The Political Power of Words: The Birth of Pro-democratic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century in the United States and France

The Political Power of Words

Taking my cue from Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner (Koselleck, 1985; Prévost, 1995; Tully, 1988), I have analyzed not only the texts of prominent political actors, but also newspaper articles, political programs and speeches, personal letters, poems and the names of associations in order to properly understand both the descriptive significance and the subjective power of the word ‘democracy’. The United States and France are two particularly telling cases, because it was there that influential politicians first began to call themselves ‘democrats’. This comparative analysis has allowed me to identify two principal modes of usage of the word ‘democracy’ in the political field: (i) to distinguish oneself, either negatively or positively, from one's rivals; and (ii) to sanctify the regime, a practice that, in turn, makes it possible to distinguish the preferred regime from those embodying ideologies regarded as undesirable. I claim, thus, that political actors use the word ‘democracy’ primarily as a means to increase their own political power or to diminish the power of their opponents.

The mode of distinction can be further divided into three sub-modes: (i)

Negative distinction: the recourse to the ‘bad name’ for political purposes is ‘a device to make us form a judgment without examining the evidence upon which it should be based’: the propagandist ‘does this by giving bad names to those individuals, groups, nations, races, policies, practices, beliefs, and ideals that [the propagandist] would have us condemn and reject’ (Institute for Propaganda Analysis 1995 [1937], p. 218).

The process of labeling individuals, groups or institutions has a number of political consequences in terms of power relations. Labeling functions not only as a public marker to identify which actors are deemed legitimate and which are not; often, it is also through labeling that one actor gains a certain legitimacy and another not. In the struggle for legitimacy, actors strive to practice self-labeling and to avoid ‘outside labeling’ as much as possible. Those political actors who manage to distinguish themselves positively in the eyes of the state or of certain sectors of the population can more easily mobilize financial and human resources to defend and promote their cause. Conversely, political actors who have distinguished themselves negatively become more isolated. They find it more difficult to mobilize resources and therefore become preferred targets for the political actors who have succeeded in acquiring greater legitimacy. The attacks can be all the more vicious, to the extent that the negatively identified actors lack the resources to defend themselves and have difficulty establishing alliances because of the very fact of their negative image (Bourdieu, 1982; Gove, 1975; Green, 1987; Jenson, 1995; McAdam et al., 2001, pp. 143–8; Schervish, 1973).

When a word comes to be recognized by almost all actors as suggestive of positive values, there occurs (iii) a struggle for monopoly. Historically, political actors asserted their monopoly over that label in order to prevent their rivals from appropriating it for themselves (hence, the ensuing profusion of accusations that the word ‘democracy’ had been stolen and statements distinguishing the ‘real’ democrats from the ‘false’).

When there is no longer any one camp exercising a monopoly on a label (‘democracy’ or ‘democrat’) understood in a positive sense, all camps continue to lay claim to it nevertheless. The word thereupon becomes part of the process of sanctifying the regime. As a result, the word may once again be used by the actors to take up a position in the political field, which is an ideological and international field as well.

Of course, historical and political reality is complex and the motives of political actors are often varied. Hence, it was not every political actor who used the word ‘democracy’ for its negative or positive power. The fact remains, though, that historical sources abound with cases where political actors used the word for its subjective power (to excite positive or negative emotions) rather that its descriptive potential (to provide a neutral designation for a regime having certain characteristics). Note that it is not unusual to find texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries asserting the political potency of words and labels. In France, the revolutionary Élysée Loustalot explained in his journal La Révolution de Paris (7–14 November, pp. 3–4) that the ‘abuse of words has always been one of the primary means employed to subjugate peoples’. For the American Alexander Graydon, there was nothing better than a ‘well chosen appellation’ to seduce the ‘people’, and Fisher Ames remarked in a letter to John Rutledge that ‘Names and appearances are in party warfare arms and ammunitions' (quoted in Morantz, 1971, p. 145). ²

