1 The French Revolution was about trust. This may seem like a perverse claim, when radical Jacobins would elevate défiance and denunciation to political principles, but it is nonetheless true. [1] There would have been no Revolution if the state and social elite had not been engaged in a complex and ultimately fruitless negotiation throughout the later 1780s about who to trust with the nation’s financial future. The consciousness of the need to be trustworthy permeated the early discussions of the Estates-General, and the very first act of the newly-dubbed National Assembly was to issue a guarantee – unlimited and unconditional – for the accumulated debts of the state, now become the responsibility of the “nation”. [2]

2 As Anne Simonin has recently noted, “la confiance entre gouvernants et gouvernés” was “une question politique fondamentale” for the Revolution into and through the period of “the Terror”; a question “dont les émotions permettent de saisir les ramifications”. [3] Under the pressure of both practical and emotional crisis, the duties of governance in time of war, dread of conspiracy, and an emotive demand for “une authenticité sans faille des gouvernants”, there ensued a “spirale infernale” to Thermidor and beyond. Reviewing a range of recent historiography, Simonin demonstrates how a fine web of emotional responses, captured from public and private utterances and correspondence, has allowed scholars such as Timothy Tackett and Marisa Linton to surpass earlier conceptions of such responses as unreflexively irrational, and to integrate them into understandings of the complex logics of a slide towards endemic distrust, and a willingness to believe implausible narratives of betrayal, under such crisis conditions. Trust, in the years 1792 to 1794, is both present and absent, constantly sought, constantly lacking. A thing that, rationally, should be present, and yet the absence of which both provokes anxiety, and is the cause of further anxiety, fear, anger, and violence. [4]

3 In recent decades, Anglophone scholars have given particular attention to the dimension of confiance expressed by the English word trust. [5] This addresses the delicate balance of beliefs and interests in situations where choosing to faire confiance may bring risks. Within social science, trust has often been understood as a particular problem of industrial mass society. [6] This intimate association between trust and modernity is challenged by more historical analyses. Charles Tilly in 2004 explored a sixteenth-century case-study of a “trust network” that exhibits many of the connections seen in later studies. [7] Tilly offered his own pithy definition of our key term: “Trust consists of placing valued outcomes at risk to others’ malfeasance”, and a trust relationship is one where “people regularly take such risks”. [8] It should be noted here that this Anglophone scholarship differentiates between risk-bearing trust and more secure confidence in a way which is perhaps less clear in French. Niklas Luhman in 1979, for example, claimed that confidence was a relatively unreflective behaviour that “involves a feeling of familiarity”, and lacked the conscious risk-taking decision-point of an act of trust. [9] However, this is somewhat arbitrary - one could propose that the assurance of confidence came from reflection on hard evidence, whereas trust cannot always be justified as a conscious decision. In practice, furthermore, one of the things conspicuously absent from the French context of our period was any reassuring sense of familiarity, so in what follows, we shall draw on methodological understandings of trust, and its associated risks, when considering revolutionaries’ claims about confiance.

4 Trust as an object of study occupies a space where rational calculation and emotive concern are absolutely entangled. Those who advocate for the necessity of public trust, whether as scholars or politicians, would like it to be a simple rational calculation through which people can be led to the right, trusting, answer. But the whole reason that trust is a lively issue in modern scholarship is that people refuse to be led in such a fashion, refuse to give their trust on rational grounds, and instead both give and withhold trust for a wide range of emotive reasons. [10] As Anne Simonin’s summary above already indicated, by the period 1792-4, such behaviours had become a critical issue for the French Revolution. Rebecca Spang has written eloquently and persuasively of how such issues had arisen earlier, by 1790-91, around the nature of revolutionary money, from the official assignats to billets de confiance that might be literally no more than squares of paper with a local official’s signature, and how assertions of trust and practices of corrosive fear and distrust clashed and overlapped. [11] But these topics can be pushed even closer to the heart of revolutionary politics and constitution-making, from 1789 onwards.

1.  Looking for revolutionary trust

5 One thing almost universally agreed-upon by historians of 1789 is its pervading sense of generalised menace and insecurity: expressed in actions like the “Great Fear” of the summer of 1789; integral to the “Famine-plot persuasion” that had underpinned Parisians’ drastic conduct a few weeks earlier; and demonstrated in the near-hysterical relief of the National Assembly deputies themselves when they understood that the Parisian July rising was for, and not against, them. [12] Yet by its very nature, such insecurity breeds a desire for something in which to trust. As it did in that summer of 1789, with the extraordinary emotional vigour of the “Night of 4 August” and its bold assertion of a leap into a new future. [13] In codifying the outcomes of that event, the deputies joyously proclaimed Louis XVI the “Restorer of French Liberty”, as they had joyously applauded him and escorted him en masse back to his residence on 15 July, when his personal presence had been the guarantee of their survival, and short-term political victory. [14] As two deputies had written in July, encapsulating widely-expressed feelings at the time, “It is not the heart of the king that we doubt,” although they had gone on to add, “it is those of the men who counsel him”. [15]

