Revolution and the Republic
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Constant forcefully observed, would be a mistake, for the simple reason that
happiness alone was not our goal. It is, he remarked, ‘to self-development that
our destiny calls us’ and it was through the exercise of political liberty that this
could best be attained. ‘Political liberty’, Constant declared, ‘by submitting to all
the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred
interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among
them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and the power of a
people’. The ambition, therefore, was not to enjoy one or other form of liberty but
rather ‘to learn to combine the two together’.
I I I
When, therefore, Constant provided his definition of the liberty of the moderns he
did not stop at the idea that it amounted to our ability freely to pursue our whims
and interests. Rather, he concluded with the suggestion that it consisted of ‘every-
one’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government,
94 See Constant, De la liberté, 493–515.
95 Ibid. 494–5.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
167
either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions,
demands which the authorities are more or less compelled to take into consider-
ation’.96 The pressing problem was to create a political system that would make this
possible, whilst at the same time avoiding a return to the excesses of popular
sovereignty. In Constant’s case, he again turned to England by way of example,
arguing in favour of both a hereditary chamber and an elected lower house. Citing
the House of Lords, Constant asserted that an hereditary chamber was compatible
with the existence of ‘civil and political liberty’ and that it acted as a vital
‘intermediary’ body between monarch and the representatives of the people. Con-
stant’s views on the elected chamber were equally straightforward. He rejected the
French system of electoral colleges in favour of the English practice of direct
election based upon a stringent property qualification. Defending the latter, he
articulated what was to be one of the key themes underpinning liberal discourse in
the first half of the nineteenth century: enlightenment and ‘rectitude of judgement’
derived from leisure, and leisure was only possible through the possession of
property: hence ‘property alone makes men capable of exercising political rights’.97
Just as importantly, Constant recognized the logic underpinning representative
government. ‘What’, he remarked, ‘is general representation but the representation
of all partial interests which must reach a compromise on the objects they have in
common’.98 It was, in other words, private and sectional interests that formed the
body politic.
Here was a perspective on politics that had been roundly condemned and
rejected by France’s practitioners of revolutionary politics.99 The passion for
national unity and for the overcoming of divisions, evident in the rhetoric of Sieyès
onwards, made it almost impossible to conceive of divergences of opinion or
examples of dissent as being anything other than the consequence of the existence
of ‘faction’ and thus as being illegitimate. Similarly, the years of the Empire had
scarcely been characterized by the toleration of voices opposed to the sovereign will
of the Emperor. It was therefore only with the Restoration of the Bourbon
monarchy in 1814 that France took a tentative step towards the creation of a
system of representative government embracing both the existence of political
parties and the practices of constitutional opposition. This experience, resting as
it did upon a series of uneasy compromises made evident at the outset when Louis
XVIII graciously ‘granted’ his people a new constitutional charter ‘by the free
exercise of our royal authority’, proved to be an unhappy one, ending ignomini-
ously with the Revolution of 1830. It did nevertheless provide an apprenticeship of
sorts in the arts and principles of parliamentary government.
The foundational text of the Restoration was the Charte of 1814.100 Dated
the nineteenth year of Louis XVIII’s reign, the clear intention was to reaffirm the
continuity of French history across the divide of the Revolution. However, the
rhetorical baggage of monarchical absolutism was accompanied by an acceptance of
96 Ibid. 495.
97 Ibid. 316.
98 Ibid. 306.
99 See Pierre Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachévée (2000), 41–91.
100 See Pierre Rosanvallon, La Monarchie impossible: Les Chartes de 1814 et de 1830 (1994).
168
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
certain limitations to the monarch’s power. Recognized was equality before the law
and freedom of religious conscience. Greater liberty was accorded to the press.
Powers to effect arbitrary arrest were diminished. In addition, although cast as
ancient institutions, the Charte recognized the existence of two parliamentary
chambers, one of which, the Chamber of Deputies, was elected upon the basis of
a restricted property franchise. Parliament was to meet regularly and at prescribed
intervals. No law could be enacted without its consent. Moreover, Louis XVIII
certainly intended to reign as a constitutional monarch and, despite his own
prejudices and the considerable powers invested in his person, largely remained
true to his word.101
That said, the existence of the restored monarchy was never more than precari-
ous and fragile. The Ultras, as the hard-line supporters of royal power became
known, fought long and hard over the next two decades to strengthen the position
of the throne, and were especially influential after the assassination of the king’s
nephew, the Duc de Berri, in 1820. Following the dismissal from the government
of the king’s favourite, the moderate Decazes, a series of measures were passed
which restricted individual rights and the freedom of the press. Electoral reform,
through the so-called Law of the Double Vote, shifted power back towards the
owners of landed property.102 With the ascent to the throne of a receptive Charles
X in 1824, the Ultras appeared, momentarily, to have got their way, the govern-
ment of Villèle passing legislation intended to protect the position of both Church
and aristocracy. As opposition to Charles X’s rule grew in intensity, the appoint-
ment of the Polignac ministry in 1829 amounted to a declaration of war against
liberal and popular opinion. A year later the Bourbons sailed into exile for good.
