Pierre-Antoine Antonelle and representative democracy in the French Revolution Minchul Kim School of History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK ABSTRACT This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an elaborate theory of ‘representative democracy’ which was a novel and radical vision of political reform and republican international order. His political and economic plan for a democratic future was focused on conceptualizing a realistic transition path to a genuinely republican society. In the wake of historians who pointed out the existence and importance of the idea of ‘representative democracy’ during the Directory, this article delves into the content of this idea by placing it in the context of Antonelle and his fellow travellers’ political struggle to consolidate the Republic while avoiding both anarchy and aristocracy. KEYWORDS Democracy; representation; French Revolution; Directory; Antonelle; representative democracy 1. Introduction It is widely held that in the eighteenth century the two notions of democracy and representation were understood and deployed in a way directly opposed to each other. 1 The language of ‘representative democracy’ did not then exist because in the eighteenth century this was an oxymoron. There is ample academic literature supporting this view, the most prominent being the works of Frank Ankersmit, Mogens Herman Hansen, Bernard Manin, Raymonde Monnier, R. R. Palmer and Pierre Rosanvallon. 2 There is nonetheless a lacuna in this account which results from the historiographical ‘skip’ of the French Directory (1795–1799). Bernard Gainot and Pierre Serna have argued that a the- ory of ‘representative democracy’ was in fact elaborated in France during the period between the death of Robespierre and the birth of the military government of Bonaparte. 3 This theory achieved © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Minchul Kim mkim1789@gmail.com 1 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. All italics inside quotations are from the original sources. Titles of French source materials in the form of books are generally translated into English, regardless of whether they have been published in English or not. 2 Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford, CA: 2002); Mogens Herman Hansen, ‘The Tradition of the Athenian Democracy A.D. 1750–1990’, Greece & Rome 39, no. 1 (1992): 14–30; Pierre Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique (Paris: 2004); Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: 1997); Raymonde Monnier, Républicanisme, patri- otisme et Révolution française (Paris: 2005), 48, 69–70; Robert Roswell Palmer, ‘Notes on the Use of the Word “Democracy” 1789– 1799’, Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1953): 203–26; Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘L’histoire du mot démocratie à l’époque moderne’, in Situations de la démocratie, eds. Marcel Gauchet, Manent, and Rosanvallon (Paris: 1993), 11–29; id., La démocratie inachevée (Paris: 2000); Ruth Scurr, ‘Varieties of Democracy in the French Revolution’, in Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions, eds. Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (Oxford: 2013), 57–68. 3 Bernard Gainot, ‘Théorie et pratique(s) de la représentation politique’, in La Révolution à l’œuvre: perspectives actuelles dans l’his- toire de la Révolution française, ed. Jean-Clément Martin (Rennes: 2005), 139–49; id., ‘Un itinéraire démocratique post-thermidor- ien: Bernard Metge’, in Pour la Révolution française: en hommage à Claude Mazauric, eds. Christine Le Bozec and Eric Wauters (Rouen: 1998), 93–106; id., ‘La notion de “démocratie representative” et son occultation’, The European Legacy 4 (1999): 84– 91; id., 1799, un nouveau Jacobinisme? La démocratie représentative, une alternative à brumaire (Paris: 2001); Pierre Serna, Antonelle: aristocrate révolutionnaire, 1747–1817 (Paris: 1997): there is a shorter and revised edition of this work, published in HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS, 2018 VOL. 44, NO. 3, 344–369 https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1442955