This article seeks to make two main interventions into the history and historiography of revolutionary France. First, historiographically it attempts to counter the two reigning “liberal” and “republican” interpretations of the Age of Revolutions by reestablishing the centrality of democracy and the democratic to the French revolutionary tradition. Second, historically it locates the substance of that democratic tradition not in conventional accounts of either sovereignty or suffrage, but rather in the original French attempt to democratize executive power from top to bottom. As this article demonstrates, democratic administration—the democratization of internal police and public regulation—was a virtual obsession of the French revolutionary project from high political theory to the most mundane and exceptional acts of everyday governance.

While few would contest that the political transformations in the Atlantic world from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth were in some broad sense “democratic,” political historiography on the foundations of modern politics in France has overwhelmingly focused on other—perhaps less murky—terms to structure their analyses. Principal among the preferred frames of political history have been liberalism and classical or civic republicanism. As Larry Siedentop argued in his foundational 1979 essay, liberalism never was the sole purview of Anglo-American politics.Footnote ¹ France too, he argued, enjoyed a distinct liberal tradition, which was at once more sociological and more statist than its neighbors’. Since then, thanks to a range of accomplished scholars—Louis Girard, André Jardin, Pierre Manent, Françoise Melonio, Melvin Richter, Stephen Holmes, Annelien de Dijn, Steven K. Vincent, Lucien Jaume, Cheryl Welch, Aurelian Craiutu, Alan Kahan, Andrew Jainchill, Raf Geenens, to name but a few—we now have a highly sophisticated understanding of this liberal tradition. Helena Rosenblatt has even gone so far as to chart a “lost history of liberalism” that takes its roots in Roman antiquity.Footnote ² Together these histories have furthered exacting interpretations of modern French politics and its contribution to modern political history more generally.Footnote ³

While classical republicanism came to French historiography later than to the British and American, it has opened similarly pathbreaking perspectives. No doubt, one of the most important historians in opening this line of inquiry in France has been Keith Michael Baker. In a programmatic essay on “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Baker provided the outlines for bringing the powerful paradigm of classical republicanism into eighteenth-century French politics,Footnote ⁴ establishing a set of arguments that have been particularly generative for reinterpreting modern French politics before and after the Revolution.Footnote ⁵

None of this is to say that a history of democracy has been absent. The great dean of French revolutionary studies, Alphonse Aulard, famously presented his political history of the French Revolution as a history of the origins and development of democracy.Footnote ⁶ More than a half-century later, Robert Palmer announced his ambition to uncover an “Age of Democratic Revolution” across the Atlantic world, confidently stating that it was “no anachronism to apply the word ‘democratic’ to the eighteenth-century revolution.”Footnote ⁷ In the same years, Marcel Reinhard taught a course at the Sorbonne entitled “La révolution démocratique.”Footnote ⁸ Certainly, the importance of the notion of democracy did not disappear in the years that followed. Lynn Hunt argued that the “origin of democracy was the ‘central mystery’ of the French Revolution” as presented by François Furet.Footnote ⁹ And in recent years the work of leading scholars, including John Dunn, James Kloppenberg, Pierre Rosanvallon, Marcel Gauchet, Joanna Innes, Mark Philp, Sophia Rosenfeld, and James Livesey, among others, has pushed democracy front and center within modern political history in France and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰ The verdict would seem unanimous: democracy too was a central feature of the birth of political modernity.

And yet, in spite of such pervasiveness, a clear definition of exactly what “democracy” meant on either side of the Revolution has remained elusive. Even as he championed its importance, Robert Palmer suggested that any well-defined sense of the term in the eighteenth century was almost impossible to discern, settling on a very general notion that “at the most, democracy was a principle, or element, which might profitably enter into a ‘mixed constitution’.”Footnote ¹¹ This idea remained little changed some sixty years later in the introduction to a volume on the conceptual history of democracy: “In the classical tradition of political thought, ‘democracy’ was evaluated positively as a useful element only in a mixed constitution.”Footnote ¹² Pierre Rosanvallon's own genealogy of the term insisted on its “semantic variety,” arguing that the word was used in the eighteenth century “only to designate an obsolete type of political system.”Footnote ¹³ Other accomplished specialists of the history of democracy have similarly confirmed that prior to 1789 it “became common to characterize it [democracy] as a primitive form.”Footnote ¹⁴ A more recent history of democracy has used the term's supposed imprecision as the basis of its analysis, arguing that “no unequivocal definition is possible,”Footnote ¹⁵ while one of the most ambitious histories of democracy has concisely stated, “disagreements about democracy constitute its history.”Footnote ¹⁶

Given the overwhelming consensus on the centrality of republicanism, liberalism, and democracy in the birth of political modernity, the glaring contrast between the sophistication of the liberal and classical republican traditions on the one hand and the woolliness of democracy on the other is arresting, and, in fine, this article argues, unwarranted. Indeed, what follows unearths a forgotten, but widespread, conception of democracy in the crucial revolutionary age from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth in France. In this tradition, democracy was defined as a means for solving public problems by the public itself. This democracy focused on inventing effective, popular and participatory practices of government, administration and regulatory police to ensure freedom and equality by acting for the public good. As such it differed deeply from contemporary conceptions that emphasized popular sovereignty and parliamentary systems. Moreover, this conception of modern democracy overlapped and in some cases complemented, but—more importantly for this article—remained in significant ways distinct from, other early modern political traditions, in particular liberalism and classical republicanism.

To be clear, by referring to this approach to democracy as a tradition, I am not suggesting—anymore than those who have traced the history of liberalism or the paradigm of classical republicanism—that it was necessarily the dominant conception, that it was the only possible understanding of democracy, that it was shared by all, or that it was always expressed in crystalline form. It may be found alongside, and intermingled, in pieces, and fused in a variety of ways with, other contemporary political theories just as it can be found in a variety of hues among different authors. Unquestionably, no small amount of work remains before we may grasp the complexities of this tradition in France and internationally with the same subtleness and complexity with which we have come to comprehend liberalism or republicanism. We may, however, begin such an investigation by exploring the work of a core group of individuals before, during and after the French Revolution.

To begin charting this tradition, I would like to turn to the figure whom those interested in the history of democracy have widely cited for his precocious insights, the Marquis d'Argenson. Palmer noted that “it is rare, even among the philosophes of the Revolution, to find anyone using the word in a favorable sense in any practical connection. Such a man can, however, be found. He is a French nobleman and sometime minister of the state, the Marquis d'Argenson.”Footnote ¹⁷ Pierre Rosanvallon similarly highlighted d'Argenson's insights into democracy: “The Marquis d'Argenson was quite alone among eighteenth-century writers,” Rosanvallon argues. “D'Argenson was the first to strip the word ‘democracy’ of its ancient and archaic referents.”Footnote ¹⁸ Joanna Innes and Mark Philp have similarly heralded d'Argenson's original and annunciatory ideas, which “adumbrat[ed] a scheme that had more obvious potential.”Footnote ¹⁹ And Andrew Jainchill has firmly established that d'Argenson's theory of democracy had a powerful influence over key figures of the French Revolution.Footnote ²⁰

Though d'Argenson's contributions have been documented by some, the precise nature of his influence on the development of a modern notion of democracy requires further investigation. Councilor in the Paris Parlement, then councilor of state, followed by intendant, and finally minister of foreign affairs under Louis XV, d'Argenson came to the democratic question through his employ as an administrator.Footnote ²¹ He consciously rooted his writings in the line of administrative reforms that occupied politically minded philosophes and parlements of the eighteenth century, following on the projects of the Duke of Burgundy.Footnote ²² Eschewing abstract questions of right, d'Argenson outlined a novel “art of government” to justly ensure the wealth and strength of the kingdom.Footnote ²³ And even as he proved unable to realize his reforms as minister to Louis XV, d'Argenson consistently homed in on the practical questions of government: “Within vast political operations, ordinarily the means seem to be born from execution and practice itself,”Footnote ²⁴ he observed.

