1.1.  “Establishing the Constitution": the administration embodies the Nation

4 The Revolution was legally consummated on 17 June 1789 when, by their Declaration on the constitution of the assembly, the deputies transferred intact the title of sovereignty from the king to the nation. Based on the ideas of Sieyès, the Assembly proclaimed that it was "already made up of representatives sent directly by at least ninety-six hundredths of the nation." Its elective and demographic legitimacy, based on reason, empowered it alone to "interpret [and] present the general will of the nation". Louis XVI, who was sovereign on the basis of the authority of history and religion, was henceforth no longer able to "help form the national will”, which now belonged to the elected representatives. The Declaration of 17 June stated in effect that there "cannot be between the throne and this assembly any veto, or negative power [2]”.

5 According to the constitutional guidelines that it suggested, the Declaration of 26 August sanctioned the transfer of sovereignty in favour of the nation alone. Assuming that the king could represent it, he was unable to do so outside it: "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority which does not expressly emanate from it" [3]. This question of the unity of the body of the represented nation resurfaced a few days later when the deputies discussed the monarch’s right of veto. During the debate on "the permanence and organisation of the Legislative Body and Royal Assent", Sieyès insisted that "the King can never be separated, even theoretically, from the nation of which he represents the majesty. When the nation states its will, the King states it too [and] all his acts suppose that he is present in the midst of you". The abbé deduced from this the rejection or, more precisely, the impossibility of any veto. But what was the reality of this abstraction, the represented nation? It was here that Sieyès initiated the logic of an administration likely to embody and constitute the national abstraction. He alerted the Assembly to the dangers of communes in the process of setting themselves up outside all laws. The word anarchy had not yet been uttered, but the fear of a national division was what inspired the intervention of Sieyès. On three occasions he insisted on the urgency of making the nation a "single whole" or "one single whole". To this end, he concluded his intervention with a proposed amendment:

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"That there be appointed today a committee of three persons to present, as soon as possible, to the Assembly, a plan of municipalities and provinces, such that we can hope not to see the kingdom tearing itself apart into a multitude of small states in republican form; and that, on the contrary, France can form a single whole, uniformly subject, in all its parts, to uniform legislation and administration" [4].

7 The plan was, quite logically, entrusted to the second Constitutional Committee (formed on 15 September). Although the ideas it developed were essentially those of Sieyès [5], the report was entrusted to Jacques-Guillaume Thouret who presented it to the Assembly on 29 September. The plan, he insisted from the outset, concerned

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 "two major parts of the Constitution. On the one hand, you organise the representative government, the only one that suits a free people; but its justice and stability depend on the establishment of proportional equality in representation, and a fixed and simple order of elections. On the other hand, you want to found a new system of municipal and provincial administration. This administration, equally representative, requires, likewise, proportional representation, and an order for elections" [6].

9 Therefore, the first part of the report, which concerned "the basis of proportional representation", proposed that the national representation should be based on "new divisions of equal extent". In the first place, "eighty large areas would bear the name of departments". In the second place, each department should be divided into nine districts "under the title of communes": a total of 720 large communes. Finally, each district was subdivided in turn into nine cantons, territorial subdivisions without administrative institutions but where the first-degree electoral assemblies whould be formed, the proposed suffrage being indirect and restricted. Starting from equal electoral constituencies at cantonal and departmental levels, the national representation was built upwards. In return, the laws that the nation gave itself through its 720 deputies should be executed in as uniform a way as possible. This was the purpose of the second part of the report which aimed to establish administrative institutions in each department and municipality.

10 It was a question first of all of "departmental administrative assemblies". They were unambiguously integrated into the Executive: "They will be responsible for that part of the executive power that is usually designated by the term "administration". Thouret insisted on this point: this is what distinguished them from the electoral assemblies. While the latter were "formed only under the aegis of the national legislature [...] as the regenerative arm of the Legislature", the administrative assemblies were "instituted under the aegis of the executive power, [and] will be its instruments and organs" [7]. Thouret did not go into details about the organisation of the departmental "administrative assemblies"; his report was largely inspired by the Provincial Assemblies of 1787 with the establishment of two bodies: the Council, a deliberative body, and a Directory or "intermediate commission" in charge of execution.

