government by the people only made sense where the people were one, where
there was unity of the will, and where there were no conflicting interests. For good
measure, he added that the people would also have to be subject to the reign of
virtue.131 Given what Blanc termed the ‘condition of a lack of solidarity in which
we live’ this was palpably not the case. It was nonsense to speak of the people as if
they were one person and spoke with one voice. Rather, in these circumstances, the
result would be a ‘babélisme universel’, with 37,000 ‘microscopic assemblies’ each
speaking in the name of their own sovereign and consumed by their own disagree-
ments, each subject to intrigue and uncertainty. In place of the ‘Republic, one and
indivisible’ would be substituted a ‘Republic split into pieces’. Next, Blanc argued
that, given the ‘state of ignorance’ in which France’s 37,000 communes were to be
found, to contemplate direct democracy was to consider handing authority over to
‘prejudice’, ‘the spirit of routine’, ‘darkness’, and ‘confusion’. It was to push a faith
in universal suffrage to the point of absurdity.
Blanc insisted that, despite recent ‘errors’,132 his own faith in the merits of
universal suffrage remained as strong as ever. He did not doubt that the people were
sovereign or that the law should be the expression of their will. As such, the
sovereignty of the people was both ‘sacred’ and ‘inalienable’. He was also ready to
accept the principle, advanced by his opponents, that ‘sovereignty could have no
other representative than itself’. However, he did believe that sovereignty could and
should be delegated. The great error of those who recommended ‘direct legislation’,
Blanc argued (echoing the Abbé Sieyès in the process) was to fail to realize that the
‘making of laws corresponded to a function, which should be judged . . . according
to the division of labour’. Not every citizen could spend all their time in discussion
and some were better placed than others to perform this function. The challenge
was to put in place a system of universal suffrage that would operate according to
‘the true principles of democracy’.
According to Blanc, representation was an important function but ‘the relation-
ship of dependence which existed between the elected member and his electors’ had
to be acknowledged. The representative was a mandataire and if he did not perform
his job properly he should be subject to immediate recall.133 In order to maintain a
concordance of views between an elected member and his constituents, a represen-
tative should be in place for one or two years at most. Blanc also indicated that he
was in favour of a system of proportional representation designed to facilitate
the articulation of minority opinion.134 In other words, it was possible to invent
131 See Louis Blanc, ‘De la vertu considerée comme principe du governement’, in Questions d’aujourd’hui
et de demain.Première série: Politique (1873), 23–43.
132 See Blanc, ‘De la Présidence dans une République’, ibid. 319–45. In this text Blanc explained
why the French peasantry voted for Louis Napoleon.
133 Blanc, ‘Du Mandat impéritif’, ibid. 347–66.
134 Blanc, ‘De la représentation proportionelle des minorités’, ibid. 239–56.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
mechanisms capable of ensuring that the sovereignty of the people was faithfully
represented.
When reflecting upon the form of election to be put in place, Blanc made it clear
that he opposed a two-tier system––on the grounds that it would recreate ‘a truly
aristocratic class’––and also election based upon single-member constituencies. His
preference was for a list system. To accept the single-member constituency model,
he contended, was in effect to side with the forces of monarchism and of counter-
revolution, for the reason that it would be ‘to accept the dominance of small
corrupt towns, to prostitute universal suffrage to purely local interests, to sacrifice
in advance the virtues of talent to the mediocrity of intransigence, of merit to
wealth’.135 He spoke elsewhere of the all-pervasive influence of the clocher, of the
church bell-tower, of narrow-minded religious parochialism. With single-member
constituencies, in other words, sovereignty would be ‘localized’ and it would be
handed over to the enemies of the Republic. It was at this point that Blanc conjured
up the experience of the great Revolution. Would it have been possible to defend
France and the Republic in 1793 from its internal and external enemies if they had
existed as 37,000 ‘scattered parts’, if (here citing Robespierre) they had been
reduced to an arena for ‘quibblers’, their ‘energy’ and ‘genius’ dissipated by the
‘obscure debates’ in ‘local assemblies’? The forces of ‘militant democracy’ embody-
ing ‘the unity of the patrie’, he argued, would have been consumed by their
enemies.136
To that extent, Blanc wrote, ‘I preserve my faith in the traditions of revolution-
ary unity’.137 It was in the name of unity and through unity that France had been
saved. Blanc, therefore, wholeheartedly embraced what he saw as the necessity for
‘political unity’ and, consequently, the benefits of ‘political centralisation’.138 There
was need for a ‘single point’ to give ‘active and strong direction to the general
interests’ of society as a whole and that point could only be located in Paris. His
opponents, he claimed, wished to reduce Paris to something less than a ‘thirty-
thousandth part’ of France and to destroy its ‘intellectual dominance’. It had been
Paris, however, that had stormed the Bastille and Paris that had brought the royal
family back from Versailles as prisoners. For fifty years Paris had been ‘the insomnia
of kings’. ‘If ’, Blanc went on, ‘you break or relax the network of communes which
has Paris as its nub, political unity would disappear and with that the nation.’139
Blanc’s considered view, therefore, was that if Paris should not smother or suffocate
France, then it should at least ‘shine’, it should inspire and lead. This did not mean,
he argued, that he supported dictatorship, because if political centralization was a
necessity then, by the same token, administrative centralization was ‘detestable’.