Penned as a response to Boulainvillier's Histoire de l'Ancien Gouvernement de la France (1727), d'Argenson's Considérations proposed a fresh interpretation of democracy, not in the abstract contractual terms offered by Hobbes's De Cive or the antiquated affirmations of Furetière's Dictionnaire universel,Footnote ²⁵ but in the concrete form of a history and proposal for administrative reorganization. Challenging administrative despotism since Richelieu, his proposal culminated in a reform that would at once increase liberty and public power. “The author [d'Argenson] appears more inclined toward democracy than monarchy, and he may be right,” noted Saint Pierre in a letter to d'Argenson. This preference may explain why the text, which d'Argenson referred to as “my manuscript on democratic monarchy,”Footnote ²⁶ circulated clandestinely until 1764 following his death.

The first title of the manuscript, probably written in 1737—Jusqu'où la démocratie peut être admise dans le gouvernement monarchique—circulated privately, finding its way into the hands of his mentor, Saint-Pierre, as well as Rousseau and Voltaire, whom he had known since adolescence. Together the title's emphasis on pushing “democracy” into “monarchy” and the work's underground distribution suggest that d'Argenson was entirely aware of, and even sought to mobilize, the redolent overtones of the term democracy. Considering his reputation within aristocratic circles as a provocateur (he was famously nicknamed “la bête” …), the word democracy under his pen carried a stirringly reflexive force. Democracy provided an original framework for d'Argenson's politics because of both its conceptual robustness and rebellious connotations.Footnote ²⁷

A proper understanding of democracy, d'Argenson argued, required a distinction between its “false” and “legitimate” or “true” forms. Fake democracy erupts out of a violent multitude against an established legal order, while “true” democracy “stipulates the interest of the greatest number of citizens,” so that they may “avoid injury” and “procure the greatest good.”Footnote ²⁸ No mere assembly of individuals, a democracy required “constituting public power” in order to “increase the role of the public in public government,”Footnote ²⁹ or what d'Argenson refers to as a “popular administration.” The primary ambition of this “police attributed to popular magistrates,”Footnote ³⁰ as he also refers to it, was to secure public welfare: a “thousand new commercial and police regulations [would be] established by the democracy I have in mind,”Footnote ³¹ he writes. Of course, in Old Regime France, “police” stood for something much grander than a municipal security force or an obligation to simply maintain order. Rather, “the power of police,” as Martin Loughlin observes, “was conceived as an all-encompassing power of regulation vested in the ruler for the purpose of promoting peace, order, and good government.”Footnote ³² Regulatory police was therefore both a mode of governmental practice and a form of judicial power; that is, a means of regulatory policy making and execution which also provided essential tools for judging failures to comply with such regulations.Footnote ³³ When d'Argenson asked in his Considérations “what is this police of which I speak so frequently?” he simply responded, “Police includes everything.”Footnote ³⁴ This emphasis on popular participation in public regulation, administration and execution provided the groundwork for d'Argenson's contribution to a modern democratic tradition.

D'Argenson attempted to elaborate a specifically modern democratic ideal by settling a tension at the heart of the administrative state, built on the destruction of deconcentrated aristocratic feudal governance. D'Argenson rejected the ideal of ancient Greece in which monarchy, aristocracy and democracy combined to form the best government. “It is humanly impossible,” he argued, “to prevent one of these three forms of government from dominating the other.”Footnote ³⁵ The danger lay in the constant threat of aristocratic domination. D'Argenson therefore presented a history in which the rise of the monarchy had challenged the aristocratic dominance over administration under feudalism. “The concept of ‘police’,” Gerhard Oestreich writes of the early modern period, “covers the authority which the ruler arrogated to himself to issue commands and prohibitions [which] … contributed to a further break-up of feudal society.”Footnote ³⁶ D'Argenson's own history portends Oestreich's observation. He too argued that the accumulation of royal power contributed to the slow destruction of aristocratic feudal rights by centralizing lawmaking within the modern state. Moreover, in d'Argenson's account, the aristocratic hold over feudal society was further destroyed by the sprouting of self-governing bourgeois administrative councils. Undermining feudal aristocracy, the legislative power of the king therefore combined with urban self-administration to erode aristocratic inequality,Footnote ³⁷ in turn providing the social foundation of the modern democratic state. The king's acts “ensured that sooner or later, the progress of human reason would tend toward making citizens equal.”Footnote ³⁸ Opening a line of argument that Tocqueville would develop to great effect a century later, d'Argenson argued that a relative social equality—compared to the uncompromising inequalities of aristocratic feudalism—was therefore politically constituted by the levelling authority of absolutism and the rise of nonaristocratic authority in local urban assemblies. Left on its own, this alliance of sovereign monarchy and urban administrative democracy would have inevitably destroyed aristocracy. The aristocracy had preserved its position, however, through the purchase of offices. Venal offices in effect conserved a historical anachronism, maintaining inequality and preventing sound administration against the democratic alliance between the king and local administrations. The result was particularly dangerous for regulatory police. Where “it is most urgent to purge the kingdom,” wrote d'Argenson against venal officers, “is everything relating to general and particular police.”Footnote ³⁹ Venal offices provoked the “alienation of public power” in which “few faults are punished,” thereby “destroying any idea of Government in France.”Footnote ⁴⁰ For d'Argenson the problem with administration was therefore not what or how much it managed but rather how it had come to be corrupted by a venal, unequal, and corrupt nobility.

A democratic police, on the other hand, would augment the kingdom's administrative capacities, forcing it to operate with more uniformity at a greater scale toward a more diverse set of ends. The public would encourage—and be encouraged by—more administration and better execution of the law. “The more the people feel in these regulations a direct and immediate interest, the less they will stray from them, and the more they will themselves ask for more laws,”Footnote ⁴¹ d'Argenson argued. Moreover, a democratic police would increase obeisance because it would be more transparent: “if the public interest is heeded, if one lets it act without confusion, it will produce a movement of continuity and renewal.”Footnote ⁴² The orginality of d'Argenson's democratized police requires pause. “Police, for many philosophes, epitomized what was wrong with government in the old regime,” Steven Kaplan notes. “They saw police not as a general method of governing or as a loosely-defined commitment to the public good but as an elaborate defense of and apology for a specific and pernicious system of rule.”Footnote ⁴³ It was precisely this problem that d'Argenson tackled: reinforcing police to ensure the public good while combatting its perniciousness through democratization.

