Horace Mann Conaway

“ Notre choix ne doit pas être difficile; les patriotes font la majorité de la nation. Ils peuvent donc, s’ils savent se réunis, faire des choix favorables à leurs intérêts. Les électeurs étant payés à trois livres ... il n’est plus nécessaire d’être riche bourgeois, prêtre, ou ci-devant noble pour accepter cette noble mission; et, si la majorité des électeurs est au niveau de la révolution du 10 Août 1792 nos nouveaux députés ne tarderont pas à la consolider et à sauver le peuple par une constitution conformé à la déclaration des droits et à l’intérêt du plus grand nombre. ”

“ Liberty and equality are their supreme good; they will sacrifice all to preserve these. They have a horror for the crimes of the nobles, the hypocrisy of the priests, the tyranny of kings. Kings! they wish no more of them, they know that outside of a Republic there is no liberty.” Again on September 24, the Convention decreed “that there shall be named six commissioners charged with rendering as full an account as shall be possible, of the present state of the Republic and that of Paris.” On September 25, the Convention declared “the French Republic is one and indivisible.” ”

“ While we recognize, Sire, that you alone are lord and master and the sole lawgiver, and that there are laws which changing times, the needs of your people, the maintenance of order and the administration of your kingdom may oblige you to modify, substituting new ones according to the forms always observed in this state, we nevertheless believe it to be our duty to call to your attention the existence of laws as old as the monarchy, which are permanent and invariable, the guardianship of which was committed to you along with the crown itself.... ”

“ M. Lally Tollendal approved this project, but argued that it was dangerous to adopt any such articles separate from the Constitution; he at the same time called the attention of the Assembly to the great difference between a new-born colonial people, who were breaking with a distant government, and an old nation extending over an immense territory, one of the first nations of the world, which for eight centuries had obeyed the same dynasty and had cherished the royal power when it had been tempered by custom. This nation, he said, will idolize this power when it shall be regulated by laws. ”

“ On July 9, 1789, M. Mounier, who had been charged by the Constituent Assembly with the preparation of a scheme for a constitution, presented a report in behalf of the committee, the first article of which reads: “Tout gouvernement doit avoir pour unique but le maintien des droits des hommes; d’où il suit que pour rappeller constamment le gouvernement au but proposé, la constitution doit commencer par la déclaration des droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme.” ”

“ As Paris may rightly be considered the source of the anti-monarchical agitation, the attitude of the third estate in this city at the opening of the Revolution may justly be taken to represent the feeling of the radical element toward the monarchy. In their cahier they said: “In the French monarchy, the legislative power belongs to the nation conjointly with the king; to the king alone belongs the executive power.” [94] The sub-cahiers from the districts of the city expressed the same idea. [95] In truth, in not a single cahier examined do we find a hint of any opposition to the monarchy. ”

“ Si c’est désobéissance de bien servir, le Parlement fait ordinairement cette faute, et quand il se trouve conflit entre la puissance absolue du Roi et le bien de son service, il juge l’un préférable à l’autre, non par désobéissance, mais pour son devoir, à la décharge de sa conscience. ”

“ Our object is to trace from the beginning the gradual development of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, of the first written constitution in France, and to follow the movement which led to the abolition of monarchy and to the adoption of the republican form of government. In view of the complex phenomena of the French Revolutionary period, it is advantageous to our understanding of that surpassingly interesting era to view the various classes of facts from different standpoints. The Revolution was social, religious, political, and economic. ”

“ Malesherbes, in speaking to the king as the organ of the parlement in 1770, said: “You hold your crown, Sire, from God alone; but you will not refuse yourself the satisfaction of believing that, for your power, you are likewise indebted to the voluntary submission of your subjects. There exist in France some inviolable rights, which belong to the nation.” Quoted from Remontrances de la Cours des Aides, 1770, by De Tocqueville; Mémoires, etc., i, 259-60. For Rousseau’s literary influence, see Joseph Texte, Jean Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Littéraire, Liv. ii, Paris, 1895. ”

“ Let it be asserted with the strongest emphasis that these six articles were not [23] merely the expression of theories. They had an intensely practical genesis, for they were the slowly-matured product of a reaction against a long-felt vexatious regime. That regime had interfered with private property and with individual action in such ways as to be grievous, yes, intensely grievous to the people.
“Art. 16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.” ”

“ The Physiocrats advocated as a remedy for this injustice a system which should make the taxes proportionate to each one’s productive riches. Turgot, taking the first step towards the realization of this idea, said, in defense of his proposal for the abolition of corvées, February, 1776: “The expenses of government having for their object the interest of all, all should contribute to them; and the more one enjoys the advantages of society, the more one should regard himself honored in sharing the expenses. ”

“ A little coterie of men became anti-monarchical; these developed the Club of Cordeliers. In 1791, when Louis XVI showed his distrust of the French people and tried to escape, hostility to the monarch and also to the monarchy was strong. Even republicanism was championed by an orator in the Assembly and by a few newspapers; one of these journals, the Révolutions de Paris, had a large circulation. The king however accepted the Constitution in September, 1791, and the outcry against him and in favor of the abolition of the monarchy subsided. ”

