Qui Parle Pour la Nation? Les Élections en Champagne, 1765-1830 (review)

In a time when elections are being organized in new nations around the world, it is instructive to look back at the role of elections during that great turning point of modern democracy, the French Revolution. In this regional study of elections before, during, and after the French Revolution in the province of Champagne, Horn makes a good case for the centrality of elections as the key to legitimacy and the exercise of power in the democratizing nation of France. Rejecting an emphasis on discourse as the way to understand the revolutionary dynamic, Horn argues that elections were crucial in determining who was able to gain and retain legitimate power during the revolution's democratizing process.

Because manipulation of votes and absenteeism at the polls were common during the Revolution and Empire, elections might not appear to have signified much. Horn's evidence suggests otherwise. Just because the Revolution rejected divine right, custom, and inheritance as the basis for rule, elections became one of the most important means for conferring power, and perhaps the only way to legitimize political authority. For this very reason, authorities were intent on designing electoral procedures with predictable outcomes. Ultimately, the restricted, complicated system of voting installed first in 1790 and then under the Consulate and Empire created a stable foundation of wealthy, agriculturally based notables whose power underpinned the centralized French state and whose presence lasted well into the nineteenth century.

Horn's analysis begins in 1765 when the royal government began experimenting with municipal and provincial elections as a way to create closer ties between the government and its subjects in the hopes of extracting more financial resources. Until then, elections were generally systems of cooptation that largely validated the prestige of groups already in power. After the debacle of the Seven Years' War, however, royal reformers were intent on establishing representative assemblies to generate support for royal policies. Even though the government limited these assemblies to the local level, never establishing a national body that could check royal sovereignty, this experiment helped to spread the idea that the public should participate in government. The rejection of the vote by status groups, that is by "order," in the Estates General cleared the way to a fluid, utilitarian system of voting by head and direct taxation.

The electoral system during the Revolution was designed to slight the importance of such volatile urban centers as Troyes, which had swept away the leadership from the old regime, as well as the institutional basis of power, in a violent "municipal revolution." As a result, electoral politics created an ongoing division between urban and rural areas, in which well-to-do rural inhabitants controlled the newly created departmental functions, and citizens in Troyes used their urban power base to push forward revolutionary ideals. The Jacobin society in Troyes arose largely as a way to influence elections in this unfavorable situation.

Horn's account shows that electoral politics by itself could not bring stability to a region plagued by food shortages, ideological division, and mobilization for war. During the Terror, the central government's representatives purged many local officials. Alexandre Rousselin, in particular, was so violent in Troyes that he destroyed whatever trust was left between the locality and the center. Because the Directory found itself unable to bring order or legitimacy back to France, it continually sponsored elections, but annulled results that displeased them.

The genius of Napoleon was to overcome this factionalism and disorder by reducing the electoral procedures necessary for legitimacy to the bare minimum through plebiscites and through the appointment of more officials from the center. Wealthy local elites were willing to trade some of their independence in return for political and economic stability. The complex, restrictive, franchise devised...