‘Democracy’: A Disparaging Word

The founders of the modern electoral systems in the United States and France were overtly antidemocratic (Dupuis-Déri, 1999). This anti-democratism can be explained in part by their vast knowledge of the literary, philosophical and historical texts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Regarding political history, it was common for American and French political figures to see themselves as direct heirs to classical civilization and to believe that all through history, from Athens and Rome to Boston and Paris, the same political forces have faced off in eternal struggles. The founders sided with the historical republican forces against the aristocratic and democratic ones, and the Roman republic was the political model for both the Americans and the French, whereas Athenian democracy was a despised counter-model (Pocock, 1975; Rahe, 1992; Richard, 1994; Roberts, 1996). Regarding political philosophy, their support went to the anti-democratic theses of Aristotle and Cicero. ³

The founders advocated a ‘republic’, which was understood as a system structured in such a way as to promote the ‘common good’ and to prevent absolute power. The anti-democratic discourse was thus consistent with the type of regime the founders intended to establish – a political regime without any agora where the ‘people’ might have the opportunity to participate directly in political deliberations and the decision-making process. James Madison's Federalist Paper number X offers a good example of how influential political actors of that time distinguished between ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’: ‘a pure democracy [is] a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person’ while a ‘republic [is] a government in which the scheme of representation takes place’ (Madison et al., 1987 [1788], p. 126).

But what about ‘popular sovereignty’? First, ‘democracy’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ were by no means thought of as coextensive; it is clear in the discourses of the leading patriots that, although the people were the source of political sovereignty, their participation had to be as limited as possible. This distrust of the ‘people’ on the part of the elite was justified on grounds of the very low level of education of the general public, which, it was said, made it unfit to govern directly. Even worse, the direct participation of the ‘people’ in political affairs threatened to engender a class struggle wherein the poor, who would constitute the majority at the agora, would inevitably carry the day against the rich. According to Madison, for instance, democracies ‘have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property’ (Madison et al., 1987 [1788], p. 126). Moreover, democracy was commonly said to be unsuitable for the modern world for reasons both of geography and demographics (modern nations are too populous and vast for the people to be able to gather at the agora to deliberate and govern) and for cultural reasons (the modern individual prefers to devote himself to his work and private life rather than to the political life of the city). Elected politicians claimed to belong to a ‘natural aristocracy’, ⁴ suggesting that they were, of course, more enlightened and more virtuous than the common folk. Thus, the ‘sovereignty of the people’ had to be only virtual and concentrated in the hands of the elected politicians in order to prevent tyranny and to secure individual freedom (Manin, 1997). This exclusion of the ‘people’, justified by the political elite on moral, cultural, economic, political, geographical and demographical grounds, was rather convenient, for it thereby justified the elite's effective monopoly on power. There is no doubt that the ‘people’ did obtain certain important rights as a result of the political and legal upheavals brought about by the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. Nor is there any doubt that some influential political actors were concerned not merely with greater political power for themselves or the official institutions to which they belonged (some of them, in fact, worked outside the precincts of the official institutions – in the clubs, the popular sections, the press, and so on). Yet the leading patriots on both sides of the Atlantic (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington in the United States, and Georges Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Emmanuel Sieyes in France) were active within the official institutions and their actions were often determined by the power relations within those structures: they took advantage of independence (in America) and the revolutions (in France) to reorganize the political system so as to concentrate sovereign power in the chambers where they already held seats – the colonial assemblies in British America, and the parliaments or the National Assembly in the summer of 1789 in Paris (Ertman, 1997, pp. 69–72; Morgan, 1988; Palmer, 1959; Tulard, 1985, p. 11; Wilkinson, 1972, p. 110). ⁵

