“The force of government”: Constitutional drafting and re-drafting of the administration (1789–1799)

Abstract 0

The word “Government” was sanctioned for the first time by the Constitution of Frimaire Year VIII instead of the term “Executive” used in the Revolutionary constitutions. This was because it exercised a legal voluntarism (the initiative of the law and a regulatory power in favour of the Consuls) that the Revolutionaries tended to deny to the Executive in favour of an elected and representative Legislature. The historiography – especially that of legal specialist – has long inferred a critical review of the Revolution from this: a kind of revolutionary governmental nihilism that produced in 1799, in reaction, an overdevelopment of governmental authority. In a sense it was necessary: this reading of the Revolution implies a condemnation of the Third and Fourth Republics in favour of the Fifth (because their executive bodies were dependent on the legislature). However, the constitutional debates of the Revolution bear witness to a constant concern for establishing “the force of government” through the intervention of the administration. This contributed to the uniformity of the nation: it made men stand together under the impulse of a centralising power driven by a general administration. In this respect, the government was far from being an afterthought of revolutionary constitutionalism, on condition, as the revolutionaries themselves wished, that the administration was considered as a constitutional object.