The Division of Powers in Bourgeois Democracy

In the eighteenth-century Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alambert, in the article on “Civil liberty” written by Chevalier de Jaucourt, we read: “There are no words, as Mssr. Montesquieu says so well, to which men have attributed so many different meanings like this one.”

In the Enlightenment, words such as Freedom, Reason, Man, Consciousness, and Nature dominated the scene – however, transported to the realm of abstraction, outside of time and history. Only dialectical or historical materialism has made it possible to understand that these terms do not indicate eternal and immutable realities like so many divinities, but products of history: ideas and ideologies which, as such, are the reflection of the relations of production and relations between classes, that is, of the positions in which individuals find themselves with respect to certain relations of production.

The aforementioned conceptions from the Enlightenment, and among them in particular the “law of nature”, had enormous importance as constituting the revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, and in particular in the French Revolution. This ideology, then revolutionary, was born in the previous century with natural law, not surprisingly in countries such as Grotius’s Holland and Locke’s England, where the bourgeoisie was already in power or was about to get there. According to this conception, man as such has rights that derive from nature, always as such, so that emperors, kings, and popes cannot deny them.

We limit ourselves to two quotations from Montesquieu and Blanqui on freedom.

It is necessary to first make some clarifications about Charles-Louis de Secondat, who in 1716, at the age of 27, inherited the title of Baron De Montesquieu from his uncle, along with a large fortune and the post of president of the Bordeaux parliament. His most important work is The Spirit of the Laws, written in 1748, in which he supports the division of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, based on the English model he admired.

After Montesquieu’s death, his ideas were seen through the dominant perspectives of the subsequent centuries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he became a theorist of the bourgeois democracies of the time, while in the French Revolution of 1789‑94 he became a republican and a revolutionary. The ideology of the Jacobins and the revolutionaries in general was a reworked mixture of Rousseau and Montesquieu, with a clear pre‑eminence of the former. Rousseau was purged of his criticism of private property and his pessimism, and was uplifted by the optimism of Condorcet and the encyclopedists in general regarding the possibility of regenerating a society corrupted by ignorance, superstition, and inequalities.

Montesquieu, having placed the principle of the republic in virtue, was seen as a republican, and therefore a revolutionary. Billaud-Varenne, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, wrote in the third year of the Republic (after the Thermidorian Reaction) that Montesquieu was the turning point of French political thought, a thought which was then continued and surpassed by Rousseau. Montesquieu speaks of three types of government: the republic, the monarchy, and despotism. The republic has virtue as its principle, the monarchy has honor, and despotism has fear. The republic can belong to the whole people or to a part of them: it can therefore be democratic or aristocratic. Bourgeois and aristocrats, readers of Montesquieu and Rousseau as well as Plutarch and Cicero, could therefore aspire to be virtuous, custodians of the ancient republican virtues in the myth of Lycurgus’ Sparta and the republican Rome of Marcus Junius Brutus.

The myth of these virtues, then widespread, did not automatically mean wanting the republic, and even less the revolution: otherwise it would be difficult to understand the praise of republican virtues made in those years by a King of Poland, even taking into account that Poland, monarchic at that time, was in fact an aristocratic republic, where kings were elected by a very numerous aristocracy, which in some periods of Polish history came to constitute more than 10% of the population.

With the American Revolution of 1776, people began to think that the republic did not concern only the ancient Greek polis or the Swiss cantons, but was also a possibility for large states such as France.

It must be said that Montesquieu, who is difficult to define as a republican, in his writings and notes dated between 1716 and 1755, later rearranged by others with the title of “Reflections and Unpublished Thoughts”, writes under the subtitle “Republics”: “I am not one of those who consider Plato’s Republic as an ideal and purely imaginary thing, which it would be impossible to implement.”

The political freedom of which Montesquieu speaks can be found both in the monarchies and in the republics: it is not proper to one or the other as such, but to the governments he calls “moderate”, where the division of powers prevents abuses, as he writes in The Spirit of the Laws: “For the very arrangement of things, power must stop power.” Montesquieu’s sympathies therefore went both to constitutional monarchy and to the republic, provided they were “moderate,” with the tripartite division of powers.

Obviously, in the France of his time, together with the very large part of the Enlightenment, he supported the less traumatic solution, that is, a monarchy which, under the influence of new ideas, would reform itself in a constitutional sense. He certainly he was not a revolutionary.

But the separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial was an attack on absolute monarchy, and therefore a possible ideological tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie in view of its rise to power. In this sense, at least until 1789, the separation of powers found a place within the revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie.