Within this environment, the word ‘democracy’ was used by influential political actors primarily to stigmatize an opponent, a faction or an institution as one advocating the rule of the poor, the abolition of private property, violence, chaos, irrationality and even atheism. In a letter to John Taylor, John Adams wrote: ‘In reality, the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less than a nation of people without any government at all … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself’ (quoted in Laniel, 1995, p. 65). In revolutionary France, the conservative and moderate patriots were of the opinion that ‘democracy’ was ‘the greatest of plagues' (Barnave, 1983 [1791], p. 50); they found it ‘abhorrent’ because it would lead inevitably to ‘despotism’ (Tackett, 1996, p. 105). The place of the term ‘democracy’ in the public discourse of the times is similar to the one occupied by the term ‘anarchy’ today. In fact, it was not uncommon for the two notions to be interchanged in the eighteenth century. ‘Democrats' were not only linked to dreadful things; they were also accused of exciting ‘the pride of the multitude by abusing the words general will, sovereign, and nation’ (Mounier 1989 [1789], p. 980). Such quotations are legion in the documents – the official speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, letters and personal diaries – of that period. Thus, the term ‘democracy’ and its derivatives unmistakably served to draw a visible negative distinction between the speaker and his adversaries, whom he sought to discredit by branding them as both irresponsible and dangerous. In times of crisis, being labeled negatively may be a matter of life or death. In revolutionary France, for instance, to be labeled a ‘counter-revolutionary’, ‘aristocrat’ or ‘democrat’ could lead straight to the guillotine.

Before the nineteenth century, only a few politicians plainly declared themselves ‘democrats' in the hope of being associated with the interests of the ‘people’ and to differentiate themselves from the new political elite that was exercising sovereign power. In France, Gracchus Babeuf and his allies in the ‘Conjuration des égaux’ (Conspiracy of Equals) identified themselves with ‘democracy’ in an attempt to make it clear they stood on the side of the poor against the new republican elite. In the United States, the anti-Federalists viewed their self-identification with ‘democracy’ as a way to indicate that the individual states were much closer to the people's local interests than the Federalists' proposed central state could ever be. On the other hand, the Federalists going to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 thought of the new central state as a dam against ‘democracy’. According to Madison, for instance, Alexander Hamilton sought a new constitution because ‘he sees evils operating in the States which must soon cure the people of their fondness for democracies' (quoted in Ketcham, 1986, p. 77). Once there, the delegates at the Convention did indeed discuss ‘the turbulence and follies of democracy’ and ‘the vices of democracy’ (Farrand, 1966, pp. 51, 288). Ultimately, partly because of the greater effectiveness of the anti-democratic discourse, neither the ‘Égaux’ nor the anti-Federalists succeeded in establishing themselves in the political arena.

The case of the American Democratic Societies (modeled on the French Clubs – Jacobins, Cordeliers, Feuillants, etc.) is specially revealing of the illegitimacy that continued to surround any ‘democratic’ label. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, blaming their failure on the word ‘democracy’ itself, stated in 1804: ‘Prudent men, and patriots, were willing to avoid a name [democracy] which had incurred disreputation from the excesses of those attached to it’ (quoted in Laniel, 1995, p. 197). The goal of a political actor in labeling a rival was in fact to discredit him while at the same time demarcating himself from the rival, with the clear implication that he, the labeler, was the true defender and promoter of positive values. The labels ‘democrat’ and ‘democracy’ were used to designate an opponent in order to stigmatize him. Brackenridge went on to prophesy:

Given the climate described above, it seems surprising that the members of the ‘Comité de salut public’ (Committee for Public Safety) in France would deploy a pro-democratic discourse during the few months of the Terror to justify their authority, going so far as to identify the Terror with democracy (Jaume, 1989, pp. 116–17, 247). In fact, Robespierre and his allies had criticized democracy before instituting the Terror, but they then made the discursive choice of proclaiming themselves ‘democrats' as a way to demarcate themselves in a positive manner – for example, from the ‘aristocrats’, ‘monarchists' and other ‘counterrevolutionaries' – and to sanctify the regime by linking it to the ‘people’ and ‘virtue’ (with regard to Robespierre's use of the word ‘people’, see David and Prieur, 2000, p. 206). Thus, the first time a French government ever called itself ‘democratic’ was during the Terror, at the very moment when it was carrying out, in the name of the people, the bloody repression of the local sections, which actually promoted the political participation of the citizens. The fall of Robespierre and his allies and the subsequent return to power of the conservatives (the Thermidorean revolution) were soon followed by the proclamation of an empire. As the French Revolution, Robespierre and the Terror were identified with ‘democracy’ throughout the opening years of the nineteenth century in France, the term carried a pejorative charge during this period.

