Constitutions old and new: Henrion de Pansey before and after the French revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT Henrion de Pansey (1742–1829) is an important but neglected constitutional historian whose views on the French past served as a commentary on the unwritten and written constitutions of his own age. A feudal lawyer before the revolution and an appeal judge under Napoleon and the restored Bourbons, he published a variety of works combining liberal sentiment with judicial traditionalism. His career illustrates the shift of moderate conservative opinion across the revolutionary divide. The alteration in his political thought is best understood through its conjunction with the three historical modes prevalent in his time: a discontinuous approach, accepting the past as a series of different regimes interrupted by revolutions; a developmental view, charting the progressive growth of institutions from seeds planted in antiquity; and a fundamentalist habit of thought that saw change as decline from pristine perfection. The jurists of sixteenth-century France remained Henrion's most admired models, and he used his roseate vision of the early modern French monarchy as a sometimes critical commentary on the constitutions designed in his own day. In prerevolutionary days he recast the ideas of the sixteenth-century rationalizer of feudalism, Charles Dumoulin, into Enlightenment terms. After the revolution, De l'Autoritéjudiciaire (1810) depicted the moderating role of the judiciary as defenders of past constitutions, and formed an oblique commentary on Napoleon's civil code. Des Pairs et de l'ancienne constitution (1816) appraised the charter of 1814. It accepted a measure of popular participation in government, but held judicial expertise essential in legislation. Des Assemblées nationales (1826) shifted the emphasis from judicial oversight to the separation of powers and representative government, although Henrion, like Guizot and the doctrinaires, remained critical of popular democracy.

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