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French constitutional monarchy
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Message 1.Β
Posted by webplodder (U3375939) on Thursday, 16th June 2011
Would France have benefited from a constitutional monarchy, which was rejected by Louis XVIII and Marie Antoinette when offered by the French revolutionaries at the time? I gather it was Marie Antoinette's urging that persuaded a indecisive Louise to stick to the absolute power of the monarchy to remain, which led to the both their deaths. Would a stronger king have altered history?
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Message 2
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Friday, 17th June 2011
In September 1791, Louis did formally accept the new Constitution. He and Marie-Antoinette strongly disliked it, and did not make much of an effort to hide that. But for a while, Louis did play the role of a constitional monarch.
It failed because of the radicalism of the extreme left and right, who were set for a bloody confrontation, and the threat of intervention by the other European powers, which brought the crisis forward. Louis could clearly have been more constructive, but in the circumstances there probably was no way on which he could be successful. -
Message 3
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
Wasn't Louis Philippe the closest they got to a constitutional monarch (though I think Louis XVIII wasn't completely absolutist, though his succeeding bro Charles IX I think tried v. hard to 'forget nothing and remember nothing' as Talleyrand warned the restored Bourbons not to do!)
Somehow I can't see the Frogs having the patience for a constitutional monarch. Constitutional monarchies tend to work in practice, but not in theory, so of course the French wouldn't like them.....
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Message 4
This posting has been hidden during moderation because it broke the in some way.
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Message 5
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
Mutatis Mutandis,
that was exaxtly what I wanted to reply to webplodder. As usual you worded it to the point as I am used from you.
I bow in respect, kind regards,
Paul. -
Message 6
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
Jenny,
isn't that a tiny bit "Frogs" bashing ?
But nevertheless you seems to know "something" about French kings...
What about Napoleon III? First chosen in the parlement as president and later by plebiscite chosen "empereur"...
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 7
Posted by webplodder (U3375939) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
Thank you.
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Message 8
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Sunday, 19th June 2011
"isn't that a tiny bit "Frogs" bashing ?"
Oh, I'm sure the French hold the Brits in exactly the same high regard......
(That's why it's so nice to be 'frog-bashing' - because one knows that it's totally reciprocated!!!!) -
Message 9
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 19th June 2011
Second try
webplodder
You summed it up really.. The French revolutionaries of the Middle Class revolution offered Constitional Monarchy to the absolutist Bourbons. No doubt they were encouraged by the success of England, and then Great Britain, especially by the "Tory Revolution" that started in 1783 and- after the French Wars interruption- was fully realised in the Great Reform Act of 1832. In other words the "would be" Middle-Class had everything to gain and very little to lose from this change, which would be at the expense of the monarchy.
On the basis of an intimate connection with France since 1965 I see this very much in keeping with the French atttitude to "the Rights of Man"..
As Henri Amouroux summed it up in his history of France during the Second World War, French people very much approve of laws that they demand should be applied to everyone else- mostly at everyone else's expense and inconvenience. But all of France knows that, when you personally want to get something done, you resort to the famous "System D"- in other words you you whatever kind of influence, favour, connection or advantage you can in order to by-pass the "system" and the laws.
More recently affairs have highlighted the fact that within the French Republican tradition it is accepted that people in public office can quite cheerfully be tolerated taking the same kind of liberties with the law and the rights of other people that the French people assume as being normal- as long as people can get away with it.
Systems do not work. People work out ways to make them work. And subsequent to the first French Republic with the 1793 revolution, French constitutions rarely seem to last more than half a century at most, after which France has to totally reconstruct itself from first principles. And it is very difficult to see how such a "revolting" and "lawless" people could actually handle an English constitional monarchy situation which fundamentally embraces Walpole's idea of "let sleeping dogs lie".