D'Argenson's democratic administration was notably compatible with royal sovereignty. Michael Sonenscher has characterized this aspect of d'Argenson's project as “reforming the monarchy but retaining its sovereignty [which] amounted to having the best of both worlds.”Footnote ⁴⁴ D'Argenson made this dual argument forcefully throughout his Considérations: “We shall never again say that royal authority is opposed to democracy, when democracy is subordinate to it.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The king remained the sole holder of sovereignty. Thus “royal authority should increase in force and solidity instead of suffer any diminishing through the establishment of this democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Monarchical power could be augmented through democracy because these two arms of state occupied complementary roles.Footnote ⁴⁷ The king expressed his sovereignty as lawgiver: “the essential right of the monarch's public power resides in his legislative authority.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The people exercised their democratic power as executing magistrates. “Royal authority judges whether law is necessary and acts accordingly,” he argued, “public interest oversees and executes it with intelligence.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Separating democratic administration from sovereign legislative power, d'Argenson claimed that “popular administration under the authority of the sovereign hardly diminishes public power [puissance], rather it augments it.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Paolo Napoli has underscored this gap between monarchical sovereignty and regulatory police in the Old Regime: “the governmental network organized by the police favors a kind of convergence between political authority and subjects,” while “the theory of sovereignty postulates their irremediable heterogeneity.”Footnote ⁵¹ D'Argenson's notion of democracy mobilized this distinction in a deeply innovative way. The democratization of regulatory police achieved a radical convergence between governmental authority and subjects, while royalty maintained the symbolic and heteronymous function of sovereignty.

Though democratic, d'Argenson's administration was not performed directly by the entire population. Rather, magistrates would be elected. “In a true democracy, one acts through deputies who are authorized through election.”Footnote ⁵² In describing Holland, the quintessentially democratic state, in his view, d'Argenson argued, “This association is equally democratic, it is led by those deputies of the people who have a momentary role. They return to private life as soon as their term as magistrate comes to an end.”Footnote ⁵³ Importantly, when d'Argenson writes of electing deputies in a “true” democracy, he does not have in mind a representative legislative body—he is not referring to late eighteenth-century “representative government”—but administrative delegates with executive power for a limited time.

Democracy in d'Argenson's work may then be characterized as a popular, institutionalized and distributed practice of regulation born of relative equality to ensure the public welfare. In this account, a representative legislative power does not jealously fight with kingship over sovereignty. Instead, the democratic and the sovereign occupy distinct spheres, working separately in a shared process of state construction. Consequently, in this conception of democracy, magistrature shuns any residue of lordship: arcana imperii gives way to public administration by the public itself. In sum, this political theory rigorously separates “the rightful power of rule” from the “government's actual ability to control the disposition of things”:Footnote ⁵⁴ the former remains a question of sovereignty and kingship; the latter constitutes the realm of democracy. The sovereign exerts right; democracy is a practice of popular administration.

This analysis of d'Argenson allows us to identify the contours of a modern democratic tradition. Four themes are especially salient: first, an appreciation of the necessity of administrative power to regulate for the public good. A modern state required administration and regulation since no legislation, no matter how essential, overcame the complexities of its own execution. Second, popular participation in administrative power was both historically produced by and helped preserve relative social equality. Third, the historical and administrative production of relative equality laid the ground for a critique of aristocracy as an anachronistic mode of corrupt ministerial despotism in contradiction to just administration. Fourth, the shelving of hereditary privilege and aristocratic lordship as ideal modes of administration opened the door to a modern “democratic” administration. The distinctiveness—when compared to liberalism or classical republicanism—and, as we shall see, wide reception of the democratic tradition merit elucidation. To the extent that authors developed these themes in their elaborations of modern politics, they participated in this tradition. Its relative coherence reveals that “democracy” was hardly mired in inimitable polysemy. Rather, this conception of modern democracy left room for a heteronymous and unified sovereignty while providing the ground for France's paradigmatic mix of critique of aristocratic privilege, emphasis on relative social equality and expansive public administration in the service of the public good, which would have an oversized impact in the modern era.

To understand how these themes amounted to a modern democratic tradition, I wish now to highlight three distinct moments in its elaboration: the first in the mid-eighteenth century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau confronted the problem of democratically ensuring the public good when the people replaced the king as sovereign lawgiver; the second during the Revolution itself, when representative legislature—or “representative government”—was invented, posing the problem of a democratized executive anew; and the third in the work of Tocqueville, who redeployed the history and practice of democratic administration on the other side of the revolutionary divide.

Rousseau's complex relationship with his contemporaries has been well established.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is of no small consequence then that, as Andrew Jainchill points out, d'Argenson is the most cited author in The Social Contract.Footnote ⁵⁶ But no doubt of equal significance is how Rousseau notes his debt to d'Argenson. Rousseau chooses the penultimate chapter of The Social Contract on civil religion for his final, most personal, reference to his predecessor. Reflecting back, he notes, “I could not deny myself the pleasure of sometimes quoting this ms. although it is not known to the public, that I might do honor to the memory of an honorable and illustrious man, who even in the [royal] Ministry retained the heart of a true citizen, and upright and sane views about the government of his country.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This note is laden with the characteristically Rousseauian confessional rhetoric of self-reflexive justification, delighting in the forbidden jouissance—“I could not deny myself the pleasure”—of a text that remains “not known to the public.” D'Argenson was one influence Rousseau could accept; an authority in keeping with his authentic vision of self and his critique of the eighteenth-century public.Footnote ⁵⁸

The influence of d'Argenson on the Genevan's work is perhaps most obvious in Rousseau's deep interest in administration. Rousseau opens The Social Contract stating his ambition to provide a new foundation for administration. “I want to inquire whether in the civil order there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration,”Footnote ⁵⁹ he begins. Understanding exactly what Rousseau means by “administration” is challenging since he never provides a straightforward definition of the term.Footnote ⁶⁰ One may start, however, with a key passage when democracy and administration are first mentioned together in Book II, chapter 6, on the law:

In a Republic, Rousseau explains, the state must be governed by laws which express the sovereign general will. Different types of administration—either democratic, aristocratic or monarchical—may then execute this legislation. Whichever form is chosen, however, this administration or government must never be confused with the sovereign. Rousseau makes this point repeatedly. For example, in his Discourse on Political Economy he writes, “the first rule of public economy is that the administration conform to the laws.”Footnote ⁶² Elsewhere, Rousseau metaphorically asserts administration or government to be the “minister” of the general will; that is, the executor of the law, not its maker. Rousseau also states this fundamental distinction with specific mention of democracy: “Above all in democracies,” writes Rousseau in his Letters from the Mountain, “the Government is in this case the executive power and is absolutely distinct from sovereignty.”Footnote ⁶³ So no form of administration or government may be sovereign.Footnote ⁶⁴ And since democracy is a form of government it cannot be a principle of sovereignty.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is not until Book III, chapter 3, on the “Division of Governments,” that Rousseau explicitly defines democracy as a form of government. This definition of democracy builds on d'Argenson's democratic administration, but breaks from Hobbes's understanding of democracy in his De Cive, where he argues that government is born of the sovereign assembly of people gathered to decide their government, who then go to “sleep” until they are called to create the next government. In Book III, chapter 17, on “The Institution of Government,” Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that government is instituted in two distinct moments: “the establishment of law and the execution of law.”Footnote ⁶⁶ He too insists that the people are acting as sovereign when they join to form a common state. But he disagrees that creating government is a continuation of this initial sovereign act. Rousseau breaks with Hobbes's conception of democracy by arguing that what has actually happened is “a sudden conversion of sovereignty into democracy.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Rousseau clearly distinguishes between popular sovereignty and the creation of a democracy.Footnote ⁶⁸ He clarifies this position, arguing that “without any perceptible change, and simply by a new relation of all to all, the Citizens having become Magistrates pass from general to particular acts, from the law to its execution.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In other words, the shift away from an act of sovereignty and toward democracy takes place along three lines: from sovereign citizens to practicing magistrates, from general to particular acts, from the creation of law to its execution. In Rousseau's account, founding a democracy is not a sovereign act; it is a form of magistrature, a way of performing particular acts and a means of execution.

