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 .

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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.

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I. Reading the Texts Literally

I.1. The UDHR Preamble: the rule of law as the only alternative to revolt

The third recital of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that human rights must be protected by the rule of law, “if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”⁵ The grammar of this clause is decisive. It does not say that rebellion is permitted when the rule of law fails; it says that the rule of law exists in order to make rebellion unnecessary. Two equivalences are therefore embedded in the text: (a) the rule of law and the prevention of tyranny are not two distinct objectives but a single one; and (b) the failure of the rule of law and the legitimacy of revolt are not two unrelated states but the same state, viewed from two angles. The text thus binds tyranny, oppression and the failure of legal protection in a single conceptual knot.

I.2. The Robert definition of tyrant: an act, not a status

The Dictionnaire Le Robert defines tyran, in its historical Greek sense, as “one who seized power by force.”⁶ The dictionary does not flag this entry with any of the standard markers (“Polit.”, “Hist.”) that signal a connotative or contested usage. The definition is therefore offered as objective and conceptual, not partisan. Two consequences follow. First, the definition turns on the act of seizing — not on the durable holding of power thereafter; the Greek tyrannos was identified by what he did, not by how long he did it. Second, classical Greek law did not, on the whole, distinguish attempt from consummation in the way modern criminal codes do; the conceptual category covered the act of seizure itself, including its inchoate forms. Imposing on the dictionary entry a modern attempt/consummation distinction is therefore an interpretive addition not warranted by the text.

I.3. The U.S. Constitution: justice, domestic tranquility, and the duty to judge

The Preamble of the Constitution of the United States announces six purposes, in the name of “We the People”: to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Article I, Section 1 vests “all legislative Powers herein granted” in Congress; Article III, Section 2 then specifies that “the judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority.”⁷ Four interlocking commitments follow from these three textual anchors: a justice that the People themselves establish — not as a regulatory ideal but as the very purpose of the constitutional act; a domestic tranquility incompatible with armed disruption of federal proceedings; the vesting of legislative authority — including the joint session that counts electoral votes — in Congress alone; and a judicial power that, by the express command of the text, must extend to all cases arising under federal authority. The verb is shall, not may; the object is all Cases, not some.

Two consequences follow that no further textual elaboration is required to derive. First, any act that uses force to obstruct the joint session’s exercise of its constitutional function is, by the text’s own terms, an act against the first three commitments simultaneously. Second, and more delicately, a court that has accepted jurisdiction over a federal case — that is, that has recognised itself competent under Article III — cannot, without violating the conjunction of the Preamble and Article III, Section 2, decline to adjudicate the question actually presented to it. To accept the cause and decline the decision is, in Continental terminology, a denial of justice (déni de justice); to recognise that no provision of U.S. federal law replicates the explicit sanction of French Code civil article 4 — “the judge who refuses to judge” — is to observe a lacuna in the sanction, not in the constitutional obligation. The obligation is in the text. What is missing is the consequence.

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II. The Chain of Execution as an Analytical Concept

II.1. The civil-law analogy

French civil law has long been familiar with the figure of the chaîne de contrats — a sequence of distinct contractual operations whose individual instruments may be valid in isolation but whose aggregate effect realizes a single economic operation across multiple parties and multiple moments. The chain’s significance lies precisely in the fact that no single maillon by itself allows the operation to be qualified; it is the chain as a whole that produces the relevant legal effect. The transposition of this figure to the analysis of power seizure is direct: a coup need not be a single instantaneous act, a rupture in the literal sense; it can be a sequence — public contestation of a result, pressure on certifying institutions, mobilisation of a force, deployment of that force against a legal proceeding — whose individual maillons are each contestable, but whose chain-effect is the obstruction of the constitutional process.

II.2. Force, success and qualification

Two implications follow. First, the success of the chain is not necessary for the qualification: the question is whether the chain was set in motion with force directed at the constitutional process, not whether the process was in fact halted. Second, the actor of the chain need not be a single person: chains of execution are inherently distributed — between speech and act, between leader and crowd, between executive pressure and legislative proceeding — and modern criminal law has accordingly developed the figure of conspiracy to capture them.⁸ U.S. federal law in particular criminalises seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding precisely because it recognises that the chain is the legally relevant unit, not the isolated act. The chain-of-execution analysis proposed here builds on that recognition and pushes it one step further: the chain is the relevant unit not only for criminal qualification of distributed conduct, but for constitutional qualification of the seizure itself.

