Short answers, pulled from the story.
Republicanism is a political ideology that promotes government in which sovereignty resides in the people and their elected representatives, as opposed to hereditary monarchy or personal absolute power. Its core principles include civic virtue, active political participation, mixed and balanced government, the rule of law, and freedom understood as non-domination rather than merely absence of restraint.
The word republic derives from the Latin noun-phrase res publica, meaning "public thing." It referred to the system of government that arose in Rome after Lucius Junius Brutus and Collatinus expelled the kings in the 6th century BCE.
The Corsican Republic, led by Pasquale Paoli, lasted from 1755 to 1769 and is considered the first Enlightenment republic established in Europe. It introduced universal male suffrage and is thought to be the first constitution in the world to grant women the right to vote. Its influence was significant among French Enlightenment philosophers and the American revolutionaries, with the Sons of Liberty naming Paoli a direct inspiration for their struggle against Britain.
John Milton advanced republicanism through political tracts and through his poetry. In Paradise Lost, he used Satan's fall to suggest that unfit monarchs could be brought to justice, and he offered a language for critiquing imperialism and forging political bonds across national lines. Scholars including Christopher N. Warren have traced Milton's international republicanism as an influence on 19th-century thinkers including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Giuseppe Mazzini founded the Young Italy movement in July 1831 in Marseille with the aim of transforming Italy into a unitary democratic republic. He formulated the concept of "thought and action," insisting that every idea must be followed by practical effort. His influence extended to figures including Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Mahatma Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Neorepublicanism is a contemporary scholarly movement that draws on the classical republican tradition to develop a public philosophy for the present. Philip Pettit and Cass Sunstein are its most prominent theorists. A central distinction neorepublicanism makes is that freedom means non-domination, not merely the absence of active interference, which has implications for economic regulation, labor rights, and private power.