This book examines how democrats and liberals conceptualized public opinion and popular sovereignty from Rousseau to the invention of the term "liberal democracy" in France in the 1860s. The study reveals a historical shift in the understanding of democracy. Initially associated with the direct exercise of popular sovereignty by democrats during the French Revolution, democracy was redefined by French liberals throughout the 19th century. What began as a regime allowing the people to directly vote on political issues transformed into the government of public opinion—where citizens no longer vote beyond elections but influence the decisions of representatives through petitions, newspapers, and associations.

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The analysis covers several representative systems proposed from the French Revolution to the Second Empire: “representative democracy” (Condorcet and Robespierre), “democracy purged of all its drawbacks” (Bonaparte and his collaborators), “the government of opinion” (Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël), “federal democracy” (Tocqueville), and “liberal democracy” (French liberals in the 1860s). Along the way, the book considers how liberal discussions of democracy at home overlapped with defenses of empire abroad. The epilogue highlights how the concept of “liberal democracy,” originally defined in opposition to “Caesarism” in the 1860s, was redeployed by French liberals throughout the 20th century against shifting adversaries—“totalitarianism” from the 1930s onwards, and “populism” since the 1980s.

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