Conscience and Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France

THE WORD CITIZEN, according to the dictionary of the French Academy of 1694, meant simply bourgeois, resident of a city. This loose usage exasperated Rousseau, the citizen of Geneva, who complained that the French applied the word to themselves without understanding its real meaning, as one can see from their dictionaries.1 In Rousseau's polity, of course, citizens by definition participated the sovereign authority. He recognized that the French could not call themselves citizens this sense without committing the crime of llse-majeste, since the unwritten constitution of the French monarchy vested sovereignty in the person of the monarch without dependence, division, conditions.2 The monarch, according to the traditional principles of the Ancien Regime, derived the plenitude of his authority from God, not from his subjects. He was not accountable to them, and they had no grounds for disobeying him

Citizenship · Conscience · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Law · Political Theory and Influence

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