Royer-Collard argued, as conceived by the Charte the Chamber of Deputies
constituted a ‘power’ and not a form of representation. It was therefore ‘false in
principle and impossible in fact that the opinion of the Chamber should always and
necessarily be the opinion of the nation’. ‘Interests’, he proclaimed, ‘are a far surer
gauge of opinion than opinion can be of interests.’116
What purpose, then, did an elected assembly serve?117 Royer-Collard immediately
dismissed three arguments supposedly in its favour. Elections were not necessary
to secure the existence of a second chamber. Elections were no better guarantee of
independence than the hereditary principle. Elections were not the only means
of ensuring that a chamber was peopled by honest and capable men. ‘There is’, he
told his fellow deputies,
an elected Chamber in the interests of the nation, in order that its views and needs
should be known and its rights respected and so that political liberty can come to the
aid of civil liberty, of which it is the sole effective guarantee. There is an elected
Chamber in the interests of the government, in order that confidence, which is the
principle of elections, extends to it and encourages a more ready and voluntary
obedience. Finally, there is an elected Chamber in the interests of both nation and
government, in order that serious errors and grave injustices, which are the motors of
civil discord and revolutions, do not accumulate within the social body, and so that
society as a whole, with all its known or unknown tribulations, should constantly
resound within government and constantly secure its attention, thus ensuring that
government, forewarned of the dangers, should be vigilant, prudent, and provident.118
As such, an elected chamber served as the best means of both protecting the
hereditary monarchy and of averting revolution.
What was completely missing in this argument was any reference to either the
sovereignty of the people or the equality of political rights. On this account, the elected
deputy was no more a representative of the people than was a peer of the realm. The
deputy had a function to perform, that of deliberating freely and without the restraints
of party upon the interests of the country, and it was for this reason that Royer-Collard
had no difficulty reconciling himself to the limited franchise endorsed by the Charte.
‘According to the principles of our government’, he announced, ‘a higher [financial]
contribution does not in itself confer any personal pre-eminence or privilege but it is
116 Ibid. 229.
117 Ibid. 274–86.
118 Ibid. 278–9.
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Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
required for certain functions as a necessary guarantee of independence and enlight-
enment.’119 ‘Aptitude’ and ‘capacity’ were associated with ‘personal wealth’ and
therefore all those able to make the financial contribution required for eligibility to
vote were deemed to be ‘equally capable’. Similarly, Royer-Collard did not see an
elected chamber as an especially appropriate vehicle to secure the protection of what
he termed ‘national liberties’. Such a role, he contended, resided in the government
as a whole and among all its constituent parts: the monarchy, the hereditary chamber,
and the elected chamber. Indeed, on this view, any strengthening of the political
importance of the elected chamber would weaken these protections, as France’s recent
experience had revealed. ‘The Revolution’, Royer-Collard declared, was ‘nothing else
but the doctrine of representation in action’.120
These views were expressed by Royer-Collard in the early years of the Restoration,
and were put under severe strain by a succession of ultra-conservative governments
that seemed to wish to operate in opposition to the perceived interests of society and
in violation of the principles laid down by the Charte. Nevertheless, if Royer-Collard’s
rhetoric was to change over time, the basic philosophy remained intact. This was the
manner in which Royer-Collard sought to defend a parliamentary chamber composed
of the hereditary peerage after the revolution of 1830. Against the sovereignty of the
people, he counterpoised ‘the sovereignty of reason, the sole legitimate legislator
of humanity’. He further argued that society should not be seen as ‘the numerical
assemblage of individuals and of wills’ but as being composed of ‘legitimate interests’.
To that extent, the peerage was a proper part of the system of representative
government, because it was an expression of ‘a social fact: namely, the social inequality
resulting from different kinds of superiority: glory, services rendered to the State,
property or wealth’. Royer-Collard then added that this amounted not to a represen-
tation of inequality for its own sake but rather to a mechanism that served ‘the
protection of society as a whole’. If this institutional device were taken away, France
would be left with nothing but a form of democracy resting upon the sovereignty of
the people and, as history had shown, this would lead to ‘anarchy, tyranny, misery,
bankruptcy, and finally despotism’. The stark conclusion was that democracy could
not produce ‘prudent’ government, and therefore that ‘political equality’ was not ‘the
just and necessary consequence of civil equality’.121
The message, repeated time after time by Royer-Collard in his solemn speeches
before the parliamentary chamber, was that the Revolution would only be brought
to an end if politics could leave passion behind and enter a new age of reason. This,
he believed, entailed the institutionalization of stable, constitutional government,
resting upon the incorporation of those who represented the general interests of
society. On pragmatic grounds alone, a limited franchise appeared to be the
best means of avoiding tyranny and disorder. From this, however, we get little
clue as to whom the Doctrinaires believed were best placed to represent the general
119 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, 410.
