History of a notion. The events in Washington on January 6, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, sparked a powerful wave of outrage in the United States. An expression imposed itself. Almost all commentators and politicians saw in it the manifestation of a loathsome thing called “Mob Rule”, or “government by the crowd” : a mob devoid of reason, which manages to dictate its law through intimidation. Even the former Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, long close to Trump, alluded to it. For him, violence was the fact “Of a crowd drenched in lies”, the individuals reunited were “Incited” speak ” President “ to walk on the Capitol. This disavowal from a supposedly repentant sycophant shows how much this day awakened a national obsession, as old as the American Constitution.
Indeed, “At the time of the Convention of 1787, a fear particularly occupied the spirits: the crowds excited by demagogues and ready to launch the assault on the government”, recalls Jeffrey Rosen, president of the Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Troubles had erupted the previous year and raised fears that the old colony sank into anarchy: the revolt of Shays (August 1786-February 1787). Debt-burdened farmers then attacked various courts, sometimes setting them on fire. The Founding Fathers were all the more worried because the most recent attempts abroad to build a republic oscillated between instability and chaos.
“In England, the regime established after the execution of Charles Ier in 1649 had collapsed ten years later in a bloodbath. The Founding Fathers were aware of this when they were preparing to create something even more ambitious: a democratic republic ”, explains Caroline Winterer, professor of history at Stanford University (California).
Reading of ancient authors
Shortly before the Convention, James Madison (1751-1836), one of the principal drafters of the American Constitution, therefore immersed himself in reading ancient authors. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who was then in Paris, had sent him whole trunks loaded with books. “The Greek historian Polybius interested him particularly, in particular because he established a theory of political cycles by the degeneration of successive regimes”, explains Caroline Winterer. The monarchy begins the sequence, then comes tyranny, then the aristocracy, which turns to oligarchy. Democracy then appears, before sinking into ochlocracy, government by the crowd.
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