be a set of constitutional laws that confirmed and gave form to the existence of the
Third Republic. The first significant step was the passing of the so-called Wallon
amendment which, in specifying the manner in which the president would be
elected, also required that the new regime be republican, bicameral. and parliamen-
tary. Subsequent articles followed in rapid succession, leading to the passing of a
law on the organization of the Senate on 24 February and, the following day, a law
on the organization of legislative and executive power. A further constitutional law,
passed in July 1875, filled out the details of these arrangements.142
141 See Steven Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852–1883 (Baton Rouge,
La., 1992).
142 See Godechot, Les Constitutions, 331–8.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
The constitution of the Third Republic therefore rested upon a President, posses-
sing substantial executive power, who was to be elected by both parliamentary
chambers; a Senate, composed of 225 members elected by indirect suffrage for nine
years and of 75 members who sat for life, possessing legislative power; and, finally,
a Chamber of Deputies, elected by direct (male) universal suffrage, with primary
legislative responsibility. In effect, what was produced was a balanced constitution
with, to quote the classic text of David Thomson, ‘elements of democracy, oligarchy,
and even monarchy’.143 It is also interesting to note that, if the doctrine of the
separation of powers was not accepted in its pure form, it was taken sufficiently
seriously, as Maurice Vile pointed out, to ensure that ‘ministers refrained from
exercising their vote in the Chamber, even when defeat might result from their
abstention’.144 Indeed, it is easy to imagine that Mounier and his fellow monarchiens
would have been happy with such constitutional arrangements! Certainly, this time
the ‘American school’ seemed to have won the day.145
For many republicans, such a level of compromise proved a bitter pill to swallow.
Jules Barni, in one of the many speeches he gave around this time before the Union
républicaine de la Somme, spoke of his fear that what would be created was ‘a
Republic surrounded by monarchical institutions’.146 Louis Blanc, as his Histoire de
la Constitution du 25 fevrier 1875 amply revealed,147 simply could not be recon-
ciled to a situation where the republicans had made all the compromises in order to
‘receive nothing, absolutely nothing’. An important part of Blanc’s denigration of
the new constitution was that these compromises had been made by republicans
who had never gone into exile and by a new generation determined to secure power
at almost any price.
After 1875 the republicans continued to make electoral progress, confirming
their majority status in the elections which followed President MacMahon’s
foolhardy dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies. Not long afterwards they also
took control of the Senate. In 1879 MacMahon was replaced by one of the
republican heroes of 1848: Jules Grévy. La Marseillaise became the national
anthem; 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, became a national
holiday, and parliament, following the revision of Article 9 of the constitution,
returned from Versailles to Paris.
Did this mean that further constitutional revisions were needed in order to remove
the offensive vestiges of monarchical and aristocratic power? On this the republicans
proved to be divided, but the moderates carried the day, with the result that the only
significant revision was ratified in 1884, when it was affirmed that the republican
form of government itself could not be subject to revision, that members of the
Bourbon, Orleanist, and Bonapartist families were ineligible for the office of presi-
dent, and that there were no longer to be members of the Senate who sat for life.
143 David Thomson, Democracy in France since 1870 (Oxford, 1980), 102.
144 M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967), 243.
145 See Rudelle, ‘La France et l’expérience constitutionnelle américaine’, 44–51.
146 Discours de MM Jules Barni et Eugène Delattre (Amiens, 1872), 10.
147 (1882).
