The Explosion of 1789 365
take on its full meaning in 1792, was already in use in August 1789, to signify a
body outside of all government, sprung directly from the people, and authorized to
create institutions, as it were, de novo. The Americans, according to Mounier, may
have been in such a juridical condition in 1776, because they had repudiated their
King; but the same was not true of France, where the King still existed, and where
in fact no one dreamed of doing without him.^16
Sieyès took a sour satisfaction in preferring principles to common sense. He was
also less inclined than Mounier to overlook the King’s recent partisanship for the
nobility. Moreover, the King was refusing his approval to the Declaration of Rights
and to the August decrees, which, if not wholly desirable to Sieyès, were necessary
to keep harmony between the Assembly and the country. To Sieyès it was clear
that the Assembly should not have to seek the King’s permission on constitutional
matters, that the Assembly alone possessed the full pouvoir constituant, that the
King must be under the constitution and not a coauthor of it, and that Louis XVI,
like everyone else, should have only such lawful powers as the constitution might
confer upon him. If Louis XVI was antagonized, it made no difference to Sieyès.
The Assembly would have preferred, like Mounier, to avoid an open clash with
the King on such topics, but it was drawn on increasingly to agree with Sieyès,
because it really had no alternative. Mounier’s own position was contradictory: he
could not both get rid of aristocracy and let the King share in making the constitu-
tion. Given Louis XVI as he was, and given a revolution against royal absolutism
and the society of estates, it was impossible to escape the principles so loftily
handed down by the chilly wisdom of the Abbé Sieyès.
On the content of the constitution, as distinguished from its origin, Mounier at
first had a majority in the constitutional committee, and it was his ideas that were
laid before the Assembly at the end of August. He and his followers were dubbed
Monarchicals or Anglomaniacs by their opponents. Actually, it was at least as
much to American as to British examples that they pointed.
Mounier’s committee proposed a threefold organization of government: The
King, even supposing that for the constitution itself his consent was not necessary,
was to have, as the national executive, once the constitution was in operation, a
power of veto over legislation. The upper house, for which they used the American
term “senate,” was to be composed of men of property and standing; the commit-
tee did not specify the qualifications or mode of selection, but made it clear that
the new senate would not be hereditary, nor composed only of nobles, so that, in its
view, there was no danger of “aristocracy.” For the lower house, often called a house
of representatives in the debates, there was to be a very wide popular suffrage, but
with property qualifications for the members. Mounier and his friends repeatedly
cited the new United States federal constitution and the state constitutions, in-
cluding the new one about to be adopted in Pennsylvania (in place of the famous
democratic constitution of 1776), to justify the executive veto, bicameralism, and
property qualifications for house and senate. “One must have a bold philosophy,
indeed,” he plaintively remarked, “to be more free of prejudice than the Americans.”^17
16 Ibid., 37–38.
17 Ibid., 15.