Of course, democracy is only one among three possible modes of government. Describing the distinctive trait of democracy, he insists that it requires “much equality in rank and in fortune, without which equality of rights and authority could not long subsist.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This equality is necessary, Rousseau explains, because “the Sovereign can, in the first place, entrust the charge of Government to the whole people or to the majority of the people so that there be more citizens who are magistrates than citizens who are simple particulars. This form of Government is given the name Democracy.”Footnote ⁷¹ Democracy is thus defined as a type of administration in which all citizens are relatively equal and hence a majority of the citizens are magistrates.Footnote ⁷² In this conception, democracy has at least one clear advantage over the other two forms of government since, as Rousseau explains in the chapter “On Democracy” in Book III, in principle the best person to execute and interpret the law is the person who made it.

Democratic administration does, however, pose significant problems. First, democracy in its purest form would mean that all citizens were also magistrates. And yet Rousseau has clearly established that the sovereign and the government must be distinct; making all members of the body politic magistrates would tend to confuse the two. He also establishes in chapter 1 of Book III that the more people are involved in government, the less force it has. Moreover, he asserts that a democratic form of magistrature will lead to “intestine turmoil.”Footnote ⁷³ And finally, while he clearly establishes that too frequent meetings of the sovereign lead to corruption, in a pure democracy everyone must gather regularly as magistrates to execute the law, which would lead to the same confusion, inefficacy and corruption that would occur if the sovereign gathered too regularly. He therefore offers his famous statement that such a regime would only be fit for gods.Footnote ⁷⁴

Democracy appears to be at once the best and the worst form of government. How, then, might a democracy—that is, a democratic administration—effectively function? Rousseau responds in a number of places within The Social Contract and the Letters from the Mountain, arguing that citizen–magistrates may delegate their administrative powers into “councils” “commissions” or “tribunals” that manage specific cases and maintain the force of government: “the functions of Government are divided among several tribunals,”Footnote ⁷⁵ he writes in his chapter “On Democracy”; or “when the Government is too slack, Tribunals can be set up to give it concentration. This is the practice of all Democracies.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, Rousseau clearly states the difference between this administrative delegation and legislative representation: “Since law is nothing but the declaration of the general will, it is clear that the People cannot be represented in its Legislative power; but it can and must be represented in its executive power, which is nothing but force applied to Law.”Footnote ⁷⁷ General will may never be represented, but a democratic administration requires deputization.

Rousseau and d'Argenson's arguments on democracy formed the core of a modern democratic tradition in France. Together, they offered a central contribution to a democratic conception of public power: in it, sovereign lawmaking was distinct from democracy, which was grounded in a relative equality that provided for popular participation in administration. This vision effectively pushed questions of formal political right outside the gambit of the democratic. Nannerl Keohane has presented the essential problem of eighteenth-century French political thought as a question of “how a sovereign could reserve full unitary authority to himself and yet ensure that a large commonwealth could be effectively administered by his agents.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For d'Argenson and Rousseau, democracy offered one means of performing the administrative functions of the state while maintaining sovereign unity. Nonetheless, their responses differed in one fundamental way: Rousseau's social contract replaced the king with the people as the sovereign lawgiver. Importantly, Rousseau did not characterize this transfer of power as democratic: popular legislative sovereignty was a republican notion in his vocabulary while democracy remained a form of administration/government. The transfer of sovereignty from the monarch to the people did, however, profoundly impact Rousseau's conception of democracy since the people would be acting both as sovereign lawgivers and as magistrates to execute such law. Therefore the creation of a sovereign general will raised the stakes of administrative politics. Summarizing the relationship between sovereign legislative power and government in Rousseau, Florent Guénard notes that they are less separate powers than conflicting powers. “It is less a problem of political right, than of practical politics,” Guenard argues.Footnote ⁷⁹ At moments, Rousseau seemed to favor an aristocratic administration since it reduced the political and practical conflicts which would emerge between those designated to execute the general will. But he also took pains to describe how a democratic administration might function through deputization, delegation and commission. So even amidst his sometimes tepid support of democracy, Rousseau provided a major contribution to the democratic tradition by showing how a democratic administration in a sovereign state could function and highlighting its profoundly political character.Footnote ⁸⁰

It might reasonably be surmised that Rousseau preferred aristocratic government in his Social Contract because relatively equal citizens had become sovereign legislators: if the people made law for and by themselves—and not through representatives—then popular execution of the law became secondary since magistrates needed only to adhere as closely as possible to the sovereign general will expressed in law. The challenge for this understanding of democracy was—as the Revolution would soon reveal—that Rousseau's idea for a nonrepresentative legislative body was rejected. With the creation of a representative legislature—coined “representative government”—a properly democratic government or administration needed to be reconsidered.

Historians have noted the enigma that during the American and French Revolutions the word “democracy” was considered incompatible with the new system of “representative government.” Bernard Manin has further shown that representative government was devised to avoid the perceived dangers of ancient democracy, revealing the paradox that “modern democracies are the product of a form of government that its founders opposed to democracy.”Footnote ⁸¹

In his participation in the debates on the new Parisian municipality in 1789, the theorist and administrator of the revolutionary era, Jacques Peuchet, provided a paradigmatic example of Manin's assessment. “The legislators,” Peuchet wrote about the Parisian administration, “hardly intended to make the capital an Athenian democracy; they intended to give it a representative government like the rest of the empire.”Footnote ⁸² Opposing Athenian democracy to the new system of “representative government,” Peuchet recognized the practical importance of legislative representation and the impracticality of ancient democracy. This acceptance, however, did not lead to a blanket dismissal of democracy tout court. To the contrary, Peuchet redefined a specifically modern democracy as a form of administration, abundantly citing d'Argenson and praising Rousseau as “the most prodigious writer the nation had ever produced.”Footnote ⁸³

