Enlightened Constitutionalism: The Rise and Fall of its Political Vocabulary from the late Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Era

In this study we shall focus on the history of the language and political vocabulary of the Late Enlightenment in order to provide a comparative analysis of a number of semantic shifts and mutations. These phenomena are a useful indication of how the different European languages attempted to break free of the Ancien Régime and its institutional context. We take as our point of departure the term constitutionalism itself, which in the nineteenth century is a new word arising as a typical part of the Late Enlightenment legacy. We then move on to words such as popolo (people), diritti (rights), costituzione (constitution), whose transformations can be detected through a case study based on the different attempts to render these terms in French, English, German, Spanish, and Swedish translations of Gaetano Filangieri’s masterpiece, La scienza della legislazione (1780). Our excursus concludes with the Napoleonic era, highlighting how the subversion of the republican foundations of Enlightenment constitutionalism led also to a reconfiguration of those Enlightenment values that had been passed on to nineteenth-century constitutionalism.