Contenu du sommaire : Les mots du vote de la Rome antique à la Révolution française

‪In the Latin verb creare, the standard theory of Roman voting certainly includes a sense of depicting the election by the Roman comitia of the city's magistrates, although researchers often point out that the actual author of a magistrate's creatio is the magistrate presiding over the court session and creating his own successor. A precise examination of the uses of this verb by the historian Livy suggests the justification of translating creare as “to elect”, or at least the idea that this verb is part of a global approach to magistrates' election in republican Rome.‪

‪While elections in Ancient Rome did not disappear with the establishment of the Principate, it is well known that the controls available to the emperors to manage the electoral process reduced the intervention of the people to a mere formality. Consequently, Tacitus redeployed the electoral vocabulary, which was now obsolete, in a political context, and applied it metaphorically to other power relationships (the relationship between emperors and army, the matrimonial alliances and establishing dynasties). Such a process of resemantization can be seen as the unveiling of the true political nature of the new regime.‪

‪The article proposes to observe the cross-emergence, in French and Italian idiomatic language, of a political electoral vocabulary inspired by the model of Ancient Rome, and to compare it with the vocabulary used concomitantly in documentary sources and vernacular chronicles describing similar operations at that time.‪

‪This article aims to show how mid-16th century antiquarian scholars renewed the understanding of the term “Tribal Assembly”. This study focuses mainly on two different visions of the “democratic” Roman constitution, presented by Nicolas de Grouchy (1510-1572) and Carlo Sigonio (1522-1584). One is based on the unity of the “people” and the other on the rights of the “plebeians”.‪

‪With the rise of “commercial society” in the 18th century, a major change took place in the idea of citizenship: the citizen came to be considered as a shareholderin public affairs. By adapting the terminology of business law to the political domain, a more economic and contractual approach to the link between electors and elected officials took over progressively at the end of the Early Modern era, and this led to the idea of representative mandate. This article aims to trace some of the stages of this semantic transformation by showing the part played by translations from English to French in this phenomenon in the18th century. At the end of the 17th century, Cicero's image of the magistrate as guardian of the republic was revived in British political thought, but it was translated into the terms of the law of trust in the great British anti-absolutist and republican texts, leading to the emergence of a whole doctrine of good government as a limited government by rulers who were trustees of their people's liberties. Difficult to translate, this political terminology was transcribed into French in the 18th century using the vocabulary of commission and proxy. This set of translations led to the politicising of a set of terms that had previously been confined to commercial use and that would come to constitute the political vocabulary of the French Revolution, such as commettants (“principals)”, commis (“employees”), constituants (“constituents”), and pouvoirs constitués (“established. powers”). All this transformed citizens into political shareholders.‪

‪At the beginning of the French Revolution, all public offices became elective. The revolutionaries extended the system of elections to functions that were not only political, but which required a relationship of public trust between the holder of a public office and the citizens over whom his or her authority was exercised. This system of elections was applied to a variety of public functions in different activities (politics, administration, army, religion, education, etc.). Defined at the time as a “choice” regardless of the variety of procedures used, in the early years of the French Revolution, election included a variety of appointment processes, such as nomination and competition, that are no longer considered as being part of an election.‪

‪Nominating someone in the political sense seems quite an obvious gesture. The Latin verb nominare already existed in republican Rome, but because of the diversity of situations in which it is used, its translation by nommer (“to name”) in French is uncertain. There is, however, a considerable number of usages of “ nommer” in recent French translations of the Latin of Livy's works, but, when a hundred cases of these usages of “ nommer” taken at random have been studied, it appears that the vast majority of their Latin counterpart are dicere, which led to the French dire (“say”), which has lost all political implication. But can we really translate dicere by “to nominate” or “to appoint”? A detailed study of these usages of dicere shows there is a range of meanings covered by these two terms and that it puts into perspective the modern distinction between “elect” and “nominate ”, at least in Rome.‪

‪Mostly based on the newspaper articles published in Le Monde during Emmanuel Macron's first term, this study aims to show that between the controversial denunciation of the “lack of empathy” of an “imperial” president and the demagogic demeanour of a politician who “plays the empathy card” with his people, the French press has constantly questioned Emmanuel Macron's image against his capacity to identify with the feelings of others, an ability which is a benchmark of our society and its rhetoric.‪

‪Beyond referential semantics, we suggest an analytical semantical approach focussing on the speech acts to decipher Emmanuel Macron's political discourse. Beyond the political referent, we suggest with Thierry Melchior (1998) or Clément Viktorovitch (2021) the speech act. After having affirmed this novelty in 2017, E. Macron argues for renewal in 2022. After established the En Marche political party in 2017, E. Macron invented Renaissance in 2022. After hoping for the foundation of a new political deal in 2017, E. Macron proposed a Refounding committee in 2022. New or re-new, birth or re-birth, founding or re-founding, behind E. Macron's statistical partiality for re-words, the basic idea remains the same: the constantly renewed semantic movement of speech acts in a discourse, of transformation or of the unprecedented. “Macronism” thus appears more as a an asserted dynamic rather than as recognised political or ideological content; and this dynamic is first and foremost that which is produced or uttered in the speech.‪