Revolution and the Republic
Page 38
131 Ibid. 175. See Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé: Ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (1997),
119–69.
132 Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe, 2 vols. (1851).
133 Ibid. ii. 227.
176
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
independence and intellectual development which enables a man freely and reason-
ably to accomplish the political act he is required to perform’.134 Consequently,
Guizot argued, the medieval English electoral system ‘summoned every capable
citizen’ and among those deemed to be eligible ‘no inequality was established’.
By what external signs could the capacity to participate in elections be ascer-
tained? Guizot’s key point was that this question could not and should not be
answered in a definitive fashion, as the indicators of electoral capacity were neither
fixed nor permanent. Again, this observation was illustrated by reference to the
English example. It was very probable, Guizot contended, that in fourteenth-
century England ‘all political capacity was almost entirely contained in the classes’
accorded the vote. Since then, however, ‘the changes which have occurred in the
condition of property and industry’ had been such as to reduce the ‘exactness’
between capacity and eligibility. ‘The law’, Guizot explained to his audience, ‘in
its description of the external characteristics of electoral capacity, no longer corre-
sponds really and truly with social facts’, and thus ‘a principle, equitable at first, has
ceased to be so’. This was the case because the category of freeholder was no longer
sufficient to embrace all those ‘capable of exercising political rights’.
These reflections upon the pre-1832 English electoral system allowed Guizot to
reach three important conclusions. The principle that attached electoral rights to
capacity was ‘universal in its nature’. Next, the conditions of electoral capacity are
‘essentially variable’ and would differ according to time, place, the internal situation
of society, and the level of ‘public intelligence’. Finally, the laws defining electoral
eligibility should never be ‘utterly immutable’ and should respond to ‘new capa-
cities’ as they formed and declared themselves in society.135
The next stage in Guizot’s account concerned the proceedings and form of
election. Returning to his major theme, he asserted that ‘the object of election is
evidently to obtain the most capable and the best accredited men in the country’.136
Electors needed to choose wisely. However, according to Guizot, elections were
‘sudden acts’ that left ‘little room for deliberation’ and that were ‘open to the passions
of the moment’. To rectify this potential problem, Guizot’s recommendations were
two-fold. First, the unit of election should be comprised of those who had ‘long been
united by common interests’ and who were ‘accustomed to conduct their affairs
amongst themselves’. Political rights, to that extent, needed to be connected to local
rights. Second, the election itself should take place in the ‘habitual sphere’ where
the electors passed their lives. In other words, electoral boundaries should be drawn
in such a way as to allow ‘respect for natural influences and relations’. Generally
speaking, Guizot concluded, the English system of division into counties had
‘attained this two-fold objective’.
What was required of the electors once they had been assembled? Without going
into the precise details, Guizot argued that elections should be based upon a direct,
rather than an indirect, suffrage and that there should be public voting. He also
believed that the electors should avoid what he termed ‘the despotism of party
134 Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe, 2 vols. (1851), 228.
135 Ibid. 234–7.
136 Ibid. 241.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
177
spirit’.137 Every election was the result of influences but the ‘soundness of election’
depended upon the elector being subject to a variety of conflicting influences.
Through informed deliberation and debate, election would ‘bring publicly into
proximity and contact the chief interests and various opinions which divide socie-
ty’, in the knowledge that this would produce outcomes ‘most suitable for the
country in general’. The end result of this process of ‘rational and sincere’ election,
therefore, was ‘the triumph of the true majority’, ‘the minority being constantly
listened to with respect’. ‘To summarize’, Guizot concluded,
one discovers in the electoral system of fourteenth-century England nearly all the
fundamental principles of a free and reasonable electoral system: the bestowal of
electoral rights based upon capacity, the close connection of electoral rights with
other rights, regard to natural influences and relations, the absence of all arbitrary
and factitious combinations in the formation and proceedings of electoral assemblies,
prudent limitation in the number to be chosen by each assembly, direct election, and
open voting.
Guizot did recognize however that this system, ‘at least in part’, had been corrupted
over time and now required ‘correction’.138
The final element of Guizot’s account concerned the division of legislative power
into two chambers. In medieval England, he argued, this separation had been a
reflection of the immense inequality of power and wealth existing in society.
