ABSTRACT
On August 27 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, France's true revolutionary covenant, was adopted. Postwar restoration under the Weimar Republic ostensibly was more democratic and federal, but the Weimar republican leaders were more Jacobins than federalists. This chapter shows that how one covenantal-federalist answer to that challenge was the invention of consociationalism by Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands which spread down the Rhine valley to Belgium and then to Switzerland, which had remained federal and simply added another dimension to its territorial federalism. Consociationalism was a modern accommodation of the covenantal tradition, it was embodied in a modern constitution that attempted to grapple with the polity not only as a Calvinist commonwealth as in earlier times but as embracing a not-only-Calvinist civil society. The French Revolution was far more secular and ultimately antithetical to those ideas and all that flowed from them.
