Assembly, perfectly convinced of the superfluity of the throne in a national government, had only placed a king at the summit of its institutions to check ambition, and that the kingdom should not be called a republic.  The only part of such a king was to prevent the truth from appearing, and to make a show in the eyes of a people accustomed to a sceptre.  This fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation.  This was the real vice of the constitution of 1791:  it was not consistent.  Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures.  The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness towards a race which had long worn the crown.  If the race of the Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.

V.

However, the royalty of ’91, very little different from the royalty of to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day.  The error of all historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly.  In the first place, the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the people’s eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it.  The work of the Constituent Assembly was the regeneration of ideas and government, the displacing of power, the restoration of right, the abolition of all subjugation even of the mind, the freedom of consciences, the formation of an administration; and this work lasts, and will endure as long as the name of France.  The vice of the institution of 1791 was not in any one particular point.  It has not perished because the veto of the king was suspensive instead of absolute; it has not perished, because the right of peace or war was taken from the king, and reserved to the nation; it has not perished, because it did not place the legislative power in one chamber only instead of in two:  these asserted vices are to be found in many other constitutions, which still endure.  The diminution of the royal power was not the main danger to royalty in ’91; it was rather its salvation, if it could have been saved.

VI.

The more power was given to the king, and action to the monarchical principle, the quicker the king and the principle would have fallen; for the greater would have been the distrust and hatred against him.  Two chambers, instead of one, would not have preserved any thing.  Such divisions of power would have no value, but in proportion as they are sacred.  They are only sacred in proportion as they are the representatives of real existing force in the nation.  Would a revolution which had not paused before the iron gates of the Chateau of Versailles have respected the metaphysical distinction of power of two kinds!