6 The interplay of deputies’ desires and beliefs about the king’s sentiments and actions was to form a leitmotif of the following three years, and ultimately prove that even pretending to trust in Louis’ intentions had been a mistake. [16] Pauline Valade has traced responses to the king’s apparent attitudes, in exploring the history of “public joy” in the early revolutionary years. [17] Barry Shapiro has suggested that deputies’ responses to royal conduct as early as the autumn of 1789 embodied a traumatised reaction to the events of June and July, and the credible fear that the royal government had wanted them dead. [18] While the necessity of trying to build a constitutional order around the dubious intentions of one notoriously fickle man doubtless indeed caused great psychic pain, we can look beyond this to the much wider field in which the National Assembly, in its constitution-making, embraced the issue of who to trust. Particularly revelatory of their attitudes were their discussions on why some did not merit trust, and where the line between trust and distrust should be drawn, in the nation they were rebuilding from first principles.

7 The commitment of the deputies to reconstructing France on a uniform basis, from the local level upwards, using the electoral principle, was undoubtedly epochal, and has been widely understood as opening a gateway to modern forms of representative democracy. Malcolm Crook subtitled his groundbreaking overview “An apprenticeship in democracy”; more recently Melvin Edelstein treated the process as the “birth of electoral democracy”. [19] Pre-dating them both, Patrice Gueniffey’s meticulous 1993 study made the bold claim that, from its beginnings in 1789, the revolutionary electoral process was “vouée à l’élargissement: un suffrage universel en devenir”. [20] In this spirit such studies, while noting that some exclusions from the franchise were furiously opposed by contemporary radicals, tend to pass over the implications of their details. Edelstein glosses all of them as components of an exercise “to reconcile two principles… considered necessary for a sound political order”: the democratic consent of a large electorate, coupled with the neutralisation of “the effects of popular sovereignty” to secure deputies “capable of independent judgment”. [21] Gueniffey observes that both Michelet and Jaurès affirmed that excluding the poor from the franchise had been a positive, revolutionary act, stripping the million votes of a “foule obscure” from the “mains de l’aristocratie”. [22] Such claims give us pause to reconsider the “democratic” credentials of the whole process.

8 In what follows, I shall suggest that the deputies of 1789 had complex notions of the trustworthiness of different groups of people, and of the nature of the public responsibility they were being called to take up, far beyond simple blanket exclusions of women and the poor. Some of these notions were extensively argued-through in debate, others were accepted almost as self-evident. Together, they reveal a political project that aspired to cool rationality but was shot through instead with emotive prejudice; where trust was explicitly identified as a key component of the structure, but was increasingly withheld, from the top down. Thus an ultimately incoherent and unworkable conception of electoral politics emerged, significantly due to an incoherent and emotive conception of what an electorate could or should be trusted to do – and who, or what, was entrusted with the power to decide on such questions. This is not to imply that a hypothetical genuinely “rational” approach would have been better, but rather to illustrate that such a thing was simply impossible, and this bears recognition in examining the politics of the period as a whole.

2.  Emotional and practical contexts

9 The first elaboration of the Revolution’s intended new order imagined wiping away all that had gone before. On 29 September 1789, Jacques Guillaume Thouret read to the Assembly the report of the Constitution Committee on “gouvernement représentatif” and “un nouveau système d’administration municipale et provinciale”. Thouret specified the need to connect these two things intimately, firstly so that “la conservation de ce ressort unique sera d’autant plus chère au peuple, qu’en le perdant il perdrait tous les avantages de sa Constitution”, and secondly, that “sa destruction deviendrait plus difficile à l’autorité, qui ne pourrait le rompre qu’en désorganisant entièrement l’Etat”. [23] Positioning their system thus as (potentially) under threat from below, as well as (emphatically) under threat from above, the Committee’s eminent membership (including Talleyrand, Sieyes, Target, Le Chapelier and Rabaut de Saint-Etienne) suggested creating a tiered network of administrations that would be, in parallel, the sites of periodic electoral assemblies. [24] Reaching down from a top level of what were inconsistently referred to as departments, provinces or grands districts to a final lower level of a mere 720 “municipalities”, this plan would truly have erased the existing map of France. [25] Before reflecting further on the detailed attention that deputies gave to different aspects of these plans, we must recall the practical, experiential, and hence mental and emotional, context in which they were acting.

10 Already hinted at in Thouret’s phrasing above, the National Assembly dwelt in an atmosphere of ongoing crisis, in which multiple potential threats pressed in on their daily business. As the report was read on the morning of 29 September, agitation was already bubbling in Paris about food-prices, the infamous ‘banquet’ of 1 October for the royal garrison of Versailles was being prepared, and the king continued to refuse to sanction the August decrees. The evening before, the Assembly had been kept back beyond its usual hour, as the comte de Clermont-Tonnerre and the abbé Grégoire had joined forces to demand action to protect the Jews of Alsace from rising violent persecution. As the session opened on the 29th, dispute had arisen over the previous session’s minutes, several bishops wrangling over the implications of accepting a patriotic donation from a monastery, and the session was only able to proceed after a formal vote, against the wishes of a significant number of the clergy present. [26]