It could, however, be argued that the French President is almost a modern Middle Class version of an "Elective Constitutional Monarchy". And moreover I can not accept the argument that the French revolutionary turmoil of 1830, which led to the monarchy of Louis Phillippe, had no impact at all upon popular discontent with England most notably the Last Labourers Revolt that started in Kent- that great county of thriving smuggling connections across the Channel and through here into London, and the riots later that demanded "the Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill"- so that the Middle Class revolution would be accomplished here in 1832.
Cass -
Message 10
Posted by webplodder (U3375939) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Thanks for that Cass, but do you think that the excesses of Marie Antoinette at a time of great deprivation of the masses was the last straw and tipped the balance and fueled the anti-monarchy movement? I know she was subjected to a campaign of hate via public publications many of which were simply untrue.
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Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
webplodder
Re the excesses of Marie Antoinette:
I was very interested by a observation made by Irene Nemirovsky in "Suite Francaise".. The novel was only published a few years ago because Nemerovsky had died in the Holocaust once the Germans caught up with this Russian Jew, who had settled in France. Her daughters survived (with a suitcase with her writing) because they had been taken in by French Christians, who passed them off as their own.
As part of a family of Russian bankers, who had lost more or less everything in the Russian Revolution- escaping to France, her experience of being on "the receiving end" of a revolution gave her an extra insight: and this was married to her experience of learning to live the French way.
Thus she points out just how unfairly Marie Antoinette was criticised for that alleged "Let them eat cake" remark. In fact she asserts that she did not talk of "gateau" but of "brioche", and explains that the flour used to make brioche is a different flour than bread flour and that the brioche is quite a cheap and common form of "bread substitute.
Perhaps - as in so many cases- the real problem was that decision of Louis XIV to build the complex at Versailles, thus creating that problem of a centre of government that is not actually the centre of meaningful power.
But Louis XIV had his own problems to counter- the bitter internal conflicts within France includiing the Civil Wars of the Fronde. The relationship of the French provinces to Paris is something of a love-hate one. If Voltaire could claim that Louis XIV implied "I am the State", then the people of Paris could counter that in truth France is the creation of Paris: and this was clearly the understanding of the Prussians/Germans in 1870, 1914 and 1940. Capture Paris and France collapses.
So an interesting comparison with Louis XIV's decision to build Versailles away from the power and influence of Paris, is the experience of London during the period when England became a Puritan Republic of the kind aspired to by revolutionaries like the "incorruptible" Robespierre, and then had the Restoration of the Royal Court.
In 2011 there remain great hopes at the economic injection that London is receiving and will receive from hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Hosting a Royal Court was like having the Olympic Games permamently. Of course it involved a great deal of luxury spending. But luxury spending creates jobs, work income and wealth, because -by definition- this has to stand up to the highest standards of interational competition.
The catastrophes of the Plague and the Fire of London so soon after the Restoration are the catastrophes that one can associate with a newly revitalised London literally bursting at the seams as people flocked to all of the industries and trades associated with London being fully once again "open for business". And the new Saint Paul's Cathedral was a clear statement of intent and self-confidence about the new London that was emerging. Within three hundred years the City of London was a global metropolis and the key central hub of the global economy, as I wrote on another thread recently- confident enough to welcome the Huguenot specialists of the French silk industry.
These economic facts were largely ignored in times of revolutionary and progressive logic in which activists worked on the anger of the poor by presenting them with the "excesses of the rich".. This resulted in the politics of redistribution, for example in the UK, through which spending power was/is taken away from the rich and given to the poor.
This of course has had a huge impact on the British economy because the demand for high-class luxury goods that could be sold all over the world was drastically reduced, while the demand for cheap "popular" lines was artificially increased.
Hence the British car industry came to focus on the low cost family car that very few other countries in the world would import in any numbers, and which emerging economies like Hong Kong and a reconstructing Japan could copy and replicate in their own versions- which increasing presented better value to the British family. So the motor car industry lost both its export potential and its domestic market.
These points were brought out very clearly by Evan Davies in the first of his "Made in Britain" series which looked at British manufacturing and projects like the sports car being developed by the MaClaren racing team which will probably be marketted for about Β£750,000.