11 It was then a question of the 720 districts or communes. Although he spoke of "erecting a second political edifice" regarding the municipalities - in that their domestic affairs would have little to do with the general administration of the kingdom - the report was far from sanctioning a "municipal power" (the expression was used for the purpose of managing their “so to speak private” affairs) that would evolve outside the orbit of the royal executive power. No doubt they were also "the first units in the representative order that goes back to the legislature," but they were equally "the last in the order of executive power that comes down and ends with them". For a uniform administration, municipalities must all have an "administrative council" and an elected “mayor” [8].

12 The report was harshly criticised and Thouret was obliged to defend his project on 3 November 1789 in a speech on the "general division of the kingdom". More so than in September, he insisted on the constitutional importance of the committee’s project. In this respect the administration could not be described as having been ignored in revolutionary constitution-making. Confronted by the resistance of deputies who persisted in emphasising local considerations and remained attached to the former circonscriptions – Mirabeau, for example, proposed maintaining the existing municipalities to avoid plunging the kingdom into "chaos" [9] - Thouret radicalised his speech. While in September he had barely mentioned the inherited provincial and municipal reality, he faced up to it on 3 November [10]. He challenged it with the higher interest for which the Assembly was responsible: adopting a Constitution as consubstantial with a national entity that would regenerate the kingdom. On five occasions, the first part of his speech began with the same words: “Establishing the Constitution”. However, “Establishing the Constitution, is, for us, rebuilding and regenerating the State. There is no need for routine pusillanimity to restrict us to the old order of things, when it is possible to establish better bases, and necessary to have the resources of government for the fresh effects that should be obtained from it [...]. Let us not undertake to draft the Constitution, if we do not want to regenerate it thoroughly” [11]. In the second part of his speech, he defended the subdivision of the kingdom into equal and uniform departments and districts as a solution for better government. "Everyone knows how much in a vast empire it is important for the uniformity of administration, for the good supervision of the administrators, for the ease of those governed, to have divisions of nearly equal extent, and with a size calculated that is appropriate to the best exercise of the different powers". However, the "disorganisation of the former government makes the need [for this] pressing". The purpose of the territorial subdivision was to unite the French under "one law and one method of government". The departments, unlike the provinces of the Ancien Régime, did not have to stand up "against the despotism" of the ministries. They had to be more numerous than the old provinces to make their submission to the executive and the laws easier [12]. As for the administrative function, understood according to the traditional discourse of "public surveillance" and "handling of specific cases", it gained in efficiency within the framework of administrations in areas smaller than those of the old provinces.

13 The Constituent Assembly did not want to settle for the creation of large municipalities. On the day when Thouret became President of the Assembly (12 November), it decreed the maintenance of the 44,000 or so municipalities of the Ancien Régime to which it nonetheless granted uniform status through its decree of 14 December 1789. Alongside the "duties […] specific to municipal power" which the municipal bodies fulfilled "under the supervision and inspection of the administrative assemblies" of district and department, the municipalities were, as Thouret’s report intended, the last echelon through which the executive power provided a uniform general administration. They received, in fact, stated article 49 of the decree, "duties [...] specific to the general administration of the State" which were only the effect of a delegation of the law as insisted upon in turn by article 51. No doubt there would be no agent of the central authority present, because of the loathing inspired in the Constituents by the figure of the Intendant, but this general administration was not autonomous: the municipal bodies exercised it "under the authority of the administrative assemblies" [13]. The instruction "on the formation of the new municipalities" insisted on the constitutional importance of the decree, particularly in its third paragraph entitled "Duties of municipal bodies". In the first place it obliged all the elected officials in the municipality to take the oath to "maintain with all their power the constitution of the kingdom, to be faithful to the nation, the law and the King, and to perform their duties well". In this respect, the instruction was careful to emphasise that the elected representatives had no representational nature with respect to the general administrative functions delegated to them by article 51 of the decree: " […] they cannot carry out these duties in their capacity as mere representatives of their commune, but only in that of employees and agents of the general administration, and thus, for all duties that are delegated to them by a separate and superior power, it is right for them to be fully subordinate to the authority of the departmental and district administrations” [14].