11 Substantive debate on the committee proposals finally opened three weeks later, on 20 October, after the highly traumatic experience of the October Days and the Assembly’s translation to Paris, amidst further fears of disorder both high and low. [27] Discussion on the very first clauses of the proposals was immediately preceded by a vote to demand that the Assembly’s previous decrees be sent out to the country “sans aucune addition, changement, ni observation” by the royal authorities, grimly suspected of nefarious intent in this matter. Only two deputies had opined on definitions of citizenship before they were interrupted by a demand to consider the counter-revolutionary actions of the bishop of Tréguier, reports of which were agitating their Breton colleagues. Clermont-Tonnerre spoke against it, to be blasted in return by Robespierre, warning that “le désordre règne dans les provinces, les trames d’une conspiration nous enveloppent”, and that delays in considering such matters “peuvent amener le bouleversement de l’ordre public”. [28] The following day brought reports of new horrific popular violence in and around Paris, and urgent debate on a “projet de loi contre les attroupements”, understood and named by the deputies at once as a “loi martiale”. Deputies interwove alarm at popular agitation with concern to tackle the hidden motors of enmity behind it. As Buzot summarised, “Il ne suffit pas d’effrayer le peuple par des lois sévères, il faut encore le calmer”, and one means was a tribunal to punish offenders at all levels, including what Ricard de Séalt had earlier called “les gens puissants” who under a limited application of martial law “trouveront moyens d’y échapper”. [29] The law was passed, and rushed to the king for sanction. Immediately afterwards, a separate decree was passed authorising the city of Rouen to form a local militia against “des troubles et émeutes” threatening it. [30]

12 Resumption of debate on the constitutional proposals on the 22nd was again delayed by argument over the motives for the duc d’Orléans’ departure for England. The baron de Menou asserted that ‘un député à l’Assemblée nationale, chargé de faire le bien par la confiance, ne doit pas même être soupçonné”, while going on to allege that an entire “partie de l’Assemblée” may share “les projets et les intrigues” attributed to the duke. [31] The day’s substantive debate was closed by a report of the Tréguier affair, leading to a decree sending the bishop for trial on suspicion of lèse-nation, ordering authorities in his region to act “contre les insinuations que les ennemis du bien public répandent dans les provinces”, and to recall locals “à la confiance due au zèle et aux décrets de l’Assemblée nationale”. [32]

13 Confiance was, as these pronouncements make clear, a quality very much in peril in late 1789, and the unfolding of events over the coming months maintained that stress. Assembly debates on citizenship, elections and administrative structures overlapped with a long series of discussions over the property of the Church that revealed further ideological schisms among the deputies. [33] Those debates interlocked with the multi-faceted continuing financial and fiscal crisis. Deputies repeatedly heard the good news of individual contributions patriotiques, sometimes into the tens of thousands of livres, but also news of hundreds of millions in debt, millions paid out in royal pensions, the existence (at first rumoured, then confirmed) of the infamous Livre rouge detailing such corrupt largesse, and the perplexing question, by later in November, of whether or not to trust Jacques Necker’s demand to turn the privately-financed Caisse d’Escompte into an official state bank, and issue further debt on the nation’s credit. These deeply perturbing general issues were punctuated by further specific challenges. Echoing the Tréguier affair, the Parlements of Metz and Rennes, and the Etats of Cambrésis, published declarations about the National Assembly that rejected its authority, and effectively called for its destruction. [34]

14 On 17 November, debate on the Metz declaration drew from Barnave a particularly concise expression of the multiple layers of threat perceived by the deputies. The seditious text was, according to him, “une circonstance particulière d’un plan général entrepris pour faire échouer la révolution.” It had its echo in the fact that “des bruits (rarement trompeurs) nous annoncent des mouvements prêts à se faire sentir dans la capitale”. The Metz judges had attacked the “droits de la nation”, their text was “séditieux par l’appel au peuple qui y est énoncé”, and “injurieux au Roi et à l’Assemblée nationale par les doutes qu’il élève sur leur liberté.” Barnave retorted that the Assembly’s decrees themselves, “celui surtout de la loi martiale, délibéré au moment même où le peuple était attroupé, ne laissent aucune excuse aux doutes qu’on affecte de répandre sur notre liberté.” Alongside counter-revolutionary conspiracy, Barnave’s words thus position le peuple as a dangerous and untrustworthy element, those who by their turbulent actions threaten the liberty of the political class, and potentially render the deputies traitors. For as he continued, “celui d’entre nous qui ne sent pas son opinion libre et qui délibère, trahit sa conscience et ses commettants”. [35] And yet, who were such commettants, and who were they to be in future? In debate almost two weeks earlier, Barnave had defined his personal vision of the electoral process: “Les députés à l’Assemblée nationale seront élus dans les chefs-lieux des districts par des électeurs nommés immédiatement par le peuple, dans chaque municipalité.” [36] Having witnessed the deputies defying the threat of le peuple in the name of their commettants, we can begin to examine how the dynamics of trust and distrust in the Assembly’s construction of an electoral process, rather than creating a simple identity between people and electorate, produced the complex answers they did. [37]

3.  Suspecting the electorate

15 The first recorded speaker in substantive debate on 20 October, Montlosier, contested the Committee’s suggested language of active and passive citizenship, not by speaking in favour of the poor, but instead against the voting-rights of all except “les chefs de famille”. [38] While Démeunier argued back vigorously for the Committee’s position, he faced a further challenge moments later, with the suggestion from Beaumetz that citizens should only be those “né français”, and not those “devenu”, for naturalisation processes were inherently suspect. [39] The thrust of debate over the weeks ahead was continually to shrink the body of Frenchmen regarded as personally trustworthy.