135 Blanc, ‘Du Suffrage universel’, ibid. 235.
136 See esp. Louis Blanc, Plus de Girondins (1853). Blanc attributed the Terror to exceptional
external circumstances and saw it as a ‘temporary and desperate means of national defence’: see ‘Lettre
sur la terreur’, L’Impossible Terreur (1989), 67–82.
137 Blanc, La République Une et Indivisible (1851), 90.
138 Blanc, L’Etat et la commune (1866).
139 Blanc, La République Une et Indivisible, 88–9.
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
101
The problem was that, if France did not have the former, it certainly had the latter,
and it was this that was the ‘cause of oppression and ruin’.
Thus Blanc found himself defending France’s communes as a valuable form of
associational life and as the building blocks upon wh
ich the ‘edifice’ of the nation
and the State was built. Nevertheless, the force of his argument, sustained over
many years into the 1860s, was that the State was the principal source of national
unity and that it was a force for progress and enlightenment. It was to be through
that centralized state that the liberty of the individual would be given political
expression and would be attained. The fragmentation and decentralization of that
political power––especially when taken as far as an endorsement of the federalism
of the Girondins––would lead to the disintegration of the nation and the triumph
of reaction. Most intriguing of all was the remarkable metamorphosis that Blanc
seemed to believe would occur as the people expressed its indivisible sovereign will.
Through the mechanism of representation and a single parliamentary chamber, the
ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the individual (provincial) citizen was to be
transformed into the unitary, revolutionary will of the patrie. It was a transfigura-
tion no less miraculous than that which occurred when the monarch, in his person,
was taken to embody the sovereign public will of a deeply fractured polity.
Views similar to those held by Louis Blanc continued to be widely articulated by
writers and publicists within the Jacobin tradition and who persisted in believing that
the Second Empire could be analysed and understood by analogy with the events of
the 1790s. The transition to the concerns of political modernity came rather from
those who were prepared to look Napoleon III’s regime squarely in the face and,
perhaps also, to acknowledge that there were important lessons to be learnt.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Jules Barni played a key role in the reformu-
lation of republican understandings of liberty and equality. His views on constitu-
tional matters and the territorial organisation of the State were no less innovatory.
Again, we can make a comparison between the views of Charles Renouvier and
those of Barni. In his text of 1848 Renouvier had been content to make a few
general references to the nature of the Republic and the location of sovereignty.
Barni’s Manuel Républicain, by contrast, gave a detailed presentation of the institu-
tional arrangements appropriate to a republic, systematically drawing upon his
experience of exile in Switzerland. In so doing he fully reflected the impact of the
experience of the Second Empire upon republican thinking.140
According to Barni, universal suffrage was ‘the fundamental feature of any republic
worthy of the name’. Given that, in practice, it was impossible for the people to
‘deliberate’ on all matters of public interest, representatives had to be chosen.
However, in line with earlier republican thinking, Barni contended that these
representatives were to be ‘mandated’ and that these mandates were to be ‘limited,
temporary and revocable’. In this way the people would preserve ‘the sovereignty
which belonged to it and of which it can only divest itself by committing suicide’.
Again, in practice, Barni recognized that this sovereignty translated into ‘the law of
140 Jules Barni, Manuel Républicain (1872), 11–96.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
the majority’, but his memory of the coup d’état of 1851 was such that this was
combined with an insistence that this must not be confused with ‘the despotism of
number’. ‘All absolute power’, he wrote, ‘is a usurpation of the rights of citizens’.
