The Online Library of Liberty

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• Introduction
• De Lolme’s Life and Early Writings
• The Constitution of England
• Later Writings
• Editions of the Constitution of England
• A Note On the Text
• Acknowledgments
• The Constitution of England
• To the King.
• Book I
• Chapter I: Causes of the Liberty of the English Nation.—reasons of the Difference Between the Government of England, and That of France.—in England, the Great Power of the Crown, Under the Norman Kings, Created an Union Between the Nobility and the People
• Chapter II: A Second Advantage England Had Over France:—it Formed One Undivided State.
• Chapter III: The Subject Continued.
• Chapter IV: Of the Legislative Power.
• Chapter V: Of the Executive Power.
• Chapter VI: The Boundaries Which the Constitution Has Set to the Royal Prerogative.
• Chapter VII: The Same Subject Continued.
• Chapter VIII: New Restrictions.
• Chapter IX: Of Private Liberty, Or the Liberty of Individuals.
• Chapter X 1: On the Law In Regard to Civil Matters, That Is Observed In England.
• Chapter Xi 1: The Subject Continued. the Courts of Equity.
• Chapter XII: Of Criminal Justice.
• Chapter XIII: The Subject Continued.
• Chapter XIV: The Subject Concluded.—laws Relative to Imprisonment.
• Book Ii
• Chapter I: Some Advantages Peculiar to the English Constitution. 1. The Unity of the Executive Power.
• Chapter II: The Subject Concluded.—the Executive Power Is More Easily Confined When It Is One.
• Chapter III: A Second Peculiarity.—the Division of the Legislative Power.
• Chapter IV: A Third Advantage Peculiar to the English Government. the Business of Proposing Laws, Lodged In the Hands of the People.
• Chapter V: In Which an Inquiry Is Made, Whether It Would Be an Advantage to Public Liberty, That the Laws Should Be Enacted By the Votes of the People At Large.
• Chapter VI: Advantages That Accrue to the People From Appointing Representatives.
• Chapter VII: The Subject Continued—the Advantages That Accrue to the People From Their Appointing Representatives, Are Very Inconsiderable, Unless They Also Entirely Trust Their Legislative Authority to Them.
• Chapter VIII: The Subject Concluded.—effects That Have Resulted, In the English Government, From the People’s Power Being Completely Delegated to Their Representatives.
• Chapter IX: A Farther Disadvantage of Republican Governments.—the People Are Necessarily Betrayed By Those In Whom They Trust.
• Chapter X: Fundamental Difference Between the English Government, and the Governments Just Described.—in England All Executive Authority Is Placed Out of the Hands of Those In Whom the People Trust. Usefulness of the Power of the Crown.
• Chapter XI: The Powers Which the People Themselves Exercise.—the Election of Members of Parliament.
• Chapter XII: The Subject Continued.—liberty of the Press.
• Chapter XIII: The Subject Continued.
• Chapter XIV: Right of Resistance.
• Chapter Xv 1: Proofs Drawn From Facts, of the Truth of the Principles Laid Down In the Present Work.—1. the Peculiar Manner In Which Revolutions Have Always Been Concluded In England.
• Chapter Xvi 1: Second Difference—the Manner After Which the Laws For the Liberty of the Subject Are Executed In England.
• Chapter Xvii 1: A More Inward View of the English Government Than Has Hitherto Been Offered to the Reader In the Course of This Work.—very Essential Differences Between the English Monarchy, As a Monarchy, and All Those With Which We Are Acquainted.
• Chapter XVIII: How Far the Examples of Nations Who Have Lost Their Liberty, Are Applicable to England.
• Chapter Xix 1: A Few Additional Thoughts On the Attempts That At Particular Times May Be Made to Abridge the Power of the Crown, and On Some of the Dangers By Which Such Attempts May Be Attended.
• Chapter Xx 1: A Few Additional Observations On the Right of Taxation Which Is Lodged In the Hands of the Representatives of the People. What Kind of Danger This Right May Be Exposed To.
• Chapter XXI: Conclusion.—a Few Words On the Nature of the Divisions That Take Place In England.
• Guide to Further Reading
• Bibliography
• De Lolme’s Principal Publications
• Works Cited By De Lolme
• Classical Sources
• Modern Sources

