ABSTRACT

From its very inception, the Belgian Senate combined a relatively democratic franchise with highly elitist eligibility conditions. In this contribution, I investigate whether this double-sided institutional architecture went hand in hand with a specific political language. I do so by focusing on two moments of accelerated democratisation: the revolutionary wave of 1848, which, in Belgium, resulted in the lowering of the franchise to its constitutional minimum, and the large-scale constitutional reform of 1893. If the Senate generally presented itself as a conservative corrective against the ‘rule of the mob’ during these periods, some of its liberal members nonetheless also recurred to the language of popular sovereignty. For them, the Senate could only credibly play its stabilising and conservative role if it faithfully expressed the voice of the people that it represented. Even in the conservative setting of this high assembly, therefore, an aristocratic brand of populism could blossom.