Constitution of the Year VIII

• 1. Introduction

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  The Constitution of the Year VIII, the charter that created France's Consulate, was written in just 11 days. The man who stood to gain most from it, Napoleon Bonaparte, wanted a text that was, in his own words, "short and obscure". He got one. The document kept the word republic, borrowed its vocabulary from ancient Rome, and gave every adult man a vote that chose almost nobody. How do you build a constitution around a single person? What did ordinary voters really decide under it? And did the official tally of its plebiscite tell the truth?

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• 2. Brumaire and the Drafters

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  On the 9th of November 1799, the 18th Brumaire of Year VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte seized the French government in a coup d'État. The trigger was a refusal. The Council of Five Hundred would not agree to revise the Constitution of the Year III. Napoleon acted alongside the Abbot Sieyès and Roger Ducos, and together they set up a provisional consulate. In the eyes of some observers, the coup effectively ended the French Revolution.

  Each of the assemblies named a commission to prepare a replacement text. Several sessions passed before Napoleon interfered to speed things up. He worked on the new constitution with Sieyès, and their aim was a strong executive concentrated in Napoleon's hands.

  The principal author was Pierre Claude François Daunou. He belonged to the Society of Ideologues, a group of liberal republicans who were hostile to Jacobinism. Daunou had also played a significant part in writing the Constitution of the Year III, the very text the coup had pushed aside. The finished constitution was adopted under the pretext of an emergency, and only afterward put to a vote of the people. Its vocabulary came straight from ancient Rome.

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• 3. Roman Costume

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  The words Consul, Senator and Tribune were chosen on purpose by the authors of the constitution. They signalled a break with what had come before. Robespierre's republic of roughly 1792 to 1795 had been far more radical. The Directory, which governed from 1795 to 1799, was an oligarchic and liberal republic.

  The Consulate looked back instead to Caesar Augustus. His Rome was conservative and a republic only in name, yet it reminded the French of stability, order and peace. Some have called the resulting regime "modern Caesarism".

  Under this classical costume sat an unusual omission. The Constitution of the Year VIII was the first French constitution since the Revolution of 1789 to appear without a Declaration of Rights.

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• 4. A Constitution With Names

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  Five citizens are named directly in the constitution: Napoleon, Cambacérès, Lebrun, Sieyès and Ducos. That is highly unusual, because a constitution is meant to apply permanently. Naming individuals tied the text to the lifetimes of those men. Napoleon was designated explicitly as First Consul, so the office was tailored to him in a way no earlier French text had been.

  The executive was a Consulate of three Consuls, appointed for ten years and indefinitely re-electable by the Senate. The first three were Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun. Unlike under the Directory, the Second and Third Consuls could only give advice.

  All real executive power therefore belonged to the First Consul. He proposed and promulgated laws, and he named and dismissed ministers and civil servants. He also held significant powers over diplomacy and the military, and he carried no political responsibility.

  Some rights were still affirmed in general terms, among them the inviolability of the home, personal safety and the right to petition. The rules for newcomers also tightened. A foreigner now had to wait ten years to claim French citizenship, where earlier law had required seven.

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• 5. Lists of Confidence

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  Every man in France could vote under the Constitution of the Year VIII, yet no voter could elect a representative. Suffrage was universal for men but indirect, and it worked in three stages. In each canton, the voters picked a tenth of their number to form a district list. That list supplied the public servants of the arrondissement.

  The district list in turn picked a tenth of its members for a departmental list, which supplied the officials of the department. The departmental list picked another tenth to form the national list. From the national list came national civil servants, including members of the Legislative Body and the Tribunate. The result was a set of "Lists of Confidence", from which the government or the Senate then made the real choices.

  The text also leaned on the word "notables", a term already common under the monarchy. It meant prominent, distinguished men such as landholders, merchants, scholars, professionals, clergymen and officials. Voters in each district chose a slate of them. At the top of that pyramid, the Senate held the power to pick from the national list.

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• 6. Three Houses and a Council

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  The Council of State, created by article 52 of the constitution, held between 30 and 50 members, all appointed by the First Consul. It was built as an instrument of the executive. Its tasks ran from drafting laws to controlling the administration, including settling disputes between citizens and the State.

  The legislature, by contrast, was deliberately split to weaken it. The Tribunate had 100 men over the age of 25, chosen by the Senate from the lists of notability. It discussed laws proposed by the Government and could give its opinion on corrections or improvements. It then named three speakers to defend its position before the Legislative Body.

  The Legislative Body, with 300 members over the age of 30, voted on those laws. It could neither discuss nor modify them, and so it was sometimes called, facetiously, the "mute assembly". A bill it approved became a decree that could be promulgated as law.

  The Conservative Senate had 80 members over the age of 40. Only 60 were appointed in Year VIII, with two more added each year for ten years. Sieyès and Roger-Ducos, the outgoing Second and Third Consuls, were named senators by right. They chose most of the rest in consultation with Cambacérès and Lebrun.

  The Senate played no part in making laws, but it chose the members of both assemblies. It was presided over by Napoleon himself. As the "conservator of the Constitution", it could also block a text the Legislative Body had voted. To make the whole system official, the constitution still needed the approval of the voters.

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• 7. The Plebiscite

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  Voting on the constitution ran for 15 days, and the official results were made public on the 7th of February 1800. The vote was not binding. Its real function was to give Napoleon a veneer of democracy. Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, announced the figures: just over three million in favor and only 1,562 against. Roughly 6 million voters were registered on the electoral lists.

  In 1972, the French historian Claude Langlois demonstrated that Lucien had massively falsified these results. The true total in favor was probably around 1.55 million, with several thousand voting against.

  Even the inflated numbers were not needed to make the constitution law, but they gave it the look of a national mandate. The first change to the text would soon follow, in the Constitution of the Year X.

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• 8. Amended Into an Empire

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  The Constitution of the Year X made Napoleon First Consul for Life. A more extensive alteration, the Constitution of the Year XII, established the Bonaparte dynasty and made Napoleon a hereditary Emperor. The republic's Roman titles had carried the system a long way from the Consulate's first years.

  In 1814, the first, brief Bourbon Restoration abolished the Napoleonic constitutional system. When Napoleon returned to power, he revived it and almost at once replaced it with the so-called Additional Act of April 1815.

  That revival ended with the Hundred Days. When Louis XVIII returned in July 1815, Napoleon's constitutional arrangements were definitively abolished. The Bourbon Charter of 1814 replaced the Napoleonic constitutions entirely.

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