Acte constitutionnel du 24 juin 1793
Contributions
- Committee of Public Safety
- author
- National Convention
- author
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Notes
Soon after the formation of the Committee of Public Safety in April 1793, five new members were added on 30 May to an ad hoc committee attached to the CPS to formulate a new republican constitution. It was chaired by the former nobleman Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (also president of the National Convention) and included Louis-Antoine Saint-Just and Georges Couthon. Rapidly setting to work after the dramatic expulsion of 22 Girondin deputies on 2 June, they reported back to the Convention after eight days – Hérault-Séchelles being the chief author – which, making no important changes, ratified a final draft on 24 June.
As Bertrand Barère told the deputies, "In a few days we have reaped the enlightenment of all the ages". Indeed, the new document was the purest expression of democratic ideals to date, confirming universal manhood suffrage, enlarging the list of natural rights, qualifying the right to property by considerations of public interest, and adding the rights to subsistence and to revolt against oppression, the latter of which had been latent in the August 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It sought at once to appeal to the radical sans-culottes movement while at the same time hoping to win back the insurgent federalists by striving not to appear too radical. It was acclaimed overwhelmingly by public referendum.
On 10 June, Maximilien Robespierre told the Jacobin Club, "We can now present to the universe a constitutional code, infinitely superior to all moral and political institutions, a work doubtless capable of improvement, but which presents the essential basis of public happiness, offering a sublime and majestic picture of French regeneration… This Constitution has emerged in eight days from the midst of storms, and becomes the centre where the people can rally without giving itself new chains".
However, the 1793 Constitution was never put into effect as the Convention, finding France besieged by internal and external conflicts, voted to operate in permanent session under emergency powers, and postponed its implementation. It was set aside indefinitely on 10 October 1793, when the Convention declared a 'Revolutionary Government' until peace was achieved. The ensuing Reign of Terror, which culminated in the execution of Robespierre and other leading Montagnards in July 1794, was followed by the Thermidorian Reaction, which rejected this Constitution and eventually supplanted it with the Constitution of 1795, leading to the establishment of the Directory.
See R.R. Palmer, 'Twelve who rule' (1941, Princeton University Press), pp.30-35; and Colin Jones, 'The Longman Companion to the French Revolution' (1988), pp.70-71.