Only when "British jobs" will produce these kind of "British wages" will the UK be able to sustain the standards of living that people have been encouraged to think of as a "human right" through the politics of subsidising the life of the masses.
Of course, to go back to France, for most of its life the Common Market/EU project has been a more structured way for the Germans to make reparations to France than happened after the First World War. The Common Agricultural Policy has always been a way of redistributing wealth from industrial Germany to a still heavily rural France, which- according to a French Troskyist publication I read- has more communes than the whole of the rest of the EU put together, each coping with its own affairs at a small scale and local level, thanks to the subsidies given to the French countryside.
Cass -
Message 12
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Cass,
The French revolutionaries of the Middle Class revolution offered Constitional Monarchy to the absolutist Bourbons. No doubt they were encouraged by the success of England, and then Great Britain, especially by the "Tory Revolution" that started in 1783 and- after the French Wars interruption- was fully realised in the Great Reform Act of 1832. In other words the "would be" Middle-Class had everything to gain and very little to lose from this change, which would be at the expense of the monarchy.Β
I've yet to hear of any French-Revolution-era account which cited the English/British revolutions as a model. Nor for that matter, any American-Revolution-era one. -
Message 13
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Paul makes an interesting point about Napoleon III. A "plebiscitary democracy" is a contradiction in terms, as evidenced by the many examples in both europe and the Middle East from the 20th century onwards of those who have iused the forms of democracy to achieve dictatorial power and Napoleon III is, in many ways, the progenitor of the methods used by later dictators of both the right and the left.
He rose to prominence by appealing to the urban middle-classes and their desire for stability and then elevated himself in a palace coup by appealing to those in the provinces impatient with parliamentary norms. In one of his earliest but probably most convincing political analyses Karl Marx, later evicted from France by Napoleon III, explains in his study of Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851how democratic mechanisms might be employed to serve the cult of personality by a largely ill-informed electorate.
However as the Second Empire progressed constitutional mechanisms were gradually put in place. In 1859 he issued a political amnesty, in 1860 he extended the powers of the National Assembly and the Senate, in 1861 the press were allowed to publish reports of parliamentary debates, in 1863 government ministers (although still appointed by the Emperor and accountable to him) explained policy in the Assembly and in 1867 they responded to questions from Assembly deputies. As a result a parliamentary opposition emerged and in 1870 Napoleon instituted parliamentary government with Emile Ollivier as the leader of the government party.
All these reforms were carried through by the use of plebiscites, a technique adopted by de Gaulle almost a century later. By the end of his reign Napoleon III could almost claim to be France's first constitutional socvereign (although unlike the British monarch he still held a tight grip on foreign and defence policy).
Ironically these reforms, at least those regarding the removal of press censorship and the widening of the Assembly, were to [prove his undoing. As a consequence of Bismarck's reworded Ems telegram in 1870 France became caught up in a war fever, fuelled by a jingoistic press and irate Assembly, that Napoleon, unlike his uncle always fearful of war, could not staunch.
Once disaster struck, as in 1815, 1917, 1940 and 1968, the French scapegoated the man at the top rather than their own misplaced enthusiasm. However the taste for constitutional monarchy lingered. The Third Republic set up by Thiers in the wake of the Prussian defeat in 1871 had been intended only as a provisional government, in reaction to the excesses of the Communards. The aim of the founders was to replace it with a constitutional monarchy along British lines.
However the 1830 revolution had left the royalists divided between two claimants from the Bourbon and Orleanist lines. The Bourbon claimant, the Comte de Chambord, had agreed that on his death the royalist claim would unite behind the Orleanist pretender, the Comte de Paris.
Chambord was offered the throne but, true to Carlyle's axiom about the Bourbons having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, would only accept on the basis of absolutist rule. The Third Republic's founders decided to await Chambord's demise and the passage of the royal claim to the Comte de Paris.
