Revolutionary Electoral Culture and the Dynamics of Voting in Assemblies

Compared to elections today, revolutionary elections are perplexing. How was it possible to hold elections in which money, the media, political parties, and electioneering were absent? This chapter describes revolutionary electoral culture and explains its origins. Electoral culture signifies the common values and implicit rules of political behavior governing elections. ¹ By critically evaluating the argument that the electoral results were obtained by fraud and manipulation, it contributes to the lively historiographical debate on the role of the French Revolution in the development of modern democracy. Patrice Gueniffey argues that pluralism, electoral competition, and interest-group politics were foreign to revolutionary political culture. François Furet asserted that the revolutionaries supported the Rousseauist conception of the unitary general will: any opposition was considered illegitimate. ² The Revolution therefore was the precursor of totalitarianism. However, this argument is anachronistic because political pluralism was foreign to the political culture of the eighteenth century. In this sense, the Revolution did not create modern democracy.