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Individuals, Institutions, and Innovation in the Debates of the French Revolution

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Individuals, Institutions, and Innovation in the Debates of the French Revolution Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution Alexander T. J. Barrona, Jenny Huanga,b, Rebecca L. Spangc, and Simon DeDeob,d,1 aSchool of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408; bSanta Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; cDepartment of History, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; and dDepartment of Social and Decision Sciences, Dietrich College, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Edited by Danielle S. Bassett, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Michael S. Gazzaniga March 19, 2018 (received for review October 9, 2017) The French Revolution brought principles of “liberty, equality, fra- parliament, the body itself had little precedent to follow. Its ternity” to bear on the day-to-day challenges of governing what members therefore faced a double challenge: how to convey was then the largest country in Europe. Its experiments provided points in a way familiar enough to be intelligible by others, while a model for future revolutions and democracies across the globe, nonetheless making claims that were in many cases substantially but this first modern revolution had no model to follow. Using novel (“revolutionary,” even). The NCA was a site, therefore, reconstructed transcripts of debates held in the Revolution’s first of both epistemic and political innovation. Conceiving it as such parliament, we present a quantitative analysis of how this body suggests two sets of questions. First, how did new ideas enter managed innovation. We use information theory to track the cre- that parliament room; how were they adopted, adapted, or dis- ation, transmission, and destruction of word-use patterns across carded by the men who heard them? Second: What institutions over 40,000 speeches and a thousand speakers. The parliament as did the parliament evolve to manage the onslaught of novelty and a whole was biased toward the adoption of new patterns, but reaction, optimism and grievance, philosophical argument and speakers’ individual qualities could break these overall trends. organizational minutiae that characterized the day-to-day tasks Speakers on the left innovated at higher rates, while speakers of governance and nation-building? on the right acted to preserve prior patterns. Key players such The digitization of historical archives allows us to answer as Robespierre (on the left) and Abbe´ Maury (on the right) played these questions in a fundamentally new way. Using latent Dirich- information-processing roles emblematic of their politics. Newly let allocation (2) and new techniques in information theory COGNITIVE SCIENCES created organizational functions—such as the Assembly presi- drawn from the cognitive sciences (3), we track the emergence PSYCHOLOGICAL AND dent and committee chairs—had significant effects on debate and persistence of word-use patterns in over 40,000 speeches outcomes, and a distinct transition appears midway through the made in the NCA and later reconstructed in the Archives Par- parliament when committees, external to the debate process, liamentaires (AP) from detailed records kept at the time. Two gained new powers to “propose and dispose.” Taken together, critical measures—novelty (how unexpected a speech’s patterns these quantitative results align with existing qualitative interpre- are, given past speeches) and transience (the extent to which tations, but also reveal crucial information-processing dynamics those patterns fade or persist in future speeches)—allow us to that have hitherto been overlooked. Great orators had the public’s trace both new manners of speech and the emergence of new attention, but deputies (mostly on the political left) who mastered institutions. Our mapping of the French Revolution’s turbulent the committee system gained new powers to shape revolutionary early days in terms of the creation, sharing, and destruction of legislation. word-use patterns complements existing studies of specific ideas cultural evolution j political science j cognitive science j Significance computational social science j digital history How do democracies make decisions? We can read transcripts he French Revolution was a turning point in European from parliament houses and legislative halls to see how par- Thistory. Revolutionary commitments to individual liberty ticular ideas are introduced and debated, but we understand collided with ideals of social equality, while the rejection of very little about the general principles of how these systems Divine-Right monarchy and the embrace of laws based on rea- deal with information, or the origins of those principles. Here son opened a host of practical questions about how to govern the we study the parliamentary assembly of the first 2 years of most populous state in Europe. The first parliament of the Revo- the French Revolution, a model for democracies and revolu- lution, the National