Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
71
provided more effective protection for all the members of a community than
divided power.’ The point is a straightforward one. The Anglo-American tradition
has taken it to be axiomatic both that power must be checked and divided if it is not
to be abused and that the protection of the rights of the individual by the State is of
fundamental importance. It is only thus that freedom can be said to exist. Yet, as
Nannerl points out, in France from the sixteenth century until well into the
eighteenth century, the first of these key conditions for a liberal polity was ‘rejected
outright’ whilst the second was ‘commonly ignored’. This made sense in the
context of a society which was both divided and parcellized and in which not
only was a strong State necessary to secure civil peace but also where that State––in
the form of an absolute monarchy––came to embody claims to represent the
generality, as opposed to the partiality and particularity, of society’s interests. As
Ellen Meiksins Wood has commented: ‘The king embodied the public aspect of the
State as against the private character of his subjects.’18 In this situation the central
political question was that of rendering royal power ‘more truly public’, of cleansing
it of particularistic influences, of ensuring that la monarchie absolue did not descend
into la monarchie arbitraire.19 The moral prescription––as Bossuet made plain in
his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Ecriture Sainte, first published in 1709––was
that the divinely ordained monarch should work for the greater good of the kingdom.
If kings were not subject to the penalties of the laws, they must themselves be just and
owed to the people the example of justice-keeping.20
This is not the place to explore the vexed question of whether the absolute
monarchy in pre-revolutionary France was a myth or a reality.21 Research over the
last thirty years or more has served to indicate that it was at best a tendency or
direction towards which policy moved rather than an established form of govern-
ment.22 Only royalist propaganda taken at face value has led us to believe that the
crown triumphed over all its opponents.23 It was, however, the propaganda
generated by the crown that did so much to establish the widely and long-held
belief that there could exist a single superior and sovereign will capable of expressing
the permanent and common interests of the entire nation, despite the fact that
the monarchy had little possibility of actually imposing that will. Here we might
take one glorious (and enduring) example: the gardens of the Palace of Versailles.
Summarizing the scale of this magnificent achievement, Ian Thompson writes that
it ‘was packed with messages about the military might of France, about technologi-
cal progress, the superiority of French art over Italian, the commanding reach of the
18 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought:
A Genealogy of Rousseau’s “General Will”’, History of Political Thought, 4 (1983), 287.
19 Pierre Rosanvallon has made a similar point. See ‘Political Rationalism and Democracy’, in
Samuel Moyn (ed.), Pierre Rosanvallon: Democracy Past and Future (New York, 2006), 127–8.
20 See Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, tr. Patrick
Riley (Cambridge, 1999), 85. According to Bossuet there was ‘nothing more distinct’ than the
distinction between absolute and arbitrary government.
21 See Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon, L’Absolutisme en France (2002).
22 See Regnheld Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Absolutism (London, 1976) and David Parker, The
Making of French Absolutism (London, 1983).
23 Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 1980).
72
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
Most Christian King and the futility of insurrection. Even the little fleet that bobbed
around the Grand Canal was an effective piece of propaganda about France’s status as
a maritime power.’24 At the time of the death of Louis XIV in 1715 France might
have been ‘impoverished, vanquished [and] riddled with internal dissent’,25 but there
still remained a powerful conviction that la monarchie absolue received justification as
an appropriate response to the conditions of urban and religious unrest of the recent
past. Furthermore, the fear of a return to the wars of religion occupied a central place
in the minds and memories of the French people.26 Thus, the absolute monarchy
figured as a mechanism designed to enhance, rather than to diminish, the security
and liberty of the individual.
Such a view received its most coherent theoretical justification in the writings of
Jean Bodin, and especially in Les six livres de la République, first published in
1576.27 In Bodin’s celebrated phrase, sovereignty was an ‘absolute and perpetual
power’. It was not only supreme but also indivisible. The source and the exercise of
sovereignty were deemed to have the same location: the monarch alone. As such,
Bodin’s theory was designed to counter all claims––and principally those voiced by
Protestants––to the effect that sovereignty had its origins amongst the people and
therefore that a right to rebellion existed.
