Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  political model for contemporary France (damning what were described as the

  ‘sophisms of the uncritical admirers of the Greeks and the Romans’) but also

  35 See Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs: La souverainété, le peuple et la représentation

  1789–1799 (1995).

  36 Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (1982), 66.

  37 See Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyès et l’invention de la constitution de France (1998), 53–72.

  38 See Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994), 252–305.

  39 See J. K. Wright, ‘National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the

  Declaration of Rights’, in Dale Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the

  Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 199–233.

  40 See esp. Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Considérations sur les Gouvernements et principalement sur celui

  qui convient à la France’, Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 407–22; speech by the Comte de Lally-

  Tollendal, ibid. 514–22; Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Principes du gouvernement Français’, ibid. 523–7.

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  Absolutism, Representation, Constitution

  showed themselves as possessing a perceptive appraisal of the dangers of arbitrary

  government, be it in the form of the despotism either of a single individual or

  of the ‘multitude’. In so doing, they advocated the claims of representative,

  as opposed to direct, democracy, believing the latter to be entirely inappropriate

  to a modern state. If, in the circumstances, they were prepared to accept that

  sovereignty resided in the nation––politically, there was no alternative––they

  strongly contended that its exercise could only be secured by non-mandated

  representatives sitting in two chambers so constructed as to represent the diverse

  interests of the whole country and to secure sound and responsible legislation.

  ‘To be the source of sovereignty and to exercise sovereignty’, Mounier commented,

  ‘are very different things.’41 Similarly, the monarchiens also recommended the

  separation of executive and legislative power. As Mounier further explained: ‘In

  order to avoid tyranny, it is absolutely indispensable to ensure that the power to

  make laws is not in the hands of those who implement them.’42 In short, the

  preservation of individual liberty demanded the division of sovereignty and this

  could best be achieved in a system of representative and constitutional government.

  Seeking to build upon experience, rather than philosophical principle, the constant

  point of reference was the English constitution. The institutions of government had

  to take into account ‘the weakness and the passions of men’.43

  By early September 1789 the monarchiens had been swept aside, defeated

  decisively in the vote for a second chamber by 490 votes to 89. Why did they

  lose? Two reasons can be highlighted. The first is that to call for two parliamentary

  chambers and to endorse the English model was taken to be either implicit or

  explicit support for aristocratic power and privilege and very few people in the

  summer of 1789, never mind later, were prepared to stand up for the aristocracy.

  The opponents of Mounier and his friends persistently lampooned the supposed

  merits of England’s constitution, frequently citing Rousseau’s quip that the English

  were only free once in every five years when they voted in elections and that the use

  of their freedom showed that they did not merit it.44 The brochure published by

  Charles-Philippe-Toussaint Guiraudet in 1789, Qu’est-ce que la nation et qu’est-ce

  que la France?, accurately captures these sentiments. To introduce such a system

  into France would be to institute the ‘most terrible of governments: hereditary

  aristocracy’ and to rekindle the ‘ashes of feudalism’. The role of the people was to

  destroy ‘these gothic and absurd divisions’.45

  The second reason is more complex and relates to the Rousseauian rhetoric

  permeating so many of the speeches made before the National Assembly. The

  41 See esp. Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Considérations sur les Gouvernements et principalement sur

  celui qui convient à la France’, Archives Parlementaires, 560.

  42 Ibid. 409.

  43 Ibid. 412. ‘In matters of government’, Mounier wrote, ‘many philosophers have followed the

  example of Plato by creating republics which could only ever exist in their books.’

  44 See Mounier, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 563. For an example of the use of the

  Rousseauian critique of England see the remarks of Pétion, ibid. 533.

  45 Charles-Philippe-Tousssaint Guiraudet, Qu’est-ce que la nation et qu’est-ce que la France? (1991),

  35–45.

  Absolutism, Representation, Constitution

  77

  constitutional debates of the summer of 1789 abound with references to the general

  will and all too frequently it was asserted that the general will could not err. There

  was no broad agreement about who embodied or who could express that general

  will, but among the opponents of the two-chamber model there was the firm

  conviction that, through the Revolution, the nation had been reborn. A revolution

  had taken place in the ‘hearts’ of the people, Jean-Baptiste Salle declared, to the

  extent that ‘the French today are everything that they could be’.46 Shorn of

  privilege and of the prejudices of the past, as Rabaud de Saint-Étienne remarked,

