Public Opinion versus Popular Sovereignty: Liberalism in France after the Revolution (1789-1830)

Today, political theorists often understand public opinion as an expression of popular sovereignty: people exercise their power by voicing and discussing their political views. Scholars have shown that this amalgamation of the two notions first occurred during the French Revolution. To date, however, no study has investigated how theorists of public opinion envisaged it in relation to popular sovereignty after the Revolution. As a result, we have forgotten the tensions between the two concepts that emerged at this juncture. This was a time when their meaning was subject to intense philosophical debate. 

My project seeks to fill this gap, by investigating how French liberals – Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard and François Guizot – proposed public opinion as an alternative to popular sovereignty in reaction to the Revolution. By restoring them to their original context, I aim to show that these thinkers only discussed popular sovereignty in answer to its uses by political opponents and to highlight its flaws. Instead, they used public opinion to theorize the workings of representative government. For them, public opinion and popular sovereignty implied distinct ideas about the goal of politics, the meaning of political participation and the political actors it involved. Retrieving this deep-seated opposition might teach us that advocacies of the rule of public opinion do not necessarily imply sympathy for democratic politics.