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ABSTRACT
Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored monarchies within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role.
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Notes
1 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
2 Marcel Gauchet, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et politique 1’, Le Débat 7, no. 14 (1981): 133–57, 136. For the second part of the two-part essay, see Gauchet, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et Politique 2’, Le Débat 8, 15 (1981): 147–68.
3 Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs: la souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).
4 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Vœux d’un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux études de la nature (Paris: Didot/Méquignon, 1789), 46–9 and 53–4.
5 On these topics, see, for example, Corinne Pelta, Le Romantisme libéral en France, 1815–1830: la représentation souveraine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), as well as the numerous entries in Dictionnaire du romantisme, ed. Alain Vaillant (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2012).
6 See my 2010 doctoral dissertation on debates about the role of monarchy in post-Napoleonic France, now published as Ferreira, Le Pouvoir royal (1814–1848): à la recherche du quatrième pouvoir? (Paris: LGDJ, 2021). For the impact of these French discussions on the Brazilian and Portuguese constitutions of the 1820s, see my preliminary article, ‘Le pouvoir modérateur dans la Constitution brésilienne de 1824 et la Charte constitutionnelle portugaise de 1826: les influences de Benjamin Constant ou de Lanjuinais?’ Revue française de droit constitutionnel 89 (2012) : 1–40, as well as my larger study, Le constitutionnalisme octroyé: itinéraire d’un constitutionnalisme au XIXe siècle (France, Portugal, Brésil) (Paris: éditions ESKA, 2019). For other accounts of the appropriation of the Francophone concept of a moderating monarchical power in the 1824 Brazilian and 1826 Portuguese constitutions, see Christian Edward Cyril Lynch, ‘O discurso político monarquiano e a recepção do conceito de poder moderador no Brasil (1822–24)’, Dados 48, no. 3 (2005): 611–54, and Gabriel Paquette, ‘The Brazilian Origins of the 1826 Portuguese Constitution’, European History Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 444–71.
7 On the circulation of this form of constitutional thinking from France to Portugal via Brazil, see my Le constitutionnalisme octroyé. On Japan, see Eddy Dufourmont, ‘Un modèle pour le Japon? Nakae Chômin et la constitution brésilienne de 1824’, Estudos Japoneses 38 (2017): 25–39. On Thailand, see Eugénie Mérieau, Constitutional Bricolage. Thailand’s Sacred Monarchy vs. The Rule of Law (New York: Hart Publishing, 2022).
8 Benjamin Constant’s 1815 text, ‘Principes de Politique’, republished in Constant, Écrits politiques (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1997), 327–8.
9 For Constant’s early attempt to theorize a role for a moderating power within a republican constitutional framework, see his manuscript written between 1795 and 1810, Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonné sur la possibilité d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays (Paris: Aubier, 1991) 359–453. Compare this account to his later more monarchical attempt to theorize a similar power in the 1815 ‘Principes de Politique’, republished in Constant, Écrits politiques, 323–37. On the Thermidorean phase of Constant’s thought with regards to this topic, see, in English, Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748–1830 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 198–238. For a succinct Anglophone overview of Constant’s political thought addressing his attempts to theorize a role for a restored monarchy in a post-revolutionary parliamentary regime, see William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 115–43. From the moment of their initial coinage and popularization by Restoration-era ultra royalists in the early 1820s, the noun ‘absolutism' and the adjective ‘absolutist’ (understood in a political sense as pertaining to a robust form of state power) were both meant in a pejorative sense. On this latter topic, see below.
10 On this topic, see Tanguy Pasquiet-Briand, La Réception de la Constitution anglaise en France au XIXe siècle. Une étude du droit politique français (Paris: Institut Universitaire Varenne, 2017). For a slightly different approach emphasizing French attempts to Anglicize political culture during the Bourbon Restoration, see J.A.W. Gunn, When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).
