A passage highlighting the identification of Algerian revolutionaries with figures from the French Revolution
Here is an excerpt from the memoirs of Zohra Drif, in which she reflects on her experience during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962).
« So my confession aims clearly to justify, fifty-seven years later, why Samia and I decided to include Mama Zhor, our sweet accomplice and best cover of all time, as soon as El Kho proposed our admission into the armed groups. We did so, of course, without his knowledge. Indeed, I have
perhaps not shared enough about Mama Zhor’s considerable role, not only in building our awareness and facilitating our maturation but also in firming up our commitment. She personified the power of our ideals and presented an impregnable bulwark against all sowers of doubt and discouragement. Unlike us, she had no need of Saint-Just or Danton or Montesquieu. She was all of them at once and more »
(Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter, Zohra Drif)
P.S.: Samia is in fact Samia Lakhdari, one of the members of the FLN. Mama Zhor is the mother of Samia Lakhdari. El Kho is in fact Yacef Saadi.
Pauvre Montesquieu, auteur de l'expression "doux commerce". Les tordus, les tortionnaires, les menteurs, les pousse-au-suicide professionnels peuplent précisément le commerce, continent moral où l'on plante un couteau dans le dos de son prochain sur le refrain "il n'y a rien de personnel vous savez, c'est juste le business".
What were the stakes of these two modes of voting at the time of the birth of the constitutional monarchy in 1791?
Suffrage is the act by which one declares their will, in a choice, a deliberation (notably political). At the birth of the constitutional monarchy, while its Constitution was being drafted, the choice of suffrage mode was paramount for the National Constituent Assembly. Several important figures take a stand and illustrate themselves on this issue.
Who are these figures and why do they defend one mode of suffrage and not the other?
First of all, let’s explain universal suffrage. It consists in the recognition of the right to vote for all citizens of voting age. (Note that at that time only men over 25 years old can be citizens. Women do not have this right. In France, it was not until 1945 that women could vote for the first time.)
Censal suffrage is a vote reserved for people who paid the cens-from which it takes its name. Under antiquity, the word cens was the enumeration of Roman citizens (census) as well as the evaluation of their fortune. This was done every 5 years. Nevertheless, the term has evolved. In 1791, in France, cens referred to the direct tax that a citizen had to pay to become a voter. (Note that the name of this tax can still change, sometimes called contribution and not cens, as in Article 2, Section II of the Constitution of 1791.) In 1791, to have the right to vote, the citizen had to pay a cens equivalent to the value of three days of work.
On the other hand! It must be understood that even if an individual (male) did not pay the tax for giving him the right to vote, after turning 25, he became and still remained a citizen for his all life. It was then called a passive citizen. As for those who paid this specific direct tax, they were called active citizens.
During the French Revolution, politicians such as Maximilien Robespierre argued that universal suffrage was best for France. It is, in their eyes, the most democratic—the fairest. But why?
Firstly, for them, the citizens must, as Robespierre explains in his speech named The silver mark, be equal in rights as explained in the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights. Depriving citizens of a right under any pretext related to their fortune would then be tantamount to going against these sacred and fundamental rights. For the defenders of this mode of suffrage, it is impossible to adopt the censal suffrage because of its contradiction with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Moreover, in this same speech Robespierre raises the fact that by depriving a large majority of citizens of this right to vote, they will be totally excluded from politics to the point of becoming foreigners. He would no longer have any voice, nor any weapon to be heard or weigh in the balance of the political game in order to defend their interests as a people—the common good. Totally disarmed, they would no longer exist. Politics would then be a world in which the poorest citizens would not be part, but which nevertheless governs them.
Consequently, this raises another danger for the defenders of universal suffrage, that of the creation of a dominant rich (bourgeois) class, which would use politics to defend their own personal interests at the expense of those of the people and the common good. This would mean somewhere recreating a kind of new form of the Ancien Régime. Now, the distinction would no longer be that of the noble or commoner blood, but the wealth of the citizen. If he is born rich, or poor.
Despite all this, why did some defend censal suffrage?
