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Stephen W. Sawyer, Demos Rising: Democracy & the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Notes, references, illustrations, and index. 320 pp. $35. ISBN: 9780226837598.
Author’s Response by Stephen W. Sawyer, American University of Paris
I would like to thank the editors of H-France Forums, Venita Datta and Hélène Bilis, for making this discussion possible. It is one of the advantages of working on a multi-volume, long-term project that the insights of colleagues offer essential contributions as it takes shape. So, I am very grateful to my colleagues for their engagement with Demos Rising, who have written such careful and thoughtful comments, which will continue to nourish my reflections in the years to come.
As Jennifer Pitts notes, the book is the second volume of what I plan to be a trilogy on the emergence of modern democracy and democratization in modern France from an international perspective covering the period 1770 to 1880. I am writing the volumes as a genealogy in backward chronological order. My aim is to avoid an origins story. In this account, the history of modern democracy is explicitly not the working out of an inherent logic established in its fullness by founders in late-eighteenth-century revolutions. Instead, I am slowly pushing back in time, looking for hesitant beginnings, branches of democratic understanding and practice that broke off, that may have given fruit for some time and were later buried, but nonetheless remain part of the history of democracy.
The first volume of the project, Demos Assembled, focused on the period 1840-1880 to explore how democracy was shaped through the working out of a set of public problems, which are the chapters of the book—inequality, equality, emergency, necessity, exclusion, and terror.[1] I suggest that by addressing these public problems, the post-revolutionary liberal fear of the modern state was slowly displaced, clearing the path for modern democratic governance.
Demos Rising provides a prequel to that story by uncovering how democracy was understood in the first half of the nineteenth century as a mode of social organization, or what Will Selinger refers to in his comments as a “social imaginary.” Though this conception of democracy has been largely forgotten, it framed practices and ideas about democracy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The actors of the period had a name for this social imaginary: democratic society. Recovering this conception helps then recover the broader worldview within which questions of governance were understood in the first half of the nineteenth century: could a democratic society govern itself democratically?
Demos Rising explores how this question was answered not in the abstract, but through the confrontation with a set of material problems of everyday life that, as Nicolas Delalande points out, have been largely ignored in previous accounts of democratization. I offer the history of a much wider and capacious conception of the democratic, which grew out of the idea that the democratization of society generated a range of problems that needed to be treated in the public realm. This idea, I argue, is how a modern democratic state was built in the post-Revolutionary period. Solutions to problems of deforestation, urbanization, health crises, labor relations, industrial capitalism, religious tensions, and imperial expansion (and many others not discussed in the book) were understood to be products of democracy, by which they meant the democratization of social relations. The question that framed attempts to respond to these problems was whether or not solutions could be found through popular governance. Such an approach, as Lucia Rubinelli insightfully puts it, shifts “our attention toward the social sphere as the fundamental precondition for any meaningful theory and practice of political democracy.”
Jennifer Pitts rightly notes that in this approach “elections were indispensable but radically insufficient.” It is no doubt the sidelining of elections and civil society in favor of popular regulatory practices and democratic society in this period that renders the account strange to us. Indeed, my project as a whole demonstrates that there was an entire history of democracy from the mid-eighteenth century to the last decades of the nineteenth, which thus far has been understood to be a mere precursor to the full development of modern democracy in its parliamentary form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What this history of the demos reveals is that this period was no mere prologue. Across 1770-1880, a capacious and transformative conception of democracy took shape which was very different from our own. The essential ambition of this democracy was to empower the people to self-govern. In the contemporary sense, democracy takes place on the input side through the cultivation of private interests in civil society, expressed in periodic elections and enacted through the representation of interests by law-makers, with the execution of those laws becoming an administrative afterthought. Instead, what took shape in this period was a powerful conception of democracy that emphasized the importance of popular participation on the output side, that is, incorporating people into processes of execution of the law, administrative bodies, and popular governance.
