French Republicans and the suffrage: the birth of the doctrine of false consciousness

Abstract

Paradoxically, the suffrage of the French Second Republic endorsed outcomes that were anathema to its republican authors. There thus arose the formula that the Republic could not be threatened by an electoral outcome however conservative that might be. A related aspect of the defence of the Republic fixed blame on an unsophisticated electorate—and specifically the peasant voter—that was too readily imposed upon by forces of reaction. Here, one finds the essentials of the doctrine relating to the misreading of class interests later called false consciousness. These ideas formed the most characteristic political theories of the period and were revived with the coming of the Third Republic. The constitutional entrenchment of the Republic, in 1884, ended the debate. The tension between republicanism and the democracy sought by universal suffrage is a chapter in French political thought now little noted in scholarship, whereas the events referred to here are reasonably familiar. An investigation of the intellectual debate surrounding universal suffrage reveals a surprisingly neglected aspect of nineteenth-century republican ideas.