14 The latter were set up by the decree of 22 December 1789 "on the constitution of primary assemblies and administrative assemblies". This was a constitutional law insofar as, in accordance with the bill of September 1789, "a new division of the kingdom into departments will be made, both for representation [i.e. national] and for administration" (article 1) [15]. Each department was administered by a decision-making body: an elected council of 36 members which appointed within it an executive body, the departmental directory. Each department was subdivided into districts where the administration was likewise entrusted to an elected council which appointed its directory. Unlike the communes, which partly administered local matters, the departments and districts were only created for the purpose of providing delocalised general administration. As such, they enjoyed no autonomy of the kind that could be found in a so-called law of decentralisation. “The instruction on the formation of the administrative assemblies and administrative bodies", of 8 January 1790, insisted on this point when it discussed, in paragraphs five and six, the duties of general administration handed down to the administrative bodies. The general administration was conceived as a chain of dependence which descended from the king to the very depths of the nation: "The constitutional principle on the distribution of administrative powers is that the authority descends from the King to the departmental administrations, from there to the district administrations, and from the latter to the municipalities" [16]. It is obvious in this respect that the Constituent Assembly did not intend to make war on the royal executive, and even less so to organise administrative anarchy, as Aulard wrote [17]. It was precisely because the deputies were aware that the elected officials of the department, who moreover were elected by assemblies in charge of electing the National Assembly, could believe themselves to be representatives, that the law of December 1789 (section III, article 5) submitted the deliberations of departmental administrative meetings for the approval of the king [18]. However, as Guillaume Glénard correctly demonstrated in his thesis [19], the discussions concerning the powers of the king as the supervisory authority of the departmental administrations indicated a shift in his authority. While the draft of September 1789 provided that the administrative assemblies "will be entirely subordinate to it", the final text of December no longer contained this wording. Some deputies feared the omnipotence of ministers or accused the Constitutional Committee of wanting to maintain the intendants, which the law of December took care to remove, in article 9. It follows that the law, in its section relating to the "duties of administrative assemblies", was accepted only after a compromise: the departmental administrations were placed under the double tutelage of the Legislature and the king. It was "under the inspection of the Legislative Body, and by virtue of its decrees" that they deliberated in particular with regard to taxes (article 1).

15 The ensuing debate showed that the Constituent Assembly intended to restore the king in place of the administrative assemblies.

1.2.  "The force of government": submitting the delocalised administration to the king

16 On 12 August 1790, the Constituent Assembly voted on an "Instruction [...] on the duties of the administrative assemblies" which insisted, like the previous one of 8 January, on the respect that the local elected officials owed to the Constitution. Should we read into this the malfunctioning of the newly elected administrative bodies? Chapter I of the instruction, relating to "Constitutional Objects", stressed the subordination of the administrative assemblies to their dual supervisory authority insofar as their duties were only delegated by the Legislature or the King, “leader of the nation, and supreme custodian of the executive power. Any resistance to these two authorities would be the greatest political offence, since it would break the bond of monarchical unity”. This was an opportunity to recall that departmental administrations "cannot issue decrees, orders or regulations [...]. Their decisions made in general assembly or of council [...] which will concern the system of the general administration of the kingdom, may be executed only after they have been presented to the King, and have received his approval" [20].

