368 Chapter XV
assemblies the will of the nation really lay in, the country would fall into anarchy
and dissolution. The National Assembly must bind its constituents, not be bound
by them. Most men were busy with their own affairs; they were in fact “work ma-
chines.” Since they had to obey the laws they had the right to consent to them; but
this meant only that they might choose representatives without dictating what
these representatives should be obliged to do. There could be no “democracy” in
France (that is “direct democracy”), with thousands of little assemblies each pursu-
ing its own program or forcing its will on the national government.^21 There should
be gouvernement représentatif, in which representatives were put into or taken out
of power by the voters, but, while in power, governed according to their own judg-
ment under orders from no one. As to those who urged a second chamber merely
to prevent hasty and ill- considered action, Sieyés had a favorite proposal to make
to them: the single National Assembly could subdivide into small groups for lei-
surely deliberation, then combine again for voting, by numerical majority, to ex-
press its authoritative decision.
Sieyès’ logic was hard and even repellent, but it is not easy to dismiss it as mis-
taken. It was perfectly true that the Assembly, if it was to hold to the advanced
position taken in the Declaration of Rights and the August decrees, would be
threatened from two directions: both from the side of the King and of those who
surrounded him in the use of a veto, and from the side of a people already aroused
to habits of direct action by the experience of revolution. The coming years were to
be characterized by a kind of absolutism in the national representative body, tem-
pered by the King’s pursuit of his own designs, and by appeals of malcontents, both
radical and conservative, to various regional and local assemblies against the gov-
ernment in Paris. This is only to say that during the Revolution France was deeply
divided, with no authority widely enough accepted to make civil peace.
The vote in the Assembly proved to be a disaster for Mounier. The bicameral
principle was defeated almost ten to one, with 849 votes for a single house, 89 for
two houses, and 122 abstaining.^22 Where Munier had insisted on the absolute veto,
21 At the beginning of 1789, on the eve of elections to the Estates General, Sieyès had been of a
contrary opinion on the referral of important decisions to subordinate assemblies. He then said that
the coming National Assembly (a term he already used) should confine itself to a few basic constitu-
tional changes, and should consult with provincial, district, and parish assemblies before legislating
on other matters. (See Instructions données par S. A. S. Monseigneur le duc d ’Orléans à ses representants
dans les bailliages [n.p., 1789], passim.) For Sieyès’ change of mind, and later distrust of such habitual
referenda, various historians have found it an adequate explanation to call him a bourgeois, alarmed
by the violence, the popular tumult, and the threats to property of the summer of 1789. Sieyès was
indeed a bourgeois, with 13,000 francs a year from various church benefices in 1789. Robespierre went
through a comparable evolution, from appeals to the assemblées primaires when he was out of the gov-
ernment, to attempts to control them when he was in the government, in 1793 and 1794; he, too, has
been explained as a bourgeois. But there is, after all, a problem of government itself.
22 On this elementary yet highly significant point there still seems to be confusion after more than
a century and a half of intensive work on the French Revolution. One often obtains the impression
that partisans of aristocracy voted for an upper chamber, with the implication that bicameralism was
an aristocratic and unicameralism a more democratic belief. The Moniteur (issue of September 8–12,
1789) gives only 499 as the number of those voting for a single house; it is followed by the Archives
parlementaires and by Buchez and Roux. The Moniteur is not a true source, however, for dates before
November 24, 1789, and it seems likely that this figure is a typographical error, since the Journal des
débats for September 10, 1789, gives the figure 849, which is adopted by Egret, Révolution de Notables,