5 - Tracking the French Revolution in the United States: Popular Sovereignty, Representation, Absolutism, and Democracy

Summary

In both France and the United States, the ascendance in the late 1780s and early 1790s of a version of constitutional popular sovereignty oriented around disembodied representation laid the foundation for the abrupt invention of an alternative, absolutist understanding of “the people’s” authority in 1792-1793. Known as democracy, that absolutist conception simultaneously energized and destabilized each polity by demanding embodied, iconic formulations of “the people.” The resultant political muddle in the second half of the 1790s partially obscured institutional innovations critical to the turn-of-the-century reconciliation of disembodied representation and democratic absolutism. With Napoleon’s rise to power and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, democratic absolutism flourished. The analogous relationship between developments in France and the United States in the 1790s and early nineteenth century stemmed in part from the diffusionary dynamics of the French Revolution. Diffusionary forces would not have registered so powerfully, however, if residents of the United States had not been prepared for them by their prior investment in monarchy. Developments in the early American republic tracked closely to successive French revolutionary phases because absolutist principles, habits, and hopes continued to animate large numbers of people long after the adoption of the Constitution.