Citizens of a New Enlightened Age: the French Revolution and Idea Citizenship

If any word springs to mind when thinking of the French Revolution, it is surely ‘citizen’. Little wonder generations of historians have credited the Revolution with inventing the modern citizen. This book asks what inheritance the events of 1789 really bequeathed to us. It suggests that, far from handing down a proto-democratic model of citizenship based on political participation, the Revolution actually depoliticised this civic status and redefined it in terms of the passive enjoyment of rights guaranteed by the state. The book also reintroduces the First French Empire to the picture. Napoleon imposed his own definition on citizenship, whose associated rights became, on his watch, conditional and precarious. This legacy still haunts citizenship today, at a time when state power is infringing upon civil liberties everywhere. The book concludes that the true inheritor of revolutionary citizenship in the present day is China, whose civic settlement other countries around the world are rapidly coming to emulate.