In the other camp we find the patients of Montesquieu’s thought. (He died in 1755 but has greatly influenced, through his works such as The Spirit of Law French politics under the Revolution.) This thinker theorizes, in this same work, in chapter VI of book XI; "All citizens must have the right to give their voice to choose their representative. Except those who are in such a state of baseness that they are deemed to have no will of their own."
Abbé Sieyès, whose full name is Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, joins the latter on this point. Indeed, the religious man, author of a very famous work What Is the Third Estate? is of the opinion that the people would not be educated enough and do not have enough time to hold in their hands the power to vote or be elected. In a speech delivered on September 7, 1789, he explains; "First of all, the great plurality of our fellow citizens has neither enough education nor enough leisure to want to deal directly with the laws that must govern France." Which means, in other words, that most of the citizens are not intellectually elevated enough, but also that they are far too busy working to have something to eat to have the luxury of interest and understand politics.
Thus, for them the people would be a mass of which many individuals would have neither the time nor the competence to take an interest in public affairs. It would be almost dangerous to allow the people the right to vote or to be elected. Therefore, to distinguish between citizens who are in this level of baseness, and those who are not there, their pecuniary capacity is used. Whether or not they are able to pay the cens, or the contribution. (Note that some defend the idea that Abbé Sieyès did not really support a censal suffrage, but a capacity-based suffrage, because he says he wants to judge citizens' abilities before giving them the right to vote.)
Another justification for the supporters of censitary suffrage is that the people cannot act alone, they must be represented. To support their remarks, they take the example of ancient republics where every citizen could vote, express themselves and be eligible. Montesquieu says in book XI in chapter VI of The Spirit of the Law; "There was a great vice in most of the former republics. The people had the right to make active resolutions. Something of which it is incapble. The people must enter the government only to choose representatives there." Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès is also of this opinion and adds; "It is obvious that 5 to 6 million active citizens cannot assemble, they must therefore be represented." The representation of the people by elected officials is thus both a realistic necessity, because it is impossible to gather millions of men, and also, in their eyes, a necessity of capacity, because not all citizens of the people would be capable of doing politics.
From this second justification born the outline of what has become national sovereignty, but this will be the subject of another post.
In the Constitution of 1791, which suffrage was retained and why?
This Constitution of 1791, giving birth to the first French constitutional monarchy, establishes censal suffrage. Why? In the first place, certainly because the members of the National Constituent Assembly—practically all bourgeois—were for the majority much more inclined to want to defend their personal and selfish interests rather than being virtuous and fully applying the egalitarian and democratic republican principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Otherwise, they would have had to accept a kind of competition, with additional adversaries not sharing the same interests, arising from their different respective classes.
Thus, whether they sincerely agree with it or not, the justifications brought by the thought of Montesquieu, then by Abbé Sieyès allowed them, in a way, to camouflage their greed and selfishness. They justified in this way their choice for the Constitution, thus tilting the balance of political power amply on their side—to the detriment of the most deprived.
Finally, let us add that the vote of the deputies in the National Assembly provided for by the Constitution of 1791 is an indirect election. That is to say, it is an election system in which voters do not themselves choose the person or people they wish to see elected, but elect people who make this choice. This can be explained by the fact that the National Constituent Assembly was composed mainly of deputies from the Third Estates summoned to the Estates-General by Louis XVI in 1789, and that these latter had themselves been elected through an indirect election. As a result, it is highly likely that they simply reused the system he was already familiar with.
Conclusion:
Thus, we can recognize, despite this questionable choice, that the Constitution of 1791 (the very first in France) was the first stone laid for what would later become, over the course of historical events, the French Republic. Until having five different Republics with their own Constitution. (Currently, France is under the Fifth Republic.)
Because, only two years after its drafting and that the king swore to it, the Constitution ends with the death of Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793. The deputies had thus, for the first time in history, to imagine a country governed without a king.
Sources :
Picture: Print of the session on August 4th by Charles Monnet, Paris, BnF, department of prints and photography.
Dividers: @saradika-graphics
Works:
La convocation des Etats généraux pose de nombreuses questions de procédure. Pour y répondre, un Règlement général long d’une cinquantaine
