La voix du peuple

The people have good backs. To speak in his name is a political ideal as widespread as it is hackneyed. This is the very foundation of Western democracy, but also the source of all populisms. To carry the word of the people is to appropriate it and, in the field of politics, to make it exist. The unresolved problem of the figuration of the people is first and foremost a problem of representation, since this people can only exist as a political subject through this process. n the last centuries of the Middle Ages, Christian Western Europe saw the development of territorial assemblies which, under various denominations (parliaments, states general, cortes or diets), were the place of experimentation of a constitutive political representation of the Modern state, distant ancestor of contemporary democratic regimes. This representation sets up mediating bodies between emerging political societies and princes whose sovereignty is not yet absolute. The present work deals at the same time with the ideas of theologians, philosophers or jurists, and with the practices of these assemblies which invest the peoples of a new authority.