Peuchet incarnated the methods and ideals of the late political Enlightenment: polymath, early statistician and theorist of regulatory police,Footnote ⁸⁴ he trained as a lawyer, spending the four years preceding the Revolution working under Morellet on the Dictionnaire du commerce.Footnote ⁸⁵ Peuchet penned volumes 9 and 10 of the Encyclopédie méthodique on the police and municipalities, which appeared in 1789 and 1791 respectively, while serving in the Parisian municipal administration and earning the reputation of an institutional “pragmatist.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Peuchet opened his volume 9 of the Encyclopedie méthodique with a protracted “preliminary discourse,” in the form of a history reaching back to antiquity.Footnote ⁸⁷ This narrative was designed to illustrate the “general principles” of regulatory police, which he defined as “nothing less than the executive portion of government.”Footnote ⁸⁸ His sprawling historical account drew heavily from “one of the first to treat this subject with some depth, the famous M. d'Argenson.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Peuchet claimed to borrow from the “famous minister” the idea of “popular magistrates” deputized by the people to improve the kingdom's administration. Peuchet further insisted that d'Argenson had rightly placed “the exercise of police powers within the hands of popular magistrates.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, following d'Argenson, Peuchet did not place his insights on democracy under the letter “D” of his Encyclopédie méthodique, but rather recounted its history in his article on “Administration.” He details the democratization of administration during the Middle Ages, its de-democratization under absolutism, and then its re-democratization in the years leading up to the Revolution.Footnote ⁹¹ Peuchet's updated account of d'Argenson's history of democratic administration leads to his incontrovertible conclusion that under a just regime, the king should do very little and administrative decisions should be executed by the many who are most familiar with the issues at hand.

Nor is Rousseau ever far from his reflections. Peuchet offers a faithful rendering of Rousseau's distinction between the sovereign general will, which makes law, and the administration that executes said law. “It is necessary, as Rousseau argued, that the first duty of the legislator be to make laws that conform to the general will.” Peuchet further channels Rousseau when he argues, “the administration must conform to these laws. This is a fundamental maxim of any nation that has not been reduced to the furthest degree of servitude, and administrators must never stray from it.”Footnote ⁹² Peuchet then summarizes Rousseau's claim that the law expresses the general will while the administration is its executor.

In spite of his admiration for Rousseau, however, Peuchet defended the representative legislature that his Genevan idol had so adamantly refused. The representative legislature remained legitimate as long as its power was “founded on the primary characteristics of the people: on the laws of the social contract, on the principles of positive and natural law received from the nation as a whole.” Accepting the legitimacy of representative legislative power, however, raised a new problem for conceiving a democratic administration: if the sovereign legislative power was now also delegated—and referred to as a “representative government”—how was its power distinct from a deputized democratic administration? Insisting on a fundamental distinction between the two, Peuchet redefined democratic administration, which “is, to the contrary, arbitrary and momentary. It can be changed or modified, expanded and diminished in its functions, and even delegate [specific tasks] without ever having an impact on the constitutional form.” In so doing, he added an important distinction, which Rousseau had considered unimportant, between administration and government, arguing that “administration is so distinct from government that the people may directly share in the functions of public administration without accumulating any further political power, that is without the essence or the form of government actually changing.”Footnote ⁹³ Unlike the kingdom's general laws, democratic administration was variable, dependent on the intensity of the problem to be solved. “Hence when one says that the administration is changeable or malleable,” Peuchet writes, it is because the “means designed to ensure the functioning of daily affairs change often.” Summarizing his position in 1789 in a pamphlet entitled De l'appel au peuple, Peuchet stated, “we propose the involvement of the people [l'appel au peuple] to be less a means of political legislation and instead a principle for order, police and public liberty.”Footnote ⁹⁴

By elaborating the ideal of a democratic administration, Peuchet carried the democratic tradition into the revolutionary era. While openly displaying the influence of d'Argenson and Rousseau, the novel creation of a represented legislative power—an idea ignored by d'Argenson and categorically refused by Rousseau—pushed Peuchet to elaborate a tripartite distinction between an outmoded Athenian democracy, which he rejected; a novel form of “representative” legislature, which he accepted but did not consider democratic; and a democratic administration, which he celebrated. He therefore maintained a positive conception of democracy as a popular administrative power, opening the possibility that even if the tempered politics of 1789 did not survive the declaration of the republic, the idea of a deputized democratic administration necessary for defending the public welfare would.

It should be of little surprise, then—even though it has been met regularly with bewilderment by historians—that discussions of democracy in the early years of the Revolution disregarded the novel creation of a representative legislature and targeted instead administrative and executive power. In just such an effort to feature the strange confines of revolutionary reflections on democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon expressed the ostensible peculiarity of Abbé Fauchet's understanding that “the proper place of the term ‘democracy’ was in the executive sphere.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In fact, there should be little surprise in this: administration and executive power were precisely where the democratic tradition had situated popular rule. In his extended commentary on Rousseau's Social Contract, the Abbé Fauchet repeated the radical distinction between sovereignty and government that characterized this tradition, contending that the former made law while deeply subordinating the power of the latter, which could be delegated: “The Prince and the public civil servants, instituted to execute the law, do not act in any way as sovereign; they enter only as members of the association. In their quality as delegates, charged with executive power, they are … strictly subordinate to the general will.”Footnote ⁹⁶ He further elaborated this point, practically quoting Rousseau word for word: “I cannot say it often enough, if you would like to be free, love the law,” he argued; “submit yourselves to the magistrate who is the law's minister and executor.”Footnote ⁹⁷ For Fauchet, this delegated executive power was above all “a monarchy without a monarch,” in which “every citizen could become king,” “random choice [sort] alone should bring one to the throne, a first among equals.”Footnote ⁹⁸

And Fauchet was not alone. Brissot similarly discussed the problem of democracy in terms of a popular executive.Footnote ⁹⁹ In July 1791, Brissot insisted, like Peuchet, that he too “did not want the pure democracy of Athens, the Spartan democracy of two kings, or the aristocratic democracy of Rome.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Recognizing the value of what he called “the modern system” or a “representative constitution,” he observed that the three branches of government—the legislative, executive and judiciary—were all elected within the new constitution. “All patriots are in agreement,” he explained, “except on one point”:Footnote ¹⁰¹ the executive power. For, while “half the executive power is elected”—that is, the departmental administrations—the king remained hereditary. In such a system, Brissot argued, “if the laws are executed by a distrusted king or by ministers chosen by the king … suspicion will spread and there will be perpetual disobedience.”Footnote ¹⁰² Brissot offered a solution to such rebellion: “it is necessary to surround the king with an independent and removable council, elected by the people and their representatives.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Putting a name to this system, Brissot wrote, “Such is my democracy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For Brissot, like Peuchet and the Abbé Fauchet, a refusal of ancient democracy hardly meant a refusal of democracy as a whole; it meant, above all, democratizing executive power.

While Peuchet, Fauchet and Brissot redefined democratic administrative and executive power under representative government in the first years of the Revolution, no doubt the most legendary invocation of democratic administration during the revolutionary era came after the execution of the king when representative government was all but suspended in 1794. The significance of Maximilien Robespierre's speech on 18 pluviôse, an II (5 February 1794) for understanding democracy during the Revolution has been established.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Robert Palmer referred to it as the locus classicus for the word “democracy” during the Revolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For François Furet, Robespierre's speech incarnated the illiberalism of the Terror since it evacuated “the formalities of law leaving only principles and men on their own.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And historians of classical republicanism have highlighted how Robespierre's invocations of virtue were foundational for the political logic of the Terror.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But considering the centrality of democracy in this discourse, the speech must also be read within the tradition exhumed in this article.