Yet the principles underpinning the Charte were far from clear and were,
accordingly, open to a variety of interpretations. There were those, following the
opinions expressed by the Comte de Montlosier in his widely read De la Monarchie
française depuis son établissement jusqu’à nos jours, who were prepared to see the
Restoration in terms of an unadulterated return to the pre-revolutionary past. ‘A
King, a Senate, a Chamber of Representatives’, Montlosier proclaimed in his
addendum entitled ‘Du Retour de la Maison du Bourbon’, ‘it is in this way that
; the French monarchy existed under Philip-Augustus and under Charlemagne; it is
in this way that it existed in the forests of Germania’.103 Others, equally enthusias-
tic about the royalist cause, were ready to endorse a more accommodating vision of
the type of politics required in the France of the Restoration. Of these the most
influential, and always the most eloquent, was François-René de Chateaubriand.
An early admirer of Louis XVIII’s ‘unfailing serenity’, Chateaubriand saw that
the restored monarchy offered France the possibility of peace, calm, and prosperity.
Moreover, he saw that the Charte was not some ‘exotic plant’ imported into a
101 See Isabelle Backouche, La Monarchie parlementaire 1815–1848 (2000). See Philip Mansel,
Louis XVIII (London, 2005). Mansel is of the view that, for all his faults, Louis XVIII realized that
France needed ‘peace, rest and forgetfulness’.
102 See A. B. Spitzer, ‘Restoration Political Theory and the Law of the Double Vote’, Journal of
Modern History, 54 (1982), 746–65.
103 Cte de Montlosier, De la Monarchie française (1814), iii. 405.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
169
foreign and hostile environment but ‘a peace treaty signed between two parties
which had divided the French’, a treaty where each side––liberals and royalists––
had given up something for ‘the glory of the homeland’. If the new constitutional
arrangements were not perfect––after all, the French could not achieve in six
months what it had taken the English centuries to accomplish––the new govern-
ment ruled in the interests of all, including those of the most numerous class.104
Chateaubriand’s De la monarchie selon la Charte,105 first published in 1816, gave
a detailed exposition of the principles of what he did not hesitate to describe as
‘representative monarchy’. Starting from the assumption that it was not possible
to return to the ancien régime and that a return to Bonapartist despotism was to
be avoided, the Charte, on this view, offered the only practical alternative for
the monarchy. Chateaubriand therefore sketched out a plan for representative
government, with ministers responsible before parliament and dependent upon
the support of majority opinion. Within this schema, the monarch was to reign but
not to govern, thus preserving the inviolability and sanctity of the throne.
But it was the advocates of the growing body of liberal opinion who did most,
in both theory and in practice, to establish the foundations of a representative
system. The key figures in the period between 1815 and 1848 were those who
constituted the group known as the Doctrinaires.106 Described in this way (by their
opponents) because of their apparent attachment to ‘principles’ and ‘doctrines’, the
membership of this imposing coterie included such eminent figures as Pierre-Paul
Royer-Collard, François Guizot, Charles de Rémusat,107 Prosper de Barante,108
and Victor de Broglie. Others, only slightly less distinguished, were to be found
among their number. Never a completely coherent or unified group, their basic
position was that of seeking to secure what they regarded as the proper application
of the Charte––a stance which ironically disposed them to allow the monarch
greater discretion in the use of his power than envisaged by Chateaubriand––whilst
ensuring that this was done in a liberal spirit.
This position was clearly disclosed in the parliamentary speeches of Royer-
Collard.109 Upon his first election as a deputy in April 1797, he declared to his
electors that his principles were those of everyone who ‘hoped and wished to
see the return of order, of justice and of liberty, the restitution of morality upon
long-established foundations, the definitive and absolute expulsion of the
104 Chateaubriand, Réflexions Politiques sur quelques écrits du jour et sur les intérêts de tous les Français
(1814), in Chateaubriand: Grands Écrits politiques, ed. Jean-Paul Clément (1993), i. 151–275.