Power Games and Word Games

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, a great many polemics arose in the United States and France concerning the meaning of the word ‘democracy’. Those polemics are evidence of the degree to which the political actors of that period were aware of the symbolic value of the term ‘democracy’. In the United States, a newspaper appeared in 1801 under the telling name of The Republican or Anti-Democrat and published an article with an equally telling title: ‘The Government of the United States Not a Democracy’. The article reminds readers that the concepts ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonymous and that ‘democracy’ is the ‘curse of republics’, a ‘volcano of licentiousness’, the ‘prolific mother of faction, cruelty, injustice, sedition … and tyranny’ (quoted in Morantz, 1971, p. 146). Far from being an isolated case, the Anti-Democrat was in fact representative of the antidemocratic spirit of the times.

In France, some of the main political actors of the first half of the nineteenth century (such as François Guizot and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard) were also opposed to democracy, preferring the ‘republic’ – a political regime where the political power deriving from the people remains in the hands of elected individuals. Hence, according to Royer-Collard, ‘democracy’ must be mistrusted, because it brings ‘anarchy, tyranny, misery, bankruptcy, and, finally, despotism’ (1986 [1831], pp. 130–1). Working-class leaders, however, commonly identified their cause with ‘democracy’, which was consistent with the traditional meaning of the word ‘democracy’ and its connotations of the rule of the poor. Militant socialists actually set into motion a broad-based movement under the banner of démoc-soc (for ‘démocratique’ and ‘socialiste’) (Magraw, 1986, pp. 147–50; Sewell, 1980, p. 266; Tombs, 1996, pp. 256-8, 389–90). Moreover, throughout France, banquets démocratiques were held, for they could as ‘banquets' slip through a loophole in the severely restrictive laws regulating public meetings. These events attracted thousands of individuals, and the word ‘democracy’, already included in the name of the banquets, additionally occupied a place of honor in the speeches and toasts made at such occasions (Nicolet, 1982, p. 85 n.2; Rosanvallon, 1994, p. 193 n.4 and p. 199). The slogan, ‘Long live the democratic and social republic!’ (Pigenet, 1994, pp. 527-9) – widely used by socialists during this period – also allowed socialists to easily distinguish the sort of republic to which they aspired from that proposed by conservative republicans and moderate republicans. For the socialists, ‘democracy’ represented serious social and economic guarantees to the workers and unemployed and the genuine participation of the citizens in the political process, and the labor movement provided them with a wealth of examples of associations whose general assemblies were convened as often as twice a month (Sewell, 1980, p. 256).

The moderate and conservative republicans were quick to realize the political effectiveness of the word ‘democracy’, and they too enlisted its services to lure electors whom certain socialist supporters were endeavoring to attract. That republicans came to use the word ‘democracy’ for political ends does not, of course, necessarily mean it was simply a cunning political move on their part. This semantic shift among republicans was facilitated by several moderate or conservative republican authors who had suggested that French society was democratic. They, like Alexis de Tocqueville, used the term ‘democracy’ from a sociological perspective (that describes the state of society) rather than a political one (that identifies the regime). Indeed, despite the Restoration, there was a new egalitarian spirit that many associated with democracy. Moreover, the American republic was regularly referred to as ‘democratic’ in cultured French circles in the 1830s. Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique (1969a [1835]) is exemplary in this regard, but it was not the only work in which the American republic is considered a ‘democracy’, and French partisans of the American republican system started to refer to themselves as ‘democrats’. Yet more and more individuals had a political interest in declaring France to be democratic and even in identifying the republican project as democratic. This can be explained by a number of political factors.

First, the authorities at times outlawed the public use of the word ‘republic’ because it was used as a call to sedition (Caron, 1995, p. 205; Caron, 1994, pp. 500–2; Desbrousses-Peloille, 1984, p. 468; Tulard, 1985, p. 382). With the word ‘republic’ banned, republicans looked for an alternative term to denote their political ideal. They could not be identified with the ‘monarchy’, as this was precisely the label of the regime they dreamed of overthrowing. And ‘aristocracy’, in the minds of the republicans, carried even more of a negative charge than did ‘monarchy’. ‘Democracy’ was all that remained for them. Evidently, the republicans associated themselves with ‘democracy’ more often than would ordinarily have been the case had the use of the word ‘republican’ not been prohibited. Yet the shift of conservative and moderate republicans also had a strategic purpose with regard to the socialist threat.