Gradually the House of Lords had converted itself into ‘a national institution’
willing to address and defend the ‘interests of all’.139 A ‘personal power’ had been
transformed into ‘public power’, allowing it to transcend narrow self-interest. Upon
this evidence, Guizot defended the mechanism of two chambers on the grounds
that it prevented the descent into ‘absolute’ and ‘tyrannical’ power. From this there
followed a version of the separation of powers argument. The ‘principle of repre-
sentative government’, Guizot stated, was ‘the destruction of all absolute power on
earth’. This was achieved by allowing individual citizens to criticize government, by
allowing for the independent existence of such secondary powers as municipal and
judicial authorities, and, most importantly, by ‘organizing the central power itself
in such a way as to make it very difficult for it to usurp rightful omnipotence’.140
It was in the very nature of a power that had no equal that it would ‘soon become
absolute’. The ‘secret of liberty’ was to ensure that this was never the case.
It was only the final remarks of the last of Guizot’s lectures that revealed the
wider significance of these conclusions. From the latter half of the fifteenth century,
Guizot argued, the intimate and continuous relations that had existed between
royal power, the aristocracy, and Commons in England began to break down. As a
consequence, government fell into the hands of a ‘high aristocracy, who were
divided and distracted by their intestine quarrels’. England quickly descended
into a state of violence and disorder, and neither aristocracy nor Commons
remained inclined to struggle against royal authority. Out of this
arose the despotic
power of Henry VIII and, later, Elizabeth I. ‘More than a century’, Guizot argued,
137 Ibid. 248.
138 Ibid. 264.
139 Ibid. 298–9.
140 Ibid. 307–8.
178
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
‘was necessary to enable the English Commons––invigorated and strengthened
from a material point of view by long years of order and prosperity and from a
moral point of view by the reformation of religion––to acquire sufficient social
importance and intellectual elevation to place themselves in turn at the head of the
resistance against despotism, and to draw the ancient aristocracy in their train.’141
It was only after fifty years of political revolution and conflict that representative
government was finally established in England. The lesson for France could not
have been clearer.142
The 1820s appeared to show that this was a lesson that could not be easily learnt.
Charles X in particular revealed himself to be singularly unwilling to contemplate any
compromise with the ‘new France’ invoked by Guizot. In May 1830 the monarch
dissolved the parliamentary chamber and, when the results of the subsequent elec-
tions were not to his liking, he tried to repeat the manuvre. By royal ordinance
Charles X suspended freedom of the press and changed the electoral system. Two
days later, on 27 July, protests and popular disturbances began, and within three days
Charles X was reduced to humiliating abdication and exile. This is how one of the
central actors in the drama, Adolphe Thiers, described the spirit and demands of the
protests that brought about the end of the Bourbon monarchy. France, he argued,
wanted, ‘a representative monarchy, a king, two chambers; a majority whose wishes
were respected; and in order for this to be the case: a new dynasty’.143 The Trois
Glorieuses, as the three days of popular insurrection overthrowing the Bourbon
monarchy became known, had therefore neither changed French society nor changed
‘the eternal laws of politics’: they had simply realized the promise of the monarchy of
1814 by instituting a regime that was ‘liberal and popular’. On this view––a view
shared by Guizot144––the Revolution of 1789 had been brought to a close. 1830 was
the French 1688.
The revisions introduced to the Charte by Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy can be
quickly summarized.145 The preamble to the original charter, which had insisted that
the monarch was the sole source of sovereignty, was scrapped. The king, although
head of state, could neither ‘suspend the laws or prevent their execution’. Roman
Catholicism ceased to be the religion of the State. Article 7 reaffirmed freedom of the
press, and added that censorship could not be re-established. Greater restriction
was placed upon the use of royal ordinances. The right of legislative initiative was
to be shared by the monarch and the two parliamentary chambers. Most significant
were the changes relating to the Chamber of Deputies. The parliamentary mandate
was reduced from seven to five years. The age of eligibility for election to the chamber
was reduced from 40 to 30, and for electors from 30 to 25. The tricolour flag was
to replace the white flag of the House of Bourbon as the national emblem. A year
later, it was decreed that membership of the Chambers of Peers would no longer be
141 Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe, 2 vols. (1851), 429–31.
142 Guizot pursued the same line of argument in his Essais sur l’histoire de France (1823).
143 Adolphe Thiers, La Monarchie de 1830 (1830), 13.
144 See Guizot, Mémoires (1859), ii. 1–34.
145 See Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions 1814–1848 (London, 2007).
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
179
upon a hereditary basis. Taken together, these reforms amounted to a small but
significant shift of power away from the aristocracy towards the emerging class of
bourgeois notables around whom Guizot hoped to build the durability and security of
the new regime.
