political model for contemporary France (damning what were described as the
‘sophisms of the uncritical admirers of the Greeks and the Romans’) but also
35 See Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs: La souverainété, le peuple et la représentation
1789–1799 (1995).
36 Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (1982), 66.
37 See Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyès et l’invention de la constitution de France (1998), 53–72.
38 See Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994), 252–305.
39 See J. K. Wright, ‘National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the
Declaration of Rights’, in Dale Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the
Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 199–233.
40 See esp. Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Considérations sur les Gouvernements et principalement sur celui
qui convient à la France’, Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 407–22; speech by the Comte de Lally-
Tollendal, ibid. 514–22; Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Principes du gouvernement Français’, ibid. 523–7.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
showed themselves as possessing a perceptive appraisal of the dangers of arbitrary
government, be it in the form of the despotism either of a single individual or
of the ‘multitude’. In so doing, they advocated the claims of representative,
as opposed to direct, democracy, believing the latter to be entirely inappropriate
to a modern state. If, in the circumstances, they were prepared to accept that
sovereignty resided in the nation––politically, there was no alternative––they
strongly contended that its exercise could only be secured by non-mandated
representatives sitting in two chambers so constructed as to represent the diverse
interests of the whole country and to secure sound and responsible legislation.
‘To be the source of sovereignty and to exercise sovereignty’, Mounier commented,
‘are very different things.’41 Similarly, the monarchiens also recommended the
separation of executive and legislative power. As Mounier further explained: ‘In
order to avoid tyranny, it is absolutely indispensable to ensure that the power to
make laws is not in the hands of those who implement them.’42 In short, the
preservation of individual liberty demanded the division of sovereignty and this
could best be achieved in a system of representative and constitutional government.
Seeking to build upon experience, rather than philosophical principle, the constant
point of reference was the English constitution. The institutions of government had
to take into account ‘the weakness and the passions of men’.43
By early September 1789 the monarchiens had been swept aside, defeated
decisively in the vote for a second chamber by 490 votes to 89. Why did they
lose? Two reasons can be highlighted. The first is that to call for two parliamentary
chambers and to endorse the English model was taken to be either implicit or
explicit support for aristocratic power and privilege and very few people in the
summer of 1789, never mind later, were prepared to stand up for the aristocracy.
The opponents of Mounier and his friends persistently lampooned the supposed
merits of England’s constitution, frequently citing Rousseau’s quip that the English
were only free once in every five years when they voted in elections and that the use
of their freedom showed that they did not merit it.44 The brochure published by
Charles-Philippe-Toussaint Guiraudet in 1789, Qu’est-ce que la nation et qu’est-ce
que la France?, accurately captures these sentiments. To introduce such a system
into France would be to institute the ‘most terrible of governments: hereditary
aristocracy’ and to rekindle the ‘ashes of feudalism’. The role of the people was to
destroy ‘these gothic and absurd divisions’.45
The second reason is more complex and relates to the Rousseauian rhetoric
permeating so many of the speeches made before the National Assembly. The
41 See esp. Jean-Joseph Mounier, ‘Considérations sur les Gouvernements et principalement sur
celui qui convient à la France’, Archives Parlementaires, 560.
42 Ibid. 409.
43 Ibid. 412. ‘In matters of government’, Mounier wrote, ‘many philosophers have followed the
example of Plato by creating republics which could only ever exist in their books.’
44 See Mounier, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 563. For an example of the use of the
Rousseauian critique of England see the remarks of Pétion, ibid. 533.
45 Charles-Philippe-Tousssaint Guiraudet, Qu’est-ce que la nation et qu’est-ce que la France? (1991),
35–45.
