The Roman Senate as an historical agent and political model in the French Revolution (original) (raw)

Abstract

The relationship between the constitution and foreign policy of the Roman Republic and the virtue of Roman citizens in eighteenth-century historical and political thought has recently been noted by many scholars (Kent-Wright 1997; Pocock 2003; Samson 2008; Andrews 2011). However, the role of the Roman Senate as an institution, its influence on citizen’s virtue and its role in the decline and fall of the republic has yet to be considered. In this paper I will argue that in eighteenth-century French histories of the Roman Republic the senate occupied a crucial position as an historical agent, which was necessary to understand the process of decline fall. This role as an historical agent was constantly challenged by the emphasis on individual actors such as Pompey and Caesar, who whilst members of the senate represented a direct challenge to its authority. At the end of the eighteenth-century, during the French Revolution, there was a chance to use the Roman Senate as a political model on which to base a new political system. The leaders of the Revolution, like Jean Mournier and Herbert de Seychelles, turned to the Roman histories of Montesquieu and Mably in order to understand how to write a new constitution specifically based on the Roman Senate. Much has been written on the influences of antiquity and classical republicanism on Revolutionary thought (Baker 2000; Jainchill 2008), however I will explore how the historiography of the senate challenged its validity as a political model. For post Jacobin liberal thinkers such as Theremin, Staël and Levèsque the senate represented an institution that was not only not strong enough to withstand the actions of individuals (such as the Gracchi, Pompey and Caesar) but also an institution that actively promoted virtue in citizens rather than freedom, which led directly to civil strife.

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