33 BULUS ROSSINI, Op cit
LIM SUPERIOR (µg/l)
5.11. CARACTERIZACIÓN DEL VERTIMIENTO
The most obvious question raised by this elaborate system of political representation is why Sieyès should have thought of it at all. One answer has usually been that he did so rather gradually and that he added more and more institutional complications to the system first outlined in 1789 in response to the violent sequence of events that led first to the Jacobin Terror of 1793–1794 and then to the slow death of the first French Re- public between 1794 and 1799. From this perspective, Sieyès was, as has often been said, the man who both opened and closed the French Revo- lution, the advocate of liberty in 1789 and the supporter of authority in 1799.56 But the description does not fit Sieyès’ own claim that he had
conceived of all the elements of his system before 1789. Nor is it easy to reconcile with his consistent reluctance to have anything to do with the many attempts made after 1789 to bring the Revolution to an end. The political strategy set out in the Views of the executive means and What is the
Third Estate? effectively wrecked the attempt by Louis XVI’s most popu-
lar minister Jacques Necker to use the Estates-General to transform the French monarchy into something more like the combination of King, Lords, and Commons that was the hallmark of the English system of gov- ernment. It set a powerful limit on every subsequent attempt to establish a constitutional compromise between the supporters of the monarchy and the leaders of the Revolution. Sieyès made no effort to align himself with any of the various figures who, at one time or another between 1789 and 1795, tried to find a way to end the Revolution. He was never a political ally of Mounier and the Monarchiens in 1789, or of Barnave, Duport and the Feuillants in 1790 or 1791 or of Brissot, Roland and the Girondin leaders after 1792, or of Boissy d’Anglas and the other major supporters of the Directory after 1794. He broke with Mirabeau in 1791 when the latter began to organize a campaign headed by the departmen- tal authorities to revive the authority of the monarchy as the basis of a final compromise between the king and the National Assembly. This consistent unwillingness to abandon his own system of political represen- tation and find a way to compromise with the advocates of a mixed or balanced system of government was matched by a vigorous insistence upon the unprecedented opportunity for freedom and justice provided by the events of 1789 and an emphatic refusal to allow that opportunity to be lost. Privately, Sieyès was even more adamant. “Fate,” he wrote in
57A. N. 284 AP 4, dossier 14: “Le sort avoit dit à un homme, je te donne l’immor-
talité pour un écu. Il a accepté le marché, mais il n’a pas eu de quoi payer; et c’est toujours pour cet homme que je vois travailler les personnes que j’estime le plus.”
58Antoine-Jacques-Claude-Joseph Boulay de la Meurthe, Théorie constitutionnelle de
Sieyès (Paris, 1836), pp. 4–5.
a note to his political ally, the former marquis de Condorcet during the winter of 1790–1791 (at a time when Condorcet was considering leaving the Jacobin club and endorsing Mirabeau’s rapprochement with the king and the court), “told a man, ‘I will give you immortality in exchange for a guinea (un écu)’. He accepted the bargain but then didn’t have the means to pay. Those who I see working for that man are those who I value the most.”57
From this perspective, the turn to Bonaparte in 1799 looks less like an admission of defeat and more like a last, determined attempt to establish the system that he had failed to establish in 1789. This was what he em- phasized in his own handwritten introduction to the draft of the consti- tution of the Year VIII that he went on to dictate to Antoine Joseph Boulay de la Meurthe.58This second (or, if his failure to influence the re-
publican constitution of 1795 is included, third) attempt to establish the system of representative government suggests that Sieyès had quite con- sistent reasons for advocating the elaborate system of political representa- tion that he had devised and that these were largely the same in 1789 as they were to be in 1799. They were connected to a conception of revo- lution that has all but disappeared from the historiography of the French Revolution, mainly because the French Revolution did not, in the first instance, follow the course that, before 1789, a modern revolution was widely expected to follow. One of the many reasons why it did not was because Sieyès published his three pamphlets in 1789. The strategy that they contained played a causal part in turning what might have been pos- sible into what, with hindsight, now looks like no more than lurid polit- ical speculation, deliberately exaggerated by the opponents of the French royal government to increase support for the Patriot cause. But this was not how things looked in the summer of 1788 at the time when Sieyès began to write what became the Views of the executive means available to the
representatives of France in 1789.