16 On the 22nd, the Committee’s proposal for a year’s domicile requirement was debated. Lanjuinais first clarified a potential distinction between domicile “de fait” and “de droit”, as well as suggesting actual enrolment for taxation as a requirement (not the last time that the deputies implied one could take advantage of a taxpayer franchise without actually paying tax, unless some double-lock was imposed). Dubois de Crancé insisted that “dans les campagnes” a year’s domicile “de fait” should be required, to preserve the rights of country people. Lepelletier added the suggestion of affirmative (surveilled?) residence “au moins pendant quatre mois chaque année”, and Malès revealed the subtext with the warning that “le contraire ne pourrait que favoriser trois espèces d’hommes peu dignes de faveur: les courtisans, les agioteurs et les financiers”. [40] The recent work of Jeremy Hayhoe on rural intercommunal migration in Burgundy shows both that there were real tensions between settled and incomer groups over rights and identities, and that such migration was common enough to be an essentially normal feature of peasant economic and social life. [41] In that context, we can see the dramatic distinction proposed in the Assembly as the essentially imaginary construction of ideal, but threatened, communities, in need of codified protection.

17 From the outset of the discussion, the boundaries of the group that the deputies wanted to trust with the nation’s future were made up of specific exclusions from such communities. There was never any question in debate of not imposing a series of limitations on the franchise. Even points that were clearly embedded in materiality drew observations that highlighted the assumed moral consequences of such situations. Debate on the 22nd about the basic taxpayer franchise was summed up by Démeunier: without a franchise barrier, “on admettrait les mendiants aux assemblées primaires… pourrait-on d’ailleurs penser qu’ils fussent à l’abri de la corruption?” [42] On 27 October, debating the exclusion of those referred to in various drafts as in a “servile” condition or a state of “domesticité”, the deputies collectively wrestled to explain what they meant, while all knowing, clearly, exactly what they wanted to mean. Although the formal concept of domesticité leant on the notion of servants being moral dependents, the prevalent reality of the era was of distrust of their excessive independence. One police manual had accused servants in general of “the most shocking egotism”, while Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris described servants as “spies” in every home, and as “our greatest enemies”. [43] In this context, Pétion could discourse on the distinction between the unworthy men engaged for “oeuvres serviles” and a distinct class of respectable “domestiques” that extended to secretaries, tutors and librarians, not degraded “serviteurs” but “commensaux”. Mirabeau, Barère and others weighed in, also noting that many agricultural occupations fell under technical definitions of domesticity, and the debate was exclusively occupied with ensuring that such better people were not confused with those in the “état de domesticité, c’est-à-dire serviteur à gages”, as the final wording defined them. [44]

18 Immediately after the passage of this measure, Mirabeau introduced to the Assembly a proposition that sharply highlighted personal trustworthiness. In a speech drawing on the necessity for France to “remonter chez nous tous les principes sociaux, de nous donner des mœurs publiques, de ranimer la confiance…”, he proposed to borrow the law of Geneva that barred bankrupts from public office, extending this to any “failli, banqueroutier ou débiteur insolvable”, and to the heirs of such men who “n’auront pas acquitté dans le terme de trois ans leur portion virile des dettes de leur père”. [45] he proposal occasioned vigorous debate, but only on the details of its form. Loud applause had greeted the end of Mirabeau’s speech, and it was immediately clear that a move to politically ostracise those who had most egregiously destroyed their personal credit had captured the deputies’ imaginations, and raised strong emotions (although at no point did they even begin to discuss any sense of the magnitude of this imagined problematic population). [46] While some voiced reservations about extending the exclusion to nominally-innocent heirs, others rushed to propose further categories of exclusion: the “repris de justice”, the debtor holding “lettres de surséance et de répit”, those condemned to “peines afflictives et infamantes”. This wider discussion was adjourned, and Mirabeau’s first article, on bankrupts themselves, passed without a vote. [47]

