierre as sufficient. Elected officials must be constantly in the public eye, and for this purpose France needed some additional means for participation in politics, over and above the institutions outlined by Condorcet. And while it was obviously impossible for the people of France to assemble as a whole, as the people of Athens had assembled, Robespierre proposed, as an approximation to the ideal, that the republic build “a vast and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spectators,” who in this way would monitor meetings of the National Assembly. “Under the eyes of so great a number of witnesses, neither corruption, intrigue nor perfidy dare show itself; the general will alone shall be consulted, the voice of reason and the public interest shall alone be heard.”
Hoping to find a democratic way forward, Condorcet replied three days later. Acknowledging the criticisms of his draft, he suggested that the Convention set itself a deadline, promising to convene primary assemblies in six months, on November 1. By then, the people would either have a completed constitution to consider ratifying, or they would be free to elect a new group of delegates, to convene a new National Convention that could try its collective hand at tackling the challenge of formulating a properly democratic constitution.
His colleagues ignored this idea—and it was the last time Condorcet publicly addressed the French people.
* * *
ON MAY 31, 1793, the sans-culottes again seized control of Paris, just as they had on August 10 the prior year, but this time in concert with radicals in the Convention led by Robespierre. On June 3, the Convention, besieged by armed citizens, capitulated to a list of popular demands, including the arrest of Condorcet and twenty-eight other delegates accused of political misconduct.
The purge completed, the new leaders of the Convention produced a new draft constitution in a week, obtained the virtually unanimous approval of the delegates, and sent it on to the primary assemblies of the French people for their approbation. This text was a simplified version of Condorcet’s original draft, with a few revolutionary revisions—most notably, a new passage proclaiming insurrection to be “the most sacred of rights, and the most indispensable of duties.”
Although the Jacobin constitution was quickly ratified in a popular referendum by 1,784,377 votes out of approximately 1,800,000 votes cast by eligible citizens (that is, all adult Frenchmen regardless of wealth or property), it was never implemented. Instead, it was set aside indefinitely on October 10, 1793, when a “Revolutionary Government,” endowed with extraordinary powers to repress “counterrevolutionaries,” was declared—a declaration that marks the formal beginning of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.
The outcome was ironic. What had begun as an earnest effort to institute the most democratic form of government feasible in a large modern state instead produced three unforeseen results.
The first was the de facto transformation of France in the autumn of 1793 into a one-party state, controlled by a small clique of Jacobins. Led by Robespierre, this clique in effect had asserted the need to create a kind of dictatorship, in the original Roman sense, of investing a person or a group with supreme authority during a crisis, the regular rule of law being suspended until the crisis had passed.
A second consequence would be the result, in part, of experiencing the Jacobin dictatorship. In the years that followed, there emerged a group of French politicians and theorists who wished to set explicit limits to expressions of popular sovereignty, in order to protect individual liberties. The emergence of this new and more skeptical approach to the potential value of a modern democracy may be called properly “liberal” in its concern with protecting not just civil liberties but also freedom of conscience—and it coincided with a rejection of some of Rousseau’s core concepts. Years later, Benjamin Constant pointed out how Rousseau’s conception of popular sovereignty inadvertently facilitated tyrannical results:
The people, Rousseau says, are sovereign in one respect and subject in another. But in practice, these two relations are always confused. It is easy for the authority to oppress the people as subject, in order to force it to express, as sovereign, the will that the authority prescribes for it … When sovereignty is unlimited, there is no means of sheltering individuals from governments. It is in vain that you pretend to submit governments to the general will. It is always they who dictate the content of this will, and all your precautions become illusory.
But the final, and perhaps most ironic, outcome of the French Revolution was the triumph of a new conception of “representative democracy.” To the most prominent political theorists of the eighteenth century, including Montesquieu, the phrase would have seemed an oxymoron. Like the ancient Greeks, Montesquieu regarded the election of representatives to be an aristocratic, not a democratic practice, as democracy entailed a direct access to political offices, preferably through random selection.
Yet now a critical mass of politicians, activists, jurists, and authors began to view the election of representatives to be preferable to, and a necessary check on, the unruly excesses of a purely direct democracy. In the context of the American Revolution, the phrase had appeared as early as 1777—though only in private correspondence. Condorcet himself had tried to balance the powers of primary assemblies with the need to delegate power, via elected regional assemblies, to a national assembly of mandataries who could legitimately represent the general will of the entire French nation.
