Fiche du document
1987
Copyright PERSEE 2003-2023. Works reproduced on the PERSEE website are protected by the general rules of the Code of Intellectual Property. For strictly private, scientific or teaching purposes excluding all commercial use, reproduction and communication to the public of this document is permitted on condition that its origin and copyright are clearly mentionned.
Sujets proches
Political thought Government Political theory Civil government Commonwealth, The Science, Political Administration PoliticsCiter ce document
Keith Baker, « Politique et opinion publique sous l'Ancien Régime », Annales, ID : 10.3406/ahess.1987.283368
Métriques
Partage / Export
Résumé
Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime. K. M. Baker. This article sketches the appearance, in the last decades of the Old Regime, of a politics of contestation which compelled its actors, whether they were engaged on behalf of the government or in opposition to it, to appeal beyond the traditional forms of absolutist politics to the tribunal of "the public". As a result, French politics seemed increasingly to resemble English politics, whose passions and disorders many French-men viewed with corresponding unease. In this context, the idea of "public opinion" offered a new system of authority, the abstract source of legitimacy in a transformed political culture. As a political construct offering a middle term between the extremes of liberty and despotism, it presented the image of a politics of rational consensus in remarkable contrast not only to the traditional model of French absolutism, but to the politics of contestation that was threatening it.