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22 - Political languages of the French Revolution

from Part VI - The Enlightenment and revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Mark Goldie  and
Robert Wokler
By
Keith Baker
Mark Goldie
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge
Robert Wokler
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Although they were preceded by several decades of political contestation, the debates of the French Revolution can reasonably be said to have begun on 5 July 1788, when Louis XVI agreed to summon the Estates General after a lapse of almost two centuries. Declaring the royal archives inadequate to determine how that body had once been convened, the king invited his subjects to investigate the precedents for calling an assembly that would be ‘truly national, both in its composition and in its results’ (Baker 1987b, pp. 143–5). This was a remarkable pronouncement in what was still thought to be an absolute monarchy, since it invited public enquiry not only into the entire history of the realm but also the ultimate definition of the ‘truly national’. No earlier constitutional crisis in France had unleashed a response comparable in force and magnitude to the torrent of political argument that was now to sweep the country.

Competing discourses of the Old Regime

Participants in this debate could draw upon a variety of discourses forged in the course of several decades of political contestation. A discourse of justice drew on the conceptual resources of a French constitutional tradition dramatically revived and reworked by defenders of the parlementsin opposition to the royal ‘despotism’ which was increasingly their target after 1750. Juxtaposing the lawful (justice) with the arbitrary (will), it upheld the principles of a society comprised of orders and Estates, governed according to regular legal forms, secured by magistrates exercising their functions of judicial review and registration of laws in the parlements.

Type
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The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought , pp. 626 - 659
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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