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popularity, and a number of counselors suggested that the King had no
choice but to begin his own propaganda campaign to compete for this
public support. When the crown accepted this advice, Baker suggests, it
began digging its own grave, for by acknowledging, even implicitly, the
authority of "public opinion," it undermined its claim to embody
all
politics within itself Linguistic authority passed, he writes felicitously,
from "the public person of the sovereign to the sovereign person of the
public."
How did France slide from this fateful symbolic moment to actual
revolution? Baker suggests that the monarchy's linguistic abdication
opened up a political vacuum in which different authors could now ad–
vance their own plans for reconstructing French society. These authors'
writings themselves fall into three "discourses" (the word really does be–
gin to grate after awhile): the judicial, which encapsulated the high
courts' claim to represent the nation; the administrative, which spoke for
a rational management of social interests by an enlightened despot; and
the political, which appealed to an ultimate political will inherent in the
nation. All three discourses found adherents within the traditional
institutions of government, but also among the
philosophes
(Voltaire in
the second camp, Rousseau very much in the third). Over time, the three
interacted more and more feverishly , and finally , in the hands of the bril–
liant revolutionary publicist Sieyes, coalesced into a single, powerful
"revolutionary discourse."
Baker's more recent essays explore this coalescence by engaging in
what German intellectual historians call
Begriffsgeschichte
-
the history of
concepts. He takes a politically charged expression such as
"representation," "public opinion" or "revolution" itself, and traces its
metamorphosis between the early eighteenth century and the era of po–
litical modernity that dawned in 1789. "Revolution," for instance, first
entered the French political lexicon still stamped with the original ety–
mological meaning of a turning around an axis, and therefore of a
reversal of fortunes. It connoted the inevitable, unpredictable and chaotic
fluctuations in human affairs, but not (as it does today) a process that
stretched out over time, and not an act of conscious political will. In the
1750s, however, the
philosophe
Mably (both a "judicial" figure and a
classical republican) began to use the word in a different manner, em–
phasizing that human actors could turn these moments of disruption to
useful ends. Voltaire (from the "administrative" camp) and Condorcet
conveyed the idea that revolutions could also amount to "the profound
and irreversible transformation of society by enlightenment." The eccen–
tric journalist Linguet (a "political" publicist) added an apocalyptic tone,
and in 1789, journalists completed the process by describing revolutions
