ABSTRACT
After Thermidor the deputies now dominant in the Convention sought a political settlement that would stabilise the Revolution and end popular upheaval. The Constitution of Year III (August 1795) restricted participation in electoral assemblies by wealth, age and education as well as by sex. The social rights in the Constitution of 1793 were removed; indeed, the declaration of rights was now a declaration of rights and duties. The Constitution was put to the electorate: perhaps 1.3 million men voted in favour and 50,000 against, considerably fewer votes than for its predecessor in 1793. In this extract François-Antoine Boissy d’Anglas (1756-1826), one of the framers of the Constitution, outlines to an appreciative Convention the social bases of a stable political régime.
Finally the happy hour has arrived when, ceasing to be the gladiators of liberty, we can be its true founders. I no longer see in this assembly the villains who tarnished it; the archways of this temple no longer echo with their bloody vociferation, with their treacherous propositions. Our deliberations are no longer chained by the tyranny of the décemvirs, they will no longer be led astray by the demagogy of their accomplices. Their many and fierce satellites, disarmed, vanquished, imprisoned, will no longer have the insolence to bring their daggers here, and to point out their victims among you. Crime lives alone in the dungeons; industry and innocence have come out from there to revive agriculture, and to give their lives to commerce. …
You must offer to the French nation the republican Constitution that ensures its independence; you must, with its imminent establishment, finally guarantee the property of the rich man, the existence of the pauper, the enjoyment of the industrious man, the freedom and the safety of all. You must make the French people, in the midst of the nations that surround them, take the rank that their nature assigns them, and the influence that their strength, their knowledge, their trade must give them; make tranquility reign without oppression, liberty without unrest, justice without cruelty, humanity without weakness. …
We should be governed by the best among us: the best are the most learned and those most interested in maintaining the law: now, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who, possessing property, are attached to the country where it is located, to the laws that protect it, to the tranquility that preserves it, and who owe to this property and to the affluence that it brings the education that has made them able to discuss with wisdom and aptness the advantages and inconveniences of the laws that determine the fate of their fatherland. On the contrary, the man without property must constantly make virtuous efforts to interest himself in the order that holds nothing for him, and to oppose the movements that offer him some hope. …
If you give political rights to men without property unreservedly, and if they ever find themselves on the benches of the legislators, they will arouse unrest – or allow it to be aroused – without fear of its outcomes; they will establish – or allow to be established – taxes disastrous to trade and agriculture, because they will have neither felt nor feared nor predicted their deplorable results; and finally, they will lead us headlong into those violent convulsions from which we have barely emerged, and whose agonies will continue to be felt for such a long time across all of France.
A country governed by property owners is in the social order; that where non-property owners govern is in the natural state.
Source: Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, no. 281, 11 Messidor, Year III (29 June 1795), vol. 25, pp. 81, 92.https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781032618814/e9ac31eb-0a68-4fdc-b417-e6e5b1e67c6c/content/fig18_Unfig_001.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>