By using the very label with which the socialists identified themselves, the republicans hoped to cause some confusion among socialists and the ‘people’, and this is what happened in the 1840s. Courting the ‘people’ was all the more important for the republicans, especially after 1848 and the instauration of universal suffrage for adult males: politicians were then suddenly obliged to consider – or at least to make a show of considering – the interests of the workers, the farmers and even the unemployed. Candidates tried to connect with the working class by identifying themselves as ‘workers of the mind’ or ‘proletarians of the intellect’ (Déloye, 199, p. 238), and the word ‘democracy’ itself became an essential tool for politicians competing to secure votes within the modern electoral systems. In short order, there was a mushrooming of republican associations and publications defining themselves as ‘democratic’.

No one embodied this co-opting of pro-democratic discourse by conservative republicans better than Tocqueville. In 1835, in his introduction of De la démocratie en Amérique, he posed this cautionary question: ‘Does anyone imagine that democracy, which has destroyed the feudal system and vanquished kings, will fall back before the middle classes and the rich?’ (1969a [1835], p. 12; see also 1969b [1848]). He also equated ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’ in the French context, and in October 1847 he condemned ‘democratic opinions' as a direct threat to private property (Christophersen, 1968, p. 88; Mélonio, 1994, p. 584). A few months later, in a speech before the ‘Assemblée constituante’ (Constitutional Assembly), he presented the issue in an altogether different light. He stated that democracy strives for equality in freedom, while socialism strives for equality in poverty and enslavement (Sartori, 1987, p. 386). In September 1848, less than a year after having condemned democracy by associating it with socialism, he looked forward to the birth of a republic that would be ‘entirely democratic without being socialist’ (Mélonio, 1994, p. 586). These shifts in Tocqueville's position cannot be explained on philosophical grounds; his semantic inconsistencies can be understood only in terms of politics. In the hands or the mouths of the republicans, ‘democracy’ was no longer associated with the interests of the poor but rather with the French nation, unified and respectful of liberal policy.

The reversal of meaning accomplished by the republicans was so effective that the socialists were forced to revise their own discourse. Since the republicans had founded associations whose names included the word ‘democracy’ or one of its derivatives (‘Comité des démocrates' and ‘Démocrates républicains’, for instance), the label of ‘democrat’ or its derivatives no longer sufficed to differentiate socialists from moderate or conservative republicans. With this in mind, the socialists of the ‘Comité electoral démocratique’ (Democratic Electoral Committee) re-dubbed their organization the ‘Comité des démocrates socialistes' (Committee of Democratic Socialists) (Traugott, 1985, pp. 17–18, 21). The socialists also distinguished between the ‘real democrats' (themselves) and those who were deceptively presenting themselves (the republicans) under ‘democratic colours' (Bravo, 1966, pp. 210, 214–15).

In 1849, the conservative republican Guizot (1849, pp. 9, 36) remarked that the term ‘democracy’ was used too loosely and he expressed his disquiet in his De la démocratie en France:

After mocking Guizot – ‘Don't you know that Mr. Guizot is a democrat?’ – the imprisoned socialist Auguste Blanqui proceeded to concur with him:

As it happens, a newspaper titled La Monarchie démocratique (Democratic Monarchy) was published in Paris in 1871.

If we now consider the American case, we note a process similar to the one observed in France. As we have seen, the Federalist central government had been regarded by various political actors of the time as a dam against ‘democracy’. That view was still held in 1809 by Fisher Ames, who expressed his satisfaction regarding the ‘sages in the great Convention’ who chose to establish a republic ‘which differs more widely from a democracy, than a democracy from despotism’ (Morantz, 1971, p. 13). It was only when the union was joined by new states whose inhabitants shared a distrust of elitism that politicians like Andrew Jackson realized how the word ‘democracy’, used as a laudatory term, might help their careers. Yet the creation of a huge partisan machinery and the introduction of universal suffrage for adult males are even more significant in explaining when, how and why political actors came to use ‘democracy’ in a positive way, because political parties started to view themselves as mass organizations, holding large public meetings and rallies, with more and more people getting involved in electoral campaigns. Partisanship, along with the introduction of universal suffrage, impelled politicians to adopt the label of ‘democrat’ in order to seduce the voters.

Rhode Island was, in 1842, the last state to introduce universal suffrage (for adult males). Until then, the right to vote had been limited to landholders and their eldest sons. In 1841–42, a suffrage expansion movement reached a dramatic climax with Dorr's Rebellion. The movement had summoned a ‘People's Convention’ to draft a new (illegal) constitution in which the word ‘democracy’ used in a laudatory fashion appeared in the first article (Swindler, 1979, p. 370). This movement was a sign of the growing tension between the wealthy and the workers. Indeed, a growing number of workers in the large cities of the east adhered to an egalitarian ideal, one shared by the populations of the states new to the Union. Given this context, the self-identification of politicians with ‘democracy’ was all the more effective as the word became linked to the common folk, such as small farmers and manual laborers, who had won the right to vote. Moreover, in the 1820s and the following decades, the states regularly held constitutional conventions that generated heated public debates and produced what has been called ‘the metaphysics of popular government’ (Rogers, 1987, p. 95). This whole dynamic led political actors to believe that to label themselves ‘democrats' would help them seduce the voters.

Jackson, in his bid to gain the support of disgruntled citizens, was the first influential politician to adopt a frankly pro-democratic discourse. During the presidential election campaign of 1824, all five candidates, including Jackson, identified themselves as ‘republicans’. He was defeated but tried his luck once again in 1828, this time as a ‘democrat’; this proved to be an effective way to distinguish himself from his opponents. Thus, he became the first president of the United States to openly declare himself a ‘democrat’. He promised significant financial (banking) and administrative reforms, since among the common folk there was a widespread feeling that the Federal administration was controlled by a greedy, corrupt and privileged aristocracy of officials. Presenting himself as the enemy of the ‘financial aristocracy’ and champion of the ‘real people’ (Latner, 1979, p. 5; Meyers, 1971, p. 202; Nelson, 1991, p. 141; Remini, 1981, p. 129), Jackson declared he would get rid of the entrenched officials to make room in the public administration for self-made men who had worked at the local level.

In no time, the newspapers favorable to Jackson jumped on the bandwagon and began explaining to their readers that the ‘Jacksonian cause is the cause of democracy and of the people, against a corrupt and abandoned aristocracy’ (quoted in Remini, 1981, p. 377). On several occasions, the crowds at rallies organized in support of Jackson chanted the slogan ‘Democracy against aristocracy’ (Globe, 22 September 1832; see also Remini, 1981, p. 384), which suggests just how popular the term ‘democracy’ was among electors. It was taken up more and more, even in the field of commerce. In her study of American newspapers of that period, Morantz noted that before 1800 no newspaper had the words ‘democrat’, ‘democratic’ or ‘democratic-republican’ in its name; but between 1820 and 1850 an explosion occurred, with no fewer than 202 newspaper names referring explicitly to ‘democracy’ (1971, pp. 164–5). In 1840, Jackson's organization officially adopted the name of Democratic Party.

As had been the case in France, American conservatives were quick to appropriate the word ‘democracy’. An early discursive tactic implemented by the conservatives was to trade the name National Republicans for Whigs in 1834 (McSweeney and Zvesper, 1991, p. 18; Morantz, 1971, p. 236; Reichley, 1992, p. 83). All this fuss surrounding names and labels would lead Jackson's successor at the head of the Democratic Party, Martin Van Buren, to state somewhat ironically that ‘I almost begin to pity the poor Whigs. Their next cognomen will be Democrats' (quoted in Morantz, 1971, p. 243). Van Buren could not have been closer to the truth, since after the mid-1830s, the Whigs systematically referred to themselves as ‘democrats' in order to win over the voters. A letter written in April 1835 by the Whig William H. Seward to Weed Seward reveals that this discursive shift was explicitly conceived as a political strategy; it warrants attention, because it reveals the thinking of a self-conscious propagandist:

It is worth underlining expressions such as ‘principle’, ‘suppose’, ‘felt’ and ‘believed’, all of which refer to symbolism, interpretation and state of mind rather than concrete policies or social situations. To sum up, the Whigs realized that to identify with ‘democracy’ made one look like a ‘friend of poor’. In the same vein, the Boston Quarterly Review (11 January 1839) explained to its readers that ‘No party, not believed to be democratic, can rise even to respectable minority’ (emphasis added).

