the case of Stuttgart

“A number of historians, jurists and political commentators, study today the origins of modern democracy in France. In general, they find it in the institutions created in the revolutionary era. But none of these authors has directed their research to the organization of the French municipality in the ‘ancien régime ’ one of the origins and perhaps the most important of the representative system, and therefore democracy…But apart from Tocqueville, no one has tried to demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities between the municipal organization of the ‘ancien régime ’ and those of today…For most researchers it seems that the revolution constitutes an insurmountable divide.” This lucid observation of Godechot (1972: 363-4) is equally applicable to Germany. It encourages us to analyze and understand the evolution of municipal representation in a long term perspective, unfortunately, infrequently taken into consideration by the majority of political analysts almost entirely preoccupied by contemporary politico-institutional debates and issues. But municipal political representation and the foundations of contemporary democracy were not invented in the 19th century. They appear at the same time as the birth of the communes or municipalities, that is to say, at the beginning of the High Middle Ages, and continue thereafter in different phases more or less oligarchic or democratic. The present capital of the Land of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart, will provide the most useful politico-historical perspective of the long transformation of the democratization of municipal representation in Germany