Communications

ARTICLES

Regarding the article by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "The Black Death: The End of a Paradigm" /journals/ahr/108.5/br_105.html], I agree with the points he made about the difficulties in applying modern knowledge of the bubonic plague to the Black Death. These points include the symptoms of the epidemic, its contagious nature, the presence of black rats and rat fleas, the speed of its spread, and the seasonality of outbreaks. In fact, I raised all of these points in my book Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1996 and reviewed in the AHR two years later [103 (December 1998): 1579–80]. As indicated by its title, the book focused on the sixteenth century, but I applied my arguments to the earlier epidemics.

     I only disagree with the implication that other historians have not challenged the paradigm.

 

A. Lynn Martin Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink, University of Adelaide

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., does not wish to reply.

The Editors

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

In his review of my book, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the French Revolution [AHR 107 (June 2002): 949–50], Kenneth Margerison refers to my "assumption that public opinion was consistently equated with the sovereignty of the nation," but he objects, insisting that public opinion remained "an agent apart from established authority." As should be apparent, the reviewer is confusing two completely different points: orators' association of public opinion with the will of the sovereign people (or nation); and orators' association with public opinion with the will of the government. Given the ongoing legitimacy crisis that plagued revolutionary governments, it would be unwise to treat the sovereign people and the government as identical, and it is simply misreading my book to suggest that it did.

     I believe the book made it clear that although some orators (usually governing officials) did claim an essential identity between public opinion and governing powers, many others (or the same orators at different times) treated public opinion and the government as separate forces (see pp. 105–06, 141–44). I thus portray conflict and confusion, not consistency, in contemporaries' statements about the relationship between public opinion and governing powers. So whereas I stand by my contention that the vast majority of orators associated public opinion with the will of the sovereign people, I did not argue that revolutionaries consistently equated public opinion with established governing powers.

     I also find that the reviewers' complaint about the book's "digressions" on prevailing concepts of popular sovereignty and modes of representation conflicts with the call for "more attention to the context in which the language of public opinion was employed." As I stated in the book, one cannot understand claims about public opinion without a sense of contemporaries' views on matters such as the nature of popular sovereignty (including the identity of "the people" and the specific powers of the sovereign) and nature of political representation (including the right of the represented to dictate their opinions to representatives between elections). There are, of course, many different kinds of contexts one might explore, but since the book focused on political culture, I considered it appropriate to place the politics of public opinion within the context of the revolutionaries' ideas about how power should be structured.

Jon Cowans Rutgers University, Newark

Kenneth Margerison replies:

Jon Cowans is correct in pointing out to the readers of the AHR that he never argues in Speaking for the People that "revolutionaries consistently equated public opinion with established governing powers." Of course, I did not assert in my review that he had made such an argument. I did write that Cowans's work was flawed by his "insistence that revolutionary public opinion be consistently linked to national sovereignty," and I stand by that assessment.

     Cowans's work is based on the assumption that the continued debates among revolutionaries regarding the nature of national sovereignty ipso facto reflected confusion about the character and role of public opinion. In his introduction, Cowans argues that, after the declaration of national sovereignty in 1789, "the concepts of public opinion and the will of the sovereign became conflated." This conflation was accompanied by a "degree of confusion and discord that continued to surround the doctrine of national (or popular) sovereignty." Thus "analyzing public opinion in the Revolution requires paying close attention to competing visions and interpretations of sovereignty" (p. 7). My specific criticism is leveled at Cowans's assumption, which is not supported by the evidence he presents, that the revolutionary conception of public opinion is revealed by examining the revolutionaries' often contradictory statements about sovereignty.

     Cowans's analysis of the debate over the appeal to the people on the fate of Louis XVI illustrates my point. The question of the appeal in the Convention revolved around the use of a referendum to determine the national will. The Girondins claimed that the appeal would allow the nation to exercise its sovereign authority on the important issue of the king's punishment. The Montagnards insisted that the people had already expressed their will by overthrowing the monarchy on August 10 and that the deputies in the Convention were fully empowered to employ the sovereign authority of the nation (pp. 95–97). What is the connection between this debate and the deputies' understanding of public opinion? If the language Cowans attributes to the deputies is representative of what transpired on the floor of the Convention, discussion of public opinion formed no part of the dispute over the appeal. Instead, the focus of the debate centered on the manner in which the nation's sovereignty was to be exercised. Was public opinion related to the exercise of this sovereignty? The evidence regarding the language of public opinion that Cowans presents a few pages later would seem to indicate just the opposite. Although some revolutionaries made positive statements concerning the value of public opinion, most commentators cited seemed to fear that public opinion was "corrupted," "duped," or "fooled" (pp. 100–02). According to Cowans's evidence, contemporaries never applied such assessments to the general will or national sovereignty. Robespierre, for example, often complained that public opinion could be manipulated, and, therefore, he preferred to place his trust in the general will (p. 100), a clear indication of contemporary distinction between opinion and sovereign authority.

     The pattern found in this example is repeated throughout To Speak for the People. Cowans devotes considerable space to the concept of sovereignty as it developed in the various periods of the revolution's history, and he then proceeds to provide a number of quotes, which often have no connection to issues of sovereignty, demonstrating support for or mistrust of public opinion. Because of the author's failure to provide the clear links that he claims existed between the revolutionaries' understanding of public opinion and their concept of national sovereignty, in my review I characterized aspects of this discussion as "long digressions," which "obfuscate rather than clarify the role that public opinion itself played during the 1790s."

     By assuming the conflation of sovereignty and public opinion after 1789, Cowans misreads the revolutionary understanding of public opinion, which was often disassociated from sovereign authority or the general will. On the basis of the evidence he presents, the author has not made a convincing case that public opinion and national sovereignty were different sides of the same coin in the minds of revolutionaries. As I stated in the review and again repeat, by insisting that a direct relationship existed between the revolutionary understandings of sovereignty and opinion, the author fails to recognize the true nature of public opinion as a phenomenon with a history separate from that of national sovereignty.

Kenneth Margerison Southwest Texas State University

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