Before the multitude, the people, the working masses and the colonized subalterns, there is the plebs. This arose politically under the Roman Republic, at the very moment when the demos was in the process of asserting itself in Athens. Unlike the demos, the plebeians are political actors whose principles and practices remain unknown.
The inaugural scene of the “plebeian experience” is the secession of the plebs in 494 BC: the withdrawal to the Aventine. To thwart patrician domination, migrants, undocumented immigrants, the poor and all the excluded who constitute the plebs leave Rome to settle on Mount Aventine. Rather than giving themselves leaders, the plebeians give themselves names and ancestors, rituals and institutions. She thus gains access to public speech and symbolic inscription in the order of the city. Before this founding event, the existence of the plebeians was sub-political. After him, the latter asserted themselves as citizens.
A discontinuous history of political freedom is born from this experience of radical democracy. An “insurgent” political tradition then emerges, in the words of Miguel Abensour, even underground, which was conceptualized by Machiavelli but also by Vico, Montesquieu and Ballanche. Three characteristics distinguish it: communalism, agoraphilia and its own temporality, the “breach”, in the sense of Arendt, that is to say an irruption of events which temporarily breaks the order of domination.
Martin Breaugh brings to life the history of this “plebeian principle” based on an in-depth reflection on the access of large numbers of people to political action. He discovers another intelligence of democracy understood as an experience of emancipation linking together revolt and freedom, revolution and democracy, utopia and emancipation within popular political practices.
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Martin Breaugh is full professor of political theory in the Department of Politics at York University (Canada). He has co-edited several scholarly works, including Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-War France (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and A Politics of Emancipation: The Miguel Abensour Reader (SUNY Press, 2024). He has taught political theory in Brazil, Quebec, Mexico, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Croatia.
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You can read an article on this work on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
The people of politics, by Marc Lebiez (31 mars 2026)
With L‘expérience plébéienne, published in the “Critique of Politics” collection, Martin Breaugh offers a reflection on the diversity of ways of thinking about the political notion of the people, and thus democracy. The words dèmos, populus, plebs are used as quasi-synonyms even though they carry the memory of different, even opposing, political traditions.
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Summary
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
EXPÉRIENCE PLÉBÉIENNE ET DÉMOCRATIE RADICALE
PRETEND
PART I
What is the plebeian?
I. HISTORICAL BIRTH OF THE PLEBEIAN PRINCIPLE
République romaine : la première sécession plébéienne (494 av. J.-C.)
Florence: the revolt of the Ciompi (1378)
Romans: carnival and revolt (1580)
Excursion 1: Sur la «division originaire du social»
Naples: the revolution of Masaniello (1647)
Excursion 2: Sur l’Intraitable
II. PHILOSOPHICAL GENESIS OF THE PLEBEIAN PRINCIPLE
Machiavelli: the plebs, conflict and freedom
Montesquieu : éloge de la division
Vico: the plebes and “the history of all the cities of the world”
Ballanche : le principe plébéien
De Leon: the chefs of the crowd
Foucault : la plèbe, bassesse ou résistance ?
Rancière : la mésentente plébéienne
Réponse à la question « qu’est-ce que la plèbe ? »
PART II
The question of forms of political organization
LIMINARY. ON THE DOMINANT POLITICAL CONFIGURATION OF MODERNITY
III. PARISIANS SECTIONARY AND SANS-CULOTTES SOCIETIES
Origins and action of sectional societies
Exemplary political struggle I: Against centralization
Exemplary political struggle II: Against the great specialists
A practice of insurrection
The insurrection against the Girondins
The insurrection against the Thermidorians
IV. LONDON CORRESPONDENCE SOCIETY AND ENGLISH JACOBINS
From the plebes: thinking with Thompson against Thompson
On the English Jacobins
The English 18th century and the French Revolution
“That the number of adherents of us be unlimited.”
“L’arbre de la liberté”
Un héritage sans testament?
La pluralité
Political capacity
L’altérité
New political spaces
Active citizenship
V. COMMUNE OF PARIS OF 1871 AND COMMUNARDS
What is a communard?
Towards the Paris Commune: political learning
Political clubs under the Commune: radical democracy
Communalist contribution: criticism of politics, practice of freedom
PART III
The nature of human connection
LIMINARY. SOCIAL CONNECTION, POLITICAL CONNECTION AND MODERNITY
V. THE SANS-CULOTTES: A POLITICAL LINK OF THE FRATERNITY
The sans-culottes: a political link
The “fraternity” in action
Fraternization as a political practice
Politics, violence and fraternity: a fragile political link
Rousseau’s heritage?
Undivided ownership among sans-culottes
VII. THE ENGLISH JACOBINS: A POLITICAL LINK OF PLURALITY
The industrial revolution in England
The breakdown of traditional social ties
Redoing the link: the London Correspondence Company
“In unlimited numbers”: plurality as a political bond
A political link of division?
VIII. THE COMMUNARDS: A POLITICAL LINK OF THE ASSOCIATION
The French political situation before the Commune
A principle at the heart of municipal action: association
The association as a political link
Division or indivision among the Communards?
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF PROPER NOUNS
THANKS