By February of 1794 what William Finley Shepard referred to as the “regulatory machine” of the Revolution had been largely established under the Committee of Public Safety.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This institutional mechanism, Shepard insisted, was made of delegated administrative bodies, decrees, ordinances and statutes that radically increased the government's ability to intervene in public life. In short, as Albert Soboul noted long ago, the Terror required above all the formation of a revolutionary government, which Robespierre had taken a predominant place in establishing.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is thus significant that Robespierre's speech was entitled “Report on the principles of political morality that must guide the National Convention in the interior administration of the republic.” The speech, in which Robespierre offers his most elaborate analysis of democracy, is about “administration”—though in the actual text, like Rousseau, he more commonly uses the word “government.” Indeed, as opposed to Peuchet, Robespierre was able to maintain Rousseau's conflation of government and administration because he rejected the basic tenets of a representative legislature. “The word representative cannot be applied to any mandatary [mandataire] of the people, because the will cannot be represented. Members of the legislature are the mandataries [mandataires] to whom the people have given the primacy and the power; but in the true sense, they cannot be considered representatives.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, Robespierre insists that instead of “representative government” he is the head of a “democratic government” with its own set of principles. This discussion of democratic administration or government was steeped in regulatory language: the revolutionary government must “regulate conduct” in the troubled moments of the republic;Footnote ¹¹² it must “guide political conduct” in order to “deal with the circumstances, seize the moment and choose the means”; and in so doing, it must establish “a plan for your administration which is the result of the spirit of the revolutionary government, combined with the general principles of democracy.”Footnote ¹¹³ So to the question “what kind of government may realize the prodigious goals” of the Revolution,Footnote ¹¹⁴ Robespierre plainly replied, “only a democratic or republican government,” insisting that “these two words are synonyms.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Equating the two further, he states, “the essence of the republic and of democracy is equality.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Robespierre rejected an ancient Greek system just as he rejected “representative government”; channeling the ideas of Rousseau, Robespierre declared the birth of what he titled the first “true” democracy of the revolutionary age grounded in government and the faithful execution of law. “The French are the first people in the world to have established a true democracy,” he argued. Robespierre is exceedingly clear on what this democracy entails. First, it was not the “pure democracy” of ancient Athens. Robespierre had already patently refused “the excesses of a democracy that would overthrow national sovereignty” held by the sovereign people. To the contrary, his was a “democracy that, for the general good, was tempered by law.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Furthermore, in his democracy, “all of your operations are motivated to maintain equality.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ This democratic ambition fed his critique of monarchical government. Throughout the speech Robespierre hammered his critique of monarchy and ministerial aristocracy, which necessarily weakened the force of government by its corrupting influence, anachronistic preservation of inequality and perverting privilege. For Robespierre, aristocracy and monarchy robbed the people by claiming a share of sovereignty when a legitimate government in a republic should have none. “Is he not sovereign, at least in practice?”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Robespierre asked of the king, similarly critiquing aristocratic government, in which “patrician families have invaded sovereignty.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The ambition instead must be to “realize the sovereignty of the people.”Footnote ¹²¹ Robespierre had already asserted this point in no uncertain terms in May 1793, mirroring Rousseau almost word for word: “The people are sovereign; the government is their tool and their property, civil servants are their clerks.”Footnote ¹²²

What ensured the democratic character of government, for Robespierre? Neither elections nor direct response to public opinion. Rather, Robespierrian democracy was entirely determined by the pragmatic principle of regulatory police: a democratic administration was defined by the basic fact that it preserved equality by “giving preference to the public interest above all particular interests,”Footnote ¹²³ an ideal perhaps best captured by the extensive regulatory measures of price controls which were implemented just a few days later in February 1794 by the Committee on Public Safety. Robespierre further captured the “democratic” nature of his administration, arguing that it was a question of “realizing the sovereignty of the people and concentrating its force in a firm and respected government.”Footnote ¹²⁴ For, as Rousseau had argued, the force of government was proportionate to its concentration.Footnote ¹²⁵ Following Rousseau, Robespierre highlighted that a forceful democratic government needed deputization: “Democracy is not a state where the people are continually assembled, regulating by themselves all public affairs. Such a government has never existed and never could.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Instead, democracy was a system in which deputized magistrates adhered to will of the sovereign people. “Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by the laws they have made, do whatever they may do well, and through delegates whatever they cannot do themselves.”Footnote ¹²⁷ This observation fully captures Robespierrian democracy and its inscription within the democratic tradition: democracy, Robespierre argues, is a form of political organization in which the people do what they can do themselves and choose delegates to do the rest, adhering as closely as possible to the law. Democratic magistrates were therefore subject to laws made by the sovereign people and given full power to execute it toward the citizens’ well-being either themselves or through their delegates. It was this vision which animated the administrative delegates in the twelve commissions, established just two months after Robespierre's speech in April 1794 to replace the former ministries of the Executive Council, whose tendency toward independence from the Committee of Public Safety reignited claims “that ministers were a tyrannical invention of kings.”Footnote ¹²⁸ As Palmer notes, the creation of these commissions put an end to any remaining separation between the executive and the legislative powers, granting the Committee on Public Safety the capacity to direct administration, implement policy and serve as executive to the assembly. It was therefore in this spirit that Robespierre concluded, summarizing the essential ambition of his speech, “the plan for your administration must result from the spirit of the revolutionary government, combined with the general principles of democracy.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Like d'Argenson and Rousseau before him, the principles of Robespierre's democracy were to be applied to effective administration and execution in the service of the sovereign people.

So while Manin correctly asserts that “representative government was not a form of democracy” during the French Revolution,Footnote ¹³⁰ it does not follow that democracy in the French Revolution was considered entirely antiquated and rejected. Robespierre proposed a particularly modern form of democracy, hugging tightly to the democratic tradition articulated by d'Argenson and Rousseau, just as he adopted some of Peuchet's ideas on the “expansion” of administrative power “without ever having an impact on the constitutional form.” Establishing a clear distinction between democracy as a form of administration on the one hand and popular sovereignty through legislative power on the other, Robespierre insisted that democratic administration should be concentrated in the hands of delegates, under the surveillance of the sovereign people, so that it contained enough force to ensure equality and the public good, or safety, even in exceptional times. There was no sustained or essential connection between revolution, democracy and Terror: “The Terror,” Robespierre argued, “was not a particular principle but rather a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.”Footnote ¹³¹ If, then, as Furet argued, Robespierre's democracy did not concern itself with “the formalities of law,” this was not because Robespierre rejected the law. Indeed, he clung to it staunchly. What appears to be Robespierre's Promethean drive to “embody the people” and usurp all sovereignty was precisely the reverse:Footnote ¹³² He was a deputized administrator who attempted to erase even the slightest separation between his executive power and the sovereign legislation because his democratic government needed to be the most faithful minister of sovereign law and never its originator.