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
77
constitutional debates of the summer of 1789 abound with references to the general
will and all too frequently it was asserted that the general will could not err. There
was no broad agreement about who embodied or who could express that general
will, but among the opponents of the two-chamber model there was the firm
conviction that, through the Revolution, the nation had been reborn. A revolution
had taken place in the ‘hearts’ of the people, Jean-Baptiste Salle declared, to the
extent that ‘the French today are everything that they could be’.46 Shorn of
privilege and of the prejudices of the past, as Rabaud de Saint-Étienne remarked,
France had no need of a system which would be able to accommodate diverse and
conflicting interests. Jacques-Guillaume Thouret made a similar point when he
remarked that ‘a second chamber is being proposed as a way of achieving equilibri-
um, but since all the orders are merged together there are no more diverse interests
to protect’.47 Again Sieyès had pointed the way. Purged of ‘two hundred thousand
heads’ (a somewhat unfortunate reference to the aristocracy and the clergy in view
of what was to come) what, he asked, had the nation to fear from itself? It ‘alone
could express its own will’.48 Thus reconfigured as the nation, the people were
deemed to possess a unitary will. Rabaut Saint-Étienne set out the institutional
logic which applied to such a situation. Given that the power to govern belonged to
the nation in its entirety, ‘[t]he sovereign is a single, simple thing, since it is made
up of the collective whole without exception; therefore legislative power is single
and simple; and if the sovereign cannot be divided, nor can legislative power, for
there are no more two, three or four legislative powers as there are two, three, or
four sovereigns’.49
Not everyone agreed. The monarchiens in particular did not accept this rosy
picture of a nation reborn, frequently reminding their fellow deputies of what an
uneducated populace had done to Socrates. Nor was there agreement about the
precise location of the general will that could not err. As one deputy had the
temerity to put it: ‘Everyone says that the law is the expression of the general will
but everyone adapts the meaning of this to fit his own system. Some understand
this will to be made manifest through the deputies . . . others believe that to this
we should add the will of the monarch. . . . still others want a Senate.’ Casting
&nbs
p; Rousseau to the wind, he himself concluded that ‘the general will is that of the
majority of French citizens’.50
Of one thing we should be clear: among the deputies assembled in Versailles
during the summer of 1789 there was wide agreement that a republican form of
government was only appropriate to small states and that as France quite definitely
46 Salle, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 530.
47 Thouret, ibid. 580. Thouret was later to be executed by the Jacobins.
48 Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?, 81, 61. Rhetorically at least, Sieyès went so far as to embrace
the argument that the aristocracy were not a natural part of the French nation, inviting them to return
to the forests of Germany from whence they apparently came.
49 Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, in Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 569. For a contemporary
analysis of why the argument for a single chamber was destined to fail see Antoine Barnave, De la
Révolution et de la constitution (Grenoble, 1988), 116–22.
50 Jean-Baptiste Crénier, Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 550.
78
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
did not fall into this category some form of reformed monarchy was most to be
desired. As Mounier explained: ‘In drawing up the constitution of France, we need
very much to take into account the large population of the kingdom. An association
which is so numerous is so far distant from nature that we must not imagine that it
can be governed by simple means, such as those which might be adequate for a
town or a small province.’ A monarchy, he further specified, was appropriate for all
peoples whose population exceeded ‘two to three hundred thousand men’.51
Various arguments were adduced to support this view––not least the need for a
strong executive power in a large state––but prominent among these was the
recognition that it was only in small states that all the citizens could be assembled
together. In such societies the general will could easily be known––as even the Duc
de la Rochefoucauld acknowledged52––but in a large state no such simple mecha-
nism was available.
It was this argument that provided the context in which the deputies discussed
the second of the key constitutional issues they faced: the necessity or otherwise
of the royal veto. Again, the monarchiens were the first to present their case. This
was the way that Pierre-Victor Malouet defended the right of the king to possess
an absolute veto on all legislation. ‘It is true’, he began, ‘that sovereignty resides
in the nation.’ However, he continued, ‘it is both useful and necessary for the
repose and happiness of a large nation that there exists in its midst a pre-eminent
authority, whose functions, whose powers, are so constituted that the person who
possesses it has none of the cares and ambitions which drive other men and where
the increase in his own fortune coincides with that of the general happiness.’ Such
was the origin of royal authority, as the nation had passed over to the monarch ‘an
element of its sovereignty which it could not exercise itself ’. This position of lofty
detachment and personal disinterestedness contrasted markedly with that of the
nation’s freely elected representatives: their will and ambition could contradict ‘the
general will and interest’. From this, it followed that ‘the royal veto is a right and a
national prerogative conferred upon the head of the nation in order that he may
confirm and guarantee whether a decision taken by the representatives is or is not
the expression of the general will’.53 Three points can be highlighted here. The first
is that the fear of popular disturbance and the ‘will of the majority’ was such that
the monarchiens had no desire to see measures vetoed by the monarch returned to
the people for discussion, hence the veto was to be absolute rather than suspensive.