120 Ibid. 231.
121 Opinion de M. Royer-Collard sur l’hérédité de la Pairie, 4 Octobre 1831 (1831).
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
173
interests of society. To find out the answer, there is no surer guide than the writings
of one of the towering figures of French politics in the first half of the nineteenth
century: François Guizot.
The ideas of Guizot were briefly examined in the last chapter. There we saw that,
in opposition to the contract theories of Rousseau, he had sought to establish that
reason, rather than the will of the individual citizen, was the true source of
legitimate power. For over five decades, this was the theme that informed his
writings and his extensive political career: Guizot was Minister of Education
between 1832 and 1837, Foreign Minister between 1840 and 1847, and Premier
in 1848. Arguably, however, it was the short period between the restoration of the
monarchy and the early
years of the 1820s that was most decisive for his intellectual
development. Responding to events as they unfolded, it was in these years that he
published Du gouvernement représentatif en France, en 1816, Du gouvernement de la
France, depuis la Restauration et du ministère actuel, and Des moyens de gouvernement
et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France. Between 1820 and 1822 he also
delivered the series of lectures that, three decades later, were published in two
volumes as Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe.
Guizot was born in Nîmes to a prosperous Protestant family.122 His father had
been executed during the Terror. After a period of exile in Switzerland, Guizot
arrived in Paris in 1805, and there began a brilliant academic career, matched by a
rapid entry into liberal circles. In 1814 he participated in the formulation of the
Charte and then, unlike Benjamin Constant, again went into exile with the return
of Napoleon Bonaparte. For the next five years he operated on the margins
of government, seeking like his friend Royer-Collard to secure a liberal reading of
the Charte. With the assassination of the Duc de Berri he was effectively forced
into opposition. Faced with this turn of events and with the threat of counter-
revolution, he determined upon outlining the principles of a form of government
he thought appropriate to modern society.
The starting point was an analysis and interpretation of the Revolution of 1789.
The Revolution, Guizot argued controversially, ‘was a war, a real war, such as the
world had previously known between foreign peoples’.123 For more than thirteen
centuries, he argued, France had been divided between ‘a defeated people’ and a
‘victorious people’. Her history had been the history of this struggle. The result
of the Revolution, he asserted, was beyond doubt that the former defeated people
had become the victorious people. To that extent, the Revolution was a form of
retribution, an act of revenge by a majority which had been for so long oppressed by
a dominant minority. It was, however, precisely the numerical superiority of the
victors that had led the ‘theoreticians of the revolution’ to imagine, incorrectly, that
this thereby presaged the establishment of the sovereignty of the people as the new
principle of government. This was not so, Guizot replied, for the good reason that
122 See Gabriel de Broglie, Guizot (1990) and Laurent Theis, François Guizot (2008).
123 François Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration et du ministère actuel
(1820), 1.
174
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
what had occurred was the straightforward victory of ‘one portion of the people
over another’. It was precisely this victory that the Charte had acknowledged.