The real innovations in Barni’s argument became evident when he addressed
issues concerned with the institutional structures and geographical location of
power. Breaking with the centralist tradition of republicanism, Barni embraced
municipal liberty. Each commune, he contended, should, as far as possible, govern
itself, like ‘a small republic within a large one’. The same went for intermediary
bodies such as cantons. ‘In general’, he wrote, ‘we should allocate to central
government or to the State only what the communes and the intermediary bodies
either cannot do or cannot do well.’ In this way public life would be more vibrant,
citizens would be more active, and the State would cease to be overburdened. The
traditional republican fear of political disintegration was, however, not entirely
absent from Barni’s mind. Municipal independence was not to be a pretext for ‘the
despotism and pretensions of local powers’ and therefore the State had an obliga-
tion to ensure that ‘this decentralization’ did not compromise the rights of indivi-
duals and the public interest.
Next, Barni openly embraced the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial
power, thereby dismissing republican claims that no limits could be placed upon the
sovereignty of the people as expressed through law. When all three powers were
combined in either one person (Bonapartism) or one assembly (republicanism) the
result was despotism and ‘caesarism’. Of central importance was the independence of
the judiciary, as under the Second Empire the judicial system had become ‘an
instrument of domination and corruption in the hands of the government’.
With regard to legislative power, Barni sought to ensure not only that elections
were held regularly (every two years was his recommendation) but that it was
recognized that the fundamental purpose of legislative activity was to ensure ‘the
liberty of citizens’. The purpose of government, in brief, was not to secure the reign
of virtue. Just as intriguing was Barni’s comment that the State should allow ‘each
member and each group within society to act and to develop with the greatest
amount of independence possible’. In this way would general prosperity be secured.
What of the thorny question of whether parliament should have one or two
chambers? Again, Barni broke with republican tradition by recognizing the merits
of a second chamber––it allowed for greater reflection in the discussion and passing
of laws––even if he ultimately opted for the one-chamber option. This, however,
was on the pragmatic grounds that, in the present circumstances, a two-chamber
arrangement might foster a return of ‘aristocratic pretensions’.
Finally, it was Barni’s reflections upon executive power that most clearly dis-
played the impact of the experience of Second Empire upon his thinking. Executive
power was to be subordinate to, but not absorbed by, the legislative power. Most
importantly, everything had to be done to prevent executive power from becoming
a form of ‘personal government’. The Second Republic’s system of electing a
president via direct universal suffrage was therefore not to be reinstituted. Nor,
indeed, did Barni recommend that the office of president should be continued. His
preference was for a form of ministerial committee or conseil d’état, not elected by
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
103
direct universal suffrage, but chosen by the legislative chamber. To avoid an undue
and debilitating dependence upon the latter the executive power was to be nomi-
nated for the same period of time as the parliamentary chamber. Just as evident was
Barni’s desire to diminish the extravag
ance and excess associated with the executive
offices of the State, to reduce the so-called dignified or symbolic functions of the
State to more modest proportions. If this meant that the Republic would eschew
the systematic dispensation of public honours––he attributed the creation of the
Légion d’honneur to the ‘Machiavellian genius of Bonaparte’––it also meant that it
would have no need of the lavish expenditure associated with the courts of both the
ancien régime and the Bonapartist Empires.
On 4 September 1870 the existence of the Third Republic was proclaimed from
the balcony of the hôtel de ville in Paris. The task of the provisional government was
first to resolve the outcome of the war with Prussia and then to provide France with
yet another new constitution. If the first was attained by the signing of the treaty of
Frankfurt in May 1871 (entailing the secession to Prussia of the eastern provinces
of Alsace and Lorraine), the second turned out to be an unusually long-drawn-out
process. On the eve of the unexpected collapse of the Second Empire republicans
represented at best a small and divided group, and this minority position was
confirmed by the elections that took place on 8 February 1871. Of the 645
deputies, 400 were self-proclaimed supporters of monarchical restoration. During
the next few months, and certainly following the brutal suppression of the Paris
Commune by an unrepentant Adolphe Thiers, opinion began to swing towards the
Republic, but it was by no means clear that the restoration of the monarchy could
be averted.
Fortunately for the republicans, divisions within the competing houses of the
royal family and the obstinacy of the principal pretender to the throne, the Comte
de Chambord,141 provided them with more time, and little by little the constitu-
tional edifice of the Third Republic was put into place. This was neither without its
setbacks nor without its compromises. In May 1873 Thiers was forced to resign as
head of government, to be replaced by the conservative and pro-monarchist
MacMahon, but that same year, on 20 November, a law was passed confirming
that the president of the Republic would be elected for seven years. Two years later,
beginning on 6 January 1875, the Assembly began the discussion of what came to
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