11 See Charles-Guillaume Hello, Du régime constitutionnel dans ses rapports avec l’état actuel de la science sociale et politique, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1848), 2: 181–2. On this political liberal and jurist, see the entry on Hello in Dictionnaire historique des juristes français, XIIe-XXe siècle, ed. Patrick Arabeyre, Jean-Louis Halpérin, and Jacques Krunen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 402–3. Besides the entry on Hello, there are many other useful biographical contributions to this Dictionnaire on the different jurists mentioned in this article. See also the equally useful bibliographical appendix concerning the publications of Bourbon Restoration-era parliamentarians found in Matthieu Le Verge’s doctoral thesis, Les règlements intérieurs de la Chambre des pairs et de la Chambre des députés sous la Restauration: la souveraineté des Chambres entre 1814 et 1830 (Angers: Université d’Angers, 2018).
12 According to the legal historian, François Olivier-Martin:
‘The king, placed by his hereditary function above the orders, the bodies, and the regions, defines the common good of the kingdom, which is superior to all these subordinate common goods. From his dominating point of view, he determines the sacrifices which each must make and from this angle [he] arbitrates the conflicts which oppose them.’
13 Jean-Pierre Poly and Éric Bournazel, La mutation féodale, Xe-XIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991 [1980]), 339.
14 Olivier-Martin, L’absolutisme français, 283.
15 Many scholars have mistakenly attributed the word’s first usage to the 1797 Essai sur les révolutions by François-René de Chateaubriand. In fact, Chateaubriand used the word for the first time only in the new 1826 preface he added to the reedition of the Essai in his Œuvres completès, 28 vols. (Paris: Ladvocat, 1826–31), 1: xxxix. A few years earlier, Pierre-Claude-Victoire Boiste’s 1823 Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (Paris: Verdière, 1823), 715, mentions ‘absolutisme’ as a recent neologism in its addendum of new words which had appeared while it was being printed. These two facts alone suggest that even if the term’s first usage was probably slightly older than this dictionary entry, the word likely came into widespread circulation in French during the mid-1820s. On the early use of the concept of monarchical ‘absolutism’ and its problematic posterity more generally, see Denis Lévy, ‘Un régime dépassé: l’absolutisme’ Revue internationale d’histoire politique et constitutionnelle 2, no. 6 (1952): 133–43; Jean-Louis Thireau. ‘L’absolutisme monarchique a-t-il existé?’ Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques 6, no. 2 (1997): 291–309; and Robert Descimon and Fanny Cosandey, L’absolutisme en France: histoire et historiographie (Paris: Seuil, 2002). With regards to Chauteaubriand more specifically, see Jean-Paul Clément, ‘L’anti-Machiavel’, in Chateaubriand, le tremblement du temps, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet and Philippe Bertier (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1994), 247–75. On the critique of ‘absolutism’ in France during the Restoration era, see my Le pouvoir royal, 274–91. In the past forty years, the heuristic value of the concept of ‘absolutism’ has fallen out of fashion for historians, especially for Anglophone scholars. For a summary of the historiographical critique of the concept and its role in re-evaluating the history of the emergence of the French state, besides the work of Descimon and Cosandey cited above, see James B. Collins’s 2013 Collège de France lectures, La monarchie républicaine: État et société dans la France moderne (Paris: Armand Colin, 2016), 127–57.
16 Éric Gojosso, ‘Sur l’usage de l’expression monarchie absolue en France au XVIIe siècle’, Cahiers poitevins d’histoire du droit 8–9 (2017): 271–92.
17 Besides the Francophone studies referred to above in note 15, see, in English, for a further account of how Restoration-era royalists were influenced by the eighteenth-century Ancient Constitution debate and the writings of Montesquieu in formulating their critique of ‘absolutism’, Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 40–128. For a summary of the origins of the quasi-‘libertarian’ anti-statism of the Restoration-era royalists, Carolina Armenteros, ‘From Centre to Periphery: Monarchism in France, 1791–1831’, De achttiende eeuw 44 (2012): 192–226, or https://www.dbnlalicorg/tekst/_doc003201201_01/_doc003201201_01_0014.php.