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
105
The arguments against further revision were most forcefully articulated by one of
the great political presences of the period, Jules Ferry.148 This is how Ferry
characterized his republican opponents on the left. They are, he proclaimed, ‘the
passionate and resolute opponents of the system of two chambers and the Presi-
dency of the Republic; they are unitarians, believers in simplicity. They dream of a
single chamber, without counterbalances, without rules, doing whatever it wants to
do in the world.’149 For them, the Republic stood for ‘perpetual agitation, incessant
change’. It was ‘the Revolution on the march . . . the headlong rush towards the
unknown, towards the absolute’.150 For Ferry, by contrast, the miracle was that a
new constitution, ‘made by monarchists against the republicans’, had ‘saved the
Republic’. The task ahead, the task of ‘a less idealist, less dreamy generation’,
therefore, was ‘to administer, to govern, to strengthen the Republic’ and this was
best done, in his view, through ‘good sense, work and a love of progress’. This
meant that the republicans should focus not upon vague, unrealizable schemes but
upon the important practical questions that concerned ‘the intellectual, moral and
material elevation of the most numerous and poorest classes’ of French society.151
What mattered was ‘the stability of the Republic’. Moreover, this could, and
should, be attained without the distractions which would arise from the needless
revision of the constitution. It was a nonsense, Ferry countered, to claim that
the constitution was monarchical because the president had the right to dissolve
parliament and because there existed two parliamentary chambers. History showed
that those republics possessing two chambers had been the only ones that had
endured. As for the right of dissolution, it was no more monarchical than the
president himself was a monarch: it was ‘the means of resolving insoluble conflicts,
which in the United States could persist indefinitely without causing a problem,
but which here could not exist without paralysing national life’. To take away the
right of dissolution from the president, he concluded, would be ‘to relegate him to
the rank of a nominal and decorative institution’.152
Of course, it was precisely this that occurred in practice. The tradition quickly
developed of only electing a president who would not be inclined to use his powers
and who was content to be a figurehead. Moreover, the Senate, despite that the fact
that in later years it was able to block important legislation relating to the
introduction of income tax and the female suffrage, came to play a largely subordi-
nate and quiescent role. By default, therefore, the balanced constitution gave way to
government by assembly and, in this way, the republican ideal prevailed.
148 See Jules Ferry
, La République des citoyens, 2 vols (1996); François Furet (ed.), Jules Ferry,
fondateur de la République (1985); and Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (1989). Elected as a republican
deputy in 1869 Ferry was an unequivocal opponent of what in his electoral address he termed ‘the
fantasies of personal government’. He subsequently played a key role in the establishment of the Third
Republic, serving as Minister of Education (1879–83) and twice as Prime Minister (1880–1, 1883–5).
149 Ferry, La République des citoyens, ii. 145.
150 Ibid. 376.
151 Ibid. 183.
152 ‘Extrait du discours préparé pour le 14 fevrier 1889’, in Furet, Jules Ferry, 144.
106
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
What this meant was made vividly clear in the decades that were to follow.
The passion, not to say nostalgia, for unity and unanimity remained an abiding
obsession amongst republicans––so much so that political parties were viewed as
sources of division. Like the parlements of the ancien régime and the factions of
the Revolution, they were seen as intermediary powers bent upon subverting the
general will. Thus, throughout the Third Republic and into the Fourth Republic
the majority of parliamentary deputies remained without party affiliation. Parlia-
mentary majorities, therefore, were not constructed through the ballot box but in
the parliamentary chamber itself. Moreover, in the absence of party programmes,
the emphasis within the chamber fell upon discussion and participation. Good laws
were to be the result of long deliberation, with the individual deputy esteemed
above all for his eloquence and powers of argumentation. As Nicolas Rousselier
observes, ‘for a long time the parliamentary republic rested upon the ideal of
“Athenian” democracy, submitting as many laws as possible to the deliberation of
the “magistrates” of the people, each free to vote as his conscience dictated’.153
What happened as a consequence was that France became a prey to a weak
executive and the regular fall of governments. The Chamber of Deputies, dominated
by the individual deputy and lacking any sense of party discipline, was famously
likened to a mirror in which France would not recognize herself. Unsurprisingly, it
was not to be long before calls for stronger and more effective government were
heard. In the late 1880s, these were to focus upon the mercurial figure of General
Boulanger, in later years––and especially in the inter-war period––they were to be
phrased in terms of the need to respond to pressing social and economic problems.154
Arguably these issues were only resolved with the establishment by General de Gaulle
of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
However, we might have been misled by this conventional picture. As we have
seen, the monarchs of the ancien régime saw themselves as the physical embodiment
of sovereign power. This claim was sustained not only by the ideology of divine
right and the invocation of the fundamental laws of the realm but also by a public
ritual of astonishing sophistication. At the palace of Versailles a ceremonial form
was played out which embraced all aspects of the monarch’s life. Protocol and
etiquette determined all. Portraits, medallions, and other artistic artefacts deliber-
ately fostered and enhanced the monarch’s public image. Miraculous powers of
healing were attributed to the royal touch.155 As Jennifer Jones has written, ‘French
absolutism was a theatre-state in which Versailles was the stage and Louis the
playwright and principal player.’156
153 ‘Deux formes de représentation politique: le citoyen et l’individu’, in Marc Sadoun (ed.), La
Démocratie en France (2000), i. 263–4.
