Establishing Representative Legitimacy: The Rhetoric and Practice of Transparency in Revolutionary France

My paper addresses the question of political legitimacy during the early French Revolutionary period by investigating the ways in which the National Assembly sought to establish itself as a legitimate representativegovernment. Historians have noted a theoretical shift in the meaning of political representation that took place in June 1789. Political figures, led chiefly by the Abbé Sieyes, began to define political representation as a practice wherein the national will was to be formed within the legislative body as opposed to being formed outside and then reflected in the decisions of elected officials. Legitimacy was thus theoretically divorced from a need to communicate with, or reflect the desires of, the people outside government.

However, such a sealing off of the National Assembly appears not to have been clearly manifested in the structures and standards of legitimacy the deputies erected over the summer of 1789. My paper examines the deputies’ commitment to transparency as central to the negotiation of legitimacy in practice as opposed to merely its theoretical elaboration. I trace the deputies efforts to keep their meeting space open to the public, to communicate directly with the public by printing and spreading decrees, to open their proceeding to free press coverage, and to communicate with their constituents through constant correspondence. In tandem with this investigation of the actual mechanisms and actions the deputies took to ensure transparency, I also examine their rhetorical erection of publicité (transparency) as an ideal of representative government.