However, Montesquieu’s conception of the separation of powers also responded to a need for stability and conservation, referring, from this point of view, to the most ancient and traditional vision of a society of classes. Class societies were made up of aristocracy, clergy, and the (future) third estate, that is, a bourgeoisie that expressed itself in municipal parliaments, often as conservative, if not more, than the aristocracy. The power of the king, even if absolute, found a limitation on the part of the classes which, although not having decision-making power, could not be ignored: it was not wise for the king to ignore them, as this would certainly have procured different problems, lengthened the list of his enemies, and made his power more unstable. The classes therefore had a limited power of influence towards the monarch, but at the same time they fulfilled an important stabilizing function in that society, a function understood by all, starting with the monarch himself.

This does not mean that sometimes, or often, the stability of the kingdom jumped due to the struggles and wars between monarchy and aristocracy, in which one tried to subjugate the other.

For Montesquieu, the tripartition of powers aims to make power itself more stable and therefore stronger, avoiding shocks of various kinds. Executive power remains in the hands of the monarch, as before; legislative power should pass into the hands of a parliament presumably dominated by the aristocrats and with bourgeois participation; the judicial power is in the hands of courts where the bourgeois were already competing for domination with the aristocrats. The example of England, admired by the baron, seemed to confirm the effectiveness of this division of the garments of the poor Christ between monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie. The effectiveness was in guaranteeing the stability and “freedom of man”, which we know to be the freedom of the man who owned property in France at the time, landed and bourgeois. The latter, with the revolution and the Napoleonic period, later became far more important.

We now come to the quotation from Montesquieu taken from the aforementioned collection under the subtitle “On political freedom”: “The word freedom in politics does not even remotely have the meaning attributed to it by orators and poets. This word properly expresses only a relationship and cannot serve to differentiate the various types of government: since the people’s state consists in the freedom of the poor and weak and in the slavery of the rich and powerful; while the monarchy consists in the freedom of the great and in the slavery of the small (…) So when, in a civil war, it is said that one is fighting for freedom, it is something else: the people are fighting to obtain dominance over the Great, and the great ones fight to obtain dominance over the people.”

These words are significant precisely because they do not come from a revolutionary. However, there is the intuition that freedom has a class connotation, and that the freedom of some coincides with the slavery of others.

Montesquieu, despite being a baron, is the exponent of an objectively revolutionary bourgeois class, as was shown a few decades later in France. As a revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie can afford to tell the truth, or what it deems to be true, without having to look over its shoulder. Another revolutionary class is still not pressing against it. Then, when the bourgeoisie has become mature, first stagnant and today in a state of decomposition (but it does not die by itself), then it can no longer afford the luxury of saying something that comes close to the truth: materialism and naive ideologies, and in part also generous ones, that it had professed are abandoned. In the name of its war of life and death, of its Armageddon against the proletariat, the bourgeoisie then allied itself with the remnants of all the previous owning classes, recovering their ideologies like an old coat that it is turned inside out and patched up, in order not to appear naked to the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, after having cut off the heads of kings and priests and professed atheism, sprinkles its head with ashes and asks for forgiveness from kings, priests, and God, with whom it stipulates a holy alliance against infidels and blasphemers who do not believe in the holy right of property.

We come now to the revolutionary Blanqui, a communist with a solid vision of class but lacking in science and dialectics. In Social Criticism, a collection he made of his writings from 1850 to 1870, from one of 1869‑70 entitled “Communism, the future of society” we read: “Now, communism is reproached for representing the sacrifice of the individual and the denial of freedom (…) On the other hand, where is the evidence in support of the accusation made against it? It is only a gratuitous insult, since the accused never lived. And in whose name is this arrogant supposition? In the name of individualism, which for thousands of years has permanently killed freedom and the individual. How many individuals of our species are there who have not been made helots or victims? Maybe one in ten thousand. Ten thousand martyrs for an executioner! Ten thousand slaves for a tyrant! And this is supported in the name of freedom! (…) The freedom that communism accuses, we know it, is the freedom to enslave, the freedom to exploit at will, the freedom of great existences, as Renan says, with the multitudes on the sidewalk. The people call this freedom oppression and crime. It no longer wants to feed her with his flesh and blood (…) Communism is the safeguard of the individual; individualism is his extermination. For the one, each individual is sacred. The other takes no more account of it than an earthen jar and immolates it with the massacre to the bloody trinity Loyola, Caesar, and Shylock; after which he says phlegmatically: “Communism would be the sacrifice of the individual”. It would ruin the banquet of the anthropophages, this is clear. But those who pay the price will not find this setback annoying (…) No freedom for the enemy (…) In 1848, the republicans, forgetting fifty years of persecution, granted full and complete freedom to their enemies. The hour was solemn and decisive. It will never come back. The winners, despite long and cruel wrongs, took the initiative, gave the example. What was the answer? Extermination. Closed business. The day when the gag is removed from the mouth of labor, it will be put on that of capital.”

Here we agree with Blanqui, and in the wake of Marx’s scientific, historical, and dialectical communism, we say that the only freedom available to the proletariat is the exercise of its own dictatorship.