18 Louis de Bonald, Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social, ou Du pouvoir, du ministre et du sujet dans la société, republished in Bonald, Œuvres complètes, 9 vols. (Paris/Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982 [1817–1843]), 1: 69–70.
19 On this theme, see chapter 7 of Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, ‘The King Never Dies’, 314–450. According to Kantorowicz, in applying these theories to the king, the medieval jurists he was highlighting were creating a ‘royal Christology’.
20 ‘Et persona regis est organum et instrumentum illius personæ intellectualis et publicæ’. Baldus, Consilia, III, c. 159. Quoted in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 444.
21 Nevertheless, Bonald was less critical of centralized authority and the unlimited power of God’s political analogue on earth than his less mystical counter-revolutionary royalist allies. The ultras were not the only ones concerned with the administrative growth of the post-revolutionary French state, however. Pierre Rosanvallon has claimed that the omnipresence of the state and its ‘bureaucracy’ (a word in common circulation by the end of the Bourbon Restoration) were regularly attacked between 1814 and 1848 out of a fear of a growing administrative ‘power’. Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 57–60. See, for a contemporary example of this, Joseph Fiévée, Correspondance politique et administrative commence au mois de mai 1844, Onzième partie (Paris: Le Normant, March 1818), 55, in which Fiévée argues that ‘bureaucracy’, insofar as it ‘leads as much to democracy as it does to despotism’, weakens royal power. On Fiévée more generally, see Gunn, When the French Tried to be British, 193–256.
22 This peculiarly French confusion of personhood and power is different from what historically happened in Germanophone states. Embarrassed by the composite complexity of their various constitutional and political arrangements, jurists from those states, Kantorowicz claimed, developed theories implying a more abstract and less corporeal conception of the ‘state’ than that which emerged in France. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 445–6. Some legal historians have claimed that the emergence in France of an autonomous abstract entity known as ‘the state’ and of which the king was merely an organ began much earlier than the reign of Louis XIV, during Henri IV’s kingship. See François Saint-Bonnet, L’État d’exception (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 202–4.
23 On this, besides my Le pouvoir royal (1814–1848), passim, see Jérémy Boutier, ‘La vision constitutionnelle de Nicole Robinet de La Serve: une lecture originale de la Charte de 1814’, Cahiers poitevins d’histoire du droit 8–9 (2017), accessible at https://cahiers-poitevins.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/cahiers-poitevins/index.php?id=183, and Patrick Imhaus, Robinet de La Serve par lui-même (Hallennes-lez-Haubourdin: Cicéron éditions, 2022).
24 Charles-Guillaume Hello, Essais sur le régime constitutionnel, ou introduction à l’étude de la Charte (Paris: Ponthieu et Cie, 1827), 102. The situation of the king, thus placed above political factions and submitting himself to national judgement, was deemed symbolic of representative government. On this idea, see Louis-Marie de Lahaye, baron de Cormenin, Ordre du jour sur la corruption électorale et parlementaire, 8th ed. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1846), 13–14.
25 For example, compare the arguments of early nineteenth-century Restoration-era liberals with those described by Kantorowiz in an article which preceded the publication of The King’s Two Bodies and which first put forth many of its later claims, ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Mediaeval Origins’, The Harvard Theological Review 48, no. 1 (1955): 65–91, notably 90–1.
26 In a 1796 text, Constant wrote:
‘To make an institution work, it is necessary that man be partial to the institution. It should not be that – [like] a political Pyrrhonian – he goes to collect doubts […] and incessantly asks the majority, if it continues to prefer the actual form. The mind of man is versatile; institutions must be stable.’
27 Hello wrote:
‘But if an institution changes with society, it changes only with it; when a system depends on the will of man, not only is it possible that it will pass, it is even probable that it will pass with that man, for the singular reason that man will have himself passed. It is in the nature of absolute power that the first task of each new reign is to do the opposite of the preceding reign; instead, the eternal, inalterable, impassable institution only knows how to obey the force of things and resists the enterprises of innovators.’