The political dilemma that now faced France, Guizot argued in 1820, was
whether she was to be governed in concert with these ‘new interests’ and to their
‘profit’ or whether she was to be ruled ‘under the influence’ of the old interests
associated with the aristocracy and the clergy. In broad outline, Guizot believed
that, before 1820, the governments of the Restoration had taken ‘the new France as
their ally’ and that, after the arrival in power of the Villèle ministry, they had sided
with the anachronistic and dangerous forces of counter-revolution. Consequently,
Guizot spent the 1820s arguing against the foolishness of this strategy, believing
that it would only serve to continue France’s political instability. At the same time,
he identified the need for a ‘national party’ that could rally and organize the forces
of the ‘new France’ in the parliamentary chamber. In so doing, he sketched out
what he saw as a ‘new means of government’ resting upon ‘constitutional equality
and legal liberty’.124
Guizot did this principally in Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans
l’état actuel de la France.125 He there questioned the principle of the sovereignty of
the people, accepting nonetheless that during the Revolution it had served as a ‘cri
de guerre’ and as the precursor of ‘a great social metamorphosis’. Removed from its
revolutionary context, he argued, it could properly be understood as a principle that
defined ‘government in terms of the general interest rather than government in the
name of this or that private interest’. Thus reconceptualized, it could be allied to a
recognition of the ‘dominant interests’ and ‘legitimate needs’ of the new society,
and as such was better understood as ‘the sovereignty of justice, of reason, of
right’.126 So too he questioned whether the Revolution’s hostility to aristocracy and
privilege had endured. The ‘new France’, Guizot accepted, had feared nothing
more than ‘the old French aristocracy’, to the point that the ‘doctrine of equality’
had become ‘a confused dogma’ leading its proponents ‘to pursue a fantasy’. With
time, however, and as ‘the inferior classes’ had obtained their goals, the anger had
subsided and ‘the idea of equality had appeared in a more tranquil and pure form,
always carrying the same name but no longer challenging all superiorities with the
same threats, no longer provoking the same furious passions’.127
The demand for equality, Guizot therefore argued, could be reduced to the
following terms: ‘citizens should depend upon their own merits and upon their
own strengths; through their own efforts, everyone should become what they can
become, meeting no institutional obstacles that prevent them from rising (if they
are capable of it) nor support that places them permanently in a superior position
(if they are not able to hold their own)’.128 The love of equality, in summary,
should have no other principle than ‘the need to rise in society, the most powerful
of the needs of our nature’. Guizot’s programme, then, was a plea for a civil and
legal equality that would allow all those with ability and determination to make the
124 See Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 155–84.
125 Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (1821).
126 Ibid. 142–9.
127 Ibid. 157.
128 Ibid. 156–7.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
175
most of their talents, free from external hindrance. What was being envisaged was
the emergence of a ‘true, natural aristocracy’ appropriate to a ‘new order’ char-
acterized by social mobility.129 It was a liberal vision precisely because it opposed
despotism in all its forms, be it popular, Bonapartist, or monarchical.
Certain important consequences followed from these conclusions. It meant that
the function of a representative system of government was not to conjure up the
will of the majority through a complex, but flawed, numerical arithmetic but rather
to guarantee that ‘power’ passed into the hands of these ‘new superiorities’.130
Therefore, one of the tasks of government was to seek actively to bring these new
capacities and new interests into its ranks. This in turn led Guizot to conceptualize
government as ‘the head of society’ and to envisage that it could rightly concern
itself
‘with everything that is the object of public interest or that occasions general
movement’.131 This argument also obliged Guizot to reflect upon the mechanisms
that would ensure that these new ‘superiorities’ remained worthy of their place in
government. To that end, he envisaged an elaborate system of public transparency
built around ‘parliamentary chambers, the disclosure of their debates, elections,
liberty of the press, and trial by jury’.
It was in Guizot’s lectures at the Sorbonne that he gave his fullest exposition of
the electoral and parliamentary systems he thought most appropriate to achieve
these goals.132 The point of reference was medieval England. Developing his anti-
Rousseauian argument that government was legitimate if it rested upon the claims
of ‘eternal reason’ rather than upon the individual wills of its subjects, Guizot
contended that the function of representative government was to bring together all
the ‘scattered and incomplete fragments’ of reason dispersed among the individuals
who composed society. It was in this way that ‘public reason’ would be extracted
from the ‘bosom of society’.
Part of the charm of the medieval English system, according to Guizot, was that
it had evolved almost naturally out of a vibrant pattern of social self-regulation, and
it was thus ‘the extension and development of existing liberties’. Who, then, were
its electors and how did they exercise their rights? ‘The true, the sole general
principle made manifest in the distribution of electoral rights as it then existed
in England’, Guizot avowed, ‘is this: that right is derived from and belongs to
capacity.’133 The possessors of these rights, he went on, included ‘all men invested
with real independence, free to dispose of their person and wealth’. These were
primarily to be found among freeholders, the clergy, and the burgesses of the larger
towns. Beyond these classes existed only those ‘labouring on subordinate and
precarious property’, those reduced to ‘servile dependence and brutal ignorance’,
all of whom could quite justly be excluded from the franchise on the grounds
that they lacked the ‘material and moral’ conditions providing the ‘degree of
129 Ibid. 161.
130 Ibid. 165.
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