19 Resumption of debate on the 28th demonstrated that there remained great enthusiasm for excluding the financially untrustworthy from the franchise, recalling the longstanding general anxiety of premodern societies about the need for trust in the dangerously dematerialised world of commerce. [48] More than a dozen speakers opined, leading matters in various directions about the justice of punishing those who had not actually received any substantive inheritance, how to incorporate those who had renounced an inheritance, and other tangential topics. Despite a forceful intervention by Barnave against the principle of punishing heirs, the Assembly nonetheless agreed to do so, in all cases “sauf les enfants dotés avant la faillite”. [49] Moments later, Mirabeau returned to the fray with another proposal, for an annual ceremony of “inscription civique” where the young men of a community upon reaching twenty-one would be added to a roll of prospective voters in a public celebration. Beyond the positive civic benefits of such a new tradition, he observed that “vous pourrez vous en servir dans le Code penal”, using the threat of non-enrolment as a deterrent to “les fautes de la jeunesse”, with penalties ranging up to five years’ delay. Having created, out of thin air, a mechanism to exclude any future citizen from the electorate at the whim of local authorities, Mirabeau mused a little more on how “la terreur d’une exclusion” would have salutary effects, and his text was “adoptée pour ainsi dire par acclamation”. [50]

4.  Distrusting the elected

20 With a series of arbitrary hedges around the identity of the trustworthy voter in place, the Assembly proceeded to address questions about the identity of those voted-for, and the roles they would fulfil. Immediately after passing Mirabeau’s measure above, the deputies opened a discussion on the tax-paying requirement for membership of electoral assemblies. Dupont de Nemours insisted that eligibility should lie in the eyes of the voters, apostrophising sarcastically “Eh! Pourrait-on leur dire, vous croyez à M un tel toutes les qualités, tous les talents qui peuvent mériter votre confiance” but you are wrong, because he does not pay enough tax. He was followed by the comte de Virieu who made the opposite point, that “l’élu appartenant, non aux électeurs, mais à la nation entière, la nation peut imposer telle condition qu’elle jugera convenable”, and added that, personally, he thought this should include ownership of land. [51]

21 Virieu exposed here a key point: the sovereignty declared in 1789 was a national sovereignty, held collectively, and in some important senses, centrally. Individuals’ political rights did not pre-exist it, and were subordinated to it, in the mental picture of sovereignty and citizenship held by most of the deputies (who appear to have had no doubt that they themselves acted unquestionably in the name of the nation, in all their acts). Discussion the next day of the marc d’argent led Pétion to express, through reflections on his personal dilemmas, a perspective visibly common to many: “D’un côté je me disais que tout citoyen doit partager les droits de cité; de l’autre, lorsque le peuple est antique et corrompu, j’ai cru remarquer quelque nécessité” in limiting eligibility. The actually-existing population of France, bluntly, was simply not trustworthy. He thought the marc d’argent went too far, however, and indeed questioned as Dupont had the need for a deputy qualification. But his argument again focused on the control now to be exercised over the electoral process in general: “Maintenant, dès que vous avez épuré vos assemblées primaires… je vous demande si vous devez mettre des entraves à ce choix, si vous devez, en quelque sorte, leur retirer la confiance que vous leur avez accordée”. He continued, “L’on parle sans cesse de corruption; mais ce ne sont pas ces hommes-là qui sont les plus corruptibles” before summing up: “je dis qu’on doit laisser à la confiance le choix de la vertu”, but his reasoning had made it quite clear that his own confiance in the electorate, unless actively purified, was distinctly limited. [52]

22 Debate from here veered into further limitations. A strong strand of opinion was summed up by Cazalès: landed property was the basis of the whole tax system, and landed proprietors should be the only ones allowed to be deputies, as they were attached to the land, unlike “Le négociant [qui] est citoyen du monde entier, et peut transporter sa propriété partout où il trouve la paix et le bonheur”. [53] Prieur suggested bluntly that they should "Substituez la confiance au marc d’argent”, but instead the suggestion of Pison de Galand, that “posséder une propriété territoriale quelconque” be added to the marc d’argent requirement, was voted through, and the article declared approved, notwithstanding a string of subsequent objections from Mirabeau, Pétion, Garat and Grégoire. [54]

23 In the following weeks, the Assembly debated in more detail the administrative structures to which the vast majority of elected officials would contribute. A fundamental point here is that, from Thouret’s September report onwards, new structures were envisaged not merely as uniform, but as “Subordonnées directement au Roi, comme administrateur suprême” in a rigid hierarchy of responsibility – something to be set out in great detail in the eventual legislation. Thus, when deputies debated the make-up of such bodies, they were imagining them filled by essentially passive administrators, bound by a “soumission immédiate” to royal authority, not autonomous local politicians. [55] Yet even within such a vision, distrustful exclusions and suspicions abounded.

24 On 19 November, the Breton deputy Lanjuinais interrupted debate to propose “d’exclure de l’administration du département les parents des administrateurs à un certain degré”. [56] Although Alexandre de Lameth protested that he “vois avec chagrin qu’on propose sans cesse de nouveaux moyens de gêner les droits du peuples [sic.] dans l’élection de ses représentants”, and that “ces droits ne doivent avoir d’autre règle que la confiance”, (a quite remarkable statement in the actual context we have just seen), Lanjuinais persisted with a more formal proposal, which was adjourned until Monday 23 November, when he opened discussion by observing that his personal experience from Brest was of “la faveur des ministres” allowing a handful of families to dominate municipal and judicial roles. Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély riposted that new open electoral proceedings meant that the people “n’accordera sans doute sa confiance que lorsqu’il n’y aura nul danger pour ses intérêts.” Defermon, on the other hand, cited his own experience as also supporting Lanjuinais’ contention, while the duc de la Rochefoucauld countered, once again, that “la liberté doit être entière lorsque le peuple choisit lui-même ses représentants”, and exclusions “atténuent le droit qui appartient au peuple de donner sa confiance a celui qu’il en croit le plus digne” – once again, a truly remarkable contention given the Assembly’s actual recent decisions. [57] At this point discussion became diffuse, and Lanjuinais’ proposal went no further in relation to the departmental structures.

