Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  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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  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.

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  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

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  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