  France had no need of a system which would be able to accommodate diverse and

  conflicting interests. Jacques-Guillaume Thouret made a similar point when he

  remarked that ‘a second chamber is being proposed as a way of achieving equilibri-

  um, but since all the orders are merged together there are no more diverse interests

  to protect’.47 Again Sieyès had pointed the way. Purged of ‘two hundred thousand

  heads’ (a somewhat unfortunate reference to the aristocracy and the clergy in view

  of what was to come) what, he asked, had the nation to fear from itself? It ‘alone

  could express its own will’.48 Thus reconfigured as the nation, the people were

  deemed to possess a unitary will. Rabaut Saint-Étienne set out the institutional

  logic which applied to such a situation. Given that the power to govern belonged to

  the nation in its entirety, ‘[t]he sovereign is a single, simple thing, since it is made

  up of the collective whole without exception; therefore legislative power is single

  and simple; and if the sovereign cannot be divided, nor can legislative power, for

  there are no more two, three or four legislative powers as there are two, three, or

  four sovereigns’.49

  Not everyone agreed. The monarchiens in particular did not accept this rosy

  picture of a nation reborn, frequently reminding their fellow deputies of what an

  uneducated populace had done to Socrates. Nor was there agreement about the

  precise location of the general will that could not err. As one deputy had the

  temerity to put it: ‘Everyone says that the law is the expression of the general will

  but everyone adapts the meaning of this to fit his own system. Some understand

  this will to be made manifest through the deputies . . . others believe that to this

  we should add the will of the monarch. . . . still others want a Senate.’ Casting

&nbs
p; Rousseau to the wind, he himself concluded that ‘the general will is that of the

  majority of French citizens’.50

  Of one thing we should be clear: among the deputies assembled in Versailles

  during the summer of 1789 there was wide agreement that a republican form of

  government was only appropriate to small states and that as France quite definitely

  46 Salle, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 530.

  47 Thouret, ibid. 580. Thouret was later to be executed by the Jacobins.

  48 Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?, 81, 61. Rhetorically at least, Sieyès went so far as to embrace

  the argument that the aristocracy were not a natural part of the French nation, inviting them to return

  to the forests of Germany from whence they apparently came.

  49 Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 569. For a contemporary

  analysis of why the argument for a single chamber was destined to fail see Antoine Barnave, De la

  Révolution et de la constitution (Grenoble, 1988), 116–22.

  50 Jean-Baptiste Crénier, Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 550.

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  Absolutism, Representation, Constitution

  did not fall into this category some form of reformed monarchy was most to be

  desired. As Mounier explained: ‘In drawing up the constitution of France, we need

  very much to take into account the large population of the kingdom. An association

  which is so numerous is so far distant from nature that we must not imagine that it

  can be governed by simple means, such as those which might be adequate for a

  town or a small province.’ A monarchy, he further specified, was appropriate for all

  peoples whose population exceeded ‘two to three hundred thousand men’.51

  Various arguments were adduced to support this view––not least the need for a

  strong executive power in a large state––but prominent among these was the

  recognition that it was only in small states that all the citizens could be assembled

  together. In such societies the general will could easily be known––as even the Duc

  de la Rochefoucauld acknowledged52––but in a large state no such simple mecha-

  nism was available.

  It was this argument that provided the context in which the deputies discussed

  the second of the key constitutional issues they faced: the necessity or otherwise

  of the royal veto. Again, the monarchiens were the first to present their case. This

  was the way that Pierre-Victor Malouet defended the right of the king to possess

  an absolute veto on all legislation. ‘It is true’, he began, ‘that sovereignty resides

  in the nation.’ However, he continued, ‘it is both useful and necessary for the

  repose and happiness of a large nation that there exists in its midst a pre-eminent

  authority, whose functions, whose powers, are so constituted that the person who

  possesses it has none of the cares and ambitions which drive other men and where

  the increase in his own fortune coincides with that of the general happiness.’ Such

  was the origin of royal authority, as the nation had passed over to the monarch ‘an

  element of its sovereignty which it could not exercise itself ’. This position of lofty

  detachment and personal disinterestedness contrasted markedly with that of the

  nation’s freely elected representatives: their will and ambition could contradict ‘the

  general will and interest’. From this, it followed that ‘the royal veto is a right and a

  national prerogative conferred upon the head of the nation in order that he may

  confirm and guarantee whether a decision taken by the representatives is or is not

  the expression of the general will’.53 Three points can be highlighted here. The first

  is that the fear of popular disturbance and the ‘will of the majority’ was such that

  the monarchiens had no desire to see measures vetoed by the monarch returned to

  the people for discussion, hence the veto was to be absolute rather than suspensive.

