The Expulsion of the Tarquins is presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the real birth of the Roman Republic, not as the completion of its political settlement. The overthrow of the monarchy opened a new republican period, but the surviving patriciate left the work of establishing a stable popular government unfinished; in Rousseau’s account, the decisive institutional turning point came later with the tribunate.

From Monarchy to the Republic

Rousseau rejects the claim that the Roman Republic simply followed a smooth course from monarchy to aristocracy and then to democracy. The government first established by Romulus was mixed, he argues, and soon deteriorated into despotism. The state then died prematurely, before it could reach a mature political form. Against this earlier breakdown, the expulsion of the Tarquins stands as the actual beginning of the Republic.

That beginning did not, however, settle the form of government. The Republic initially lacked a constant political structure because it did not abolish the patriciate. The expulsion ended the royal period, but left an inherited political order in place, so that the change of regime remained incomplete.

The Patriciate and an Unfinished Settlement

The continued existence of the patriciate set hereditary aristocracy against democracy. Rousseau calls hereditary aristocracy the worst of the legitimate forms of administration: its survival meant that the Republic’s founding change had not yet reconciled the governing structure with popular rule. The historical importance of the expulsion therefore lies partly in what it began and partly in what it failed to resolve.

Rousseau distinguishes this unsettled first phase from the later political arrangement. The change from monarchy did not itself establish a true democracy; the conflict between patrician inheritance and democratic government persisted until a further institution altered the balance of power.

The Tribunate and Democratic Government

The establishment of the tribunate fixed the form of the Roman government, in Rousseau’s interpretation, and completed the work left unfinished at the Republic’s birth. Only then, he says, was there a true government and a genuine democracy. At that stage the people were not merely sovereign: they also acted as magistrate and judge.

The other offices were correspondingly limited in relation to the people. The senate served as a subordinate tribunal, tempering and concentrating the government. The consuls, despite being patricians and serving as chief magistrates and absolute generals in war, were in Rome itself no more than presidents of the people. The passage thus measures republican institutions by their actual political function, not by their titles.

The Republic’s Later Direction

The democratic settlement did not remain fixed. After the establishment of the tribunate, the government followed what Rousseau calls its natural tendency and inclined strongly toward aristocracy. The patriciate, he says, effectively abolished itself as the location of aristocratic power: that power was found instead in the senate, composed of patricians and plebeians, and even among the tribunes when they began to usurp an active function.

This later development sharpens the meaning of the founding event. Expelling the Tarquins began the Republic, but neither a republican name nor the end of kingship guaranteed continuing popular rule. Rousseau’s account follows political power as it shifts among institutions, insisting that when rulers govern on behalf of the people, the government is aristocratic whatever those rulers are called.