Individuals, Institutions, and Innovation in the Debates of the French Revolution

摘要

The French Revolution brought principles of "liberty, equality, andbrotherhood" to bear on the day-to-day challenges of governing what was thenthe largest country in Europe. Its experiments provided a model for futurerevolutions and democracies across the globe, but this first modern revolutionhad no model to follow. Using reconstructed transcripts of debates held in theRevolution's first parliament, we present a quantitative analysis of how thissystem managed innovation. We use information theory to track the creation,transmission, and destruction of patterns of word-use across over 40,000speeches and more than one thousand speakers. The parliament as a whole wasbiased toward the adoption of new patterns, but speakers' individual qualitiescould break these overall trends. Speakers on the left innovated at higherrates while speakers on the right acted, often successfully, to preserve priorpatterns. Key players such as Robespierre (on the left) and Abb\'e Maury (onthe right) played information-processing roles emblematic of their politics.Newly-created organizational functions---such as the Assembly's President andcommittee chairs---had significant effects on debate outcomes, and a distincttransition appears mid-way through the parliament when committees, external tothe debate process, gain new powers to "propose and dispose" to the body as awhole. Taken together, these quantitative results align with existingqualitative interpretations but also reveal crucial information-processingdynamics that have hitherto been overlooked. Great orators had the public'sattention, but deputies (mostly on the political left) who mastered thecommittee system gained new powers to shape revolutionary legislation.