With the disappearance of Elizabeth II, it is tempting to evoke the immutability of British institutions, unlike France and its multiple revolutions and Constitutions. Things are, in reality, more complex, and the two countries are closer than they sometimes imagine, including in their political and institutional trajectories.
The United Kingdom has known its share of revolutions and constitutional upheavals, with in particular the fall of the House of Lords, without real power since the crisis of the People’s Budget in 1909-1911. Deprived of its Lords, who until then constituted the backbone of its governments and of the executive and legislative powers (most of the prime ministers came from there), the British monarchy is no longer, since that date, anything but a cosmetic monarchy. , governed entirely by the House of Commons, at least until the Brexit referendum shock in 2016.
Let’s start with the beginning. The country made its “French Revolution” for the first time in 1530, when Henry VIII expropriated the monasteries. In the same way as in France after 1789, but with more than two centuries in advance, the lands of the Church were sold to the nobles and the bourgeois who had the means to buy them. This makes it possible, in both cases, to bail out the state, while contributing to the development of a new class of private owners, powerful and unified, ready to launch themselves unhindered into agrarian and then industrial capitalism.
After the beheading of Charles Ier, in 1649, then a brief republican episode, the Crown had no choice, during the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, but to submit to the power of Parliament, clearly dominated by the House of Lords. In the 19the century, social and labor mobilization and the rise of universal suffrage reinforced the legitimacy of the House of Commons. The conflict between the two Chambers becomes inevitable and will be played out in two stages.
Explosive cocktail
In the 1880s, Lord Salisbury, leader of the Tories and of the House of Lords, recklessly advanced the theory of the “referendum”: morally and politically, the Lords had, according to him, not only the right but also the duty, if they think it good for the country, to oppose legislation passed by the Commons, except where such legislation would have been clearly laid out in the country before the election.
This is how the Lords vetoed, in 1894, the plans of Gladstone (leader of the Liberals) for new legislation on Ireland, a moderately popular reform which had not been explicitly announced to the voters. This is what enabled the Conservatives to win the 1895 elections and return to power. But Salisbury’s recklessness soon became apparent.
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