Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?

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The existence of the "public" in relation to politics is far from being an invention of the
eighteenth century in Europe. Considering anthropology, we can trace this phenomenon to
the first forms of human association with mechanisms of communal life, where notions of
belonging and reciprocity made possible the organization of a private and public sphere.
Even if we restrict ourselves to the study of western culture, just by observing the classical
heritage of political development in Greece and Rome, it is possible to account for the
existence of physical and symbolic spaces where this relationship is also materialized.
What is singular about eighteenth century Europe, then, that makes us put the relationship
between the "public" and politics at the centre of our understanding of the Old Regime?
The truth is that the spatial reality is significantly different from the one in other
societies. The perception of geographical distances between different towns and villages
was influenced by the speed of communications that connected them, but also by the
territorial unity of these under the nation and the centralization of all political power in the
figure of the absolute monarchy. During the eighteenth century there was a tension between
the local and national experience of space that was transformed by changes in the rate and
extent of communications, along with the emergence of new forms of sociability. The limits
of the private and the public during the Old Regime were disturbed by these subversions of
space, giving way to the development of public opinion. The latter, as a sociological fact
and a political invention, acted as a catalyst in the development of modern politics.
It is necessary to define the context in which public opinion is observed in order to
understand its different characteristics. Opinion, as a concept, had a change in meaning
over the past quarter of the century in France. As illustrated in the article within the
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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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Encyclopdie in 1765, the term had a pejorative connotation associated with the volatility
and irrationality of presumptions and thus had been deprived of all political intention. By
1782, however, it had been transferred to the political section of the Encyclopdie
mthodique, converted into a new concept: public opinion1. In the form of public opinion,
this "emerged as a central rhetorical figure in a new kind of politics. Suddenly it designated
a new source of authority, the supreme tribunal to which the absolute monarchy, no less
than its critics, was compelled to appeal"2. The conceptual transformation was substantial
and refers to a mobilization of opinion from the margins of the private sphere to the
centrality of the public space. This situation is understood in the context of the restriction of
the public in the person of the monarch, and its subsequent opening with the expansion of
communications and changes in sociability.
In 1762 the jurist Georg Wiesand wrote that res publicae, including everything from
rivers, forests, and salt licks to light and water, belong to the prince. They were "public" not
because they were out in the open or of general use but because the prince claimed to own
them3. According to the political theory of absolutism, then, any form of discussion of
public affairs and its subsequent manifestation in particular policies should be made by the
king himself4. In practice, this developed in a different way. Privately, the king received
1 K. M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the
Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge University Press: 1990) pp. 167-168.
2 Ibid, p. 168.
3 J. C. Laursen, The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of Public and Publicity
Political Theory, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1986): p. 586.
4 K. M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution., p.169.
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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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counsel from ministers and parliamentary objections in the form of remonstrances. Even
though the publication of these objections was forbidden, it was not uncommon for them to
get out in the open. In this context public opinion had not yet been developed as a political
invention, but it existed within the boundaries of its sociological reality. In connection with
this, Koselleck agrees with Hobbes that public opinion was presented in the form of a moral
dualism in the aristocratic and bourgeois elite, where the demands of absolutism led to the
division of the self into the "public" (or outward) obedience of the subject and the
"private" exercise of conscience. It was from the "private inner space" that the public
criticism of the Enlightenment emanated5. This argument is particularly controversial
since it presupposes a detachment between the spheres of the private and public, and the
people who formed it, whereas those who were part of the state bureaucracy actively
participated in building new spaces of critical sociability, with which some degree of
identification should have been established6. Therefore, it is plausible to suggest that
criticism and public opinion were exercised by the French elite beyond the boundaries
between the public and private sphere. Thus leading to the development of a modern politic
of contend to the centralization of power, even when it has not yet been presented with the
openness it would gain at the end of the century.
Does this mean that public opinion was only produced by the elite and within the
limits of spaces such as coffeehouses, schools, reading clubs and salons? There are different
opinions regarding the scope the Enlightenment as a phenomenon had and the extent of the
5 A. J. La Vopa, Review: Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No.1 (Mar., 1992): p. 83.

6Ibid
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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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inclusion it generated in political discussions. Habermas, somewhat misleading, suggested
that the public communication of literary subjectivity through print effected a new kind of
purely human intimacy, insulated from the hierarchical power relationship that pervaded
social reality. Likewise the issues discussed became "general" not merely in their
significance but also in their accessibility 7 However, this statement needs to be clarified.
The industrialization of the printing press allowed a massive access to literature and
facilitated its diffusion, despite the fact that general understanding still remained
constrained by the access to cultural capital. More important than books, in this period, was
the massification of the press and European postal networks. These allowed to send
information all over the world on a regular basis, resulting in a new perception of space and
the interconnectedness of events and processes, which is vital for the emergence of a public
sphere that goes beyond the local community8. Many of these newspapers and letters were
read out loud in coffeehouses, allowing the information to reach not only those who could
read but also an illiterate public, thus enabling greater horizontality in public debate.
However, even though access to coffeehouses was not economically prohibitive, it is also
misleading to think of these and other social communities as spaces of absolute democracy,
where all the privileges of a deeply stratified society were forgotten. Inside coffeehouses
was also possible to find separate rooms and private booths which allowed retreat from
other groups of customers9.

