Traumatic Politics by Barry M. Shapiro

Author:Barry M. Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271035420
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

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Mirabeau and the Exclusion of Deputies from the Ministry

Of all the members of the Constituent Assembly, it was the comte de Mirabeau who was perhaps best equipped and best prepared to exercise the effective parliamentary leadership that would have been necessary to lay the groundwork for the emergence of a viable system of constitutional monarchy from the revolutionary upheaval of the summer of 1789. Despite a scandalous past and a questionable moral reputation, Mirabeau’s “influence was immense,” as Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret has written, “because many deputies saw him as a man of great ability who was capable of conducting the Revolution in a reasonable direction.”1 Or, as Timothy Tackett states, “No other individual came closer to exercising true charisma within the Assembly, deeply stirring the deputies and sometimes entirely changing their minds on certain fundamental issues through the sheer force of his personality and his rhetoric.”2 “This giant among pygmies,” wrote the deputy Duquesnoy on 28 October 1789, as the celebrated Great Tribune prepared to enter the royal ministry, was the only one on the horizon with “the genius, the talents, and the force of character to save us from the horrible chaos into which we have plunged.”3

While Mirabeau was far from the only early revolutionary leader who sought, as François Furet put it, “to reconcile the Revolution with the monarchy in order to safeguard liberty,”4 he does seem to have had the most fully developed conception of a set of particular institutional arrangements through which the possibility of cooperative relations between the Crown and the Assembly could perhaps have been maximized. More specifically, he was the Assembly’s principal advocate of a system of parliamentary government in which the ministers would need to maintain the confidence of both the Assembly and the king and in which they would maintain an everyday presence in the Assembly itself.5 In contrast to the usual eighteenth-century understanding that fallen ministers were subject to being treated as criminal offenders, Mirabeau, in J. J. Chevallier’s estimation, was “the only one [in the Assembly] who could distinguish between the penal responsibility of ministers and their simple political responsibility.”6 Thus he argued that a minister who lost the confidence of the Assembly or the king had committed a political error rather than a criminal offense and should be treated accordingly. “I warn before denouncing,” he declared on 16 July 1789, “criticize before accusing, and offer retirement before treating ineffectiveness and incompetence as crimes.”7 In the immediate aftermath, then, of the revolutionary outburst of mid-July, Mirabeau envisioned a system of parliamentary government with a built-in mechanism for lowering the stakes of political conflict, instinctively focusing on the need for the cultivation of indulgent and pragmatic attitudes toward political opponents as a means of facilitating the development of a stable constitutional regime. Indeed, on a more personal level, Mirabeau was one of the rare revolutionaries capable, as Camille Desmoulins wrote, of acknowledging that those who disagreed with him could “make rational sense and be logically correct if not politically astute.

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