154 See also Rousseillier, Le Parlement de l’Éloquence: La Souveraineté de la délibération au lendemain
de la Grande Guerre (2000) and ‘Le Système politique: Représentation et délibération’, in Serge
Berstein and Michel Winock (eds.), L’Invention de la démocratie (2003), 355–79.
155 See Gérard Sabatier, Versailles, ou le figure du roi (1999).
156 Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime
France (Oxford and New York, 2004), 9.
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
107
In the Third Republic there was no shortage of reflection upon the powers of the
president.157 But there was broad agreement that the president was not the locus of
power, only its representative. The people, after all, were sovereign. This was why,
to many, the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894 seemed such a pointless
act. It was to destroy only the person and not the republican regime itself. And yet
the presidents themselves, cast in their modest role, were not immune from
replicating the ceremonial practices that had graced the courts of the ancien régime.
As Christophe Prochasson has shown,158 the presidency of Félix Faure (1895–9)
was marked by a self-conscious element of ritual. The president’s good health,
robust physique, and clothing were a matter of public display. His passion and
prowess as a hunter (in the royal forests) was proof of his physical courage. His
presidential visits were choreographed in meticulous detail to secure maximum
effect, his arrival greeted with cheers of both ‘Vive la République’ and ‘Vive Félix
Faure’. No voyage was complete without a gesture to the poor or the sick (with
doctors testifying to the beneficial effects upon their patients). The members of
Faure’s family were an integral part of the presidential entourage and themselves
became objects of veneration.
There were many republicans who felt deeply uneasy about this theatricalization
and personalization of presidential power, preferring the holders of the presidential
office to be content with providing a modest example of hard work and sobriety.
The fact remains, however, that the Republic, like the Bourbon monarchy before it,
was not immune from the temptation of giving physical representation and
symbolic expression to an indivisible sovereignty as a means of overcoming the
tensions of a divided polity.
157 See e.g. Joseph Barthélemy, Le Rôle du pouvoir exécutif dans les Républiques modernes (1906) and
Henri Leyrat, Le Président de la République, son rôle, ses droits, ses devoirs (1913).
158 Christophe Prochasson, ‘Le Corps de Félix: Corps et records du président Félix Faure’, in
Jacques Julliard (ed.), La Mort du roi: Essai d’éthnologie politique comparée (1999), 197–230. See also
Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford, 2000).
3
Sovereignty, the Social Contract, and Luxury
I
If political thought in nineteenth-century France was preoccupied with questions
about rights and the constitution, so too it was haunted by the excesses and disorder
of the Revolution. In this Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupied centre stage.1 Whether
loved or loathed, Rousseau came to be seen not just as the theorist of the social
contract but also as the prophet of popular sovereignty, and therefore as the patron of
a modern state that had swept away all before it. As Alexis de Tocqueville commen-
ted, Rousseau ‘became and he
was to remain the sole teacher of the Revolution in its
youth’.2
To show how this was the case and what it meant for the development of political
thought in France the central part of this chapter will seek to examine three strands
of political opinion, each of which in its day exercised considerable influence and
(in two cases) power: that associated with Catholic Reaction and the post-Napoleonic
Restoration (Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and the young Félicité de Lamen-
nais); the liberalism of Benjamin Constant and the writer-politician François Guizot;
and, thirdly, the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. For all their ideological
differences each shared a horror of what they saw as the Rousseau-inspired radical
political and social change of Robespierre’s Jacobin dictatorship. First, however, the
chapter will address the context and content of Rousseau’s theory of social contract,
assessing the significance of his ideas and the innovations they entailed. It will then
briefly allude to the long-standing debate about the influence of Rousseau upon the
Revolution of 1789.
It would be wrong to overstate Rousseau’s originality. Long before him
those not prepared to accept that sovereignty had its origin in either paternal
power or divine right had been ready to concede that its source was to be found
in the people. What marked Rousseau out from his predecessors was that they,
unlike him, saw sovereignty as being only the people’s temporary possession,
as something that was to be handed over to the appropriate authority as soon as
possible, only rarely (and in some cases never) to be reclaimed. Pufendorf, for
example, even went so far as to define the handing over of the right to govern by a
1 See Jean Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution, 1795–1830 (1972).
2 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 2001), ii. 57.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
109
defeated people as a meaningful form of consent. Not only was Rousseau
unwilling to grant that sovereignty could be given away either under duress or
by tacit agreement but he even opposed its voluntary and unforced transfer.
Sovereignty was not like a piece of property that could be freely disposed of: it
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