«Constitutional Fever»? Constitutional Integration in Post-Revolutionary France,Great Britain and Germany,1814–c.1835

Abstract

«Constitutional Fever»? Constitutional Integration in Post-Revolutionary France, Great Britain and Germany, 1814–c.1835

This article proposes a comparative perspective on the role of constitutions in European political cultures from 1814 to c.1835. Through its analysis of constitutions first as a means to legitimising post-revolutionary monarchies, and secondly as a means to integrating the divided societies in France, Great Britain as well as the German states, this article suggests two major results: 1) Constitutions were a central instrument that was imagined by post-revolutionary European societies in order to open up an «evolutionary» path to political progress and thereby finally «end» or «prevent» further revolutionary changes. 2) The major challenges to constitutional integration were posed by the emergence of competing political groups that often demanded a strengthening of certain parts of the constitutions or their further reform. The problems, which were faced by almost all political actors regarding the acceptance of these new imperatives of party politics and the different constitutional «solutions» that they had developed to meet these challenges, provide explanations for the different constitutional paths that were taken by Great Britain, the German states and France during the early 1830s. In Great Britain, a common constitutionalist language enabled a precarious understanding amongst the competing groups, whereas anti-pluralist constitutional conceptions led to constitutional instability in France and even damaged the very idea of constitutional integration in Germany thus benefitting a «unification first»-approach in the German states.