Next, we can note that the monarchiens persisted in the pre-1789 belief that the
monarch, as sovereign, transcended the partiality and particularity of individual or
corporate interests. Thirdly, they expressed a widely held apprehension about and
distrust of the logic of representation in the form of a popular assembly.
Their opponents rejected the first two, although not the third, of these points.
The people, they countered, were no longer ignorant and were becoming increas-
ingly enlightened. Second, the monarch, as the Calvinist Rabaut Saint-Étienne
made clear, should not be mistaken for the ‘permanent representative of the nation’
51 Mounier, ibid. 412.
52 Ibid. 548.
53 Ibid. 535–7.
Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
79
if only because the two words ‘permanent’ and ‘representative’ should never be
conjoined and because no function was less open to hereditary possession than
representation. The king, he announced, ‘could not be at one and the same time
representative, head, legislator and executive’.54 Moreover, to the extent that the
monarch acted according to his own particular will he, if not the general will, could
err. Nor, crucially, was the monarch alone in this, for, as the critics of the absolute
veto themselves recognized, if the general will could not err, then the will of the
representatives of the nation could most certainly be in error. This was clearly stated
before the Assembly by both the Abbé Grégoire and Rabaut Saint-Étienne.55 It
was for this reason that, displaying their Rousseauian distrust of representation to
the full, they both called not for an absolute but for a suspensive veto. In this
way, disputed legislation could be passed back to the people in order that they, the
possessors of sovereign power, could reaffirm the general will in the face of a corrupted
or misguided representative assembly. As Jean-Baptiste Salle remarked: ‘A man can
be mad, but not a great nation: a great nation which reflects upon its interests,
which decides for itself, could not will its own ill.’56 It was these arguments which
carried the day, with the result that the king was granted the right to suspend the
introduction of legislation for up to six years.
How might we make sense of this seemingly paradoxical conclusion? Patrice
Gueniffey, at the beginning of his detailed study of elections and electoral systems
during the revolutionary period,57 not only makes the point that the problem of
representation was central to the Revolution but that the dream of the Revolution
was to create a perfect symmetry between ‘the will and the interests of the citizens’.
This was to be done by introducing a system which would eschew all mediation
between the individual elector and the sovereign, thereby assuming that those
electors were able to give ‘collective expression’ to their will. The Revolution, he
comments, ‘was made against a power that was radically distinct from society,
against the division of interests which opposed orders, communities and indivi-
duals’.58 This categorical rejection of mediation and of the representation of private
interest denoted ‘a pre-democratic conception of democracy’ and one that was to
become ‘the unpassable horizon of revolutionary political culture’.59 For the time
<
br /> being, at least, the suspensive veto of the monarch seemed compatible with the
expression of the general will of the nation.
These arguments also indicated that representatives were subject to a strong
element of suspicion and so much so that, from the very outset of the Revolution,
demands were made that they should be subject to surveillance and sanction.60
To take but one example, Jean-Baptiste Salle, in recognizing that ‘the first duty of a
free people is to entrust its liberty to no one’, called for the frequent renewal of
representatives, constant public scrutiny and publicity of their actions, and the
54 Ibid. 569.
55 Ibid 567, 571.
56 Ibid. 530.
57 Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la Raison: La Révolution française et les élections (1993).
58 Ibid. 24.
59 Ibid. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en
France (1998).
60 See Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur (2000), 81–6.
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Absolutism, Representation, Constitution
right of the people to make ‘the most vigorous and imperative protests’.61 It was at
this point that the next stage of the argument came into play, in the shape of the
Abbé Sieyès’s powerful discourse on the royal veto, delivered before the Assembly
on 7 September.62
Sieyès argued against the royal veto on a number of grounds, not least because no
one’s vote could count twice. More profoundly, he believed that the veto, whether
absolute or suspensive, was a form of arbitrary power. ‘I can only see it’, he announced,
‘as a lettre de cachet63 launched against the national will, against the entire nation’. It
was, however, what followed that was the most interesting and innovative part of his
speech. ‘I know’, Sieyès remarked, ‘that we have come to consider the voice of the
nation as if it were something other than the voice of the representatives of the nation,
as if the nation could speak otherwise than through its representatives.’ This was both
false and dangerous because it ran the risk of splitting and dividing France up into
‘an infinite number of small democracies, held together only by the ties of a general
confederation’. France, Sieyès replied, was not a collection of states but ‘a unitary
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