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To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the French Revolution

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Some scholars of public opinion regard public opinion as an ahistorical category. They define public opinion as a force or reputation which influence on the people's conducts (i.e., Noelle-Neumann, even historian Paul Veyne who studied Roman Empire), or on the king's policy against people (i.e., Lowell). Thus, they say that public opinion has existed over there and over time; even in monarchy, king was subject to public reputation. Unfortunately, this kind of idea continuously lingers in current research on public opinion whose analytical object is representative democracy.

In reality, it may be possible that people's idea, opinion, and public expression influenced on those of other people, or of governmental bodies. But, in mentality, public opinion is a peculiar historical phenomenon which emerged with the rise of democratic governance. As Cowans (2001) points out, it is just opinions that have an influence or pressure on the conducts of the people, but it was not public opinion (opinion publique). The transformation of opinion from a pejorative term to a rather positive one is due to opinion's marriage with the qualifier public (Ozouf). The marriage was not, however, made possible not only by the expansion of people's power-namely, the rise of the bourgeois public sphere , as Habermas argues, but also, and more significantly, by the change of political elite's mentality. Methodologically, thus, the origin of public opinion should be found in the discourse (rhetoric) of political elites rather than in hard facts. And the historical studies of French Revolution may provide many insights into our conceptions of public opinion.