De Lolme’s Life and Early Writings

De Lolme was born in Geneva in 1741. The title page of the 1784 edition of The Constitution of England distinguished him as a “Member of the Council of the Two Hundred in the Republic of Geneva.” Service on this political body placed De Lolme within the ranks of Geneva’s most prominent families. By reputation a brilliant student, he followed family tradition and was trained in the law, beginning his professional career in the 1760s, first as a notary and later as an advocate. His customary classical education and more specialized legal learning were plainly of value to his future writing on government and constitutional liberty. But most fateful was the political training De Lolme acquired in his native city in these early years. “As a native of a free Country, I am no stranger to those circumstances which constitute or characterise liberty,” he explained to his English readers. The “Republic of which I am a member” was the setting “in which I formed my principles.”4

In its outward political forms, eighteenth-century Geneva was a republic of self-governing citizens. For the contemporary enthusiasts of republican liberty, Geneva and its independence offered a welcome exception to a European state system dominated by large and potent monarchies. In practice, however, Geneva’s government had long been an oligarchy of elite families. Political authority operated through a series of citizen councils. Although sovereignty was formally held by a General Council of all citizens, political rule was effectively exercised by two “small councils”—the Council of the Twenty-Five and the Council of the Two Hundred—under the control of the wealthiest and most powerful families. It was these smaller bodies that in practice determined Geneva’s legal and fiscal policies and selected the leading officeholders.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Geneva’s rulers faced organized challenges from excluded groups and, in moments of gravest political crisis, depended upon foreign support, particularly from the French monarchy, to sustain their power. Significant episodes of protest occurred in 1707, 1718, 1734–38, 1763–68, 1770, 1781–82, and 1789. These typically centered on a program of republican revival that called for the restoration of the sovereignty of the General Council, an enlargement of the number of citizens entitled to serve on the small councils, and a more equitable legal and fiscal treatment of the great number of propertied residents who lacked the benefits of full citizenship. In the period just before De Lolme’s birth, these conflicts had led Geneva’s government to summon military support from France and the cantons of Berne and Zurich to help “mediate” the political crisis between ruling elite and popular ascendancy. The resulting 1738 Act of Mediation stabilized oligarchic control, notwithstanding a number of political concessions to the authority of the General Council. As De Lolme later explained in The Constitution of England, the reforms proved largely cosmetic. By limiting the General Council’s legislative role to the formal approval of measures initiated only by the Council of the Twenty-Five, the governing elites easily subverted popular constraints on its rulership. “The Citizens had thus been successively stripped of all their political rights,” he observed, “and had little more left to them than the pleasure of being called a Sovereign Assembly.”5

By the time of De Lolme’s early adulthood, Geneva weathered even more serious political instability in the years 1763–68, when the forces of reform, the “Représentants” (or Party of Remonstrance), again challenged patrician rulership, now organized politically as a party of conservative “Négatifs.” Geneva’s most famous native son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings had been condemned by the Council of the Twenty-Five in 1762, entered the controversy with a scathing critique of Geneva’s ruling oligarchy published in 1764 as Lettres de la montagne (Letters from the mountain). On this occasion, the popular cause proved successful in forcing substantive concessions from the Council of the Twenty-Five, which in 1768 granted the General Council additional powers to control the other governing bodies. “The Citizens,” De Lolme enthusiastically recorded, through “an uncommon spirit of union and perseverance . . . succeeded in a great measure to repair the injuries which they had been made to do to themselves.”6

Here De Lolme wrote not in his usual capacity as an observer and theorist of government, but as an engaged political participant. He embraced the Représentants’ call for reform and republican renewal in several anonymous polemics that contributed to the vibrant public debate that Geneva’s rulers found impossible to contain. The most important of these publications was the 1767 La purification des trois points de droit souillés par un anonyme (The purification of three soiled points of law by an anonymous author). The unrestrained tone of this attack on the constitutional authority of the ruling Négatifs produced a prompt rebuke from the Genevan government, accompanied by the recommendation that its author quit his native city. Soon after, the banished citizen of Geneva arrived in the foreign land where he was to spend the bulk of his remaining years and whose constitution served as his most important subject matter.

[4. ]See below, Constitution of England, introduction, p. 20.

[5. ]See below, book 2, chapter 5, pp. 174–75, note a.

[6. ]Ibid.