28 Hello, Du régime constitutionnel, 2: 181–2.
29 Le Verge, Les règlements intérieurs.
30 Hello, Du régime constitutionnel, 2: 191.
31 This tendency of Bourbon Restoration-era French constitutional thought is perhaps best encapsulated in the famous slogan and rallying cry of the left-wing parliamentary opposition between 1830–48, one which originated in a simplified paraphrase of a line from Adolphe Thiers’s January 1830 journalism in Le National: ‘the king reigns but does not govern’. It would inspire German critics of it like Friedrich Julius Stahl, concerned about preserving a ‘monarchical principle’ (Das monarchische Prinzip was even the object and title of an 1845 work by Stahl), to develop a theory in which the king could reign and govern at the same time. Thus, as Stahl wrote in his 1847 Geschichte der Rechtsphilosophie:, ‘[S]eparating the royal power from the executive power to strengthen the royalty only led, on the contrary, to the weakening of it. Because the dominant fact is that one detaches the executive power from royalty to transfer it, in conditions of complete independence, to the ministers’. Quoted in Jacky Hummel, Le constitutionnalisme allemand (1815–1918) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 172.
32 Henri Grange, Les idées de Necker (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 280–8.
33 Hello, Du régime constitutionnel 2: 231–2.
34 Jean-Pierre Pagès, De la responsabilité ministérielle et de la nécessité d’organiser le mode d’accusation et de jugement des ministres (Paris: Béchet, 1818), 17–8.
35 As Hello phrased it in 1827, taking care to distinguish his composite meta-monarchical conception of the royal ‘institution’ from Constant’s understanding of a distinct ‘royal power’:
‘The constitution introduces in government a second person, which is the nation, and whose wishes also manifest in established forms. [… .] Since there are two [persons], it is necessary that there emerge from them a recognized principle, which they mutually respect; otherwise, there will be no common bind. This principle is what I call the institution. I understand by this word the same thing that Monsieur Benjamin Constant does by royal power; but I prefer my definition, because the institution is, according to me, independent of the king and of the nation taken separately, and any definition which seems to subordinate it to one of the two parties would badly express my thought’.
36 The belief that a ‘metaphysical division’ was at work in Montesquieu’s separation of powers was widely shared by contemporaries during the Bourbon Restoration era. For example, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi wrote: ‘One has agreed to call [a] principle, in political theory, the metaphysical division of the executive and legislative powers, in which one is attributed to the government, the other to the people’. Sismondi, Examen de la constitution françoise (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1815), 52. Nevertheless, Sismondi qualified himself somewhat by adding that the separation between the different powers could not be so rigid as to rule out the prospects for collaborative relations between them. Ibid., 53.
37 Pellegrino Rossi, Cours de droit constitutionnel professé à la Faculté de Paris, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1877), 4: 222–3.
38 The functional separation of powers within a constitution, or the principle of specialization isolating different constitutional functions from one another, implied the idea that a singular organ or group of organs was the exclusive holder of the entirety of a state function: the latter therefore formed a power which had no role to play in the exercise of a function devolved to a different power. On how the understanding of this point was discussed by French publicists and theorists between the Directory and the Second Republic, see Marc Lahmer, La constitution américaine dans le débat français, 1795–1848 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), passim.
39 A notable, albeit belated, exception to this general liberal constitutional consensus was Alexandre-François Auguste Vivien ‘de Goubert’ (1799–1854), although it was only in 1847 that this attentive reader of Constant noticed that the dissociation between royal power and executive power was essential for resolving the fundamental problem of representative government established in post-Napoleonic France. Prior to this, Vivien put great effort into dissociating the royal prerogatives of the king as head of state, a sovereign authority participating actively in the generation of public power, from those he exercised as chief executive, essentially administrative attributions whose purpose was to satisfy the requirements of public service and to execute laws. For him, the true moderating force within the constitutional division of powers was the administration, an intermediary power between the governing and the governed. See Olivier Pirotte, Alexandre-François-Vivien de Goubert (Paris: Librairie générale du droit et de la jurisprudence, 1972), 184–6.
