Constitution of 1791 — Constitutional Monarchy
France got its first written constitution in September 1791, and the monarchy it created lasted eleven months. The National Assembly had spent two years writing it, having begun in June 1789 by swearing not to disperse until they had. What it produced was a constitutional monarchy on a limited franchise. The king kept the executive, the ministers, the conduct of foreign policy and a suspensive veto that could delay legislation for two legislatures; a single-chamber assembly held the power to make law and to declare war. Citizens were divided into active and passive by the amount of direct tax they paid, which gave the vote to roughly four million men out of a population of twenty-eight million and excluded the rest along with all women, servants and the propertyless. It abolished nobility, hereditary office, guilds and the remnants of feudal jurisdiction, established equality before the law, and put the Declaration of the Rights of Man at its head. The difficulty was that the king had tried to leave the country in June 1791, been recognised at Varennes and brought back under guard, and had left behind a written repudiation of everything he had agreed to. The Assembly maintained the fiction that he had been abducted, because the alternative was a republic nobody in the chamber was ready to declare. He accepted the constitution in September, and the Legislative Assembly met in October with every one of the men who had written it barred from sitting in it by their own self-denying ordinance. War came in April, the palace was stormed in August, and the monarchy was abolished in September 1792.
- Year: 1791 CE
- Category: Political
