RELIGION AND SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE - FROM ROUSSEAU TO TOCQUEVILLE

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the ethical and political meaning of the French Enlightenment, more specifically concerning the religious implications of the idea of popular sovereignty as it is put in place at the time of the French Revolution. The study of the social status of religion in two thoughts elaborated before and after the Revolution shows the clear opposition between Rousseau's “civil religion” with its perspective of a moral regeneration of man, and Tocqueville's “democratic religion” with its liberal perspective. But it also reveals the ambivalence they share in their attempt to think through the problem of the “common soul” of a society where legitimacy rests only on its self-institution. © 1990, Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique. All rights reserved.