A version of this argument is visible in the response of Bossuet to the views
advanced by Pierre Jurieu in his Lettres Pastorales of 1689.28 Exiled in Holland, the
Calvinist Jurieu contended that it had been the people who, out of prudence, had
created the sovereign and who therefore were the source of sovereignty. Accepting
that the people themselves could not exercise sovereignty, it was nevertheless the
sovereignty of the people that was the source of all authority: it was the people who
made kings. The authority of the sovereign over the people, thus, derived from ‘a
mutual pact’ and one that specified that while the sovereign had the right to punish
the guilty he had no right to punish the innocent. ‘Never’, Jurieu wrote, ‘did the
people have the intention of giving to the sovereign the power to abuse its laws, its
liberty, its religion and its life.’ As the scriptures taught us, there was no legitimate
‘power without limits’, nor therefore was there such a thing as ‘passive obedience
without limits’. Accordingly the removal of James II from the throne of England
and his replacement by William of Orange had been legitimate because James II
had broken his pact with the people.
Bossuet’s reply first doubted the biblical accuracy of Jurieu’s account: the
Jews had not lived for three centuries without a sovereign. Rather, obedience to
the sovereign was in accordance with the precepts of Jesus Christ and had
subsequently been confirmed by the scriptures, by tradition, and by the example
24 Ian Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre and the Creation of the Gardens
of Versailles (London, 2006), 285.
25 Mettam, Power and Faction, 319.
26 David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.,
2001), 30–2.
27 See Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1992).
28 Pierre Jurieu, Lettres Pastorales XVI––XVII––XVIII (1689), suivies de la réponse de Bossuet
Cinquième Avertissement aux protestants (1690) (Caen, 1991).
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
73
of the early Church. Far from being the ‘sovereign power’, therefore, the people
had no legitimate mechanism––‘neither arms, nor assemblies, nor any authority
whatsoever’––through which it could oppose the monarch. Only the Protes-
tants, Bossuet argued, had thought otherwise, and all had failed to recognize
that ‘anarchy’ and ‘bloody civil wars’ would be the consequences of their sinful
doctrines. If ‘Cromwell and his fanatics’ were the ‘true authors of the crime’
against the person of Charles I, their justification lay in those maxims asserting
‘the absolute sovereignty of the people over kings [and] the primordial contract
between peoples and kings’. Jurieu had specifically denied this charge, arguing
that it was not ‘legitimate to oppose kings to the point of cutting off their head’,
but Bossuet observed that he had no grounds for doing so and no grounds for
placing limitations upon the power of the people, no matter how unreasonable
their actions. Moreover, Bossuet pointed out, Jurieu had singularly failed to
offer anything like a convincing definition of either the people or its powers.
Those who ‘flattered the people’, he concluded, were invariably ‘the henchmen
of tyranny’.29 Much of what was to occur during the summer of 1789 and its
immediate aftermath was prefigured in this exchange of views. Even at that late
date, many were those who believed that the interests of the people and those of
the crown could not be separated and that the sole sovereign authority resided in
the person of the monarch.
The same disposition also brought with it a pervasive distrust of those interme-
diary powers and voluntary associations that later French liberals were to consider as
one of the all-important guarantees of English liberty. Estates, parlements, the
Church, and other similar bodies were seen as feudal remnants voicing private
(and therefore selfish) corporate concerns and even when defended by Montesquieu
came to be conflated with aristocratic power and what was known as the thèse
nobiliaire. This was not all. To quote Ellen Meiksins Wood again: ‘Even in more
radical attacks on royal absolutism, the public will of the State was not generally
opposed, as in England, by asserting private interests or individual rights against it.
Nor was the common good redefined as a public interest essentially constituted by
private interests.’30 Rather what tended to happen was that the precise location of
the source and principle of generality was transferred away from the monarch
towards some other institution deemed capable of expressing its superior claims.
The Huguenot constitutionalists, for example, simply shifted its setting from the
king to the public councils of the people, thereby confronting ‘absolutism on its
own terms by stressing the particularity of the monarch’. The charge, in other
words, was not so much that the sovereign might have said ‘L’État, c’est moi’ but
that he acted as if he believed that ‘L’État, c’est à moi’.31
29 See Lucien Jaume, La Liberté et la loi: Les Origines philosophiques du libéralisme (2000), 37–93.
30 Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty’, 309.