The Revolution of 1789 was not quite like the revolution that was often predicted in eighteenth-century political speculation. Instead, it was the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution that was the revolution that had long been foretold. The looming menace of something like the Terror, either in France or in Britain, the most powerful European states, was a widely and vividly predicted feature of eighteenth-century assess-
59Jean Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne [1772], ed.
Barbara de Negroni (Paris, Nizet, 1990), p. 164. I have slightly modified the translation given in Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Vic- tor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 178. The best starting point for the study of eighteenth-century conceptions of revolution can now be found in Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History:Timing History, Spacing Con-
cepts (Palo Alta, Stanford University Press, 2002), chs. 5, 8-10.
60Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet, “De la société en général. Révolution singulière
dont l’ Europe est menacée,” Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires du dix-huitième siècle , 1 (1777), pp. 83–103 (pp. 83 and 103).
61Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, Entretiens d’un jeune prince avec son gou-
verneur, 4 vols. (Lausanne, 1785), vol. 3, pp. 234, 318; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the His- tory of Civil Society [1767], ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,
1966), Part V, section iv, pp. 231–2; Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Notre gloire ou nos rêves [1779] in his Oeuvres, 13 vols. (Paris, 1795), vol. 13, p. 396.
ments of the future of the modern world. “I see,” wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1772, “all the states of Europe rushing to their ruin. Monar- chies, republics, all those nations with all their magnificent institutions, all those fine and wisely balanced governments, have grown decrepit and threaten soon to die.”59The outcome of this race towards ruin was not
expected to be positive. “The singular revolution with which Europe is threatened,” warned the journalist Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet in 1777, would eventuate either in the total collapse of modern civilization or would throw up “some new Spartacus” to establish an “absolute division of the goods of nature” after destroying the “murderous and deceitful” system of laws and government underlying the property-based regimes of the modern world. “One or other of these two calamities,” Linguet con- cluded, “is inevitable.”60Although his prognosis was lurid, it was far from
unusual. From the marquis de Mirabeau’s warning that the “necessary consequence” of the modern “social revolution” would be “absolute decadence, corruption and, eventually, the dispersal of existing political societies,” to the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson’s observation that the “boasted refinements of the polished age” would serve simply to “prepare for mankind the government of force,” to the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s prediction that the modern world was “nearer than one might think to the revolution that Asia underwent,” so that “the time may not be too far away when Europe will languish under the splendor and misery of despotism and slavery,” claims about decline and fall, lead- ing to crisis, revolution and a despotic, highly militarized republican regime were one of the staples of Enlightenment thought, particularly in the four decades between the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 and the beginning of the French Revolution.61 From this per-
62Lebrun, Voix, p. 83. 63Lebrun, Voix, p. 84. 64Lebrun, Voix, p. 85.
revolution similar to the one that had destroyed the ancient world, a rev- olution from which there might be no way back.
