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This article intends to challenge one of the most established French national political myths through a ‘socio-genetic analysis' (Norbert Elias) of the representative regime: national representation as a democratic victory, a myth that allowed the French Revolution (1789–99) to be deemed a milestone of modern political society. During that period, a lawyer's lineage specified political representation, making his perspective the single, dominant and sole legitimate one after the end of the Revolution. This was at its height under the Consulate (1799–1804). Therefore the state bourgeoisie set out the tenets of struggle for prestige and power once and for all, in a society ruled from then on by an equality of rights. The authority of the rulers depended on the electoral sanction of those who were governed, who, in turn, were stripped of their power while being represented. Regarded as a socio-historical mechanism, the representative government's operating mode in this way reveals the usurpation of political power that it carried out while representing the governed people. To make the efficiency of such a system understandable implies a reflexive approach to the historical conditions of the development of the representative regime, while focusing on the revolutionary events during the last third of the eighteenth century.