105 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie selon la Charte (1816), Grands Écrits politiques, ii. 319–522.
106 See Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires
(Lanham, Md., 2003).
107 See Rémusat, Politique libérale ou Fragments pour servir à la defense de la révolution française
(1860) and Darío Roldán (ed), La Pensée politique doctrinaire sous la restauration: Charles de Rémusat:––
Textes choisis (2003). See also Dario Roldán, Charles de Rémusat: certitudes et impasses du libéralisme
doctrinaire (1999).
108 See Antoine Denis, Amable-Guillaume-Prosper Brugière, Baron de Barante (1782–1866):
Homme politique, diplomate et historien (2000).
109 See Prosper de Barante, La Vie politique de M. Royer-Collard: Ses Discours et ses Ecrits, 2 vols.
(1861). This text contains a commentary by Barante plus extensive selections from the speeches and
writings of Royer-Collard.
170
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
revolutionary monster’.110 In his subsequent career he did not waiver from
these original convictions. With the Restoration, therefore, he did not hesitate
to describe the monarchy as the form of government that most ‘suited’ France.
This, he affirmed, was not just a political truth but one derived from sentiment
as well as from experience. He thus concluded that the king should have the
power necessary to govern and that to deprive the king of the power of initiative,
to make his government dependent upon the support of a parliamentary
majority, would be ‘to strike royalty at the heart’.111 Allied to these conclusions
were a set of views about the nature of representation and a profound mistrust of
elections as a process of selection. To elect a deputy, Royer-Collard believed,
was not a right but a function, and one that had to be performed with
independence and discernment. Once elected, the deputy was in no sense
delegated to represent either the will or opinions of his electors.
The first thing to note is that Royer-Collard openly distanced himself from the
British model of parliamentary government.112 This argument was deployed to
refute the demand of the Ultras that the electoral law should be changed so as allow
the re-election of all deputies once very five years. Royer-Collard defended
the system introduced by the Charte whereby one-fifth of the deputies sought
re-election each year and he did so on the grounds that France could not and should
not emulate English parliamentary practices. He listed three specific reasons for
this. First, France had no tradition of fixed and stable parliamentary majorities. The
spirit of party, he intimated, was alien to the French character, which prided itself
upon independence and a refusal to prejudge an issue before the arguments had
been heard and presented. Next, ministers would not have the means to cultivate
such a majority. Corruption was anathema to ‘French character and national
scrupulousness’. Finally, no such fixed majority support would be required because,
unlike in England, the monarch governed independently of the parliamentary
chamber. The day, he predicted, when the government was dependent for its
existence u
pon the ‘majority of the Chamber’ would be not only the day that marked
the end of the Charte but also the day when ‘nous sommes en république’.113
But these arguments were only a preface to a more complete theory of repre-
sentation outlined by Royer-Collard in his parliamentary addresses. Recognizing
that the Charte was silent on a number of important questions, he raised the issue
of whether the vote should be seen as ‘a fact created by the Charte relative to
the Chamber or a right anterior to the one or the other’.114 Was voting simply ‘the
most convenient way’ of selecting the members of a parliamentary assembly or ‘the
exercise of a national right, a popular right, inherent to the very nature of political
societies’?115 On this, Royer-Collard argued, would depend whether the Charte
received a monarchical or republican reading. Next, however, had to be considered
the difficulty of what was constituted by and through the process of election.
110 See Prosper de Barante, La Vie politique de M. Royer-Collard: Ses Discours et ses Ecrits, 2 vols.
(1861). This text contains a commentary by Barante plus extensive selections from the speeches and
writings of Royer-Collard, i. 26.
111 Ibid. 217.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid. 213–17.
114 Ibid. 225.
115 Ibid. 224
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
171
Royer-Collard’s response was to suggest that representation had to be understood at
best as a ‘metaphor’. In order for the idea of representation to make any real sense,
he contended, it was necessary that the representative bore a true resemblance to the
person represented, and for this to be the case the representative had to do precisely
what the represented would do. It followed that ‘political representation presup-
posed a binding mandate’ and that it was only in this strict sense that the Chamber
of Deputies could be considered to be representative. Thus conceived, the will of
the nation would be ‘continuously expressed’. But few, if any, governments, Royer-
Collard responded, could meet these conditions and when, as in France under the
Charte, the number of electors was limited and no binding mandate existed to
speak of, representation amounted to no more than ‘a chimera, a lie’. Indeed,