Research topic
French Revolution
Boroumand L., La Revue Française de Science Politique. June 1990; 40(3): 309-337.
This article is in French. It is focused on the debate regarding its new appellation, within the Third Estate (Tiers Etat/French Commoners), one of the three components with the Clergy and the Nobility, of the General-Estate (Etats-Generaux). The Third Estate deputies argued for and against People’s Assembly or Nation’s Assembly. The tension between the two concepts of Nation and People, and the prevalence of Nation over People, I argue was not fortuitous. There lies the philosophical seed of the authoritarian outcome of the French Revolution.
Boroumand L., in Furet F. and Ozouf M. (eds), La Gironde et les Girondins. Paris. Payot, 1991: 233-264
This piece is in French. It focuses on the liberal democratic constitutional project defended by a group of French revolutionary legislators known as the Girondins who tried to oppose the absolutist republic promoted and imposed by the Jacobins in 1793.
Boroumand L., Journal of Modern History. March 2000, 72 (1): 67-108
In theory, is not the revolutionary moment–the moment when the social contract is renewed the perfect occasion for the broadest acceptance of the right to emigrate? Is that not precisely when all citizens should have the option of adhering to a new social contract (in the form of a new constitution) or rejecting it? This at least was what early modem European theorists of the social contract suggested when they were speaking in the abstract. How could legislators for whom the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 was supposed to serve as a source of inspiration, suggest suspending the right to depart, one of the rights on which that declaration was founded? How did they justify that suspension ideologically? Historiography of the French Revolution, irrespective of tendency, has never investigated the revolutionary legislator in these terms.
Background
My interest in the French Revolution is rooted in a philosophical question : why a body politic based on democratic principles denies human rights to the citizens of other countries? My first observation was that each time a Western democratic polity behaves undemocratically on the international stage it is by reference to the “nation” and its “sovereignty”, “glory,” “interests,” “honor,” “security,” etc… And “national sovereignty” is the ultimate justification for the denial of human rights.
Further research brought to light an inherent tension, not always evident, between the nation as a concept, and as a political form, and human rights as a universal principle. A tension that could be best seen in the United Nations’ Charter, on the one hand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the other hand, the sovereignty of the nation-state. The tension between these two principles are at the heart of the UN’s inconsistency and problems.
The only time in Western political history that these two concepts were at play in the internal history of one nation was during the French Revolution- they were both included in the 1791 constitution. Both concepts -“human rights” and the “sovereignty of the nation”- formed the normative foundations of the state. And the French Revolution led to the Government of Terror. My research focuses on how and why a polity based on human rights could lead to a Government of Terror. French revolutionary parliamentary debates 1789-1794 constitute my primary source.