25 When on 25 November the Assembly debated municipal structures, the Constitution Committee’s original geometrical proposal had been quietly abandoned in favour of a simple revolutionization of every existing “ville, bourg, paroisse ou communauté”. [58] In contemplating the creation of elected administrations for these thousands of entities, deputies were clear that basic untrustworthiness and exposure to corruption was their primary concern. They haggled over the concept of a scrutin de liste, where voters inscribed names for all the positions to be filled on the same ballot, describing it alternately as both “favorable à l’intrigue”, and “contraire aux intrigants”. [59] Mougins de Roquefort noted bluntly: “Toutes les méthodes de scrutin sont nécessairement vicieuses”, but the double list (as subsequently adopted) was one where “on trouve place pour l’attachement, pour la parenté, pour la prévention, et le tour des lumières et des talents pourra toujours venir”. [60] He thus made it clear that voters’ true motives (in his mind) were far from those imagined in repeated assertions about confiance. The following day, Lanjuinais revived his exclusionary plan, insisting it was more important at this lower level. While Target pointed out that “très-petites” municipalities might find it “presque impossible” to fill their councils under the weight of such prohibitions, no further objections were raised. Thus “le père et le fils, le beau-père et le gendre, les frères et beau-frères, l’oncle et le neveu, par le sang ou par l’alliance” were barred from serving together. [61]

5.  Bitter experience and second thoughts

26 The National Assembly’s collected decisions about all these matters were embodied in two lengthy decrees in December 1789, and sent out with their own extensive official commentaries to enlighten the political nation as to their new responsibilities. [62] Some twenty months later, in the divisive aftermath of the king’s Flight to Varennes, and the rising tensions which had led up to it, the Assembly revisited these rules as part of their final set of decisions on the text of the Constitution. [63] Debate on the electoral process was foreshadowed during a discussion of taxation on 6 August 1791, when Bouche proposed that those taking up elected positions should need to show a tax-receipt for the previous year’s payments first (again, we may wonder, what else did they think a tax-paying franchise meant?) His reasoning was dramatic: for a long time now, deputies had been aware that “la cabale et l’intrigue agissent dans tous les départements” to secure elected offices, and especially the “fonctions glorieuses de député.” He claimed that up to twenty thousand “aspirants à ces fonctions honorables” were currently engaged in spreading disorder. “Ce ne sont pas des intrigants qu’il nous faut pour faire des lois.” [64]

27 It remained fundamentally unclear why he thought an “intrigant” could not also be a taxpayer. Where in 1789 at least part of the concern may have been to ward off the remnants of the Old Regime, in 1791 the deputies seemed increasingly certain that their new structures were at risk from within. Systematic debate began on 9 August, with the nature of the kingdom – introducing the term “indivisible” explicitly, on Rabaut’s urging, to avoid “un argument pour une subdivision en républiques fédératives” [65] – and of citizenship, where attempts to soften the boundaries of Frenchness were stoutly resisted. While Huguenot descendants were sentimentally welcomed, the heirs of other expatriates were rejected for hotly emotive reasons: “les puissances étrangères” could send such men, “des descendants peut-être d’un banni”, to gain influence all the way from primary assemblies to the legislature itself, “si vous les receviez ainsi sans aucune precaution”. [66]

28 These fundamentally distrustful, and indeed fearful, tones ran through the lengthy and intemperate debates that followed. The definition of national sovereignty adopted, over the plaintive resistance of Thouret as Committee rapporteur, insisted on multiple adjectives as if the words alone could fend off danger: “une, indivisible, inaliénable, imprescriptible…” [67] All the previous limitations on citizenship were retained, including that of the absolute exclusion of those deemed to be a serviteur à gages. Debate exploded, however, about the provision to exclude bankrupts - and as in 1789, the primary issue was whether the measure was harsh enough. Ten speakers batted the issue back and forth with the rapporteur, running out the session. Debate resumed on the 10th with Rewbell’s insistence that “L’expérience ne prouve malheureusement que trop qu’on peut se procurer un acquit général de ses créanciers en les trompant”, and the wording of the provision needed to be tougher to exclude such fraud. Gaultier-Biauzat then requested that the measure that had accompanied this provision in 1789, excluding the inheriting sons of bankrupts, should be restored. Roussillon complained that bankruptcy, as a matter of law, only afflicted the mercantile class: “car, comment reconnaîtrez-vous qu’un homme opulent ou qui en a l’apparence et qui ne paye pas ses dettes est en faillite?” He asked for a rewrite of the article “de manière à ce qu’il frappe sur tous”. [68] Further inconclusive wrangling led to a vote to send the measure back to the committee, and to the next day’s debate.