The dominant thread of the democratic tradition—that democracy was a form of neither sovereignty nor lawmaking, but a means to ensure the popular foundations of administrative action, regulation and execution toward equality and the public welfare—was woven into the fabric of post-revolutionary French politics by Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard when he delivered his speech on the freedom of the press in the Chamber of Deputies on 22 January 1822.Footnote ¹³³ Initiating a profound revision of the uses of democracy during the Terror, he argued that even in the heart of the Bourbon Restoration “democracy is everywhere”; one could find it “in industry, in property, in laws, in memories, in things, in men.” Royer-Collard thus drew the conclusion that democracy “dominates our society. It must now find its way into our politics.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Royer-Collard's distinction between democracy as a social form and as a political regime offered him a subtle means of reframing the relationship between democratic government and popular sovereignty. With it, he could now critique the Bourbon regime for not being democratic without calling for a republic of popular sovereignty, which remained too closely associated with the tumultuous years 1792–4. Royer-Collard sidestepped the question of the republic and posed a novel question: how to give a new democratic society a democratic government? His response? Democratize the administration in ways that were surprisingly reminiscent of d'Argenson: “Does democracy have any custodial institutions, any magistrature in its own hands? No.” He succinctly answered, further arguing that “the society was formerly so rich in popular magistrature” whereas now “local police escapes it.” The problem with the local administration of the Restoration, Royer-Collar argued, was that it was not made popular through elections. Instead, “delegates of sovereign power clean our streets and light our streetlamps.” He then concluded, “Democracy has disappeared.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Rereading the democratic tradition on the other side of the Revolution, Royer-Collard argued for reestablishing the radical distinction between sovereignty and democracy. It was the police, administration and provision that needed to be democratized through the creation of locally elected magistrates.

No one did more to elaborate Royer-Collard's initial insights into a full post-revolutionary articulation of the democratic tradition than Alexis de Tocqueville. Though one simply cannot provide any simple definition of democracy in Tocqueville's work, he did offer some relatively concise descriptions of the democracy he had in mind in Part 1 of his Democracy in America. Here, Tocqueville passes from a discussion of the general territorial and historical considerations of the United States in chapters 1 and 2 to the heart of his discussion on American democracy in the following three chapters. The original manuscript therefore opened Chapter 3 with a definition of democracy:

A few pages later, in his notes to the manuscript, he clarifies this definition further: “sovereignty of the people and democracy are two perfectly correlative words; the one represents the theoretical idea, the other its practical realization.”Footnote ¹³⁷ These passages reveal a constellation within which Tocqueville was thinking about the democratic. First, he unquestionably makes a distinction between democracy and sovereignty: democracy is “a social state,” a “way of being,” and a “practical realization,” while popular sovereignty is “political law,” “a theoretical idea” and “a form” or “essence” of government. Democracy is therefore a concrete practice of social being while popular sovereignty is presented as an abstract theoretical political form expressed in law. In turn, their relationship is defined as “not analogous,” separable (“not inseparable”) and “correlative”—that is, they are clearly distinct and are not reducible to one another but have reciprocal relations. Tocqueville's preferred terms for these reciprocal concepts in his Democracy are “sovereignty of the people,” which, he says, is the starting point for any discussion of “the political laws of the United States,”Footnote ¹³⁸ and “democratic government,” adding that the “United States alone presents this new spectacle.”Footnote ¹³⁹

Tocqueville elaborates a historical analysis of the “correlation” between them in the following chapter 4 on sovereignty. He argues that “the principle of the sovereignty of the people had been the generative principle of most of the English colonies of America,” suggesting in the original manuscript that the Puritans established “the social contract in proper form that Rousseau dreamed of in the following century.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He then notes that this popular sovereignty “fell far short, however, of dominating the government.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ So while popular sovereignty permeated colonial life, the government remained undemocratic because the colonies “were still forced to obey the home country” and there remained “a sort of aristocratic influence that tended to confine the exercise of social powers to a few hands.”Footnote ¹⁴² It was then only with the Revolution, according to Tocqueville, that “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people emerged from the town and took over the government.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Or in the terms he used in his initial definition above: by establishing a democracy, popular sovereignty went from being a “fiction” to the “essence” of government. Tocqueville provides further explanation of this process in the notes to his manuscript: “I draw a great difference between the right of a people to choose its government, and the right that each individual among this people would have to take part in the government.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He makes this same point more emphatically further on. “Everything is reduced to this: to choose a government and to take part in government, these are two analogous products of human judgment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There was, then, for Tocqueville, two distinct, though “analogous,” issues: the right of a people to choose its government, which he presents in the wake of the American Revolution as a product of the expression of popular sovereignty, and the right to actually participate in making and executing governmental decisions, which is what he understands to be “democratic government.” In a statement startlingly close to Rousseau's definition of democracy, Tocqueville clearly defines the latter: “Show me a people in which all the citizens may be involved in the government and, in my eyes, this people will have the right to govern itself democratically.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In the next chapter, on government and administration (chapter 5), Tocqueville depicts what governing democratically entails, highlighting once again the relationship between equality, the principle of sovereign power and democratic government: “each individual forms an equal portion of the sovereign power, and participates equally in the government of the state.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ What makes the towns of New England particularly democratic, then, is that “the law of representation is not accepted.” Instead, “the body of voters, after naming their magistrates, directs them in everything that is not the pure and simple execution of the laws of the state.” As the notes to the Nolla edition point out, Tocqueville here “gives the town a role similar to that of the small republic in the thought of Rousseau.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Tocqueville's analysis of democratic administration in New England remains in sustained dialogue with Rousseau throughout.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Responding to Rousseau's essential critique of democratic administration that it will be too weak and prevent the effective execution of the sovereign will, Tocqueville shows in very concrete terms that this is not the case in New England, where each citizen “knows that this union cannot exist without a regulatory power.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Tocqueville highlights the extraordinary number of magistrates in the smallest New England town designed to regulate the most mundane activities. Alongside the selectmen, he notes, “the town meeting chooses a host of other town magistrates, appointed for certain important administrative tasks,” including “assessors,” “collectors,” “the constable,” “the town clerk,” “a treasurer,” “an overseer of the poor,” “school commissioners,” and “road surveyors.” “But the division of offices does not stop there,” he continues, listing “parish commissioners,” and a veritable army of “inspectors” for fire, the harvest, fencing and wood allotments. Through this extraordinary distribution of administrative tasks, “law descends into the minutest details” animating regulation of the public welfare. Not only does the extraordinary distribution of tasks ensure their efficacy; these magistrates are also under the strict control of popular sovereignty through law, which “prescribes the principles and the means to apply them; thus it encloses the secondary bodies and their administrators within a multitude of strict and rigorously defined obligations.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Thus the New England administration was democratic precisely because a majority of people could be magistrates and because it adhered tightly to the sovereignty of the people since it was widely distributed and tightly bound by law. As Tocqueville stated himself, his voyage to the United States was a search for “more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself.”Footnote ¹⁵² In short, Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to elaborate the democratic tradition on the other side of the revolutionary divide.

