Secrecy and sovereignty in the Age of Revolutions

Transparency, or publicity as it was then called, became a fundamental value linked to popular sovereignty in the late eighteenth century. Those who advocated greater publicity, particularly of legislative deliberations, did so as part of an overarching vision of political representation as a process by which the popular will was to be continuously reflected in government. Publicity, in short, would make popular sovereignty possible. But when elected officials in the early United States and revolutionary France made claims to speak for the people, the use of secrecy actually strengthened those claims by temporally dislocating disagreement to after the passage of unpopular policies rather than during the deliberative process. This reality created a paradox at the heart of representative government: secrecy was bolstering a type of regime to which it was simultaneously deemed anathema. Placing procedural decisions about publicity and secrecy front and center, this article addresses questions long plaguing historians: how did the American framers secure what Edmund Morgan called the “fiction of popular sovereignty”? And why were French revolutionaries unable to do the same? One answer, which has long been neglected despite its significance, is the procedural practices of constituent bodies in each context. This article undertakes a comparison of the procedural decisions in the American Constitutional Convention and subsequent legislature and the establishment of the French National Assembly and successor legislatures. It argues that there is nothing mystical about the legitimacy of popular sovereignty through representative government: it was the result of deliberate decisions about the procedures of governance.