Additional Act to the constitutions — 22 avril 1815

Drafted by Benjamin Constant, the Additional Act gave the Empire two chambers, ministerial responsibility and freedom of the press: the 'liberal Empire' that opinion demanded. Nicknamed 'la Benjamine', it was ratified by a plebiscite that drew only a million and a half voters out of five. The country wanted peace more than institutions: the liberal conversion lacked legitimacy.

An Empire that had to liberalise

Back in the Tuileries on 20 March 1815, Napoleon found a country that had let him pass without calling for him. The royalists were hostile, the liberals suspicious, and no one wanted the regime of 1810: neither the censorship, nor the docile Senate, nor the special commissions.

He summoned Benjamin Constant, who had attacked him in the press a few days earlier, and commissioned a constitution from him. The text was ready in three weeks and promulgated on 22 April 1815.

The Benjamine

The Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire gave two chambers — a hereditary chamber of peers, an elected chamber of representatives — ministerial responsibility before them, shared initiative in legislation, freedom of the press, the abolition of confiscation and public judicial proceedings.

The flaw lay in the title. By presenting itself as 'additional', the text kept the earlier imperial constitutions in force and looked like patching rather than a new regime. The liberals nicknamed it 'the Benjamine': the irony bore as much on the author as on the parentage.

A plebiscite that was not one

Put to the vote, the Act gathered about a million and a half yes against a few thousand no — but out of five million registered voters. Abstention was the real result: the country was not refusing, it was no longer committing itself.

Proclaimed at the Champ de Mai on 1 June and applied for a few weeks, the Additional Act nonetheless left a trace: from this experiment and its debates would come French parliamentarism of the nineteenth century, and it was the chamber elected under it that, after Waterloo, demanded the second abdication.