Abstract

This article proposes a single analytical concept — the chain of execution — to characterize a recurring phenomenon in modern constitutional history: the seizure of political power not by a single, instantaneous act, but by a sequence of coordinated acts whose individual maillons appear ordinary, ambiguous or contestable, but whose aggregate effect is the capture or the obstruction of the constitutional order. Read literally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights¹, the dictionary definition of tyrannos², and the United States Constitution³ together suggest that no instantaneous coup is required for tyrannical qualification: the use of force, even partial, even unsuccessful, against the legal process of power transfer suffices. The 18 Brumaire (1799) and the events at the United States Capitol of 6 January 2021 are then re-read as two species of the same genus, with one decisive difference — Napoleon’s plebiscites of 1800, 1802 and 1804 retroactively converted force into legality, and the 2024 U.S. presidential election may be read as performing the same operation eighty-five generations later. The article concludes that the operative variable is not the success of the seizure itself but the subsequent ratification by the body politic, which raises the classical Aristotelian and Tocquevillean question of whether a people that ratifies an act of force becomes itself the author of the constitutional violation. The literal reading is then articulated with the four-pole collegial constituent model previously proposed at Digital Synapse Exchange .

* * *

Introduction

Why do political actors escape the law that everyone else is bound by, and why does almost no one effectively respond? The question, posed in this stark form, is older than constitutional law itself; but it acquires a particular sharpness when one notices that the texts which were drafted precisely to prevent such escape — the UDHR, written constitutions, criminal codes — appear to operate, at the highest levels of power, less as binding norms than as a shared vocabulary that the powerful negotiate among themselves. The hypothesis defended here is more specific than this familiar lament. It is that one of the principal mechanisms by which power escapes its legal envelope is a temporal mechanism: the seizure of power, far from being instantaneous, is distributed across a chain of acts whose end-state is constitutional rupture, and whose final maillon is not a coup at all but a vote — a popular ratification that retroactively re-qualifies all preceding acts as legitimate.

The argument unfolds in five movements. Part I establishes the literal meaning of the three governing texts (the UDHR Preamble, the Robert definition of tyrannos, and the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble and Article I) and shows that the conventional readings smuggle in restrictions the texts themselves do not state. Part II introduces the concept of the chain of execution by analogy with the chains of contracts familiar to French civil law, and shows how it dissolves the false dichotomy between the “successful coup” and the “mere riot.” Part III applies this framework to 18 Brumaire and to the events of 6 January 2021, treating them as two cases of the same genus with different outcomes. Part IV examines the operative variable that distinguishes the two: the role of the plebiscite — and, more generally, of the subsequent vote — as a retroactive legitimating device, and asks whether a people that ratifies an act of force becomes the co-author of the constitutional violation. Part V articulates these findings with the four-pole collegial constituent previously proposed at DSE⁴, and explains why such a structure is logically the only candidate able to address the chain-of-execution problem at its root.

* * *

I. Reading the Texts Literally