17 Judging by the two alarming reports that Demeunier read to the Assembly in March 1791, the instruction did not produce the anticipated effects. On behalf of the Constitutional Committee, he presented “the provisions that must complete the organisation of the administrative bodies” on 2 March and, on 7 March, the report "on the organisation of the ministry". As he announced at the beginning of this latest report, the two draft decrees were linked: "you will find there the basic laws, which must ensure, direct and contain the operation of the government" [21]. The report of 2 March started by iterating disobedience from the administrative bodies - mainly the districts - regarding the law or the king. Since "there is danger in leaving the authority that will punish the deviations any longer undecided", Demeunier proposed that the king could annul "an unauthorised decree [of an administrative body]". He also considered that the king had to be able to suspend the "rebel bodies", the Legislature having in this case to rule on the measure to deny or confirm it [22]. In his report of 7 March, Demeunier returned to the necessity of arming the Executive against the administrative bodies, the central Executive which, on this occasion and on several occasions, was explicitly named "government" [23], insofar as it had to direct and coordinate general administration. “Gentlemen", concluded Démeunier, "you have before you a dangerous pitfall. If you upset the action and the strength of the government, the kingdom will be given over to anarchy and will only offer a scattered crowd of administrative or municipal bodies, acting without agreement and without restraint. This fault will make us lose everything and forget everything. There will be no more public freedom, if the central administration does not keep everything subject to the law” [24].

18 As the Constituent Assembly moved towards the final text of the Constitution, the role of the Executive, particularly in terms of government, was far from weakened. The decree of 15-27 March 1791 "concerning the organisation of administrative bodies" [25] provided the proof of this. In accordance with the report of the Constitutional Committee, it empowered the king who, with the countersignature of his Minister of the Interior, could annul the acts of the administrative bodies and individually or collectively suspend the members of those bodies, but had to inform the Legislature, which alone could pronounce any dissolution. The strengthening of the Executive that was enshrined in this decree did not go unnoticed by the opposition. Robespierre, at the meeting on 3 March 1791, unsuccessfully asked for an adjournment, on the grounds that the decree aimed to annihilate the prerogatives of the communes and districts: "This is a decree which contains a host of constitutional questions of the utmost interest, and whose decision can either strengthen or overthrow the Constitution" [26].

19 The final text of the Constitution of 3 September 1791, was intentionally restrained about developments concerning the "internal administration": it contained only eight articles which, like the decree of 15 March, bore witness to a desire to submit such matters to the King. Symptomatically, the eight articles form section II of chapter IV, entitled "The exercise of executive power". The vote on these articles, at the session on 16 August 1791, gave rise to almost no debate, except for deciding whether or not the agents appointed by the king were to take the civic oath [27]. The Constituents were above all anxious to create a chain of dependence for the benefit of a general administration directed by the king: they did not bother to go into details of the powers that would be specific to the administrative assemblies. The municipal administration was silenced by the Constitution which merely stated that there was in each department a "superior administration, and in each district a subordinate administration" (article 1). The dual tutelage (Legislative and Executive) expressed in the law of 22 December 1789 was watered down in favour of that exercised by the king. In fact, the administrators, who "have no representative nature", were "agents elected inform time to time by the people, to exercise administrative functions under the supervision and authority of the King " (article 2). Of the eight articles relating to "the internal administration", four relate to the king’s power of sanction: the Constitution did more to confirm the decree of 15 March 1791 than to endorse the law of 22 December 1789. Acting cautiously, the Constituents also stated that it was "up to the legislative power" to lay down rules concerning the administrators and, in general, the internal administration (article 4) [28].

