Constitution of 1791

Two years in the making

From the Tennis Court to the Manège

On 20 June 1789 the deputies of the Third Estate, locked out of their hall, swore at the Tennis Court not to separate until France had a constitution. France had never had a written one: the kingdom had lived by custom, by the king’s will and by the privileges of its orders, provinces and towns. It took the National Constituent Assembly more than two years to write one, and it did not write it at one stroke. It voted the constitution in pieces, as decrees, while it governed the country.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789, was to stand at its head. Within weeks the deputies settled the great questions of power. On 10 September they rejected a second chamber, which moderates such as Jean-Joseph Mounier had wanted on the English model; the next day they gave the king a veto that could delay laws but not block them for ever. From late 1789 and through 1790 they remade the country on the new principles: 83 departments in place of the old provinces, elected judges and officials, an elected clergy.

Then, on the night of 20 June 1791, Louis XVI fled Paris with his family. He was stopped at Varennes and brought back, and he had left behind a declaration condemning much of the Assembly’s work. The Assembly chose to keep him, claiming he had been abducted, because a constitutional monarchy without a king was hard to imagine. When crowds gathered on the Champ de Mars on 17 July to demand his removal, the National Guard fired on them. The moderates who had just broken away from the Jacobin Club to found the Feuillants then revised the decrees in August, gathering them into a single text, raising the property qualification for electors and dropping it for deputies. The Assembly adopted the finished constitution on 3 September 1791.

A king under the law

What the Constitution said

The Constitution opened with the Declaration of 1789, then a preamble that abolished, in one page, nobility, hereditary titles, the feudal regime, the sale of offices, the guilds and every privilege. Seven titles followed. The kingdom was one and indivisible, divided into 83 departments. Sovereignty belonged to the nation, which exercised it only through its representatives: an elected legislative body and the king.

The king kept the executive power, but as the nation’s first official rather than its owner. He was now King of the French, reigning by the law and not above it. His person was inviolable, but no order of his could be carried out unless a minister countersigned it and answered for it. He appointed ministers, ambassadors and generals and conducted foreign relations, but war could be declared only by a decree of the legislature, sanctioned by him. The legislature set his civil list for the whole of his reign. If he led an army against the nation, or left the kingdom and did not return when summoned, he would be deemed to have abdicated.

Laws were made by a single chamber, the Legislative Assembly of 745 deputies, elected for two years, which the king could not dissolve. He could refuse to sanction its decrees, but his veto was only suspensive: a decree presented again by the two following legislatures became law without him. Laws on taxes needed no royal sanction at all. Judges were elected. The Constitution also guarded itself against change: the next two legislatures could not propose any revision.

Active and passive citizens

Who could vote

The Declaration said that all citizens had the right to take part in making the law. The Constitution drew a line through them, using a distinction worked out by the abbé Sieyès. Active citizens were men aged 25 or over, living in their town or canton for a set time, who paid a direct tax worth at least three days’ labour, were not servants and had taken the civic oath. Passive citizens had the same civil rights but no vote. Women, however rich, were all passive.

Voting went in two stages. Active citizens met in primary assemblies and chose one elector for every hundred of them; the electors, who had to meet a much higher property qualification, then met in each department to choose the deputies.

About 4.3 million men qualified as active citizens, more than half of the men aged 25 or over: a broad vote for its time. Robespierre attacked the tax qualification, in the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club, as a betrayal of the Declaration, and in May 1791 he persuaded the deputies to bar themselves from the next Assembly. The men who had written the Constitution would not be there to defend it. The colonies, though part of the French empire, were left outside it.

The king’s oath

On 13 September 1791 Louis XVI wrote to the Assembly that he accepted the Constitution.

The next day he came to the Assembly and swore the oath the Constitution required of him: to be faithful to the nation and to the law, and to use all the power delegated to him to maintain the Constitution. Paris celebrated with festivities and illuminations. Yet after Varennes few believed him sincere, and to many patriots a constitution that kept him on the throne was already out of date.

Eleven months

How the constitutional monarchy fell

The Legislative Assembly met on 1 October 1791, made up entirely of new men, and it soon clashed with the king. In November it decreed measures against the émigrés and against the priests who refused the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; Louis vetoed them, and Paris began to call him Monsieur Veto. Pushed by the Girondins, the Assembly declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792, and the defeats that followed turned suspicion on the court. When Louis vetoed two more decrees in June and dismissed the Girondin ministers, a crowd invaded the Tuileries on 20 June and made him put on the red cap, but he would not give way.

On 10 August 1792 the sections of Paris and the fédérés from the provinces stormed the Tuileries. The king took refuge with the Assembly, which suspended him and called for a National Convention elected by all men, with no distinction between active and passive citizens. On 21 September the Convention abolished the monarchy. The Constitution of 1791 had lasted less than a year, and the king it had declared inviolable was tried by the Convention and guillotined on 21 January 1793.

Its ideas outlived it. It was France’s first written constitution, and its model of a monarchy bound by a written text, with responsible ministers and an elected assembly, came back in other forms in the constitutional monarchies of the nineteenth century. In 1830 Louis-Philippe even took its title of King of the French.