40 Albert Fritot, Esprit du droit et ses applications à la politique et à l’organisation de la monarchie constitutionnelle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Self-published, 1827), 280.
41 On Lanjuinais’s influence in both Brazil and Portugal, see my earlier article, ‘Le pouvoir modérateur dans la constitution brésilienne de 1824 et la Charte constitutionnelle portugaise de 1826’. In Lanjuinais’s work on the history of French public and constitutional law, one finds the usual phrases on coronation and the singular nature of the king, as an institution, ‘a being apart in the social pyramid’ since the post-1789 rejection of the division of the French population into estates. See Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, Constitutions de la nation française, avec un essai de traité historique et politique sur la Charte, et un recueil de pièces corrélatives, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudoin frères, 1819), 1: 193.
42 François-André Isambert, Du pouvoir réglementaire, ou De la nature et de la force des ordonnances (Paris: Corréard, 1821), x for reference to Constant, 36–8 and 43 for reference to Lanjuinais.
43 Ibid., 45.
44 For a good example of such Portuguese scholarship emphasizing Constant’s singular influence, see Marco Caldeira, “O poder neutro” de Benjamin Constant e o constitutcionalismo português (Lisbon: Chiado, 2016). For a study emphasizing how Constant had, previous to the passage of the Portuguese constitution, determined the appropriation of the idea of the ‘moderating power’ of monarchy in Brazil, see Lynch, ‘O discurso político monarquiano e a recepção do conceito de poder moderador no Brasil (1822–24)’.
45 For a commendable synthesis illustrating how Portuguese and Brazilian intellectual and political history were conjoined during this period, see Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
46 This does not seem to be due to the limited use of ideas analogous to those found in the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies in Portugal. National historians like Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, in his influential 1879 História de Portugal, reference the king’s two bodies in the late nineteenth century, and even the Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago has explored the idea in his 1982 novel, Memorial do convento (entitled Baltasar and Blimunda in English translation). See Angelis Cristina Soistak, De como um rei tem dois corpos em ‘Memorial do convento’ (dissertation, Universidade Federal do Paraná, 2011).
47 Alexandre Thomaz De Moraes Sermento, 5 January 1827 speech, in Diario da Câmara dos Senhores Deputados da Nação Portugueza, 1st Legislature, session 1, (1827) 3, 30. The Viscount of Banho and the older brother of the Baron of Moncorvo, Moraes Sermento was elected deputy, first in 1820 to the constituent assembly, then in 1822 to the new Cortes, and finally, after a three-year hiatus in legislative sessions, in 1826, the year of the passage of the constitution. Subsequently a member of the Supreme Court of Justice, he was named a peer by Queen Maria II in 1834. On the political and constitutional chaos in Portugal during the early 1820s prior to the 1826 Charter, see the recent study by José Domingues and Vital Moreira, História constitucional portuguesa II: Constituição de 1822 (Lisbon: Assembleia da República, 2023). A forthcoming third volume will be devoted to the 1826 Charter.
48 Lanjuinais, Vues politiques sur les changements à faire à la constitution de l’Espagne, afin de la consolider, spécialement dans le royaume des Deux-Siciles (Paris: Baudouin fils, 1820), translated into Portuguese shortly after its publication as Lanjuinais, Consideracões politicas sobre as mudanças que conviria fazer na constituicaõ hespanhola, a fim de a consolidar especialmente em o reino das Duas Sicilias. Escritas em lingua franceza por Mr. Lanjuinais par de França … e publicadas em Paris em dezembro de 1820 (Lisbon: Na Typographia Rollandiana, 1821).
