 Dictatorial power in its original, Roman form is a formally delegated and time-limited power to defend an already existing republican constitution through the use of extra-legal force (D xlii–xliv, 1–19). A Roman dictator, then, was clearly not a sovereign in Schmitt’s sense of the term. In the course of modern constitutional history, however, the institution of dictatorship, Schmitt claims, fused with sovereignty, and this fusion related sovereignty to democracy. The first step towards this fusion, in Schmitt’s account, was the use of commissarial dictatorship in the early modern absolutist state. The absolutist sovereign did possess the sovereign power to decide on the exception, and was thus capable of authorizing commissars to use dictatorial methods in his name. But the notions of dictatorship and sovereignty were not yet fused. The commissarial dictators of the absolutist sovereign were mere agents of the sovereign and did not themselves possess the power to decide on the exception. The absolutist sovereign, in turn, though he had the power to decide on the exception, was not himself a dictator; first of all since he did not decide under someone else’s but by his own authority, and secondly because he was of course expected to rely on legal governance as his normal mode of operation (D 20–33). But the relation between sovereignty and dictatorship changed in the French revolution. The revolutionary governments relied heavily on dictatorial action to create a new situation of normality that would allow a new constitution to come into force. The revolutionary governments, like the absolutist sovereign, claimed the power to decide on the exception, but they did not claim to be sovereign. Rather, they claimed to exercise the authority to decide on the exception in the name of the French people, even while they were ruling the French people by the use of dictatorial methods (D 132–47). Sovereignty and dictatorship had become fused in the novel institution of sovereign dictatorship: A sovereign dictator is a dictator who does not defend an already existing constitution but attempts to create a new one and who does so not by his own authority but in the name of the people (D 112–31).