Saturday University: Monarchy and revolution, charisma and popular sovereignty

Historical tensions of the political in France since 1789 The possibility of political and social change through revolutionary violence seems to have characterized French political culture since the end of the 18th century. Far beyond 1789, 1830, 1848 and the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871, the self-image associated with "1968" or the protest movement of the gilets jaunes in 2018/19 would be inconceivable without this historical prefiguration. At the same time, France's political culture is characterized by a peculiar state of tension: between the revolutionary struggle for egalitarian rights of participation in the invocation of the sovereign nation on the one hand and the collective fascination with charismatic heroes at the head of the state and nation on the other - from the roi connétable in the 17th and 18th centuries to Napoleon I and his nephews to Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle. The lecture examines the historical genesis of this tension: when and why did the expectation of a personal embodiment of national greatness turn into the erosion of political-constitutional legitimacy? And what do the French experiences of crisis contribute to an understanding of the structural crisis of the political in the present?

Course number: 261100437