2.1.  The constitutional debates of Year I

21 The Girondin draft Constitution, read out from the rostrum by Condorcet on 15 February 1793, was at the very least paradoxical. While it exalted the ascendancy which the Legislature was to have over the Executive with a view to "unity of action" - within a "one and indivisible" Republic - it put the Executive in the place of local governments increasingly conceived as simplified mechanisms, acting only "as delegates of the national government" [29] (article 11 of the draft). Who was being governed and how? The primary concern of the report was indeed to exalt "the unity, activity and strength of the government". It could not be through monarchy, which exercised the "means to govern by error and seduction" by claiming that the king was the living embodiment of the law. Furthermore, “when the example of monarchies has proved that they are constantly governed by a council, it would be difficult to find any utility in the institution of a monarch. Thus royalty had to be abolished”. For Condorcet, it was obvious that "unity and activity could be the fruit of an organisation of powers, simple and wisely combined” [30]. It was “simple" because it had, in the draft of 15 February, a tendency to deny the balance of powers that the Constituent Assembly had sought to introduce. “These constitutions based on the balance of powers suppose or threaten the existence of two parties; and one of the first requirements of the Republic is not to recognise either of them”. In the absence of a single power, the Constitution had to at least sanction the pre-eminence of the Legislature, invested with regulatory power out of mistrust of executive power [31]. Barère would not demur during the discussion about the Executive in June 1793: "[…] we should not forget one principle, which is that there is only one single power; the national power, which lies in the Legislature. It is with the balance of powers that we have English constitutions and twin brothers who fight each other as happened on 10 August [1792]” [32]. Condorcet pleaded for "the institution of a single power" in favour of an Assembly in which it was planned that the laws would not be draconian, as a result of the introduction, as in the Constitution of Year I, of a popular veto. This was the reason why the body responsible for "the execution of the laws" or for directing “in detail the measures of general administration […] should not be considered as a genuine power”. It was a question of a "council of national agents" [33]. They must be "essentially subordinate to the depositories of legislative power, or the principle of unity of action would be isolated" [34]. However, as the enforcement agents should be regarded as "the officers of the people and not those of these representatives", they would not be appointed by the deputies but elected by the people (who alone could judge them by the institution of a “national jury”).

22 Paradoxically, as they were the "first agents of the government" [35], this governing executive was enhanced in the Condorcet draft; in the name of unity of action, the "national council" had to act on the basis of simplified administrative mechanisms. Because communication with thousands of municipalities was considered impossible, the draft proposed instituting "large communes" [36], as Thouret had wished in 1789. At departmental level, Condorcet wished "to reduce the number of those who form them". The deliberative body, within the department, was liable to give "the appearance of a departmental representation so opposed to the unity, to the indivisibility of the Republic" [37]. The very relative autonomy of the delocalised administration set up by the law of December 1789 was no longer on the agenda. It was on the pretext "of increasing the activity of the government, to preserve a more thorough unity" [38], that Condorcet wished to flank the departmental administrations with an agent appointed by the Executive, replacing the elected procureurs généraux-syndics [39]. The district administration, meanwhile, was quite simply removed.

23 The Constitution of 24 June 1793 finally lifted a taboo: it included the word "government" twice in its text, more precisely in its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In the preamble to the Declaration of 26 August 1789, the word government had already been used: but it was to refer to the "corruption of governments", namely to the Ancien Régime, which was illegitimate because it did not recognise and did not guarantee natural rights, particularly by a separation of the acts of the Legislature and the Executive. In the Jacobin Declaration, "the goal of any social institution" resided in the declaration and protection of rights. But it was no longer a question, as in 1789, of comparing "the acts of the legislative power with those of the executive power [...] with the aim of any political institution". In a symptomatic way the citizens of 1793 had to be able to "constantly compare the acts of the government with the goal of any social institution". Article 2 of the Declaration of 1789, referred to "any political association" as preserving natural rights. In article 1 of the 1793 Declaration we can read: "The government is instituted to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights” [40].