29 Thouret attempted on this third day, 11 August, to have the measure withdrawn, as the “unanimous” view of the Committee was that it was unjust, and conflated the entirely innocent persons who might have become insolvable through a fire or crop-failure, with the careless but not criminal faillite, and with the undoubtedly criminal banqueroutier. He was turned down by the Assembly, which entered into an elaborate, ramifying discussion about the moral necessity of such a measure – “la confiance est la base du négoce” and would become “inébranlable” if misconduct risked loss of “le plus beau titre dont un homme puisse s’honorer, le titre de citoyen français” [69] – versus its potentially perilous effects – “relativement aux propriétaires [le decret] deviendrait la plus effroyable tyrannie” [70] – and ended, perhaps out of exhaustion, voting to approve the measure as put forward three days before (excluding bankrupts unless discharged, and no longer mentioning their children).

30 Debate turned to an even more exhausting topic: the Committee proposal to abolish the marc d’argent qualification for deputies, but quadruple the tax-threshold for participation as an elector. This raised an inevitable ideological storm between the mainstream and the radical left of the Assembly, but assertions of the thoughts and feelings of purported voters were in play throughout. Thouret, opening, deployed the doctrine of singular national sovereignty to explain why local “sections” could not be autonomous, and how the “délégués intermédiaires” in each electoral assembly had responsibilities that required guarantees of “indépendance personnelle” and concern for the chose publique, and only with such guarantees could one “leur abandonner l’exercice libre de la confiance” in choosing deputies and other officials from amongst “tous les sujets qui méritent leur confiance”. [71]

31 Pétion, arguing the opposite, stressed the emotional attachment that a supposed general body of “citoyens” had to their personal eligibility, many of whom the Assembly now proposed to “découragez”. Such men “vont être privés d’un droit précieux… auquel ils attachent plus d’importance qu’à la représentation même à laquelle ils n’aspirent pas. Mais presque tous aspirent à la qualité d’électeur”. He perorated on the sentimental satisfactions of a more egalitarian electoral body: “L’homme ordinaire aime à se trouver placé au milieu de ses concitoyens de toute profession”; finding a rich man there, “il aime à se rapprocher de lui, parce qu’il sait que cet homme n’aura pas pour lui le même dédain qu’il affecte dans le cours ordinaire de la vie”. [72] These claims opened up a range of increasingly bitter reflections on the past two years’ experience. [73] Briois-Beaumetz was scornful of the notion that participation was a treasured possession, remarking (to applause): “n’avez-vous pas vu qu’une grande partie des électeurs, loin de regarder cette honorable distinction comme une faveur, comme une marque d’estime de leurs concitoyens,” instead insisted it was an onerous burden, and demanded to be paid. This, he asserted, accounted for the “désertion” of the assemblies, “puisque dans cette capitale même, au sein du patriotisme, on a vu des choix résulter de 200 électeurs seulement”. [74]

32 Barnave, in an extensive speech that mocked “idées métaphysiques de liberté” and “la démocratie pure”, insisted bluntly that working people “n’ont pas un intérêt assez puissant à la conservation de l’ordre social existant”. Returning to a fundamental assertion of 1789, such people offered “à la corruption de la richesse, un moyen trop facile de s’emparer des élections”. [75] “[F]aits connu de tout le monde”, he continued, should rule out the engagement at higher levels of all but the financially-independent. Profoundly dangerous men were already slipping into the assemblies, “animés, poussés par l’intrigue,” bringing “le principe de turbulence et le désir de changement dont ils sont intérieurement dévorés”, men who wish to “mettre l’intrigue à la place de la probité, un peu d’esprit à la place du bon sens, et l’intérêt particulier et toujours actif à la place de l’intérêt général et stable de la société! (Vifs applaudissements.)” [76] In the face of such inflammatory rhetoric, debate spiralled out of control, and at one point “Plusieurs instants se passent dans une violente agitation” as various members fought to speak at once. Disorder was such that repeated attempts to close the debate failed, and it was finally adjourned to continue the next day. [77]

33 Thouret resumed discussion on the 12th, insisting that the censitary restriction on électeurs was an essential “garantie” to protect the “corps social… contre les erreurs des corps électoraux partiels”, reminding the Assembly, yet again, that such bodies act “pour la nation entière”. Objections, he went on somewhat paradoxically, appeared to contain “un germe de défiance et même de division”. Electoral participation, as had been spelled out repeatedly, was not an individual right but a social function, and the electorate did not have the right to make unsuitable choices in exercising that function. Over interjections from the left, he continued at length with an increasingly aggressive attack on the risk of electoral assemblies that have “une telle latitude pour faire de mauvais choix, qu’en nommant tous individus payant le marc d’argent, ils pourraient composer la plus détestable législature”. [78] The dread of a pincer-movement from above and below was palpable. Reinforcing Barnave’s prior claims, Thouret asserted that including unsuitable electors opened a door not merely to error, but to subversion: “mémoires” received by the committee, and “les faits que chacun de nous connaît” established that such people, either failed to attend electoral assemblies, or “les abandonnent dès les premier ou le second jour,” and thus “les intrigants, qui s’attendent à ce dégoût prochain,” take up the first two or four days of business “par des incidents; apres quoi l’élection reste abandonnée à ceux qui veulent s’en emparer. (Applaudissements.)”