But the differential effect was nullified from the moment more and more politicians of all stripes declared themselves ‘democrats’. Mindful of this problem, American Democrats, like the French socialists who first identified themselves with ‘democracy’ in France, accused their opponents (the Whigs) of usurping the title of ‘democrat’ in the hope of establishing a monopoly over the word by discrediting their adversaries' use of it. This was done intentionally, as evidenced by the words of Amos Kendall, a supporter of Jackson's Democratic Party, who expressed himself quite clearly on this issue:

In the opposite camp, the Whig Henry Clay replied by asserting that the Democrats were but ‘bogus democrats’, whereas the Whigs were for ‘genuine democracy’ (quoted in Laniel, 1995, p. 322). The height of irony was reached when the Whigs claimed that Van Buren's partisans ‘arrogate to themselves the name of Democrats' (quoted in Morantz, 1971, p. 256).

Of course, for someone to claim a new public identity does not imply that his or her political identity has to be redefined in depth. As was the case with the French conservative and moderate republicans who identified themselves as democrats but emphasized that their democracy was not a socialist one, the American Whigs gave themselves a ‘democratic’ label while at the same time making clear they stood for a ‘well regulated democracy’, to cite Whig Chief Justice John Marshall. He explained that, for him, ‘democracy’ must protect

Despite these stipulations, the Whigs felt they had no choice but to clearly identify themselves as ‘democrats’. Like the French republicans, they labeled their associations and conventions ‘democratic’, as, for example, the Young Men's Democratic Whig National Convention, held in Baltimore in May 1840. In a speech made during the presidential campaign of 1840, the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison (who eventually won the elections) commented: ‘The most extraordinary thing in this contest is that we are fighting under the same banner. All here claim to be Democrat’ (quoted in Morantz, 1971, p. 259). Another of Harrison's speeches delivered during the same campaign deserves a close look (quoted in Nelson, 1991, pp. 169–74). He first condemned the ruling Democrats by labeling them negatively as ‘monarchists' and by suggesting that they were using the label ‘Democrat’ misleadingly: ‘It is the vilest imposture ever attempted upon the credulity of the public mind to array the poor of the country under the name of Democrats against the rich, and style them aristocrats’. Then, he explained:

He declared, nonetheless, ‘I am a democrat’.

Thus, a mere two generations after the openly anti-democratic founders of the modern United States and France had established not a democracy but rather an electoral regime known as a ‘republic’, the leading politicians there were vying for exclusive rights to the word ‘democracy’. Even God, hitherto a monarchist, had become a democrat. The notion of ‘Christian democracy’ made its appearance in France in 1830, emerging initially from the ranks of the left. This democratic God was, in the words of the historian Frank Paul Bowman, the ‘Christ of the barricades' (1987). Hence, the communist Étienne Cabet could affirm: ‘It is Jesus, it is a God who thus prescribes DEMOCRACY among all Christians and the whole Humanity!’ (1846, pp. 160–1; see also Pilbeam, 2000, pp. 499–515). Twenty years later, the idea of a democratic God was co-opted by the right. ‘Democracy’ then refers only to the electoral regime supplemented by liberal rights. In 1873, for Henri Baudrillart, who wrote the entry on ‘Democracy’ in the Dictionnaire general de la politique, ‘modern democracy [coincides] with the fundamentals of Christianity’ (1873, p. 635). In the United States, John L. Sullivan wrote in October 1837, ‘Democracy is the cause of Humanity … It is the cause of philanthropy … It is the cause of Christianity’ (quoted in Laniel, 1995, p. 308).

