Peuple parisien, peuple cisalpin

Abstract

During the French Revolution, the concept of people is enriched. Since the French people has become a major political actor and the sovereign of the nation, political elites build new representations on it. But the French Revolution implicates many other people such as the Italian peoples. In this paper, I would like to compare two discourses built by the Parisian elites under the Directory: the first one on the Parisian people; the second one on the Cisalpine people. These two people are dominated according to different modalities: the Parisian people has to be supervised but the democratic legitimacy of the representatives still needs it; the Cisalpine people is a foreign people to the French nation which the French government dominates in the only purpose to guarantee its own interests. These different logics of domination end in the construction of two different realities under the term of people.

Keywords

• Nation
• dominated territory
• socio-political group
• ethnotype
• denial of Nation hood