The Dream of the Feeling Citizen: Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu

In these pages I want to sketch out the pre-history of the “homme-citoyen” enshrined in the French constitution and in world history with the promulgation of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789), the first formal declaration of human rights. This essay seeks to trace a part of the story of man and citizen before their yoking together in and as the modern subject of rights. The invention of the man-citizen might well be the most significant legacy of the French Revolution, but the political success of this figure and its centrality in modern democratic republicanism have obscured the tensions—historical and actual—within and between the two terms. This essay is then an attempt at a genealogy not only of the terms, but also of the ambivalences of modern citizenship.