31 Herbert H. Rowan, ‘L’État, c’est à moi: Louis XIV and the State’, French Historical Studies,
2 (1961–2), 83–98.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
The conclusion drawn by Keohane is unambiguous. ‘Many of Rousseau’s
authoritarian passages’, she writes, ‘were restatements of hoary arguments in French
absolutist thought.’32 Nowhere was this more evident than with the concept of
‘la volonté générale’. It came replete with the injunction not only that sovereignty
should be neither divided nor restricted but also with the call for the total alienation
of each individual and of his rights to the community. Rousseau’s innovation lay
not with the concept of sovereignty but in his denial that the sovereign will could be
indefinitely identified with one individual. By doing this he opened up the way for
the all-important redescription of sovereignty as the will of all those citizens who
made up the membership of the political body. In this fashion was the theory of
absolute monarchy transformed into the radical alternative of absolute popular
sovereignty. The misunderstanding has been to believe that in either case a concern
for the liberty of the individual was absent. Moreover, this discloses one of the most
important elements of continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary France. ‘It is
no exaggeration to say’, Lucien Jaume writes, ‘that the totality of revolutionary
debate up to Bonaparte is marked by the doctrine of the indivisibility of sovereignty,
a concept which the Revolution did not forge but which it had taken up from the
monarchy.’33
I I
During the summer and into the autumn of 1789 virtually no one challenged the
principle of monarchy. As Madame de Staël was later to comment, the desire was to
secure a ‘monarchie tempérée’.34 Nevertheless, a dramatic transfer of power took
place. The Estates-General, convened at Versailles in early May, initially sat, in line
with tradition, as three separate orders. The Third Estate, nominally representing
95 per cent of the population, soon proposed that the three Estates should conduct
their deliberations as one body. Initially rebuffed, they pressed on alone, on 17 June
giving themselves the title of National Assembly. Three days later, finding them-
selves locked out of the building where they met, the deputies of the Third Estate
reassembled at a nearby tennis court and swore not to dissolve themselves before
France had been given a new constitution. In the following days, they were joined
by the majority of the members of the clergy and then, on 25 June, by forty-seven
representatives of the nobility. The new body was to vote not by order but by head.
On 7 July it gave itself a new name: the National Constituent Assembly, thereby
indicating its clear intention to provide France with a new constitution and
effectively transferring the location of sovereignty to itself. A week later, the people
of Paris, fearing military repression, stormed the Bastille. Having lost control of
32 Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 442.
33 Lucien Jaume, Échec au Libéralisme: Les Jacobins et l’État (1990), 15. See also Lucien Jaume,
‘Citoyenneté et souveraineté: Le Poids de l’absolutisme’, in Baker, Political Culture, 515–34.
34 Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des
principes qui doivent fonder la république en France (1979), 160.
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
75
events, Louis XVI had no alternative but to concede. His fate was now in the hands
of those who claimed to lead the Revolution.35
As was so often the case, it was the Abbé Sieyès who most clearly articulated the
logic that informed the new situation. His pamphlet, Qu’est-
ce que le Tiers Etat?,
published in January 1789, clearly set out the grounds for this transfer of sover-
eignty. For Sieyès, the only legitimate source of power derived from the nation: all
other forms were contrary to the ‘common interest’. ‘The nation’, he proclaimed,
‘existed before everything else; it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal; it
is the law itself.’36 And for Sieyès the nation was constituted by the Third Estate
alone, for the simple reason that it, rather than the aristocracy and the clergy,
laboured to produce the wealth upon which the nation rested. To that extent, the
Third Estate was ‘Everything’: it was ‘a complete nation’. It followed from this,
Sieyès argued, that the ‘representatives’ of the Third Estate were the ‘rightful
depositaries of the national will’ and that they could, therefore, ‘without error,
speak in the name of the entire nation’.37
These arguments were advanced before the Third Estate had established its
political ascendancy. Once it had done so, the challenge became that of translating
these claims into constitutional principles and practices.38 Most obviously, this was
in part quickly achieved through the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du
Citoyen, Article 3 of which declared that sovereignty resided in the nation whilst
Article 6 specified that the law was an expression of the general will. No mention
was made of the king. If this much could be agreed upon relatively easily, there was
markedly less unanimity when the deputies addressed the issue of the composition
of the National Assembly and the related question of the legitimacy or otherwise of
the royal veto.39
In the first instance, the intellectual leadership of the Revolution fell to the
group known as the monarchiens and loosely clustered around the figure of Jean-
Joseph Mounier. Their dominance was short-lived (Mounier himself resigned
his seat in October 1789 and returned home to Grenoble) but during the
summer of that year the documents they produced as members of the constitu-
tional committee provided the focus of debate.40 Starting from a definition of
liberty as the absence of interference and its need for protection through law, the
monarchiens not only dismissed the idea that the classical world could figure as a
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