“ What way could the Constitutionalists turn? Sorel has truly said: “The abolition of royalty was the acknowledgment of a fact; the proclamation of the Republic was the recognition of a necessity. A government was necessary to France, and no other than a republican government was possible.” [163] And the Republic had existed in [61] fact in France for two short, but very critical periods. From June 21 to September 14, 1791, the king had been suspended and the Constituent Assembly had conducted through the ministry the work of the executive. ”

“ C’est ainsi que les Américains ont fait leur déclaration de droits; ils en ont à dessein écarté la science; ils ont présenté les vérités politiques qu’il s’agissait de fixer sous une forme qui pût devenir facilement celle du peuple, à qui seul la liberté importe, et qui seul peut la maintenir. ”

“ Count de Mirabeau’s Lettres de cachet, published in 1783, may be regarded as among the earliest of such personal expressions. Its attitude was rather negative than constructive. It attempted to show that a despotism depended not at all upon the character of the particular sovereign, but on the absence or insufficiency of laws; that France without a veritable constitution was only a despotic state, and that there is no mean between an absolute despotism and the absolute reign of law. [83] In 1787, the Count declared, “What is necessary is a constitution; France is ripe for the Revolution.” ”

“ He meant Republicanism not in the modern sense, but in the sense of a monarchy with democratic local institutions. Aubertin, L’Ésprit public, 278, 279. Even the Ésprit des Lois gave some sanction to a Republic as an ideal form of government when it recognized virtue as the temper of society required for this form of government. Voltaire, friend of the monarchy and critic of Rousseau as he was, wrote: “Le plus tolérable des gouvernements est le républicain, parce-que c’est celui qui rapproche le plus les hommes de l’égalité naturelle.” ”

“ The following excerpt from A Residence in France, 1792-95, described in a series of letters from an English Lady, i, 93: “If the electors and elected of the other departments be of the same complexion with those of Arras, the new Assembly will not, in any respect, be preferable to the old one. I have reproached many of the people of this place, who, from their education and property, have a right to take an interest in the public affairs, with thus suffering themselves to be represented by the most desperate and worthless individuals of the town. ”

“ Assembly only “suspended Louis XVI provisionally, until the National Convention should pronounce upon the measures it believed ought to be adopted for assuring the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality.” Clubs, sections, journals, and provinces, and even radical democrats, are rather silent about a substitute for the monarchy. When the abolition came on September 21, it was received as the news of a national victory; but at first the term Republic, used on the 22nd, was little greeted by the nation. ”

“ June 20, in the Tennis Court at Versailles, and there adopted the resolution which declared the National Assembly a Constitutional Convention, and subscribed to the following, known as the Tennis Court Oath: “The National Assembly, regarding itself as called upon to establish the Constitution of the kingdom, effect a regeneration of the state and maintain the true principles of the monarchy, may not be prevented from continuing its deliberations in whatever place it may be forced to take up its sittings. ”

“ This may be answered by the statement that generally, in movements depending upon public opinion, the people are more pronounced against an abuse or misuse which they have experienced than about an untried theory; are more capable to pronounce upon a destructive than upon a constructive scheme, are more enlightened in their negative than in their positive actions. The Constituent Assembly was happy in its negative work of destroying the abuses of the old régime, but less [60] felicitous in its positive work of reconstruction. ”

“ From these citations, we are warranted in the inference that the members of the Constituent Assembly in its earlier period regarded the monarchy as the natural and the most suitable form of government for France. On the question of the division of powers, the number of chambers, the elective or hereditary kingship, the absolute or limited veto, there were differences of opinion; but national tradition and personal attachment to Louis XVI. were of sufficient force to bar any discussion of other possible forms for the executive branch. ”

“ Society has a right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.”
Article 15 was both theoretical and reactionary against actual abuses. If the nation was to be supreme over all of its agents, it could only hope effectually to maintain that superiority by holding all its functionaries strictly accountable. Practical experience under the monarchy in the collection and the expenditure of finances had impressed an effective lesson upon the French people of the abuses incident to irresponsible officers. ”

“ Mais, nous, Messieurs, nous avons pour concitoyens une multitude immense d’hommes sans propriétés, qui attendent, avant toute chose, leur subsistence d’un travail assuré, d’une police exacte, d’une protection continue, qui s’irritent quelquefois, non sans de justes motifs, du spectacle du luxe et de l’opulence,” etc. ”

“ This transformation of the theory of liberty from a privilege to a natural right was chiefly accomplished after 1734. Boulainvilliers, in L’Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France, published (1727) in Holland after his death, asserted as its fundamental thought: “Le gouvernement féodal est le chef d’oeuvre de l’ésprit humain.” To the author, all progress of royal, civil, or municipal authority is an usurpation of the rights of the nobility, who were the only heirs of the early Franks, conquerors of the Gauls. ”

“ Ideas have their origin in individual minds, are advocated by these individuals, and by and by the nucleus of devotees has grown into a party that serves as an organ of propagation and makes use of the instrumentalities of their age for the dissemination of their views and for the moulding of public opinion into conformity thereto. If the conditions are favorable, the new ideas secure acceptance and are embodied in institutions ”