It is no doubt the strangeness of this conception that pushes some of the reviewers to ask just how democratic were the processes and practices that I explore in the book actually were. This is a central question, bound to the challenge of the deeply original way (for us) that democracy was understood during the period under study. It is precisely the incongruity, as I suggest in the introduction, of this conception of democracy that may account for why we have lost sight of this conception of democracy. Its recovery requires an effort to see beyond our democratic lens and come to grips with a more critical and historical understanding of the democratic. Indeed, few histories have been as normatively teleological as the history of democracy. I have attempted to start from a different perspective, taking my cue from Thomas Kuhn: “Look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.”[2]
Gianna Englert points out that in chapter two on deforestation, “activists, peasant communities, and shop workers,” ran up against “scientists, politicians, policymakers, engineers, intellectuals, political economists, and urban elites,” who developed policies to combat what they considered anthropogenic climate change. She then asks, considering the importance of the policymakers and elites, “was the demos really responsible for enhancing the organizational capacity of the modern state?” They certainly thought so at the time, so how did they understand this as a democratic problem?
As Karl Marx himself argued in an early article on “Theft of Wood,” the problem of deforestation was bound to the rise of democratic society. One of the most consistently cited democratic consequences of the French Revolution in the period was the extraordinary distribution of land across France due to the selling of noble and church lands. This self-named democratic distribution of land, however, had undermined the stewardship that large landholders had ensured over forests in the Old Regime. In other words, deforestation and the climate change they argued it generated, was a result of the democratization of property, a cornerstone of democratic society. The response on the part of policymakers was the creation of a vast new wave of forest regulations to alleviate the consequences of this democratization: in a democratic society, it was no longer possible to leave private individuals to do as they wished with their own property. The problem was that peasants and landowners who depended on the exploitation of forests for their livelihoods deemed the new public regulations tyrannical. The result was an extraordinary wave of revolts in forests throughout France, which far outstripped the numbers involved in urban revolts in the period. This, in turn, forced public authorities, courts, local administrators and public intellectuals to moderate and adjust the regulations initially proposed. What emerged was an iterative process in which the democratization of society transformed a private claim into a public problem and led to the negotiated construction of a more robust and responsive governance. It was in this way, as Jennifer Pitts notes, that “peasants’ actions shaped the public authority that governed them.”
Lucia Rubinelli similarly wonders whether the social sciences discussed in chapter seven were “in fact, democratic” and questions the efficacy of the surprising fact that early social science was framed in religious terms. It is possible, as Rubinelli suggests, that their use of non-secular language “functioned primarily as a rhetoric.” While this approach is possible, I have chosen a different one. Indeed, it is the apparent absurdity, in Kuhn’s words, for us that the social science born of democratic society was framed in non-secular terms by very sensible people that drew my attention in this chapter. So what might they have been trying to do?
At the heart of these early social sciences was the assessment that a democratic society, which they understood to be the social condition of modernity itself, was not transparent to itself. Under such conditions, to govern democratic society non-despotically required a reflexive relationship to social self-understanding. Modern government could not be reduced to will; it needed to be built out of a recognition of social needs and practices and attempts to alleviate them. Democratically governing a democratic society was therefore not about checking political will through other institutions but rather discovering social structures that limited individual and group action. It is in this way that the sovereignty and government distinction, which had been so central to early modern political thought, gave way to a new distinction—that between society and government. The relationship between society and government was therefore rooted in the ambition to foster a society of equals by overcoming the problems that the democratization of society would necessarily engender.
Social scientists who attempted to diagnose the challenges brought forward by democratic society recognized that intervention in favor of the public welfare unavoidably carried moral assumptions regarding how a democratic society should be organized. And yet, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was sufficient to mention the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or the Terror to unlock the liberal fears of state-led moral tyranny. Such comparisons helped fuel liberal critiques of robust administrative action, articulating a stark challenge to public authority and collective obligation in a democratic society. The consequence, however, was not a renunciation of a more forceful regulatory power but the contrary. Social science helped buttress the search for a substantive democracy by generating an unprecedented and non-arbitrary investigation of the social structures that should guide action toward the collective good. The first self-designated social scientists understood that for social science to guide social governance decisions legitimately, they also needed to search for the common values underpinning its investigations and conclusions. This discussion of common beliefs took the shape of an immanentized political theology, which, they argued, was proper to their historical age and social condition. The sum of this reinvention of belief then was not a conservative, traditionalist religious ideal. It sought to overcome the narrow-mindedness and radicalism of previous religious discourse by offering a critical sociological and historical examination of the shared values that could undergird non-despotic public power and administrative practice.
In his compelling reading of the book, Will Selinger closes by asking a series of important questions: “What if there is never a synthesis between democracy and administration? What if we are left simply with an ongoing political negotiation, in which experts and ordinary citizens each bring their own perspectives to the table, and we can hope for no more than some degree of trust and consensus?” This problem points toward one of the central themes of the project as a whole. That democracy is,in the deepest sense, historical. The story told in Demos Rising is one of how constant social change was understood to be a fact of the modern democratic condition and that the ambition of popular government was to serve that society non-despotically. In Selinger’s words, democracy came to offer little more than “ongoing political negotiation.” To be clear, legislative elections and representative government were and are essential to that process. But as the book seeks to demonstrate, there is a long history of democracy that ran infinitely deeper into the very conduits of social organization.
We live, for better and for worse, in a moment that provides a unique opportunity to explore the history of democracy. We are observing the return, in a new guise, of the problem of thinking democracy in the shadow of monarchy and aristocracy, coupled with the return of new kinds of autocratic and oligarchic trends; disagreements over the place of the courts and a vast attack on public administration have all come to characterize our present crisis of democracy. Fittingly, versions of these problems characterized the period under study in this project. As Jennifer Pitts notes, the project of uncovering ideas and practices of democracy that were central for more than a century and have been buried since, is “recuperative.” The project does not seek to return to the blatant injustices or extraordinary legacy of exclusion that was part of this conception of democracy. Rather, by recovering its ideals, practices and contours, it seeks to restore creative possibilities for understanding and practicing democracy in the future.
Nicolas Delalande puts his finger on a key finding of this history when he asks whether it is an idiosyncratic case of France or if there may be a more general story that emerges between this conception and the more “classical” interpretations of the rise of democracy. Recovering the history of the demos in France in this period from an international context is intended to shed light on broader questions we are currently asking of modern democracy. Perhaps most importantly, in this account democratization was explicitly not about using popular power to check public authority or the state. It was about injecting popular participation into the process of governance and execution of public decisions in order to facilitate the pursuit of the general interest non-despotically.
As a result, this conception consistently challenged ideas of judicial supremacy and constitutional review and sought to balance any necessity of bureaucratic expertise with popular involvement in administrative action. That is, the democratic conception of the administrative state was not reducible to a competition between rechsstaat and polizeistaat: public law and policy drew legitimacy not solely through adherence to constitutional norms and civil law or technocratic expertise but also through participation in their execution and implementation. Hence, as I argue in Demos Rising, one essential consequence of the thirty years of popular mobilization from the 1820s through the military reaction of the early 1850s—or the demos revolution—was certainly the experiments with universal suffrage; however its most important consequence was giving specific content to abstract demands to serve the public welfare through concrete policies.
The tectonic transformation that took shape in this period consistently fell short of its ideal but nonetheless provided a legacy of creative practices for how to shape social life non-despotically: the self-fashioning of the polity was to be done by the people themselves. Or as I argue in Demos Rising, it is a story about how a democratic society struggled to govern itself democratically.
Stephen W. Sawyer
American University of Paris
ssawyer@aup.edu
Notes
[1] Stephen W. Sawyer, Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880, 1st edition (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[2] Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xii.
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Volume 21 (2026), Issue 2, #6