Constituent Assembly (NCA), was a picture tions across the globe, and show how patterns of speaking are of upheaval from its outset. created, picked up, and ignored or propagated. Political ide- Over the course of 2 years, the thousand or more individuals ology, top–down rules, and individual charisma all affect how in that Assembly took it upon themselves to propose and argue word patterns survive and thrive or, conversely, disappear and the previously unimaginable: the revocation of Old-Regime priv- drop away. ilege and the reinvention of the relationship between individual and state. But this parliament was more than a debate society for Author contributions: A.T.J.B., R.L.S., and S.D. designed research; A.T.J.B., J.H., R.L.S., and S.D. performed research; A.T.J.B., J.H., R.L.S., and S.D. contributed new reagents/analytic ambitious young men. It was also the origin of a system of rule. tools; A.T.J.B., J.H., R.L.S., and S.D. analyzed data; and A.T.J.B., J.H., R.L.S., and S.D. wrote In the years that followed, successive legislative bodies declared the paper. war on most of Europe, dissolved the French monarchy, declared The authors declare no conflict of interest. a Republic, and sentenced the former king to death—all while This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. D.S.B. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial simultaneously writing constitutions and passing ordinary legis- Board. lation. Many of their procedures and some of their personnel This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution- were drawn from the experience of the NCA. NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND). As a parliament, the NCA confronted the problems that 1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected]. come with managing massive flows of information—problems This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10. still faced by the modern deliberative political bodies that, in 1073/pnas.1717729115/-/DCSupplemental. many cases, are its direct descendants (1). But as the first Published online April 17, 2018. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1717729115 PNAS j May 1, 2018 j vol. 115 j no. 18 j 4607–4612 Downloaded by guest on September 25, 2021 (much as evolutionary biology analyzes both mechanisms of one agent’s language patterns are used and copied by another transmission/selection and the particular phenotypes for which (9, 10). To study the flow of rhetorical influence and attention an environment selects). in the NCA over time, we characterize how patterns of lan- We find, at high significance, a bias in favor of the propaga- guage use, uncovered by topic modeling, are propagated from tion of novel patterns. In the framework of cultural evolution, speech to speech. We do so using Kullback–Leibler Divergence the flow of ideas through NCA is out of equilibrium: the system (KLD) (11): KLD, or “surprise,” measures the extent to which reveals itself as having preferentially selected for what violated the expectations of an optimal learner, trained on one pattern, prior expectations. This effect was driven in part by charismatic are violated by later patterns. Other work has demonstrated that political radicals such as Robespierre and P´etion de Villeneuve, surprise (in the Kullback–Leibler sense) is a cognitive as well as who not only introduced new patterns more often than their an information-theoretic quantity. It predicts what a subject will peers but did so in a way such that others followed. By contrast, look at in a dynamically evolving visual scene (12) and can be influential conservative figures such as Abb´e Maury and Cazal`es used to map an individual’s higher level activities (detecting, for acted as inertial dampeners: their speeches maintained past pat- example, biographically significant transitions in a subject’s intel- terns and carried them forward, despite the Assembly’s overall lectual life) (3). Methodologically, this paper extends that work bias toward innovation. Conservatives of the French Revolution by considering surprise in relation to both past and future. “conserved”: not only did they refer to past traditions, but they We use surprise to analyze a corpus of speeches by many did so with familiar discursive strategies and inherited word-use different individuals. Surprise here measures both the devia- patterns. tion of one speech from the patterns of prior ones (novelty) In parallel with these individual-level differences, our methods and from patterns that appear in the future (transience). High reveal a major transition in how the parliament as a whole pro- surprise compared with the past indicates the topic mixture is cessed novelty. Roughly halfway through the NCA’s existence, new compared with previous speeches, hence the term “nov- committees—which met outside the parliament but reported elty”; high surprise compared with the future indicates that later to it—gained new power to raise and resolve questions. Ora- speeches do not retain that pattern very strongly, hence the term tors on the left and right continued to confront each other in “transience”.
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