24 When he presented, the draft of the very long Constitution (80 articles) that he wrote with Saint-Just, on 10 June 1793, Hérault de Séchelles insisted on this very point of a government ultimately created by the absence of separation of powers understood as a balance of powers. In order that the Executive Board of the project "shall not [...] have any representative nature", it was envisaged that the electoral assemblies would nominate candidates from among whom the Legislature would chose 21 members. “The Council thus subordinate, and henceforth a guardian without imperilling the fundamental laws, contributes to the unity of the Republic by the concentration of government” [41]. As in the Girondin draft, this discourse on the strengthening of government required administrative simplification: only eight articles on "administrative bodies" (Chapter XVI of the draft); their autonomy - even if the districts and communes were to be maintained - was not exactly exalted. They remained "agents elected from time to time to exercise, under the authority of the Council, administrative functions" (article 4), who "must respond within a month to requests addressed to them" (article 5). Moreover, the "administrative function", as in the text of 1791, referred to the domain of the law: article 6 of the draft, invested the Legislature with determining it and setting, in particular, the rules that presided over the subordination of the administrations [42].

25 Nevertheless, the "government", apart from the special meaning given to it by the Preamble, seemed to remain an impossibile feature of written constitutionalism. The text of 24 June even removed the term "power" to qualify the Legislature and Executive. There was a striking imbalance between revolutionary discourse, which only concerned the need for government, and the Constitutions which always, prior to that of Year VIII, evaded the word.

2.2.  The constitutional debates of Year III

26 While the Thermidorian Convention rejected - especially after Prairial - the Constitution of Year I, it continued to worship the "force of government". This was for the obvious reason that its members had participated in the advent of this force through the establishment of Revolutionary Government, which they extended for almost a year after Thermidor. It is not surprising, therefore, that the debates on the new Constitution sought to justify what historiography usually considers to be an "enhancement of the executive" [43], or as the invention of the very principle of government "in constitutional law by the duality, within the Executive, of a Directory in charge of "governing" (in other words deliberating) and of an administration, under the impulse of ministers, charged only with executing the "thinking" of the government [44].

27 In his "Preliminary discourse on the draft Constitution for the French Republic" on 5 Messidor Year III, Boissy d'Anglas gave a re-cap of revolutionary history in order to persuade his colleagues of the “need for a definitive Constitution and a firm government” [45]. His attacks were primarily levelled against the text of 24 June 1793, which, contrary to what Hérault de Sechelles expressed two years earlier, "is nothing other than the organisation of anarchy" [46]. It was condemnation of the fact that he created an "Executive Council without dignity, without strength, without stability". It was divided “into such a number of members, that secrecy and promptness of action can never become its lot". Finally, [it]s relations with the administrative bodies remained “indeterminate; we do not know if they are subject to it, we do not know if they are independent; and those who have shouted so boldly against a federalism that did not exist, do not establish any link that ties together the various shreds of the empire" [47]. The Constitution of 1791 was no less spared by this dual accusation, albeit unfounded, of having instituted a weak executive and elected administrations which undermined its authority. "You have always attacked and weakened it," Boissy d'Anglas said of the Executive, "because you wanted to overthrow the throne that threatened you" [48]. As for the administrative bodies, the speaker dared to consider that they had organised federalism ("though it was never realised") [49]. Indeed the Constituents "had thought it necessary to establish in each department a secondary authority strong enough to resist the monarch [...]; they did not think that any authority tending of necessity to be enlarged, numerous administrative bodies appointed by the People, charged with duties which brought them closer to them, constantly removed from the common centre of national power, could also conspire and compete with the powers of the Nation" [50].

