Page:Lectures on the French Revolution of John Acton.djvu/133

Rh tion of his capture and of his imprisonment on the throne, but because, at the moment of his flight, he had avowed his hostility to the institutions he administered.

The central idea in the plan of September 29, the idea of small provinces and large municipalities, was never appreciated and never adopted. Sieyes placed the unit in the Commune, which was the name he gave to each of the nine divisions of a department. He intended that there should be only 720 of these self-governing districts in France. Instead of 720, the Assembly created 44,000, making the Commune no larger than the parish, and breaking up the administrative system into dust. The political wisdom of the village was substituted for that of a town or district of 35,000 inhabitants.

The explanation of the disastrous result is as much in the Court as in the Legislature, and as much in the legislation that followed as in the policy of the moment in which the great issues were determined, and with which we are dealing. No monarchical constitution could succeed, after Varennes; and the one of which we are speaking, the object of the memorable conflict between Mounier and Sieyes, is not identical with the one that failed. The repudiation of the English model did not cause the quick passage from the Constitution of 1791 to the Republic. Yet the scheme that prevailed shows defects which must bear their portion of blame. Political science imperatively demands that powers shall be regulated by multiplication and division. The Assembly preferred ideas of unity and simplicity.

The old policy of French parliaments nearly suggested a court of revision; but that notion, not yet visible in the Supreme Court of the United States, occurred to Sieyès long after. An effective Senate might have been founded on the provincial assemblies; but the ancient provinces were doomed, and the new divisions did not yet exist, or were hidden in the maps of freemasonry.

Power was not really divided between the legislative and the executive, for the king possessed no resource against the majority of the Assembly. There was no