49 Lanjuinais, Constitutions de la nation française, 1: 38–9.
50 Ibid., 1: 198.
51 Ibid., 1: 186.
52 Ibid., 1: 201. Lanjuinais’s approach to attenuating monarchy’s direct political influence in the arcana imperii of the ministerial cabinet echoed the earlier pre-revolutionary efforts of Necker. See Grange, Les idées de Necker, 296. André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin (1783–1865) would likewise later defend the idea before Louis-Philippe that the relations between the king and his ministers should be an ‘internal affair between them and him’. Dupin, Mémoires de Dupin, 4 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1855–61), 3: 311–2. He therein underscored a commonplace idea in wide circulation during the July Monarchy. For another example of a similar conception of what post-revolutionary monarchy should ideally look like, see Victor Cousin’s description of what constituted a good constitutional monarch in Cousin, Des principes de la Révolution française et du gouvernement représentatif (Paris: Didier, 1864), xlviii–xlix.
53 Lanjuinais defined the legitimacy of the royal power of restored monarchs as lying in their dual status as at once moderators and arbitrators of the different competing forces within government, and guardians of the constitution and of public liberties granted those outside of government. See Lanjuinais, Constitutions de la nation française, 1: 191. The anti-royalist oppositional journalist, lawyer, politician, and freemason from Île Bourbon (today Réunion), Nicole Robinet de La Serve, argued that the royal veto and the king’s right to dissolve the legislative chamber provided the constitutional means for the monarch to discover what the general will was. The legitimacy of the king’s ‘moderating and conservative power in the constitution’ and the exercise of this power lay exclusively in this interpretative function, one in which the king’s actions were made subordinate to the genuine expression of popular sovereignty. See Robinet de La Serve, De la royauté selon les lois divines révélées, les lois naturelles de la Charte constitutionnelle (Paris: Baudouin, 1819), 164.
54 Jean-Marie Duvergier de Hauranne, De l’ordre légal en France, et des abus d’autorité, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudouin, 1826), 1: 333.
55 José Bernardo da Silva Cabral, in Diaro da Câmara dos Senhores Deputados da Nação Portugueza, 5th Legislature, Session 3, 58, 30 October (1844): 335. Along with his influential two brothers (of whom, António Bernardo da Costa Cabral, Minister and Secretary for Royal Affairs between 1842 and 1846), Silva Cabral had tight control over Portuguese political institutions during the 1840s.
56 10 January 1839 speech given at the Chamber of Deputies, republished in Alphonse de Lamartine, La politique et l’histoire (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1993), 145–6.
57 Ibid., 146. The French legal historian and philosopher – also a specialist of the British constitution – Denis Baranger has claimed, basing himself on the arguments of William Blackstone, that the royal prerogative in Britain does not indicate ‘a list of competencies, but an ensemble of determinations of royal power defined negatively, by their extraordinary and exceptional character, which is inseparable from the person of their holder’. See Baranger, Parlementarisme des origines: essai sur les conditions de formation d’un exécutif responsable en Angleterre (des années 1740 au début de l'âge victorien) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 54–5.
58 See Thomas de Carvalho’s 20 February 1861 speech published in Diaro da Câmara dos Senhores Deputados, 12th Legislature, Session 2, 37 (1861), 484. On the historic weakness in Portugal of the crown vis-à-vis the ministry from the 1840s until the monarchy’s collapse, see Roxane Garnier, Un modèle européen de démocratie: le cas portugais (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 2005), 17.
59 Diaro da Câmara dos Senhores Deputados, 7th Legislature, Session 1, 6, 9 March 1848, 13.
60 Lamartine, La politique et l’histoire, 147.
61 Lamartine, ‘Un principe et point de partis’, Le bien public, 19 November 1845.
62 29 May 1846 speech by Guizot, republished in François Guizot, Histoire parlementaire de France. Recueil complet des discours prononcés dans les Chambres de 1819 à 1848, précédée d’une Introduction: Trois générations, 1789– 1814–1848, 5 vols. (Paris: Lévy frères, 1863), 5: 227–8.