28 By thus denaturing the first two Constitutions, by charging them at this point with the vices of a weak government, Boissy d'Anglas was able to maintain a modest silence on the Revolutionary Government of Year II. His proposals for the new Constitution, however, were inspired by the dual record of the establishment of a decisive government that was completely dependent on simplified administrative bodies, designed as mere transmission belts. No doubt the Directory that he proposed to set up was unrelated to a Committee of Public Safety, since it was not composed of deputies and the Legislature was no longer, as it was in article 1 of the Decree of 14 Frimaire Year II, "the sole centre of the Government's impetus" [51]. The organic separation of functions was returning in Year III as a means to obviate any "dictatorship". This did not prevent Boissy d'Anglas from proposing that five directors should be, as were the members of the committee, elected by the deputies (and one fifth of them renewed each year). "This combination sufficiently concentrates the strength of the government so that it is fast and firm [...] it is in its hands that you will place the thinking of the government, the sacred depository of its direction. One mindset will embrace all parties in their general relationship" [52]. As for the simplification and reform of the administrative bodies, they presented disturbing analogies with what Billaud-Varenne had proposed in his report on 28 Brumaire Year II. "In government as in mechanics," he explained, "all that is not combined with precision, both in number and extent, obtains only an incomplete set, and causes endless ruptures. The hindering resistances, and the destructive friction, diminish as the workings are simplified. [...] so every good government must have a centre of will, levers attached to it immediately, and secondary bodies on which these levers act in order to extend the movement to the utmost extremities” [53]. Boissy d'Anglas, although he preferred the astral to the mechanical metaphor, made a similar speech in support of his remarks on "the interior administration", which he took care to designate as "a direct emanation of executive power". In fact, this administration “has to be uniform, regular and constant in its progress; it is the nurturing heat of the star of the day that escapes from its bosom to gently penetrate the most remote places of the earth. Never has any part of the government needed a more perfect whole, a more intimate agreement, more regular combinations. The slightest rivalry among its agents, the slightest opposition in its measures, both thwart public happiness and attack the general system" [54]. As a result, Boissy d'Anglas proposed the elimination of the districts and a return to the large communes, whereas the decree of Frimaire Year II drew support from the districts following the near elimination of the departmental administrations. The latter were barely favoured by the draft of Year III: "Why [...], when the execution must be simple and rapid, would you organise decision-making bodies, tormented by the need to make laws, [...] departing from this unity of principles so necessary to any government?". Instead of the old general councils, the draft Constitution preferred five elected members under the "supervision and authority of the executive power". Since a national agent had been attached to the districts under the terms of the decree of Frimaire, they were provided with "a general commissioner, charged with prompting the execution and ensuring the maintenance of the laws, as well as corresponding with the executive power by which he will be appointed” [55].

29 This sort of administrative purge – a reduction from 450,000 to 50,000 administrators - and its close tutelage under the Executive were not to the liking of all the deputies who obtained an initial postponement of the vote at the session on 22 Messidor, six days after the beginning of the debates. This forced Daunou, a member of the Commission of Eleven, to fly to the aid of the plan for administrative simplification at the meeting on the 21st: "The strength of the government increases when the authorities are more respected, when their subordination is better guaranteed, when their action becomes more direct and less complicated” [56]. After a second adjournment at the meeting on 10 Thermidor, on the subject of the "Commissioner General" for the departments, Daunou returned to the charge, on 11 Thermidor: "Citizens, the government must be everywhere; it must see everything clearly; it must be somehow aware of what is going on in every corner of the Republic" [57].

30 While the plan of the Commission of Eleven, like these debates, were saturated by the obsession with government, the final text of 5 Fructidor Year III, as usual, evaded the word "government". Undoubtedly, the term "executive power" (title VI) referred to a necessarily decision-making executive (articles 142-143) since it was collegial and, above all, its mission largely transcended the mere execution of laws [58]. However, its subordination to the Legislature, a revolutionary tradition perpetuated in Year III, seemed to have forbidden the constitution-makers from appointing this government Executive, for fear of perhaps evoking the "corruption of governments" to which the preamble of 1789 referred to in order to indicate the intermingling of powers. Such an intermingling of powers, by attributing a law-making initiative to the Executive, would break the taboo: only in the Consular Constitution of Year VIII, did "government" receive its textual consecration.

31