Guardians of the Immature: Conception of the People in Eighteenth-Century France

In eighteenth-century France, “the people” came to embody two contradictory conceptions. On the one hand, the concept absorbed all the negative attributes philosophers associated with the populace, including vulgarity, superstition, servility, selfishness, and misery, fostering a skeptical and pessimistic view of their capacity for enlightenment. On the other, it was entrusted with republican ideals of liberty, autonomy and virtue. This article re-examines these coexisting concepts of “the people,” showing how the elitist-paternalistic logic and utopian illusions embedded within the term in practice excluded the people from socio-cultural and political life, and prevented them from truly becoming self-enlightening and self-governing citizens. I explore how, however sympathetically philosophers and statesmen approached the historicity of the people’s immaturity and heteronomy, they nonetheless regarded the people as incapable of exercising their own reason and defending their own liberty; instead, they had to be transformed, guided, and spoken for by their “guardians,” “legislators,” and “representatives.” This persistent distinction between an enlightened minority and a majority condemned to darkness constituted the Enlightenment’s underlying logic regarding the people, a logic inherited in the French Revolution.