A particularly vivid example of this kind of speculation was laid out in a pamphlet entitled La Voix du citoyen (The citizen’s voice) published shortly before the Estates-General assembled at Versailles in May 1789. Its au- thor, Charles François Lebrun, had been a political advisor of the French chancellor René-Nicolas de Maupeou, drafting some of Maupeou’s legis- lation during the last great demonstration of royal authority in 1771 and, as the duc de Plaisance, was to become a prominent political figure dur- ing the first Empire. In La Voix du citoyen Lebrun issued a stark warning of what might happen if the Estates-General failed to deal with the monar- chy’s financial problems. Disagreement between the three estates over how to apportion the tax-burden needed to fund the deficit would, he warned, precipitate a bankruptcy whose economic and social effects would be catastrophic. It would destroy the authority of the state and shatter every social bond, leaving the French nation exposed to the depredations of all the other European powers. If France managed to sur- vive at all, it would be reduced to the least of all the powers.62 But,
Lebrun continued, in this final extremity, patriotism would find its ap- pointed place. It would recognize necessity as the supreme law and, adopting the ancient republican maxim that the public safety had to be the supreme law (salus populi suprema lex esto), the French nation would dispense with legality and justice in order to preserve itself. It would sac- rifice both the nobility and the clergy to the “tumultuous equality” of democracy. And if democracy was in turn to fail, France would still find a way to ensure that she was not effaced from among the European pow- ers. A “determined leveller” would emerge from within the Third Estate to found a new constitution upon the ruins of the old.63 Not content
with the destruction of the nobility and the clergy, this “audacious level- ler” would summon the citizenry to even greater liberty and prosperity. But he “would lack the authority needed for his beneficent views.”64At
every step, perpetual meetings would distract the people from industry, agriculture, and commerce. At once, Lebrun predicted, a general desire (le voeu général) would lead him to be entrusted with all public power as a legal despot, thus bringing the long cycle of political conflict to an end. Not surprisingly, Lebrun republished his pamphlet in 1810. It was a very graphic prediction of the sequence of events running from 1789 to the Jacobin Terror and the first Empire.
65“The sovereignty of the king was transferred to the people; aristocratic society
was replaced by the world of free and equal individuals, a dual upheaval, carried out so rad- ically—and this is still the mystery of 1789—that it gave the question of the reconstitution of society the character of a philosophical question analogous to those treated by the philosophers of natural jurisprudence. . . . So much so, that of the two great classical prob- lems that the French Révolution has posed for historians—that of the causes of 1789 and that of the lurch from 1789 to 1793—the latter is perhaps less of an enigma than the for- mer.” (“La souveraineté du roi est passée au peuple, la société aristocratique a été remplacée par le monde des individus libres et égaux: double basculement opéré si radicalement—c’est encore le mystère de 1789—qu’il donne à la reconstitution du corps politique le caractère d’une question philosophique analogue à celles qu’ont traitées les philosophies jus natural- istes. . . . Si bien que des deux grands problèmes classiques que la Révolution française pose à l’historien: celui des causes de 1789, et celui de la dérive de 1789 à 1793, le second est peut-être moins énigmatique que le premier”): François Furet and Ran Halévi, Orateurs de
la Révolution française (Paris, Gallimard, 1989), pp. xciv–xcv.
66The phrases were coined by George V. Taylor, “Non-capitalist Wealth and the
Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 79 (1967), pp. 469–96 and Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1964).
The Jacobin phase of the French Revolution may well have come after the revolution of 1789, but in imaginative terms the Terror came first. This has an important bearing both on Sieyès’ political thought and on the wider question of the origins and nature of the French Revolution it- self. Once Sieyès’ system is set in the context of eighteenth-century pre- dictions of revolution, it looks less inexplicably radical in its premises and effects than the best modern historians have sometimes taken it to be.65
If, to use the terminology of the modern historiography of the French Revolution, the revolution of 1789 was a “political revolution with social consequences,” this was because something like “the social interpretation of the French Revolution” was already in existence as a nightmarish vi- sion of modernity’s future.66From this perspective, Sieyès’ system might
best be described as one of the last of an elaborate sequence of theoretical attempts (not only in France and not just before 1789) to conceive of a system of government compatible with those of the properties of the modern world that were taken to be likely to maintain its potential for peace and prosperity while, at the same time, forestalling those taken to be likely to condemn it to repeat the cycle of decline and fall that had de- stroyed its ancient counterpart. The context from which Sieyès’ idea of representative government emerged was shaped by this kind of concern with modernity’s potential for catastrophe and the accompanying search for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying modernity’s ca- pacity for civilization. The elaborate system of political representation that he tried unsuccessfully to persuade his contemporaries to adopt, first
67Pierre Jean Grosley, Londres, 3 vols. (Neuchâtel, 1774), vol. 3, p. 331.