‘Democracy’ also inspired poets such as Walt Whitman and Victor Hugo who waxed lyrical on the connections between democracy, reason and progress. For instance, in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, democracy was no longer a political system, but a culture in which the ‘democratic individual’ could flourish (1983 [1855], p. 1). This complete reversal in meaning did not go unnoticed among contemporary observers, as witnessed by this lucid comment published in the North American Review (no. 54, January 1842): ‘what would have been the horror of the framers of the Constitution, could they have been told, that in fifty years time, the government they were setting up with such careful framed safeguards against what they called democracy would be itself called a democracy.’

Conclusions

A cursory examination of historical sources in other parts of the world indicates that, in all likelihood, the modes of usage of the word ‘democracy’ were, there as well, to a large extent politically motivated. Otherwise, how would we explain that Simon Bolivar, much like the American and French patriots, considered ‘no form of government … [to be] as feeble as democracy’ (quoted in Vayssiere, 1989, p. 15), and at the same time account for Augusto Pinochet's boast in 1998 that his army had saved ‘Chilean democracy’ (New York Times, 13 September 1998)? Joseph Stalin also used the word ‘democracy’ for political purposes and, hence, did not hesitate to speak of ‘popular democracies' in order to distinguish the USSR and its allies from the false liberal ‘democracies' (Buton, 2000, p. 64). Meanwhile, anti-Stalinist socialists such as Victor Serge claimed they were the real democrats (1985 [1942], pp. 170–1). All this suggests that, as in the two cases studied here, political actors elsewhere have used the word ‘democracy’ as a label to distinguish themselves from their opponents and to facilitate the mobilization of political resources (with regard to the political use of the word in a Third World country such as Senegal, see Schaffer, 1998).

The cases of France and the United States suggest, however, that the political force of words and labels depends on the setting-up of various symbolic and political networks. First, political actors tend to use certain words on the assumption those words are made politically forceful when explicitly linked or opposed to other words. Political actors have linked the word ‘democracy’ to ‘tyranny’, ‘chaos' or ‘anarchy’ when ‘democracy’ was viewed negatively, and to ‘reason’ and ‘God’ when it was viewed positively. Second, it seems important for political actors to make clear oppositions between words: ‘democracy’ (negative power) in opposition to ‘republic’ (positive power). These precautions tend to demonstrate that political actors regard words as not entirely accurate weapons. Moreover, words like ‘democracy’ are used in a context that is not only discursive but symbolic as well and may be dispensed with in certain situations. In Abraham Lincoln's famous 1863 Gettysburg Address, for instance, he praises the ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ without once uttering the word ‘democracy’.

We should not infer from this research that the word ‘democracy’ is now nothing more than a word used by political actors to gain support and mask a system in which power is exercised in the name of the people. First, the meaning of a word like ‘democracy’ is not fixed once and for all. In early twentieth-century France, for instance, partisans of both the far left and the far right ascribed a pejorative sense to the word ‘democracy’. Thus, H. Lagardelle, editor of the journal Le Mouvement socialiste, explained that the ‘duel between democracy and labour socialism will continue inexorably’ and that ‘the time of triumphant democracy will not last forever’ (Lagardelle, 1906, pp. 187, 192). The rightist Charles Maurras, for his part, affirmed that ‘democracy is evil; democracy is death’ (1925, p. 121). ⁶ This kind of pejorative marking of the word ‘democracy’ allowed these political actors to highlight their opposition to liberal parliamentarism. Second, not all of today's political actors claiming to be democrats do so for propaganda reasons; the claim may be made in good faith, especially in the light of that word's now longstanding association with the liberal electoral regime. Third, the fact that the word ‘democracy’ has been co-opted by so many political actors and factions as a tool in political struggles severely undermines its analytical value. Thus, this study should make students of political history more aware that the stability or neutrality of words as crucial as ‘democracy’ cannot be taken for granted. Ignoring the deliberate use political actors make of words and labels for political purposes can give rise to erroneous interpretations. Last but not least, scholars must be aware of the political force of the term ‘democracy’ when they use it themselves.