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The 18th Brumaire of the Abbé Sieyès
- Thread starter Gary Oswald
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Good LORD, that was a complicated constitution. I agree you'd see a shift towards a supremely powerful Elector because how else could anything ever work?!
The other alternative could be that the College of Guardians becomes an “executive Senate” somewhat akin to the way men of the 18th-century thought the Roman Senate had worked, and a lot of historians in the 19th-century, especially Vandal and Thiers, (and I think they were probably right) thought that this was what Sieyès planned. Either way though, the whole finely balanced construct has to become lopsided to work out.
It was quite the complex constitution, but something that interests me in this situation would be, assuming Joubert is loyal to Sieyes' idea, how the military situation would progress. Would he be put in charge of any of the field armies? What about Bonaparte, what would he be up to? Moreau?
Also, from what other people told me, it did seem like Sieyes was crafting the position of Grand Elector with himself in mind and the general who gave him his support would be Minister of War, so I was a bit surprised that the article seemed to say that Sieyes was planning to give the former position to Napoleon.
Also, from what other people told me, it did seem like Sieyes was crafting the position of Grand Elector with himself in mind and the general who gave him his support would be Minister of War, so I was a bit surprised that the article seemed to say that Sieyes was planning to give the former position to Napoleon.
On the first question I need a little time to think on it to give you a decent answer, but can answer the latter quite promptly.
The idea that Sieyès wanted to be Grand Elector is an entirely baseless one put about first by Bonaparte and then taken up by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries (especially François Furet), but was not assumed by most contemporaries close to Sieyès. Roederer, for example, argues that Napoleon chaffed against the idea of the Great Elector because he felt that “being the most illustrious warrior in Europe [the Great Elector], would be obliged to place the fortunes of the state in the hands of less capable generals” which suggests he clearly thought without reservation that Sieyès intended Bonaparte to play the role, and so did the man himself. You can find similar statements in Daunou’s account of the coup, though I don’t have the book to hand as it’s quite rare. The historian J.H. Clapham was likewise fairly sceptical as to whether Sieyès actually wanted to be the Grand Elector, and whilst he speculates that the War Consul might have been designed to ‘tempt’ Napoleon that’s purely speculatory, and at any rate doesn’t mean Sieyès wanted the role of Elector for himself. Likewise, as Woloch argues, it was an open secret in Paris in 1799 that Sieyès intended to crown a Great Elector and that it was to be Bonaparte, whilst as Denis Bredin recounts most of those who had an inkling of what was to come prior to the coup thought Sieyès' powerless monarch would be the Duke of Brunswick or the younger brother of the King of Prussia. Almost no one thought he sought to make himself France's new King.
Basically the idea that Sieyès wanted to be the Elector himself stems from the idea that Sieyès was an egotist who, after a sparkling debut in 1789, basically saw the revolution as an opportunity for self-enrichment, whereas most modern Sieyès scholarship has moved quite far beyond that. The elector was a long-standing theoretical preoccupation of Sieyès' political project (you can find it in his work more or less as early as 1791), drawn in no small part from Rousseau, but it was always to be powerless, and for all his idealism, Sieyès certainly would never have abdicated a place in the constitutional fray like that when he had designed an institution for men modelled on his own career as a citizen-statesman-constitution writer; the College.
I imagine any general, be they Joubert or someone else, would try to decline to become Grand Elector due to the inherent inactivity of the role in favour of having the much more active position of the War Consul. In that case, would someone like Boulay de la Meurthe become Grand Elector, or might even Sieyès take the role “provisionally” with the intention of being absorbed into the College at a later date?
Why was the Duke of Brunswick considered for such a position as the Great Elector? Didn’t he once threaten to tear Paris to shreds nearly a decade ago? Would’ve seriously thought he would be the last person people anyone would consider.
He had quite a reputation as an enlightened monarch in the latter part of the century, so I assume that’s why, though I’d stress that I don’t think there’s any evidence Sieyès ever planned this. It’s more to illustrate that what everyone knew was that he wasn’t planning to make himself Elector.
Yes I think finding someone to be Elector is a big “if”, unless they have the foresight to think “cool yeah I’ll just subvert this all later”. This is roughly what happens in a TL I’m in the very early stages of planning, though not one which follows the, admittedly implausible, sequence of events outlined in my article, which is more a speculative attempt at seeing how Sieyès’ plan would turn out if every detail were implemented as intended.
Sure - I’m happy to answer questions on this all day to be honest, talking about Sieyès is a good distraction from actually having to write about the man.
I’ve honestly never been quite sure why Joubert was the choice other than personal amity, especially since Sieyès had already been cultivating Bonaparte since before he’d gone to Egypt. Sieyès eulogised Joubert before the convention when he died, and I think generally speaking they simply just worked well together.
The thing about those Constitutions and those weird divisions of competence between chambers is that they're rife in the period. The Directory had a similar division and the Empire too, going as far as three chambers, each playing its own part but separate. I think they owe something to the Venetian organization and baroque ways.
