The Explosion of 1789 369
the Assembly adopted a suspensive veto by 673 to 325. The King himself made it
known, through Necker, that he did not want Mounier’s absolute veto, believing it
politically too dangerous ever to use in practice. The suspensive veto was soon de-
fined to mean that a measure passed against the King’s veto by two successive bi-
ennial legislatures, in addition to the one in which the measure originated, would
become law without his approval. The King thus received a power to delay, for as
long as six years, a program repeatedly endorsed by the legislature and presumably
by the electorate. This was surely a dangerous kind of appel au peuple. In any gov-
ernment such institutionalized confrontation or stalemate would have been im-
politic; in time of revolution and war it might be fatal, and in 1792 it was to prove
ruinous to the constitution and to the King, “Monsieur Veto,” himself.
It is clear that the materials did not exist in France for a constitution on the
American model, with “balanced government” in the manner of John Adams. In
fact, it seems that Adams himself would have voted against Mounier in 1789.
Stoutly defending his principles, Adams nevertheless thought that temporarily a
single house might be best for France, because a senate would “be formed, most
probably, of princes of the blood, cardinals, archbishops, dukes and marquises; and
all these together would have obstructed the progress of the reformation in reli-
gion and government, and procured an abortion to the regeneration of France.”^23
This was precisely the view of the Left, as it was already called, in the French As-
sembly. Patriots feared that even an elected upper house would be dominated by
the nobility, or turn in some way into a special “body” or “order” like the old parle-
ments or estates. But even the French Right in 1789 would not vote for an upper
house. What the truly conservative aristocrat desired, the little nobleman from the
country, was the old- fashioned “order” in which he had been born, to which he
owed his status, and which had been dissolved in the Estates General against his
will. He did not want an English House of Lords or an elective senate on the
American model, for such a body would be filled by wealthy and prominent nobles
or bourgeois, and the ordinary nobleman or gentleman of the provinces, if he went
into politics, would have to enter a lower house by soliciting votes from the com-
mon people.
There was wisdom in the arguments of Mounier and Mirabeau for a strong ex-
ecutive independent of the elected assembly. But the strong governor created in
1780 by the constitution of Massachusetts was an elected officer of limited term, as
was the strong President created at the Philadelphia convention for the United
States. In an appeal to the people he could be voted out. The French King, as Sie-
yès observed, was hereditary and irremovable. He was also a carryover from former
times, not really in sympathy with the new. The King could not be wholly trusted
p. 152, as also by Mathiez. All sources that give figures at all give only 89 as the number voting for two
houses. Some authorities (Egret, Lanzac de Laborie, Lacretelle) accuse the Right of following a poli-
tique du pire, that is, of voting for a single house in order to produce an unworkable constitution.
Lacretelle says that he remembers many having said, tout ne va pas encore assez mal (Histoire de
l ’Assemblée constituante, Paris, 1821, 1, 202); and Lanzac de Laborie attributes to Maury the cynical
remark that si vous établissiez deux chambres votre constitution pourrait se maintenir. I do not know on
what contemporary evidence such allegations may rest. I follow Egret in his conclusion on why Right
and Left combined to swamp Mounier by favoring a single house.
23 Discourses on Davila (1790) in Work s (1851), VI, 274.