French Republicans in the late nineteenth century would often say that universal suffrage could not commit suicide. The people could decide, on any and all questions, except for the form of the regime itself. “Once universal suffrage was admitted, the Republic follows as a logical consequence,” for only under a republic could this suffrage continue to exist (Alfred Nacquet, 1873. La République Radicale. Paris: Librairie Germer-Baillière, 11).

As with most assertions of self-evident truths, the phrase exposed deep anxieties about the logic it purported to reveal. That the people might reject a republic in favor of a monarch or emperor was an animating worry of French Republicans well into the twenthieth century. Under the Third Republic, manhood suffrage was secure but the regime was not, and the security of the first paradoxically sustained a worry about the second.

Amel Ahmed’s groundbreaking The Regime Question will profoundly reshape how we think of the first wave of democratization, with critical implications for democracy today. Across four foundational cases, Ahmed recovers the centrality of the regime question—the “choice of political system” (5) or “how shall we govern ourselves” (242)—distinct from many of the usual markers of democratization, such