However, like Charles II, Chambord took an unconscionable time a-dying and by the time of his eventual death in 1883 the enthusiasm for a constitutional monarchy among the political class had evaporated. Contrary to expectations the Third Republic appeared to have bedded down remarkably well. There was none of the instability and crisis associated with France's first and second attempt at republican rule and the bourgeoisie were firmly in control (Napoleon may have aided this by preparing the ground beforehand). Also the emergence of the Radical-Liberal Party, with its anti-clerical agenda, especially in the field of education, would have seen the revival of the monarchy as a positive hindrance to implementing this agenda.
As a consrquence no further offer was ever made after Chambord's death. Some discussion of a constitutional; monarchy flared briefly following the fall of the Vichy government after Liberation in 1944. It was pointed out that the monarchies of Holland, Norway and Denmark, where the monarchs had either gone into exile, or, as in Denmark, provided a rallying point for non-cooperation with the occupier, had not been stained by the taint of collaboration as France had. However this did not apply to Belgium or Italy which were also monarchies.
Also, the monarchists were divided. Some, like the Cagoule movement provided the earliest instances of armed resistance and were responsible for perhaps one of the most daring rescues of WWII (apart from Skorzeny's springing from captivity of Mussolini) - the escape from imprisonment of General Giraud (although it did neither Giraud nor the monarchists little good in the long run). Others, like the young royalist supporter Francois Mitterand, rallied to the cause of Petain and Vichy (although even he changed sides when he saw which way the wind was blowing).
When the real king-in-waiting, Charles de Gaulle, surprisingly abdicated at the beginning of 1946 the Third Republic revived and mutated into the even more fragmented form of the Fourth. It took another crisis 12 years later for the crown to be offered to de Gaulle, on his own terms, again. Fortunately for France he had brought a constitution with him. -
Message 14
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
I've yet to hear of any French-Revolution-era account which cited the English/British revolutions as a model. Nor for that matter, any American-Revolution-era one.Β
Wasn't Mirabeau stringly influenced by the works of Locke and looked to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the template for the desired outcome of the Revolution? Didn't Lafayette, who had fought alongside the American colonists and was the head of the Army and National Guard at the outset of the Revolution, favour a constitutional republic along American lines?
It was the failure of these two figures, one favouring the continuation of the monarchy, the other a republic, but both committed to constitutionality, to work together that led them being outflanked by an increasingly radicalised Asembly and the Revolution, which both of them had done so much to foster, descending into extremism and butchery. -
Message 15
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
White Camry
I am amazed.. for one thing by your assumption that I implied that the French were capable of modelling themselves on anyone else- even their dear old enemy England. . There was a famous dictum about the Ancient Greeks that many other people came up with discoveries and inventions, but it was only the Greeks with their deep and universal understanding who were able to fully realise the potential in the idea and bring it to fruition.
The French see themselves in much the same tradition. Of course "les Anglais" have enjoyed some advantages by being at a safe distance from the full thrust of history and this gave them a head start in exploiting the wider global reality. But the world turns on an axis that puts France at the very centre of the true tide of human history. Hence at present French commentators praise the wisdom of President Sarkosy and Madame Lagarde, who had decided to copy the "Anglo-Saxon model" of "its the economy stupid", in learning that these Financial bubbles tend to burst, and then its is very important to come back to the idea of Government based upon a Social Contract.
In a piece on "History" he wrote in 1828 for the Edinburgh Review T.B. Macaulay spelled out the advantages enjoyed by Great Britain in building on England successful story of gradual constitutional development with well founded institutions and customs which had made constitutional monarchy work. But France was determined to do the job really properly and inauguarate a whole new age of human history by going back to the greatest models of the greatest age of human government- the Roman Empire, that built upon the Greek experience. So, rather like a Jurassic Park experience, they decided to revive the glories of Ancient Rome.
