History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

Its work was prodigious, its means a nullity; all that enthusiasm can inspire, the Assembly undertook and perfected, without a king, without a military leader, without a dictator, without an army, without any other strength than deep conviction. Alone, in the midst of an amazed people, with a disbanded army, an emigrating aristocracy, a despoiled clergy, a conspiring court, a seditious city, hostile Europe—it did what it designed. Such is the will, such the real power of a people—and such is truth, the irresistible auxiliary of the men who agitate themselves for God. If ever inspiration was visible in the prophet or ancient legislator, it may be asserted that the Constituent Assembly had two years of sustained inspiration. France was the inspired of civilisation.

III.

Let us examine its work. The principle of power was entirely displaced: royalty had ended by believing that it was the exclusive depositary of power. It had demanded of religion to consummate this robbery in the eyes of the people, by telling them that tyranny came from God, and was responsible to God only. The long heirship of throned races had made it believed that there was a right of reigning in the blood of crowned families. Government instead of being a function had become a possession; the king master instead of being chief. This misplaced principle displaced everything. The people became a nation, the king a crowned magistrate. Feudality, subaltern royalty, assumed the rank of actual property. The clergy, which had had institutions and inviolable property, was now only a body paid by the state for a sacred service. It was from this only one step to receiving a voluntary salary for an individual service. The magistracy ceased to be hereditary. They left it its unremoveability to confirm its independence. It was an exception to the principle of offices when a dismissal was possible, a semi-sovereignty of justice—but it was one step towards the truth. The legislative power was distinct from the executive power. The nation in an assembly freely chosen, declared its will, and the hereditary and irresponsible king executed it. Such was the whole mechanism of the Constitution—a people—a king—a minister. But the king irresponsible, and consequently passive, was evidently a concession to custom, the respectful fiction of suppressed royalty.

IV.

He was no longer will; for to will is to do. He was not a functionary; for the functionary acts and replies. The king did not reply. He was but a majestic inutility in the constitution. The functions destroyed, they left the functionary. He had but one attribute, the suspensive veto, which consisted of his right to suspend, for three years, the execution of the Assembly's decrees. He was an obstacle; legal, but impotent for the wishes of the nation. It was evident that the Constituent Assembly, perfectly convinced of the superfluity of the throne in a national government, had only placed a king at the summit of its institutions to check ambition, and that the kingdom should not be called a republic. The only part of such a king was to prevent the truth from appearing, and to make a show in the eyes of a people accustomed to a sceptre. This fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation. This was the real vice of the constitution of 1791: it was not consistent. Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures. The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness towards a race which had long worn the crown. If the race of the Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.

V.

However, the royalty of '91, very little different from the royalty of to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day. The error of all historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place, the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the people's eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it. The work of the Constituent Assembly was the regeneration of ideas and government, the displacing of power, the restoration of right, the abolition of all subjugation even of the mind, the freedom of consciences, the formation of an administration; and this work lasts, and will endure as long as the name of France. The vice of the institution of 1791 was not in any one particular point. It has not perished because the veto of the king was suspensive instead of absolute; it has not perished, because the right of peace or war was taken from the king, and reserved to the nation; it has not perished, because it did not place the legislative power in one chamber only instead of in two: these asserted vices are to be found in many other constitutions, which still endure. The diminution of the royal power was not the main danger to royalty in '91; it was rather its salvation, if it could have been saved.

VI.

The more power was given to the king, and action to the monarchical principle, the quicker the king and the principle would have fallen; for the greater would have been the distrust and hatred against him. Two chambers, instead of one, would not have preserved any thing. Such divisions of power would have no value, but in proportion as they are sacred. They are only sacred in proportion as they are the representatives of real existing force in the nation. Would a revolution which had not paused before the iron gates of the Château of Versailles have respected the metaphysical distinction of power of two kinds!

Besides, where were, and where would be now, the constitutive elements of two chambers, in a nation whose entire revolution is but a convulsion towards unity? If the second chamber be democratic and temporary, it is but a twofold democracy with but one common impulse. It can only serve to retard the common impulse, or destroy the unity of the public will. If it be hereditary and aristocratic, it supposes an aristocracy pre-existent in, and acknowledged by, the state. Where was this aristocracy in 1791? Where is it now? A modern historian says, "In the nobility, in the presence of social inequalities." But the Revolution was made against the nobility, and in order to level social hereditary inequalities. It was to ask of the Revolution itself to make a counter-revolution. Besides, these pretended divisions of power are always fictions; power is never really divided. It is always here or there, in reality and in its integrity,—it is not to be divided. It is like the will, it is one or it is not. If there be two chambers, it is in one of the two; the other complies or is dissolved. If there be one chamber and a king, it is in the king or the chamber. In the king, if he subjugates the Assembly by force, or if he buys it by corruption; in the chamber if it agitates the public mind, and intimidates the court and the army by the power of its language, and the superiority of its opinions. Those who do not see this have no eyes. In this soidisant balance of power there is always a controlling weight; equilibrium is a chimera. If it did exist, it would produce mere immobility.