63 One could argue that the accelerated transition from the Second Republic to the Second Empire in France represented an early attempt after the July Monarchy’s collapse to create a republican monarchy, much like the longer and more chaotic shift from the First Republic to Napoleon I’s Empire represented a similar attempt before it. By the same token, the presidential model of centralized and highly personalized executive authority in the French Fifth Republic represents the continuation of this same tendency. By way of contrast, republican Portugal was slightly more successful in reconciling a presidential system with the preservation of the moderating powers once accorded to a monarch in the nineteenth century. See my chapter, ‘L’élection au suffrage direct du Président au Portugal: renforcer et contenir le pouvoir modérateur en République (1911–2011)’, in La désignation du chef de l’Etat. Regards croisés dans le temps et dans l’espace, ed. Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet (Paris: Fondation Varenne, 2012), 117–61.
64 On this topic, see Julio Cesar Lemes de Castro, ‘Dos dois corpos do rei à democracia burguesa’, Revista Esboços, 22 (2009): 127–38, although the author regrettably does not attempt to apply Kantorowicz’s ideas of dual kingship to nineteenth-century Portuguese constitutional history.
65 See the chapter on sovereignty in my Le pouvoir royal (1814–1848), 215–67.
66 On the theme of ochclocracy, see my article, ‘“La démocratie dans toute sa pureté”: une longue histoire de la sortie en politique du concept d’ochclocratie (1780–1880)’, in Revue de la recherche juridique 147 (2013): 605–48, and its expansion in book form as Ferreira, Le pouvoir de la foule. Horizon de la démocratie (Paris: Eska, 2019). For a complementary English-language survey of the same theme covering a slightly different and earlier chronological frame, see Iain McDaniel, ‘Ochclocracy and Democracy in the “Long Quarrel”: Modern Republicanism and its Ancient Rivals Revisited’, in The Long Quarrel: Past and Present in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jacques Bos and Jans Rotmans (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 161–83.
67 Lefort used Kantorowicz’s work to criticize the totalitarianism of Cold War communist regimes and the persistence of the theological desire to incarnate social unity in political corporality. See Claude Lefort, L’Invention démocratique. Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981). On Lefort’s concept of the ‘empty space’ of power, see Gaëlle Demelemestre, ‘Le concept lefortien du pouvoir comme lieu vide: paradoxes de la société démocratique moderne’, Raisons politiques 42, no. 6 (2012): 175–93, and Gilles Bataillon, ‘Claude Lefort, pratique et pensée de la désincorporation’, Raisons politiques 4, no. 56 (2014): 69–85.
68 On this theme, see my Le pouvoir de la foule.
69 On Pinheiro Ferreira, see my articles, ‘Un Sieyès rouge? Regards sur le système politique de Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira’, Revue de la recherche juridique 146 (2013): 91–131; and ‘Une solution aux errements du capitalisme: la propriété duale d'un précurseur du corporatisme chrétien, Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira’, in Pensée politique et propriété (Aix-en-Provence: PUAM, 2019), 245–60.
70 See, for example, Pinheiro Ferreira, Principes du droit public, constitutionnel, administratif, et des gens, ou Manuel du citoyen sous un gouvernement représentatif, 3 vols. (Paris: Rey & Gravier, 1834), 1: 350–1.
71 27 February 1835 speech, José Victorino Barreto Feio, 27 February 1835 speech, Diaro da Câmara dos Senhores Deputados da Nação Portugueza, Legislature 1, Session 2, no. 33 (1835): 444.
72 2 May 1885 speech, Bernardino Luís Machado Guimarães, ibid., Legislature 25, Session 2, no. 74 (1885): 1401.
73 Teófilo Braga, Soluções positivas da Política portugueza, 2 vols. (Porto: Chardon, de Lello e Irmão, 1912–13), 2: 123.