But in this they were encouraged by the British experience and by many elements of British thought, after all England/Britain kept beating them in wars from the 1690's until the French helped the British in America to defeat the British Crown, merely at a cost to the French Crown and no benefit. But the war and the friendships and connections that it brought inevitably had resonance within France where it seemed anomalous to be fighting for the rights of American colonists that were denied to the whole of the French third estate. The most notable champion of change was surely the Marquis de Lafayette who had fought for the rights of man in the Americas and associated himself with the revolution, presumably along with many of those who had been his comrades in arms in that conflict.
Moreover the American ambassadors in Paris (names have gone for the moment-- Was Jefferson one briefly? And Dr "Electricity"?) subsequent to the achievement of independence included some of the famous leading figures of the American Revolution, and it is inconceivable that there was not much debate in such learned circles in the most civilized and cultured city on Earth (by its own estimation) when the colonies went on to draft the Constitution that set up the USA.
Furthermore interest in constitutional matters and the very different way that things were done in England after the revolution of 1688-9 were popularised in France by Voltaire's "English Letters" based upon his personal observations during a period of exile in England. Voltaire was to be hailed as one of the heroes of the French Revolution. Meanwhile Montesquieu had included the English Constitution with his study of constitution making leading to his theories of checks and balances, that were (and are) very influential within the US Constitution.
As for the Tory Revolution of 1783-1832 that was very heavily influenced by a new outburst of intellectual thought associated especially with Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, while Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" was a "warning lesson from history". C.R. Fay, however, in his "Great Britain from Adam Smith to the Present Day" tackles the question of Adam Smith's indebtedness to France. He left Scotland where he had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy to spend time in France, and he only wrote the "Wealth of Nations" after his time there. But Fay finds most of Smith's ideas already in lecture notes that he wrote before going, and points out that some of the ideas that he did seem to pick up in France were associated with Scotsmen who had decided to build their lives in France rather than England. He mentions Richard Cantillon's essay written 1730-4 and published in 1755. Cantillon was part of that Scots cluster that founded banks in London and Paris, including John Law and the famous financial collapse at more or less the same time as the South Sea Bubble. Fay notes that the elder Mirabeau had a copy of Cantillon and goes on "It was at Mirabeau's house that Adam Smith listened to the French economists and filled out his conception of an economic system. And in conclusion he quotes Dugald Stewart who published an early volume on "Life and Writings of Adam Smith":- "The leading opinions, which the French economists embodied and systematized, were, in fact, all of British origin".
But to go back to the start when you embody and systematise something you are not merely using it as a model.
Cass -
Message 16
Posted by webplodder (U3375939) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Thank you very much for the detailed responses - I'm clearly among historical experts here. Much food for thought.
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Message 17
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Allan D
Thanks.. We seem to have got some of those in common.. What about my American ambassadors?.. I suppose I have got notes somewhere. ......
Benjamin Franklin. I looked in D.H.Lawrence "Selected Writings":
"Benjamin was just in his eyeholes- to use an English vulgarism, meaning he was delighted- when he was at Paris judiciously milking money out of the french monarchy for the overthrow of all monarchy. If you want to ride your horse to somewhere you just put a bit in its mouth. And Benjamin wanted to ride his horse so that it would upset the whole apple cart of the old masters. He wanted the whole apple-cart upset. So he put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass..
Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world order was a long process. In the depths of his own consciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be an American...He (the American) was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic." (1917-18)
Cass -
Message 18
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Allan D,
Wasn't Mirabeau stringly influenced by the works of Locke and looked to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the template for the desired outcome of the Revolution? Didn't Lafayette, who had fought alongside the American colonists and was the head of the Army and National Guard at the outset of the Revolution, favour a constitutional republic along American lines?Β
Well, that's two.
It was the failure of these two figures, one favouring the continuation of the monarchy, the other a republic, but both committed to constitutionality, to work together that led them being outflanked by an increasingly radicalised Asembly and the Revolution, which both of them had done so much to foster, descending into extremism and butchery.Β
Which is why I'd never heard of them. -
Message 19
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Tuesday, 21st June 2011
Cass,
So he put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass..Β
The image of which ...
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