Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth-century French political thought

Abstract

Political theorists recently focussed their attention on the history of the idea of constituent power. This, they claim, shows that the notion of pouvoir constituant expressed the radical and absolute power of the sovereign people. In other words, constituent power pointed at the democratic and irresistible core of popular sovereignty. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of nineteenth-century French political thought offers a different account of constituent powerÕs history. Analysing archival resources, I show that in the aftermath of the French Revolution politicians and legal scholars relied on constituent power to tame the idea of sovereignty and the powers from it derived. First, during the Restoration constituent power was used to pose a limit to the power of the monarch. Second, throughout the July Monarchy scholars resorted to constituent power to claim that, even if the people was sovereign, its power was restricted to authorising the constitution. Third, during the Second Republic, jurists and politicians addressed the peopleÕs sovereign power in terms of constituent and constituted power. While the first was meant to disappear after the constitutionÕs approval, the second was a second-order power limited by the hierarchy of norms and the rigidity of the constitution.