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III. Two Cases of the Same Genus: 18 Brumaire and 6 January

III.1. 18 Brumaire (9–10 November 1799)

The coup of 18 Brumaire is the textbook case of a chain of execution. It begins as a parliamentary maneuver: the Council of Ancients is persuaded to relocate the legislative session to Saint-Cloud, ostensibly on security grounds, in fact to remove it from Paris and from public scrutiny. On the second day (10 Brumaire / 1 November), the Council of Five Hundred resists, denounces the maneuver, and threatens to declare Bonaparte an outlaw. At that moment, grenadiers commanded by Joachim Murat enter the Orangerie and physically disperse the deputies.⁹ Within weeks, the Constitution of the Year VIII is drafted, omitting any Declaration of Rights, and a new executive structure — the Consulate — is installed.¹⁰ The chain’s individual maillons (relocation, debate, resistance, military entry, drafting of a new constitution) are, in isolation, of varying legal character; the chain as a whole is a seizure of power by force in the strict sense of the Robert definition.

III.2. The events at the United States Capitol (6 January 2021)

The chain of execution observable on and around 6 January 2021 likewise consists of several maillons: the public contestation of the certified results of the November 2020 election; the pressure exerted on state-level certifying officials; the proposal to substitute alternative slates of electors; the pressure exerted on the Vice-President in his role of presiding over the joint session of Congress; the mobilisation of a crowd in Washington, D.C.; and finally the breach of the Capitol while the joint session was in progress, with the result that the certification was interrupted for several hours and members of Congress were evacuated.¹¹ The federal indictment subsequently filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith characterised the conduct under four federal statutes — conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights¹² — and over twelve hundred persons were prosecuted at lower levels for offences ranging from trespass to seditious conspiracy.¹³ The chain as a whole exhibits the same internal structure as 18 Brumaire: force directed against a legal proceeding whose function is precisely to consummate the lawful transfer of power.

III.3. The Supreme Court and the constitutional denial of justice

In Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), decided 6–3 on 1 July 2024, the Supreme Court declined to qualify the conduct itself and instead drew a tripartite scheme: absolute immunity for the President’s “core constitutional” acts, at least presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts; classification of any specific allegation between these three buckets was remanded to the lower courts.¹⁴ The procedural posture is the relevant fact. The Court granted certiorari — it accepted jurisdiction. It heard argument on the merits. It issued a decision. On any external description, the Court exercised the judicial power that Article III, Section 2 obliges it to extend to all cases arising under the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The substantive question presented — whether the conduct alleged in the indictment, taken as a whole, fell within or outside the protections of the constitutional order — was therefore properly before it.

What the Court did with that question is the operative fact. It did not adjudicate it. It reformulated it, breaking the question into a taxonomy (official / unofficial; core / non-core) and remanding the application of that taxonomy to the lower courts. From the perspective of the literal reading developed in Part I, this is not a doctrinal innovation but a structural problem: a court that has accepted jurisdiction and rendered a framework decision yet declined to qualify the conduct it was asked to qualify performs, in Continental terms, a déni de justice — a denial of justice. The classical objection that no provision of U.S. federal law replicates the explicit sanction of French Code civil article 4 misses the point: the obligation to judge is not an artefact of French civil law, it is the conjoined command of the Preamble (“establish Justice”) and of Article III, Section 2 (“the judicial Power shall extend to all Cases”). The U.S. Constitution lacks the sanction; it does not lack the norm. To accept the cause and decline the decision is, on a literal reading of the founding text itself, a constitutional default — not merely a prudential choice or a doctrinal disagreement.

From this perspective, the relevant question is not whether the doctrinal architecture of Trump v. United States is internally coherent but what the architecture does: it converts a question that is, on the literal reading of the texts, a question of constitutional fact (was the chain of execution directed against the legal process of power transfer?) into a question of categorical taxonomy (was each maillon, considered in isolation, official or unofficial?). The conversion is itself an act of judicial policy — the “politique judiciaire” that Continental observers attribute to supreme courts when they harmonise rather than apply. The decision did not blanket the events; but by deferring qualification, it generated a window of time during which the political variable — the next election — could operate as the closing maillon of the chain. Part IV examines what that closing maillon does.

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IV. The Decisive Variable: Retroactive Legitimation by the Vote

IV.1. Napoleon’s plebiscites: the archetype

The principal difference between 18 Brumaire and 6 January is not in the chain itself but in what came after. Napoleon’s seizure of power was followed by three plebiscites. The plebiscite of An VIII (February 1800) ratified the new constitution by an official 3,011,007 votes in favour against 1,562 against (99.94%); historical research has since established that Lucien Bonaparte, then Minister of the Interior, inflated the official “yes” count by roughly twenty thousand votes in individual localities, but even after correction the actual figure of approximately 1.55 million favourable votes represented a substantial popular endorsement.¹⁵ The plebiscite of An X (1802) on the Life Consulship recorded approximately 3.6 million yes against 8,374 no, with the highest turnout for any plebiscite since 1789. The plebiscite of An XII (1804) on the hereditary Empire recorded 3,521,675 yes against 2,579 no per the Bulletin des Lois.¹⁶ The historian Martyn Lyons has aptly summarised the resulting regime as a “dictatorship by plebiscite.”¹⁷ Whatever one’s judgment of the figures’ honesty, the structural mechanism is unmistakable: an act whose initial qualification under the Robert definition was a seizure of power by force was, by successive votes, retroactively re-qualified as the constitutional ground of a new legality.

