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In its first research period (2014–2015), the Research project ReConFort focused on national sovereignty/constituent sovereignty as a key category of its overall research on communication dependencies of historic constitutions. The topos was not only used as a search item, but also as On a comparative overview, national sovereignty is used to explain a legal starting point of the constituting process (the so-called ‘big bang-argument’). All references to national sovereignty mark the process of juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution, i.e. political legitimation is turned into legal legitimation. This is coincident with the normativity as goal of the modern constitutional concept arising out of the revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.

The essay of the Principal Investigator examines the juridification of sovereignty in the French discourse around the works of Sieyès and the parliamentary pre-revolution. In the debates around the Great Sejm the old aristocratic understanding of the Polish Nation as one of the noblemen is found to be powerful. The procedural openness of the May Constitution 1791 is explained as a reflex onto juridification of national sovereignty. National sovereignty in the Spanish Cádiz Constitution 1812 is connected to the anti-Napoleonic context of the constitutional process. The general and extraordinary Cortes’ claim to the constituent power by virtue of the recourse to national sovereignty cannot be understood as representing a Rousseauian national . The natural origin of national sovereignty in the Cádiz’ liberal understanding is influenced by late scholastical concepts and combines the supralegal limitations for the royal government with the historical legitimisation of the Cádiz constitution by the old fundamental laws of the Monarchy (). The constituent sovereignty in the Norwegian May 1814 is in various aspects comparable with the Spanish case: the constitutional process was received as guarantee of national independence. The Moss Process into the Swedish Union under the Fundamental Law of the Norwegian Empire of November 4, 1814 demonstrates the Extraordinary Storting as Constituent Assembly and the monarchy as constituted power. The statement of the Christiana Faculty of Law 1880 on the King’s veto with regard to constitutional amendments relies on the differentiation between constituent and constituted sovereignty by explaining why constitutional amendments cannot be left to either of the constituted powers – neither to an ordinary parliamentary assembly nor to the King alone.

The French 1814, mixing constitutional binding and divine reign, avoids the term sovereignty. The reference to authority () in the preamble permits the prerevolutionary subsumption as divine right. The monarch by the Grace of God Louis XVIII appears as constituent sovereign, the label as charter () tries to create the impression of a royal privilege. Due to his absolute power, the monarch is the sole bearer of executive power (Art. 13), of the exclusive right of legislative initiative (Art. 45, 46) and of jurisdiction (Art. 57). The 1814 was imitated numerously until 1830, including its intrinsic systematic incompatibilities (between the monarchical principle and parliament’s legislative and budgetary rights). Its revolutionary overcoming in the French July Revolution 1830 led to a European-wide constitutional movement, whose connection with national struggles for freedom, invigorated the people and its representation as constitutional factors. Like in France, a parliament took over the task of drafting a constitution in Belgium after the Revolution of 1830: The constituent assembly, dominated by the liberal-catholic legal minds, is , the newly-to-be-appointed King is just taking on the role as . Contrary to the French model, the Belgian Constitution is not negotiated with the monarch, but freely proclaimed by a national congress in its own right.

In the octroi of the Piedmontese 1848, the constituent act of granting the fundamental law () was communicated to maintain the of the absolute monarchy, to rationalize the old royal sacredness. Therefore, according to the preamble of the , the participation of the Council () was simply advisory. The Piedmontese state was to remain based on the ‘monarchical constitutional foundation’ (art. 2) and ‘the person of the King is holy and inviolable’ (art. 4). The oath of the Senators and Representatives contained first the loyalty towards the King and then towards the constitution and the laws (art. 49). The Italian coincidence of the monarchical sovereignty in its absoluteness with the granting of the Albertine Statute was meant to avoid any scope for the differentiation between and . The improvised parliamentarism in the Frankfurt National Assembly corresponded with the openness of the ‘Sovereignty of the Nation’ whereby Heinrich von Gagern inaugurated the St. Pauls church-assembly. This avowal to the singular and unlimited of a not existant German nation did not make sense as a programmatic claim to self-government, but reflected the indecisiveness of the post-kantian liberalism between monarchical and popular sovereignty. It avoided the open commitment to popular sovereignty and thus the conflict with the monarchy, enabling a consensual framework between imperial government and parliamentary majority.

