The establishment of the Roman tribunate is presented as the decisive constitutional turning point in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of the Roman Republic. It completed the Republic’s unfinished break with patrician dominance, made the people sovereign as well as magistrate and judge, and gave the government a settled democratic form; yet it did not arrest the government’s later drift toward aristocracy.

Rome’s Early Political Structure

Rousseau places the tribunate within a long institutional development rather than treating it as an isolated reform. After Rome’s foundation, the new republic consisted of the army gathered by Romulus: Albans, Sabines, and foreigners. These groups were divided into three tribes, each tribe into ten curiae, and each curia into decuriae, headed by officials called curiones and decuriones. Each tribe also supplied one hundred Equites, or Knights, forming a century. Rousseau reads these divisions as evidence that the early arrangements were military in origin, even as the small city provided itself with a system suited to future greatness.

The original division soon produced an imbalance. The Alban and Sabine tribes remained stable, while the foreign tribe grew as newcomers settled in Rome and eventually surpassed the others in strength. Servius responded by abolishing the racial basis of division and organizing four tribes by the city’s inhabited quarters, each named after a hill. He also prevented residents from moving between quarters, preserving the separation of the groups. This earlier reorganization illustrates the continuing effort to adapt Rome’s institutions as its population changed; the tribunate would later address a different problem, the Republic’s incomplete political settlement.

From Regime Change to Constitutional Settlement

Rousseau distinguishes the actual birth of the Republic from the expulsion of the Tarquins. Although that expulsion ended the kings’ rule, the new regime retained the patriciate and therefore left half its work undone. Hereditary aristocracy remained in conflict with democracy, and the government had not yet acquired a stable constitutional form. The tribunate’s establishment marks the resolution of that unsettled phase: only then, Rousseau argues, was there a true government and a genuine democracy.

This account also rejects the simple description of Roman history as a steady passage from monarchy to aristocracy and then democracy. Rousseau calls Romulus’s initial arrangement a mixed government that soon deteriorated into despotism, and treats the early state as having died before it reached maturity. The Republic’s real development begins with the expulsion of the Tarquins, but its constitutional completion comes later, with the tribunate. In this sequence, the institution is not merely an addition to an already complete republic; it is what makes the republican order politically definite.

The People, the Senate, and the Consuls

The tribunate’s significance appears in the distribution of political functions Rousseau associates with the settled Republic. The people were not only sovereign; they were also magistrate and judge. The senate served as a subordinate tribunal, tempering and concentrating the government rather than holding sovereignty over the people. The consuls, despite being patricians, chief magistrates, and absolute generals in wartime, were in Rome itself no more than presidents of the people.

That arrangement makes the tribunate a hinge between popular sovereignty and the machinery of government. The people’s position was not limited to choosing or obeying rulers: Rousseau describes them as occupying the sovereign and governing roles, while the senate and consuls remained subordinate. His account thus defines the Republic’s democracy by the actual location of authority and function, rather than by institutional titles alone.

The Government’s Later Drift

The settlement did not secure Rome permanently against political change. Rousseau says that once the government had taken its settled form, it followed its natural tendency and inclined strongly toward aristocracy. The patriciate, in his interpretation, effectively abolished itself as the site of aristocratic power; that power instead came to reside in the senate, which included patricians and plebeians, and even in the tribunes when they began to usurp an active governing function. A title could not settle the question of what a body did: when the people had rulers who governed for them, Rousseau classed the government as aristocratic, whatever those rulers were called.

This later movement connects the Roman example to Rousseau’s general account of government’s tendency to oppose sovereignty. As the government’s particular will acts against the general will, its increasing exertion changes the constitution and can eventually suppress the sovereign people and break the social compact. The tribunate therefore signifies both a democratic achievement and a point in an ongoing constitutional history: it establishes the people’s central authority, but the changing work of institutions can still redirect power away from them.