Despite Guizot’s statements to the contrary,146 this aspiration turned out to be
something of a colossal failure. What was meant to be a new France based upon
the moderate principles of juste milieu finished up looking like a corrupt and
conservative system operating in the interests of the upper bourgeoisie alone. If
the primary preoccupation of the regime appeared to be that of preserving order,
Guizot himself unfairly (and inaccurately) became known for one piece of advice he
gave to his fellow citizens: ‘Get Rich’. In point of fact, Guizot was just as concerned
to see the moral elevation of the French population as he was to see their material
advancement. It was this concern that had informed the comprehensive educational
reforms he introduced between 1832 and 1837. The law of 1833 implemented
universal primary education, thereby doubling the number of pupils to almost
2.5 million. These, and other similar, reforms had the pragmatic purpose of seeking
to create and strengthen national unity in post-revolutionary France. However,
as Pierre Rosanvallon has noted,147 Guizot’s principal weakness derived from an
inability to attribute popular protest and dissatisfaction to anything other than ‘the
simple manifestation of moral disorder’. Thus, when the economy started to run
into serious trouble in 1847 and opposition began to mount, he showed himself
to be incapable of responding to a situation that defied his understanding. In
particular, he consistently opposed the demand to extend the franchise beyond its
260,000 electors. As that campaign mounted. with a series of what became illegal
‘banquets’, Guizot’s unpopularity increased. On 23 February 1848 the king
removed him from his position as the head of government. A day later Louis-
Philippe himself abdicated in favour of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, and left
for England in the guise of Mr Smith. On the next day the advent of the Second
Republic was proclaimed from the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.
It was at this point that the increasing impoverishment of Guizot’s thought
became most visible. In 1849 he published De la Démocratie en France.148 Written
in exile in London, it was nothing if not polemical and rancorous in tone. What,
however, is most striking was Guizot’s refusal to contemplate any compromise with
the spirit of a more extensive democracy. The text began with the assertion that
France’s ‘greatest weakness’, from which all her other ills derived, was that of
‘idolâtrie démocratique’. It was this that undermined and destroyed France’s
governments as well as her liberties, her happiness, and her dignity. Democracy’s
‘empire’ was such that it had become the ‘sovereign, universal word’, appropriated
by all parties as their talisman and thus as a justification for ‘social war’. Everywhere,
Guizot contended, the individual liberties of citizens faced the ‘volonté unique’
146 In his Mémoires, Guizot argued that the system introduced by the Charte in 1814 and reformed
in 1830 had given France ‘thirty years of free and regular government’.
147 Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot
, 305.
148 Guizot, De la Démocratie en France (Brussels, 1849).
180
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
embodied by the numerical majority of the nation. The inevitable result would be
‘revolutionary despotism’. ‘It is this idea’, Guizot wrote, ‘that has to be eradi-
cated.’149 And so, recognizing the immense appeal and vitality of this idea, Guizot
was left only with the option of seeking to rally ‘all the conservative forces of social
order’ to hold back the advancing tide. ‘Not being able to suppress [democracy],
it must be contained and controlled.’150 Unless this could be done, he believed,
France would be lost.
I V
Reading these lines it is hard not to recall the celebrated introduction provided
by Alexis de Tocqueville to his De la Démocratie en Amérique.151 Democracy was
seen by Tocqueville as ‘the rapidly rising power in Europe’. Due to political failure,
it had been abandoned to its wildest instincts and was now slavishly worshipped as
‘the idol of strength’. Democracy, therefore, needed to be educated and to be made
fit to govern. But it was there that the similarities ended. A consistent thread
running through Guizot’s entire work was the contention that some form of
inequality was an inevitable aspect of all societies and that to ignore this was to
commit oneself to acts of unpardonable political folly. Tocqueville took an oppos-
ing view: for him, the gradual development of the principle of equality and
its expression in the form of an equality of conditions was the fundamental and
irresistible fact of our history. As a tendency it was universal and lasting, and it
eluded all human interference. It was, indeed, a ‘providential fact’ and to attempt to
check its progress was ‘to resist the will of God’.
This conclusion had been confirmed by what Tocqueville had seen on his visit to
America.152 ‘It appears to me beyond a doubt’, he wrote, ‘that, sooner or later, we
shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions.’153 And
for Tocqueville, this meant democracy, as both a political and a social principle, as a
principle of both government and civil society.154 ‘I confess’, Tocqueville commen-
ted, that ‘in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy