ABSTRACT

In France, more than elsewhere, a willingness to build up a Republic against an Ancien Regime was at the heart of the political project. During the century that followed the French Revolution, republicans sought to replace dynastic and religious transcendence by political transcendence as a manner of organizing collective life and the relationships among human beings. The idea that an election leads to a difference between representatives and those whom they represent–upon which republican transcendence is based–is accepted reluctantly, if not rejected entirely. It is no coincidence that political scientists have recently become interested in direct democracy. For a long time, the overall atmosphere of religious and republican holidays was different. As for sociologists, their criticism has unveiled the conventional and utopian nature of the republican idea. The weakening of republican transcendence through the extension of democratic ideas and values should be neither deplored, nor denounced, nor celebrated.