34 Against a cry from Salle that “vous calomniez les Français”, Thouret riposted that “la majorité de cette Assemblée, pour ne pas dire l’universalité,” knew that the assemblies “ont été fort travaillés jusqu’à présent de cette manière.” Cries of “C’est vrai!” and further applause followed. [79]

35 Debate continued in a furious tone – d’André demanded that the President “imposez silence” on the “bruit épouvantable” of the left, Robespierre charged that “M. d’André veut devenir despote” – but even Grégoire, opposing the change, had to observe that “la plupart même des citoyens actifs” were “déjà trop dégoûtés malheureusement dans beaucoup d’endroits”. Stripped of the chance to become électeurs, “ils ne seraient là en quelque sorte que pour nommer des maîtres”. [80] After other speakers had elaborated on various issues of principle, Le Chapelier spoke at length, insisting that anywhere up to four-fifths of electors had been notoriously absent from voting in many departments. [81] Further agitated debate remained inconclusive, but it led into further disturbing discussions of the fundamental corruption of electoral politics.

36 Deputies vigorously debated the proposed removal of the rule imposed on assemblies in 1789, to only elect those resident in their own département. Leleu de la Ville-au-Bois looked back to early 1789, and having witnessed agents of both the duc d’Orléans and “M de Condé” make electoral solicitations, including “les offres les plus insidieuses, les plus corruptibles”. [82] Salle declared that such a restriction was necessarily constitutional, as “conservatoire de la liberté”, and “épuratoire des mauvais citoyens.” Elections would otherwise be swarmed by “tous les intrigants de la capitale”, promoted by unscrupulous journalism and by “la recommandation d’autres intrigants qui auraient eu l’art de se faire une réputation locale”. [83] Garat, speaking next, went back again to 1789, making even wider accusations: everyone knew, he insisted, how many intrigues had been active “dans les assemblées électorales qui nous ont portés ici; brigue de nom, brigue de rang, de fortune.” All this was to be feared again in future elections, the outcomes of which “sera plus intéressante que jamais.” Malès briefly echoed and reinforced the preceding points, noting “C’est l’indignation qu’ont excité les coureurs de bailliages qui a déterminé l’Assemblée à rendre ce decret constitutionnel; les memes motifs existent aujourd’hui”. [84] Although the Assembly seemed in two minds – first voting “à l’unanimité” to close discussion, then re-opening it when Merlin asked for 1789’s restrictive measure to be reinserted – it finally voted, once again, for the restriction to be restored with “Vifs applaudissements”. [85]

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38 The deputies of 1789-91 lived within a complex and contradictory political culture, that they wrestled desperately and unsuccessfully to reduce to something simple and coherent. One element was what Charles Walton has called a “culture of calumny”. [86] They had learned from the Old Regime that there was no reliable boundary between true and false accusations, and that a false accusation was almost always worth making, in a context of widespread secrecy and suspicion where almost nothing could be effectively falsified. At the same time, they were also emerging from a culture of authoritarian policing and the formal, legal constraint of liberty, in both political and economic spheres, and, crucially, where these overlapped. [87] While their general aspiration might have been to start afresh, it was visibly almost impossible for them to let go of the idea that things and people should be controlled. They dreaded corruption and threw themselves into almost literal paroxysms at the social threat of the fraudulent bankrupt (perhaps because it was one particularly close to their shared experiences, as they so unhesitatingly defamed domestic servants). But although they reacted violently against a society where political manipulation of privilege had been a central route to economic security, their preferred solution of unregulated individualism starkly failed to create a culture in which corruption was effectively repressed (even, looking ahead beyond our scope here, in the depths of “the Terror”). [88]

39 In their constitutional construction, the members of the National Constituent Assembly strove to resolve a paradox: they had asserted that the sovereign nation was all-powerful and pre-existed the structure they were building, but that only a small and shrinking proportion of actual members of the nation could be trusted not to bring it to ruin through intrigue and corruption. And in the name of the nation, “indivisible” but imperilled, those who threatened it from above and below should not be trusted: the countervailing risk was just too overwhelming, practically and emotionally. Meanwhile in practice, demanding that every level of local authority operate as the passive administrators of instructions from above made every instance of disagreement into potential rebellion. [89] The deep roots of the link between trust and Terror analysed by Anne Simonin can be found here. In the same fashion, the suggestion of Sophie Wahnich that the emergence of the Terror can be interpreted as a desperate effort to find a balance between the counter-revolution and the uncontrolled violence of the people, can be seen more as the continuation of profound convictions than as a drastic overturning of them. [90] While the deputies claimed to be building a rational new system on the trust of the electorate, their angry, bitter failure to be confident, to actually trust anyone to do right when they might do otherwise, should be recognised as one of the key elements that fatally undermined the constitutional project, and would continue to disrupt republican politics far into the future.

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