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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 235.: FRENCH NEWS [86] EXAMINER, 2 FEB., 1834, P. 72 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II

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Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

235.: FRENCH NEWS [86] EXAMINER, 2 FEB., 1834, P. 72 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


235.

FRENCH NEWS [86]

EXAMINER, 2 FEB., 1834, P. 72

This article is headed “London, February 2, 1834.” For Mill’s bibliographic entry see No. 226. See also the headnote to No. 233. In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, the item is listed as “Article on France.”

the french chamber of deputies has, so far as depends upon itself, disposed of two important subjects—the municipal constitution of Paris1 and the question of entails.2

The local affairs of every commune or township, and of every department of France, are managed, to a certain extent, by a body, termed in the former case the Municipal, in the latter, the departmental council. Under the empire and the restoration these bodies were named by the Crown, but laws have been enacted since the revolution of 1830, providing for their election in a mode partaking, though in different degrees, of the nature of a popular choice; the electors of the municipal councils, amounting for all France to about one million, those of the departmental councils to about two hundred thousand only.3

Paris was excepted from these enactments, its local administration being reserved to be regulated by a separate Act; and a Bill was accordingly introduced by the Government, which has now passed the Chamber of Deputies. Its provisions are a fresh exemplification of the close spirit of oligarchical monopoly, which pervades all the constituted authorities of France. Paris composing nearly the whole of the department of the Seine, the same body which acts as a municipal council for the affairs of that city, serves also (with the addition of two or three members from St. Denis and Sceaux) as a council for the general affairs of the department.

This system being adhered to in the new Bill, it consequently became necessary to determine whether the members whom Paris is to elect for this twofold purpose, should be chosen by the small number of electors who would fall to the share of Paris, under the provisions of the Departmental Law, or by the more extensive constituency which the Municipal Law would provide. Having this alternative, the Chamber of course made its election for oligarchy. The Departmental Law was the model preferred: and while every other town and every village in France has now the managers of its local affairs elected by something like a really popular system of election, the capital alone is placed under the management of a narrow and exclusive privileged class.

The other Bill which has just gone through the Chamber, without opposition, is of a more democratic character, and will scarcely be allowed to pass the other House. When Buonaparte determined to force an aristocracy, vainly and ignorantly expecting that the pretty exotic would be of as much service to his bad Government as it had been found by other Governments, where it was of spontaneous growth, he so far set aside the law of the equal partibility of property on the death of the proprietor, as to allow the creation of entails (majorats) to accompany a title of nobility, and a considerable number of these majorats have since been created.4

These, if the Bill passes the Chamber of Peers, will be set aside, (due regard being had to rights already acquired,) and the future creation of majorats interdicted.

The adoption of this measure, entirely unopposed by an assembly so anti-popular in its general policy, is a striking illustration of the peculiar character of the democratic feeling in France. It is not true, as is often asserted, that the French are lovers of “equality,” in the true sense of the term. There is not a people in Europe more greedy of distinction than themselves; or more ready to do homage to it in others, so long as it is merely personal distinction. But they cannot endure the shadow of a hereditary privilege; an advantage marked out for a particular caste, and not accessible to the remainder of the community. In studying French affairs, this observation will be found a necessary key to much. In this latter sense the passion for equality so pervades the nation, that even the bourgeois oligarchs of the Chamber of Deputies are as completely possessed by it as other people. Hence the abolition of the hereditary peerage, the abolition of majorats, and much else.

[1 ]Projet de loi sur le conseil-général et les conseils d’arrondissement du département de la Seine, et sur la municipalité de la ville de Paris (8 Dec.), Moniteur, 1832, pp. 2116-17, finally enacted as Bull. 116, No. 262 (20 Apr., 1834).

[2 ]Proposition de M. Parant, relative à l’abolition des majorats et des substitutions (14 Jan.), Moniteur, 1834, p. 112. Narcisse Parant (1794-1842) was a deputy from the Moselle. Disagreements between the Deputies and the Peers over the existing entails delayed enactment until Bull. 138, No. 308 (12 May, 1835).

[3 ]Bull. 104, No. 235 (22 June, 1833), replaced the various Acts going back to Bull. 17, No. 115 (17 Feb., 1800).

[4 ]The provisions of equal division in Livre III, Titre I, Chap. iii, Sect. iii, Art. 745, and Titre II, Chap. iii, Sect. i, Arts. 913-19 of the Code Napoléon (the Code civil), Bull. 154 bis, No. 2653 bis, were set aside by Napoleon in Art. 5 of Bull. 112, No. 1823 (14 Aug., 1806), which created the majorats.