The French Constitution 817
times. In practice in 1791 the distinction between active and passive citizens was
often locally uncertain. In principle, it is hard to see how the Assembly excluded
more than a quarter of the population on economic grounds.
Active citizens had the right to vote only for “electors,” who in turn, in electoral
assemblies, chose the national deputies, the bishops and various local officials. It
was these electors who exercised true political citizenship, and the heart of the
question is how many persons were qualified to be chosen as electors. To be an
elector, one had to be an active citizen paying a tax equal to ten days’ wages of
common labor. Various writers state that only about 50,000 persons in all France
could qualify as electors; see Gottschalk, Era of the Fr. Rev. (1929), p. 172; Ger-
shoy, Fr. Rev. (1947), p. 147; J. M. Thompson, Fr. Rev. (American edition, 1945),
p. 136; Göhring, Grosse Revolution (1951), II, 52; Klay, Zensuswahlrecht und Gleich-
heitsprinzip... 1791 (1956), p. 85. I have also fallen into this error in my History of
the Modern World (1956), 347. The enormity of the misrepresentation may be seen
by the fact that the number qualifying as electors, though not really known, is esti-
mated at 3,000,000; see Sagnac, p. 165 and Godechot, p. 74.
The error has arisen from a confusion of the number qualified to serve as elec-
tors with the number actually chosen and functioning as electors in 1791, which
was in the neighborhood of 50,000— naturally so, since the constitution provided
that there should be one elector for each hundred (or local fraction thereof ) of the
active citizens, who, as stated, were found to number 4,298,360 in 1791. It was of
course not always the same 50,000 persons who functioned as electors, or at least
such was not the intent or provision of the constitution. Electors were chosen in
1790; new electors were chosen in 1791; and the constitution provided for a new
choice of electors by active citizens in March 1793 and every two years thereafter.
Three- quarters of the active citizens, and some three- sevenths of all men over 21,
were in short qualified to serve as electors. The extent of participation is illustrated
by a curious incident of June 15, 1791, when the constitutional committee recom-
mended to the Assembly, for the forthcoming election of national deputies, the use
of a kind of mechanical tabulating device to count the vote in electoral assemblies.
One of the reasons offered was to prevent the deception of “electors who cannot
read and write.” This is very different from the picture of a France ruled by 50,000
of the “rich”; in this respect, at least, Taine’s picture of a bustling popular political
activity in 1791 seems far more realistic.
It has been usual even for historians with all the figures at hand to reach conclu-
sions somewhat at variance with them. Thus Sagnac and Godechot both tell us
that 3,000,000 qualified as electors, but that the wealthy bourgeoisie controlled the
state; that there were only 967 electors in Paris (meaning that 967 were chosen in
the election of 1791), which of course signifies that there were about 100,000 ac-
tive citizens, which in a city of 600,000 would in turn signify that only a minority
of adult males were “passive”; and they intimate that had the system been less
“bourgeois” the electors would have been more numerous, whereas actually absen-
teeism was chronic in the electoral assemblies, and sometimes there were only 200
present and voting in the electoral assembly of Paris, because most of the electors
could not afford to spend several days away from their normal occupations. It is