68David Hume, “Of Public Credit” [1752], in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political
and Literary ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, Indiana, Liberty Press, 1985), pp. 360–1. More
generally, see Istvan Hont, “The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in
Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael So-
nenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic,” History of Political
Thought, 18 (1997), pp. 64–103, 267–325.
69Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy [1767] (ed. An-
drew Skinner, Edinburgh and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966), Bk. II, ch. xiv, pp. 226–7.
in 1789, then in 1795 and again, in 1799 was designed to prevent, not promote, the long-predicted “social revolution” of eighteenth-century speculation about the future and the despotic outcome that it was ex- pected to entail.
As many eighteenth-century political theorists had claimed, the most immediate source of the threat was the deficit. “The revolutions that the system of public loans will produce all over Europe have no precedent in the history of the ancients,” noted one French commentator at the begin- ning of the reign of Louis XVI.67The potential effects of using public
credit to fund the costs of war had been described most vividly by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1752. Either, he wrote, “the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation.”68
Hume’s warning was widely noticed. In his Inquiry into the Principles of Po-
litical Oeconomy of 1767, the exiled Scottish Jacobite Sir James Steuart
drew out the wider geo-political implications of allowing the modern system of war finance to run unchecked. Suppose, he wrote, that a Prince was to contract debts up to the value of the whole property of the nation, as Hume had surmised, taking the land-tax up to twenty shillings in the pound “and then let him become bankrupt to the creditors,” such a ruler would at once have emancipated himself from the public debt and have at his disposal “the income of all the lands...for the use of the state.” “I ask,” Steuart commented, “what confederacy among the modern European Princes, would carry on a successful war against such a people?...And what country could defend itself against such an enemy?”69 This had
been why Hume had issued his warning with its brutal recommendation that it might be better to destroy the debt by a voluntary state bankruptcy than allow the debt to destroy the nation. When, in 1787, the English political commentator Arthur Young made an assessment of the likely outcome of the developing conflict in France over the royal government’s financial deficit, his prognosis followed Hume’s logic. “Dined today,” he
70Arthur Young, Travels in France, ed. Constance Maxwell (Cambridge, U.K., Cam-
bridge University Press, 1929), pp. 84–5.
71A. N. 284 AP 2, dossier 12 (note headed “finances”).
noted in Paris on 17 October 1787, “with a party, whose conversation was entirely political.” “It is very remarkable,” he continued,
that such conversation never occurs, but a bankruptcy is a topic; the curious question on which is, would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war, and a
total overthrow of the government? The answers that I have received to this
question appear to be just; such a measure, conducted by a man of abilities, vigour and firmness, would certainly not occasion either one or the other. But the same measure, attempted by a man of a different character, might possibly do both.70
Sieyès himself drafted a model of the long-term effects of public debt that followed the same logic as the one that Hume and Steuart had out- lined.71But France was an absolute not a constitutional monarchy. The
implications of a failure to take responsibility for dealing with the deficit out of the hands of the royal government were set out most fully in the Views
of the executive means. A considerable part of the pamphlet (see below, pp.
24–32, 60–7) was devoted to a discussion of the possibility that, faced with a choice between preserving itself and preserving public faith (its obliga- tions to its creditors), the royal government would opt for the first. There were, Sieyès wrote, two moments at which a bankruptcy was possible. The first, which would have averted summoning the Estates-General al- together, had passed. But the second remained a real possibility because it might be carried through with the support of the Estates-General itself. Instead of a bankruptcy engineered by ministerial fiat, the representatives of the nation might be persuaded that “at bottom” what was at issue was no more than “a combat between landowners and capitalists” (as investors in the public funds were known in eighteenth-century France) and, rather than meet the costs of funding the debt, would prefer to sacrifice