APPENDIX V
“DEMOCRATIC” AND “BOURGEOIS”
CHARACTERISTICS IN THE FRENCH
CONSTITUTION OF 1791It seems desirable to perform, for the French constitution of 1791, an operation
resembling, in a lesser way, the one recently performed by Robert E. Brown for the
Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and the United States federal constitution,
that is, to assemble evidence that the French constitution of 1791 was somewhat
more “democratic,” and somewhat less “bourgeois,” than has been commonly said
in the past half century.
Conservatives in 1791, such as Burke and Mounier, regarded the constitution as
“democratic,” meaning that it applied the elective principle very extensively, based
representation on numbers, and did away with inheritance of public position. As
late as Taine it was customary for conservatives to stress, though with disapproval,
the breadth of popular participation in politics under the constitution of 1791
(Origines de la France contemporaine, 1882,II, 263– 70). With Madelin, on the con-
servative side, we get an emphasis on narrowly bourgeois provisions which belied
the Declaration of Rights (Rev. f r., 1912, pp. 108– 9). Burke, defending “a perma-
nent landed interest,” had already, in 1791, identified the French experiment in
political democracy with a kind of bourgeois rule, or government, as he said, by
“tradesmen, bankers and voluntary clubs of bold, presuming young persons: advo-
cates, attorneys, notaries, managers of newspapers, and those cabals of literary men
called academies” (Works, 1839, IV, 13).
On the democratic side, in 1789– 1791, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Grégoire,
Marat, and others objected to the limitations placed by the constitution on suf-
frage and electoral powers. By the time that Michelet and Louis Blanc treated the
subject, shortly after the Revolution of 1848, the question was already an old one,
with Michelet emphasizing the democratic character of the constitution, offering
figures, and denying that the constitution was “essentially bourgeois, as has so
often been repeated,” and Louis Blanc maintaining that it “was essentially bour-