And Thomas Paine, one of Condorcet’s allies in the Convention—after the journée of August 10, he had been made an honorary citizen of France and subsequently elected as a delegate—had been even more explicit about the benefits of a representative democracy in The Rights of Man. Originally published in English in two parts, the first in 1791, the second in February 1792, this paean to revolutionary values was quickly translated into French and a number of other European languages. And in part two, Paine welcomed the French Revolution’s political outcome as a triumph—not for simple democracy but for “the representative system.”
“Simple Democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary means,” Paine explained. “By ingrafting representation upon Democracy, we arrive at a system of Government capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests and every extent of territory and population; and that is also as much superior to hereditary Government, as the Republic of Letters is to hereditary literature.”
Two years later—in the improbable context of a “Report on the Principles of Public Morality” that commends terror as “the mainspring of popular government” in the midst of a revolution—Robespierre himself came to a similar conclusion even more emphatically: “A democracy is not a state where the people, continually assembled, regulate by themselves all public affairs, and still less one where one hundred thousand portions of the people, by measures that are isolated, hasty and contradictory, would decide the fate of the whole society.” Properly understood, Robespierre avers, “democracy is a state where the sovereign people, guided by laws that are their work, do by themselves everything they can do well, and by means of delegates everything that they cannot do themselves.” Modern democracy may perish, not just from “the aristocracy of those who govern” but also from “contempt on the part of the people for the authorities that they themselves have established.”
This is a complete about-face from the ultrademocratic views Robespierre had championed in his speech on the draft democratic constitution in 1793. And even though the passage occurs in a speech justifying his government’s recourse to frightful violence, these comments, so similar to those of Tom Paine, suggest an emerging consensus among professed democrats in favor of this previously unknown hybrid regime, an indirect or representative democracy.
* * *
ROBESPIERRE’S SPEECH was a warning to the sans-culottes. The indigenous sovereignty of the people, he now argued, had to be replaced, first by a transitional dictatorship to defend the new republic, and then by a representative democracy in which the people, through elections, would hand over power to a government of the “just and wise.”
When Robespierre was arrested a few months later, on July 27, 1794, the tocsin was sounded, but few sans-culottes rallied to his side. By slowly but surely alienating a growing number of ordinary Parisians, he had destroyed the original basis of his power. His execution the following day marked the end of the Terror in France and also the effective end, in that epoch, of any serious effort to institute a truly self-governing democracy in France.
* * *
CONDORCET’S FATE was even more harrowing. Facing arrest after the insurrection of May 31, 1793, he had gone into hiding. In these months, the architect of the world’s first modern democratic constitution had every reason to despair: he knew perfectly well that his fondest hopes for an enlightened regime of political freedom had been hijacked by Robespierre and a few other fanatics of virtue. But even in his clandestine chambers, he was able to give voice to his wildest hopes, by writing his “Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind”—a defiant declaration of secular faith that would become his last will and testament.
Condorcet was finally cornered ten months later in Clamart-le-Vignoble—an innkeeper’s suspicions were aroused by his hungry guest’s order for a twelve-egg omelet. Arrested by the police and transferred to a prison, Condorcet died twenty-four hours later—whether by suicide or murder will never be known.
Condorcet was just one of countless political victims in these years. Hundreds had perished in the uprising of August 10, 1792, and more than a thousand during the September Massacres a month later. In the months that followed, some seventeen thousand people were executed after a trial, the king and queen the most prominent among them. Perhaps another twenty thousand suspects—including Brissot, Danton, and Condorcet, among other political leaders—were left dead with less formality during the Jacobin Reign of Terror.
But it was the pious Catholic peasants of the Vendée who suffered most. In the fall of 1793, after the Jacobin coup, the new republic’s conscripts, on orders from Paris, embarked on a murderous rampage, indiscriminately targeting civilians as part of a campaign to avenge the bloody royalist uprising in that remote west-central French province. Before this pioneering venture in “total war” was over, almost 250,000 people, many of them innocent men, women, and children, had perished in a premeditated slaughter.
The French Revolution had produced a new understanding of democracy—and a hecatomb on a grand scale.