Eighteenth-century political writers in France such as Abbé de Saint-Pierre or Abbé de Mably developed schemes for perpetual peace and used the idiom of Droit public de l’Europe (European public law) to found the administration of foreign affairs on a scientific analyses of the real, instead of imagined, interests of the state. But once the calculative orientation was pushed far enough, it turned into a speculation that received its most advanced articulation in the physiocratic theory about optimal relations between economic actors. The state works best, they argued, once both the sovereignty of the ruler and property rights are both conceived as absolutes. Many revolutionaries shared these views and aimed to realise them by abolishing noble privileges and declaring all French white males free and equal. At one stage, the revolutionaries even tried to write these principles into the foundation of a new law of nations. Nothing became of this, however, and while restoration elites briefly flirted with applying the scientific pretensions of the enlightenment to the business of government, the post-Napoleonic moment returned to the forms of old-regime diplomacy.

Although Emmanuel Sieyès is often read as a theorist of sovereignty, I argue that he theorised constituent power as a way of framing the principle of popular power alternative to ideas of both national and popular sovereignty. In his view, both versions of sovereignty attributed unlimited and absolute power to either the representatives in parliament (national sovereignty) or the multitude (popular sovereignty) and resulted, respectively, in legislative blockages or re-totale. Sieyès introduced his theory of constituent power to avoid both outcomes. Constituent power allowed him to claim that political authority resided in the people but was limited to the authorisation of the constitution-writing process, as carried out by elected representatives. Once the constitution entered into force, the people’s constituent power would retreat and make space for the constituted order, run by representative institutions. Yet these only had a limited power, as they could only act within the limits imposed by the people when authorising the constitution. The outcome of this theoretical construction is a constitutional representative government where the people who hold the original constituent power exercise it only indirectly (contra popular sovereignty), while the delegates who hold a derived constituted power exercise it only within limits (contra national sovereignty).