And what they all have in common is that they don't work if there is not enough time spent being a republic and/or a democracy beforehand. The Empire version did, sorta, but only because Napoléon was so authoritarian and so his word went and that was that. The incentive to use extralegislative means was too great and had proven all too much it succeeded often.
And what they all have in common is that they don't work if there is not enough time spent being a republic and/or a democracy beforehand. The Empire version did, sorta, but only because Napoléon was so authoritarian and so his word went and that was that. The incentive to use extralegislative means was too great and had proven all too much it succeeded often.
Yes, the Imperial constitution in particular is similarly arcane since it’s essentially an evolution of the Consulate which is in turn an adapted version of this Sieyèsian plan (particularly wrt to the three chambers which was one of his long-term fantasies) - and as you say, in the Consulate and Empire they only worked because they were meaningless in the face of Bonapartist unitary autocracy. I think this particular constitution takes the Directory’s to a new level, however, and it’s particularly notable that in 1795 Sieyès was largely excluded due to his insistence on all these competing competencies and mandates. I think that’s particularly true of the “dual election” system from above and below in these 1799 plans which are really more out there than anything beforehand. Likewise, the College of Guardians (and then the Senat) owe something to the Council of Ancients, but it’s much more simply an upper house than they were, so I think there is something to the notoriety of the weirdness of Sieyès’ system (as did contemporaries, even supporters of the Directorial constitution).
But yes as you say, the problem is that any constitution is going to be abridged (as I suggested was likely in my article) either in fact or in spirit through clever use of loopholes. Whether one survived, I think, is linked to whether the republic survived in the international arena and if it did if a stable equilibrium could emerge from whatever constitution was left standing.
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As I often note, it should be remembered that what they were ultimately replacing was the three-estates system of the Estates-General, or the structural similar if in detail distinct Reichstag and many other contemporary legislatures (in the vein of the Reichstag) or irregular constitutional assemblies (in the vein of the Estates-General); the idea of several different groups or "orders" in the legislature was far more reasonable and normal concept than it seems to us today. Historically, these were not separate chambers for the most part; the multi-chamber legislature in England was itself something of an accident of history. But the concept of "vote by order", that is, while they met and debated together, they voted separately, and a majority of the different orders had to support rather than a vote by head, was common -- some assemblies did all vote by head, some all vote by order, but most did order for some matters and head for others, or even double-majorities of both vote by head and vote by order. In the pre-chamberized English Parliament, for example, our best understanding is that all matters already needed a double-majority of both the two orders of Lords and Commons, which is what made chamberization relatively smooth, even though its permanence seems to have been accidental.
For my part, I think it's likely that a number of the ideas of this nature come from late 18th and early 19th French political scientists trying to harmonize the three-part structure of the historical Estates-General with the multi-chamber "perfect" system they could see across the Channel and across the Pond -- the Estates-General, the Reichstag, etc., to what extent that they worked, worked as a united body. I think that such multi-order legislatures probably can be perfectly functional as bodies (ignoring the question of democracy and fair representation), but that it's likely that once you get beyond two chambers it probably becomes too unwieldy to function if all chambers are expected to have a real role in the process.
For my part, I think it's likely that a number of the ideas of this nature come from late 18th and early 19th French political scientists trying to harmonize the three-part structure of the historical Estates-General with the multi-chamber "perfect" system they could see across the Channel and across the Pond -- the Estates-General, the Reichstag, etc., to what extent that they worked, worked as a united body. I think that such multi-order legislatures probably can be perfectly functional as bodies (ignoring the question of democracy and fair representation), but that it's likely that once you get beyond two chambers it probably becomes too unwieldy to function if all chambers are expected to have a real role in the process.
I agree that this is right in general of the 18th-century (especially in the United States) but I’m not sure it actually has much bearing on the specific system proposed in question. Sieyès, as you doubtless know, was the premier anti-Estate theorist of the age, particularly opposed to voting by order, and one thing he consistently stressed was a desire to break from the Estate based constitutional order of the Old Regime - his remark in What is the Third Estate “it is almost impossible not to see [the British constitution] as a monument to gothic superstition” makes that clear enough. Likewise Sieyès was an unusually bitter critic among the revolutionary moderates of the the American constitution and particularly of The Federalist. That’s also made clear in his constitutional designs of 1799, obsessed as they are to break free from the “vicious scaffolding” of Medieval constitutionalism. And whilst he appropriates some ideas from the past, his many chambered legislatures are not tiered in the sense of a modern unicameral, bicameral, tricameral etc. system which has been the Anglo-American constitutional heritage (and its gift, perhaps, to the world). Indeed a lot of these bodies aren’t legislatures at all - he has Tribunates and Colleges and Juries which sometimes look to the modern reader like legislative bodies but maybe are better considered through the lens of Roman institutions (which was Sieyès’ reference in revolt against his age).
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What were his objections to it? And more generally, was anyone in Revolutionary France advocating for a "copy the Americans" solution to the constitution?