Uncertainty and despotism: the challenges of democratic equality: charles de remusat and democracy as a problem in liberal and doctrinaire political thought in the 19th century.

Summary This work is at the same time about the history of liberal political thought in France -in particular that of Ch. De Remusat- and about a classical problem of political theory, that of the conditions of synthesis between democracy and liberalism, between the liberal tradition of the defense of individual rights and the democratic tradition of participation in the life of the city. It is divided into four parts. The first part, profiles, aims at presenting a biographical sketch of ch. De Remusat. It aims especially at showing the way in which he combined his public and intellectual activities. The second, ideas, analyzes the strongly critical view that the liberal family had of the "democratic idea" -around which the first ideas of de Remusat were formed- as well as the process of his own intellectual and political formation, bringing out the double influence of constant and guizot. The third part, certainties, focuses on the 1820s, and examines how Remusat conceives of the effects of the revolution and its main legacy, the egalitarian principle, and how the conception of representative government elaborated by the doctrinaires resolves the question of which political regime is best suited to govern this democratic society haunted by a kind of constitutive uncertainty. Finally, the fourth part, reconstructions, goes through the reflexion of a former doctrinaire who in the maturity of his life revises his youthful certainties, carried away by the need to understand the absolute failure of the representative government founded on the sovereignty of reason, He was carried away by the need to understand the absolute failure of representative government based on the sovereignty of reason, and by the need to reflect on the new challenge that -for the liberal tradition- the democratic society under the second empire poses, namely, its tendency to combine the sovereignty of numbers and centralization in a new form of despotism.