IV.2. The 2024 election as the closing maillon

If the chain-of-execution analysis is applied consistently, the U.S. presidential election of November 2024 must be analysed as a candidate for the same retroactive function. This is not a normative judgment about the election itself — which was conducted, counted and certified under the ordinary constitutional procedure — but a structural observation about the effect of that election on the prior chain. From the moment a person against whom a chain-of-execution allegation is pending is returned to the office whose lawful occupancy was the very object of the contested chain, the political system performs an operation analogous to the Napoleonic plebiscite: it does not annul the chain, but it places the chain’s author in the position from which the chain can no longer be prosecuted, while simultaneously communicating, by majority vote, a form of popular acquiescence — at minimum — to the chain’s outcome. The Trump v. United States decision and the subsequent dismissal of the federal proceedings consummate the same logic at the judicial level. The chain has been re-qualified.

IV.3. Aristotle, Tocqueville and the despotic people

This raises the philosophical question that has haunted democratic theory since antiquity. Aristotle, in Politics III.7, classified democracy among the deviated regimes — those which govern in the interest of a part rather than of the common good — and reserved the term politeia for the correct form of rule by the many.¹⁸ Tocqueville’s analysis of the “tyranny of the majority” extended this concern to the modern context: a numerical majority that votes against the constitutional framework is not, by virtue of its majority, beyond constitutional reproach. Fareed Zakaria has more recently described as “illiberal democracies” those regimes in which electoral majorities crush counter-powers rather than compose with them.¹⁹ If a people, in full knowledge of the chain of execution, ratifies its author at the next election, then either it validates the chain — in which case the constitutional violation acquires a popular co-author — or it acquiesces in an act it disapproves out of weariness, division or calculation, in which case the legitimation is by default rather than by adhesion. Either way, the procedural conception of democracy (majority election) does not, by itself, guarantee the substantive conception (respect for the constitutional order). The texts that founded modern constitutionalism did not, in the main, anticipate the case in which the people itself elects to authorise tyranny.

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V. The Structural Response: Articulating with the Four-Pole Collegial Constituent

If the chain of execution is the operative figure of modern constitutional rupture, and if retroactive legitimation by majority vote is the closing maillon, then any structural response must address both moments simultaneously — neither the law alone, nor the judges alone, nor the people alone offering sufficient guarantee. The four-pole collegial constituent previously proposed at Digital Synapse Exchange²⁰ is the only candidate this author is aware of that addresses both. By election by competence-pole rather than by general suffrage on a single ticket, it deprives any single actor of the capacity to direct the entire chain; by deliberation among four equal poles supervised by an informational pole, it makes the chain of execution institutionally visible at every maillon; and by submission of the constituent text — and not the constituent person — to popular ratification, it preserves the principle of popular sovereignty without exposing it to the despotic-people problem in its acute form. The popular will is exercised on a filtered text, not on a leader; the leader cannot be the chain’s closing maillon because there is no leader at the constituent level.

To this structural response a second, operational layer should be articulated. The manipulability of constitutional language — through proportionality, reasonableness, balance, and other doctrinal abstractions — is one of the principal mechanisms by which the chain of execution conceals itself in plain view. A legal order partly anchored in arithmetic invariants — commutativity (Code civil, art. 1104), exact restitution, exact fractions — would be correspondingly less manipulable, because invariants are verified, not chosen.²¹ The four-pole constituent provides the institutional vehicle; the arithmetic of exact fractions provides the operational discipline. Together, they describe a constitutional architecture in which the chain of execution becomes, for the first time, structurally legible.

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Conclusion

The thesis of this article can be stated in three lines. First, the seizure of political power, in modern conditions, is rarely a single act and almost always a chain. Second, the chain’s closing maillon is, increasingly, not a coup but a vote — a popular ratification that retroactively re-qualifies the chain. Third, the contemporary case at the United States Capitol is not the first of its kind but the latest in a series whose archetype is 18 Brumaire, and which raises in acute form the classical question of whether the people that ratifies the chain becomes the chain’s co-author. The literal reading of the UDHR Preamble, of the Robert definition of tyrannos, and of the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble and Article I converges on a single conclusion: under the texts’ own terms, the chain qualifies. What does not follow from the texts — what no founding document anticipated — is the case in which the people, having read the chain, votes for it.

Auteur

Miguel Vidal Bravo-Jandia

Ingénieur — Master II Droit, UFR Montpellier I / Maîtrise ès droit, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas