This book revisits the emergence of democracy during the French Revolution and examines how French liberalism evolved in response. By focusing on two concepts often studied separately—public opinion and popular sovereignty—it uncovers a significant historical shift in the understanding of democracy. Initially tied to the direct exercise of popular sovereignty by Rousseau, Condorcet, the Montagnards, and Bonapartist theorists, democracy was first rejected, then redefined by nineteenth-century liberals as rule by public opinion. This transformation culminated in the invention of the term “liberal democracy” in France in the 1860s. Originally conceived in opposition to “Caesarism” during the Second Empire, liberal democracy was later redeployed by French liberals against shifting adversaries—“totalitarianism” from the 1930s onward, and “populism” since the 1980s.