7 Ibid, p. 106.
8 A. Gestrich, The Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate German History, Vol. 24,
No.3 (2006): p. 421.
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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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These were not the only mechanisms and spaces of contend, and if we abstract
ourselves from the written culture, we can see a long history of response that involved more
directly the popular sectors of society, in what Habermas attempted to define as a "plebeian
public sphere" but without having studied the matter in detail. Andreas Wrgler conducted
a study on the uprisings in Germany and Switzerland in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century, which led him to suggest that this phenomenon preceded the tensions of
pre-revolutionary France and that people watched the actions of their governments
critically, commented on them and were ready to resist them if they seemed too
burdensome or unjust10. These uprisings were widely covered by the press in the eighteenth
century and serve as testimony of the emergence of a public sphere, despite the fact that, in
essence, these demonstrations were of a more spontaneous and local nature compared to the
ones in the written culture.
Taking all this into consideration, how can we characterize public opinion in
relation to modern politics? As we have consistently stated, our approach to the public in
the early eighteenth century is mostly possible from a sociological dimension. By this I
mean that public opinion was manifested as the expression of a sphere of public sociability,
which had gained greater awareness of its existence as a result of the intensification of
communications and the subversion of geographical and social spaces. This does not imply
that public opinion was not deeply political. On the contrary, even when it had not yet
become a recognized and authoritative body, which happened in the last quarter of the
9 M. Schaich, The Public Sphere in P. H. Wilson, A Companion to Eighteen-Century
Europe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 128.
10 A. Gestrich, The Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate, pp. 424-425.
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century in France, various forms of political protest were being covered under its lack of
unity and certainty. In the plurality of its manifestations and from the margins of the public
discourse, public opinion contained a space for criticism of the administration of power in
the context of an absolutist state.
Towards the end of the century, however, this situation was transformed gradually
while a greater openness to the political debate developed by the agency of both the elite
and the state. Immanuel Kant, in his essay on the enlightenment published in 1784, made a
defence of freedom in the public use of reason, when it was exercised by scholars. For him,
it was a scholars duty to make their objections regarding the state of society known before
the reading public, with the final aim of promoting the enlightenment of people, regardless
of their own private role as agents of the state or a particular institution 11. Similarly, the
absolutist state began to widely use the media with the aim of spreading and argue before
the public, its position on the decisions and policies that were being carried out. A particular
promoter of the states involvement with public opinion was Jacques Necker, finance
minister of Louis XVI, who although was not particularly in favour of criticism, did urged
to recognize the increasing role of public opinion and the need for the State to exercise
some degree of influence in it. Thus, while modern politics began to openly develop in the
public sphere, the nature of "public opinion" in its sociological expression was contained by
its political invention. According to Keith Baker, this understanding of public opinion
emerged in eighteenth-century political discourse as an abstract category, invoked by
actors in a new kind of politics to secure the legitimacy of claims that could no longer be
11 I. Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? in M.J. Gregor (Ed.),
Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 1996), pp. 11-22.
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made binding in the terms (and within the traditional institutional circuit) of an absolutist
political order. The result was an implicit new system of authority, in which the government
and its opponents competed to appeal to the public and to claim the judgment of public
opinion on their behalf12.
The main features of this new understanding of public opinion are consistent with
the ones described in the Encyclopdie mthodique. Construed as rational, universal,
impersonal, unitary, it took on many of the attributes of the absolute monarchical authority
it was replacing, just as it prefigured many ambiguities of the revolutionary will to which it
in turn gave way. The idea of party divisions and conflicting political interest was as
antithetical to the rationalist conception of a unitary public opinion as it was to be to the
voluntarist conception of a unitary general will13. There is an obvious paradox between the
political invention of public opinion and its rationalist understanding. Frequently invoked
from the new practices of open confrontation in modern politics, was precisely the latter the
one that tended to deprive public opinion of political content in its discursive aspect. While
this might misdirect us to think that public opinion became a dispensable subject within the
political sphere, its role was central to the recent increase in public discussion. Even though
the conceptual transformation of this phenomenon tended towards its encapsulation, its
social counterpart continued making itself noticed exponentially, directing public opinion
towards the centre of political attention, and making plausible at least the idea of a
subsequent revolution in France.

12 Ibid, p.172.
13 Ibid, p. 198.
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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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Finally, I wanted to highlight the elusiveness of public opinion to its academic
conceptualization. The difficulties in establishing a rational and harmonious vision of
public opinion, with a largely stable manifestation in society, could induce us to overlook
its role in the development of European politics during the Old Regime. Just as Rousseau,
we react with a totalizing interest before the disbelief that disorder causes in us. However, it
becomes central if we really want to apprehend the dynamism of the late Old Regime, not
to ignore the presence of public opinion, even if it was deprived of political organization. It
is precisely its disorganized emergency within the diffuse boundaries of the private and the
public that made the gradual development of modern politics possible within the tolerance
of the absolutist regime. The increase in the extent and frequency of the media and political
discussion was with the agreement, suspicion, but also the patronage of the monarch.
Through its various manifestations in the social sphere, and its political invention, the
transformation of public opinion turned out to be central to the development of modern
politics.

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Did Public Opinion have a significant role in European politics before 1789?
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Bibliography
Baker, K.M. Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the
Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press: 1990.
Gestrich, A. The Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate German History, Vol. 24, No.3
(2006): pp. 413-430.
Kant, I. An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? in M.J. Gregor (Ed.),
Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 1996), pp. 11-22.
Laursen, J.C. The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of Public and Publicity Political
Theory, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1986): pp. 584-603.
La Vopa, A.J. Review: Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Europe The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No.1 (Mar., 1992): pp. 79-116.
Schaich, M. The Public Sphere in P. H. Wilson, A Companion to Eighteen-Century
Europe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 125-140.