  Next, we can note that the monarchiens persisted in the pre-1789 belief that the

  monarch, as sovereign, transcended the partiality and particularity of individual or

  corporate interests. Thirdly, they expressed a widely held apprehension about and

  distrust of the logic of representation in the form of a popular assembly.

  Their opponents rejected the first two, although not the third, of these points.

  The people, they countered, were no longer ignorant and were becoming increas-

  ingly enlightened. Second, the monarch, as the Calvinist Rabaut Saint-Étienne

  made clear, should not be mistaken for the ‘permanent representative of the nation’

  51 Mounier, ibid. 412.

  52 Ibid. 548.

  53 Ibid. 535–7.

  Absolutism, Representation, Constitution

  79

  if only because the two words ‘permanent’ and ‘representative’ should never be

  conjoined and because no function was less open to hereditary possession than

  representation. The king, he announced, ‘could not be at one and the same time

  representative, head, legislator and executive’.54 Moreover, to the extent that the

  monarch acted according to his own particular will he, if not the general will, could

  err. Nor, crucially, was the monarch alone in this, for, as the critics of the absolute

  veto themselves recognized, if the general will could not err, then the will of the

  representatives of the nation could most certainly be in error. This was clearly stated

  before the Assembly by both the Abbé Grégoire and Rabaut Saint-Étienne.55 It

  was for this reason that, displaying their Rousseauian distrust of representation to

  the full, they both called not for an absolute but for a suspensive veto. In this

  way, disputed legislation could be passed back to the people in order that they, the

  possessors of sovereign power, could reaffirm the general will in the face of a corrupted

  or misguided representative assembly. As Jean-Baptiste Salle remarked: ‘A man can

  be mad, but not a great nation: a great nation which reflects upon its interests,

  which decides for itself, could not will its own ill.’56 It was these arguments which

  carried the day, with the result that the king was granted the right to suspend the

  introduction of legislation for up to six years.

  How might we make sense of this seemingly paradoxical conclusion? Patrice

  Gueniffey, at the beginning of his detailed study of elections and electoral systems

  during the revolutionary period,57 not only makes the point that the problem of

  representation was central to the Revolution but that the dream of the Revolution

  was to create a perfect symmetry between ‘the will and the interests of the citizens’.

  This was to be done by introducing a system which would eschew all mediation

  between the individual elector and the sovereign, thereby assuming that those

  electors were able to give ‘collective expression’ to their will. The Revolution, he

  comments, ‘was made against a power that was radically distinct from society,

  against the division of interests which opposed orders, communities and indivi-

  duals’.58 This categorical rejection of mediation and of the representation of private

  interest denoted ‘a pre-democratic conception of democracy’ and one that was to

  become ‘the unpassable horizon of revolutionary political culture’.59 For the time
<
br />   being, at least, the suspensive veto of the monarch seemed compatible with the

  expression of the general will of the nation.

  These arguments also indicated that representatives were subject to a strong

  element of suspicion and so much so that, from the very outset of the Revolution,

  demands were made that they should be subject to surveillance and sanction.60

  To take but one example, Jean-Baptiste Salle, in recognizing that ‘the first duty of a

  free people is to entrust its liberty to no one’, called for the frequent renewal of

  representatives, constant public scrutiny and publicity of their actions, and the

  54 Ibid. 569.

  55 Ibid 567, 571.

  56 Ibid. 530.

  57 Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la Raison: La Révolution française et les élections (1993).

  58 Ibid. 24.

  59 Ibid. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en

  France (1998).

  60 See Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur (2000), 81–6.

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  Absolutism, Representation, Constitution

  right of the people to make ‘the most vigorous and imperative protests’.61 It was at

  this point that the next stage of the argument came into play, in the shape of the

  Abbé Sieyès’s powerful discourse on the royal veto, delivered before the Assembly

  on 7 September.62

  Sieyès argued against the royal veto on a number of grounds, not least because no

  one’s vote could count twice. More profoundly, he believed that the veto, whether

  absolute or suspensive, was a form of arbitrary power. ‘I can only see it’, he announced,

  ‘as a lettre de cachet63 launched against the national will, against the entire nation’. It

  was, however, what followed that was the most interesting and innovative part of his

  speech. ‘I know’, Sieyès remarked, ‘that we have come to consider the voice of the

  nation as if it were something other than the voice of the representatives of the nation,

  as if the nation could speak otherwise than through its representatives.’ This was both

  false and dangerous because it ran the risk of splitting and dividing France up into

  ‘an infinite number of small democracies, held together only by the ties of a general

  confederation’. France, Sieyès replied, was not a collection of states but ‘a unitary