For virtually every historian and political theorist of modern France, Tocqueville's argument in The Old Regime and the French Revolution on the democratic consequences of a centralized administration is second nature. Tocqueville's masterpiece consists of three books, with the central Book II consisting of twelve chapters, which one may divide into two parts of six chapters each: chapters 1–6 recount the administrative transformation achieved by centralization from above, and chapters 7–12 explore the social consequences of these transformations below that culminated in the Revolution. Tocqueville opens the middle, transitional chapter of the central book—chapter 6 of Book II—by summarizing how the transformation of administration in the Old Regime generated an extraordinary uniformization of French “minds.” The intendants and post-revolutionary administrators “seem to shake hands across the abyss of the Revolution which separates them. I would say the same for those who were administered.”Footnote ¹⁵³ With this statement, Tocqueville synthesized an essential claim of his entire oeuvre: shifts in institutional organization provoked deep sociological change toward equality and in so doing constructed a democratic modernity. Unsurprisingly, Tocqueville's interpretation of a modern democracy did not emerge fully formed from his own head in the mid-nineteenth century. He knew this. And it was sufficiently important to him to inform his reader as well. So in the next paragraph, Tocqueville signaled the influence of his intellectual forebear: “As early as the middle of the century (1733), M. d'Argenson wrote: ‘The details conferred to ministers are immense.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Tocqueville too—like Rousseau and Peuchet—reached back to d'Argenson to understand the democratic effects of administrative centralization.

While Tocqueville's debt to d'Argenson has long been recognized,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ what has only been intimated is how his socio-institutional history builds out of the rich democratic tradition that preceded him. When researching the Old Regime, Tocqueville admitted,

Medieval French parishes and the New England townships had at least two characteristics in common, he argued: “Both were administrated by civil servants that acted on their own” and “under the direction of the entire community.” He then concluded, “The rural parish of the middle ages became the township of New England.” Tocqueville therefore set out to understand what had happened in France that had prevented the development of a democratic administration along the lines of New England. His answer: absolutism. “Under the old monarchy,” Tocqueville argued in words that are strikingly similar to those of d'Argenson, Rousseau and Peuchet, “there were only ever two ways of administrating,” pointing toward administration through assemblies or by a single appointed official.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Tocqueville discusses these two kinds of administration and their histories throughout the old regime: one may refer to these two modes of administrative power under the titles of local police regulation and central state administration. Local police regulation was the earlier form of governing power, which d'Argenson and Peuchet also described as emerging out of the medieval period and Rousseau had discussed in his Letters from the Mountain. As d'Argenson and Peuchet argued, this administrative power was slowly displaced by the new absolutist administrative apparatus that prepared the revolution designed to “abolish the political institutions that had, for many centuries, reigned without rival.” Local police regulation did not entirely disappear, however: “In France, even in the eighteenth century, there are still a few vestiges,” he wrote.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Tocqueville's narrative clings closely to the latent potentialities of democratic administration previously described by d'Argenson and Peuchet. “Louis XI restrained municipal liberties,” Tocqueville argued, “because their democratic nature frightened him; Louis XIV destroyed them without fear.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Tocqueville speaks of this “democratic” administrative principle on a number of occasions: “During the middle ages,” he explains, “inhabitants administered themselves democratically … even in eighteenth-century France one could still find traces.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Hints of this previous democratic administration could be found everywhere: “Up until around the end of the seventeenth century, we find them [cities] continuing to form small democratic republics.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ And in some cases, it continued even up to 1789: “Until the Revolution, the government of the rural parish in France retained something of that democratic aspect.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ While it was largely dismantled by the new centralized state, there remained a local democratic administration, which was not a counterpower to sovereignty, but subordinate to it. As such, recounting the history of this democratic administration and its replacement under absolutism provided an essential resource for achieving the process of social equality long underway and promoting regulatory governance in the service of public welfare.

So when Tocqueville posed the question “What is democracy?” during the debates on the social question in 1848, he made no mention of popular sovereignty, responding instead that it meant “giving the greatest share possible of liberty, enlightenment and power to each individual.” Two lines later, he specified his question, asking, “What is a democratic government?” To this second question he responded that it was a government that “instead of restricting liberty offered a thousand ways of rescuing it … opening all kinds of new perspectives.”Footnote ¹⁶² In his own response to the social question, Proudhon struck out at this conception, damning democracy: “Such is the pretention of Democracy,” he exclaimed, “that it presents itself as the form of government which most accurately translates the sovereignty of the people.” Proudhon condemned democracy because it was a form of government, and as such it confiscated the direct expression of popular sovereignty guaranteed by the republic. “Democracy,” Proudhon insisted, “was no more than the symbolic [symbolique] of sovereignty which responded to none of the questions raised by the idea.”Footnote ¹⁶³ In this discussion of how to constitute the social in the mid-nineteenth century, the battle between Tocqueville and Proudhon was less over liberalism or republicanism. Their stated disagreement focused on democracy; that is, democratic government.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Robert Palmer noted the surprising similarities between Tocqueville's writings on democracy and his eighteenth-century predecessor, the Marquis d'Argenson.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ This article has suggested that Palmer's discovery may not be so unexpected after all. Indeed, in spite of the extraordinary waves of stunning progress in our understanding of the political history of modern Europe since, a precise and more textured history of the arc of democracy between these two authors and administrators from the 1730s through the wake of the Revolution of 1848 may become yet clearer if we distance ourselves from some of our contemporary assumptions about democracy. In this spirit, I have attempted to flesh out a distinct set of reflections on democracy in France during the critical century surrounding the French Revolution by suggesting that d'Argenson, Rousseau, Peuchet, Fauchet, Brissot, Robespierre, Royer-Collard and Tocqueville—and many others not discussed here—formed the spine of a coherent democratic tradition in revolutionary France. At the heart of this tradition sat a specific interest in the governmental, regulatory and executive capacities of democracy in service of a relatively egalitarian society for the public welfare.

The originality of this democratic tradition could be found in the ways it considered the ends of regulatory police fundamental to a just modern polity, while at the same time redefining the means through which it was accomplished. This tradition refused to understand police and executive powers through the lens of sovereign prerogative. It also sought to overcome the widely accepted difficulties of what was perceived as a democracy of the ancients at the same time that it diverged entirely from representative legislature, understanding democracy instead as a response to a profoundly novel set of problems tied to the necessity of administrative power in modern society. Moreover, democracy in this tradition was not overwhelmingly concerned with rights, since the primary ambition of democratic administration was to augment the effectiveness and reach of regulatory power into the daily lives of subjects and citizens. And though deputizing governmental and administrative power to commissions and tribunals was fundamental to its effectiveness, none of these presentations of democracy overwhelmingly focused on representation or the vote as the central source of legitimacy for a modern democracy. So democracy in this tradition had little to offer in the realms of formal constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, suffrage and popular sovereignty: these were all areas where the liberal tradition, classical republicanism and theories of monarchy had provided more abundant insights, in some cases for centuries. Instead, this democratic tradition sought to expand the means through which administration could equitably and effectively pursue social welfare. So while it may challenge some of our reigning assumptions about democracy, recovering this modern democratic tradition may also provide important insights into the democracies of tomorrow, especially as we seek to combat inequality and privilege through the construction of a popular and accountable regulatory power designed to ensure the public good.