Article 25 of the Belgian Constitution of 1831 specifies that all powers emanate from the nation, but fails to define who or what the nation is. This chapter aims at reconstructing the underdetermined meaning of national sovereignty by looking into a wide array of sources concerning the genesis and reception of the Belgian Constitution. It argues, firstly, that ‘nation’ and ‘King’ were conceptually differentiated notions, revealing a concern on the part of the Belgian National Congress to substitute the popular principle for the monarchical one. By vesting the origin of sovereignty exclusively in the nation, it relegated the monarch to the position of a constituted power. Secondly, it refutes the widely accepted definition of national sovereignty as the counterpart of popular sovereignty. The debates of the constituent assembly prove that the antithesis between the concepts ‘nation’ and ‘people’, supposedly originating in two rivalling political-theoretical traditions, is a false one. Not only were both terms used as synonyms, the Congress delegates themselves plainly proclaimed the sovereignty of the people. However, this did not imply the establishment of universal suffrage, since political participation was limited to the propertied classes. The revolutionary press generally endorsed the popular principle, too, without necessarily agreeing to the form it was given in practice. The legitimacy of the National Congress’s claim to speak in the name of the people was challenged both by the conservative press, which rejected the sovereignty of the people, and by the radical newspapers, which considered popular sovereignty invalidated by the instatement of census suffrage.

The present contribution is a study concerning the legitimization of representative government in Piedmont-Savoy. The essay considers normative factors alongside with constitutional practice, public debate and juridical representations. The purpose is to highlight the wider community’s perceptions of the Constitution. The focal points of the argument are ‘Constitution’, ‘Sovereignty’ and ‘Parliament’, terms whose meaning in a specific context is explored in depth.

What is at stake here is not the philosophical or constitutional affirmation of the concept of sovereignty, but rather the notion as to how the sovereign power was supposed to take shape and operate within the institutional system.

The formula used by the Albertine Statute to describe the new constitutional regime is «representative government» (Art. 2 St. Alb.). This formula assumes different meanings depending upon the specific socio-political conjuncture. So, in the Italian case, the question of sovereignty is closely intertwined with the form of government, as well as with the legitimization of the representative government.

The meanings of sovereignty and representative government are analysed in terms of their dictionary definitions, the political catechism of Michelangelo Castelli and Giorgio Briano, and newspaper articles. The essay also takes into account contemporary culture and the range of available foreign models. In the Piedmont-Savoy the absolute power of the Sovereign had been circumscribed by the gracious concession of the Constitution. The monarchical principle was not in fact understood in the same way as the of 1814 had been, since in France supreme authority had been enclosed within the person of the King, whereas the Albertine Statute presuppose the more modern meaning of a monarchy which through the granting of the constitution, bound itself fully and irrevocably to it. On the other hand, representation was considered to be a genetic element of the new legal order. Furthermore, the metaphor of the pact between sovereign and people served to legitimize the new constitutional regime. The theory of the omnipotence «omnipotence of Parliament» was intended to steer a middle path between the monarchical principle and the excesses of popular sovereignty. The British theory avoided the serious inconvenience of constituent power. There was, indeed, but a single ordinary sovereignty.

The following study is a result of the first phase of the ReConFort research on the constitutional debate of late eighteenth century in Poland (the so-called First Republic, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). Several categories of sources, including not only juridical but also political writers’ and politicians’ private correspondence, were analysed. An analysis of the issue of sovereignty and an interpretation of this concept in journalistic writings and legal acts of that time lead to the conclusion that sovereignty was defined as an external independence and, in particular, as the ‘inner freedom’. On the grounds of journalistic writings and the Great Sejm’s (the 4-Year Sejm) legal acts the class of nobility remained the sovereign. The articles of the Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 changed the role of the nobility (possessors), which became henceforth ‘the free nation’ in a political sense. Its main task was to represent the whole society composed of the nobility, bourgeoisie and peasantry. The adoption of the law on the free royal cities (1791) also provided an opportunity for a more liberal interpretation of the constitution itself. Another matter was a discussion on the position of the monarch related to the problem of his resignation from ‘free royal elections’, which was the most controversial regulation. The conservatives clearly interpreted these plans of the patriotic fraction as a ‘coup d‘etat’, an attack against the existing freedom and the first step to the introduction of an absolute model of rules.