User:Dr Gangrene/communes

In 1854 a municipal law was enacted in Luxembourg, which, with the hindsight of history, appears as the last attempt of the reactionary movement to stifle the natural evolution of the commune towards autonomy and to restrict the influence of the citizens in the management of the local communities to which they belonged.

After the Grand Duchy achieved its independence from Dutch administrative oversight in 1839 and sought to put its house in order, one of the first measures was the law on the organization of municipalities, dated 24 February 1843. This organic law placed the municipalities and their organs in close dependence on the government. The action of the population in communal life was cleverly stifled. Communal elections by signed ballots were a mockery, as it was actually the government that chose municipal councillors as it pleased, usually among friends of the ruling power. And overall, it had placed a damper: the secrecy of communal deliberations and accounts.

It was inevitable that all this would be swept away in March 1848 since, in Luxembourg, the 1848 Revolution was essentially a revolt of the communes. Henceforth, access to municipal council meetings was free, and the budget and municipal accounts were published. The property qualification for municipal elections was reduced from 22 francs, or 10 florins, to 5 francs. Suffrage was now direct and secret. The government could no longer, as in the past, arbitrarily remove municipal councillors deemed too rebellious. Previously, the appointment of the mayor belonged to the sovereign — that is, in fact, to the government — without the right of presentation by any body and with the ability to choose the mayor outside of the municipal council. Now, the mayor had to be chosen from within the council, which proposed three candidates for selection. The aldermen were no longer chosen by the government but elected by the municipal council. The same held true for the municipal secretary and treasurer, once chosen by the government.

But soon the reactionary movement raised its head. In September 1853, the Jacques Willmar cabinet was abruptly dismissed and replaced by the Mathias Simons cabinet, the government of the coup d'état of 1856.

As soon as it came to power, it undertook the abolition of the municipal law of 1848, which had dealt a fatal blow to those oligarchies then called cantonal cliques. Three months after coming to power, the Simons government submitted to the Chamber a draft new municipal law. Its essence was simply the resurrection of the law of 1843, which had itself been a copy of a Dutch municipal regulation for cities in 1824 and for the countryside in 1825.

The proposed law was poorly received in the Chamber. The report of the central section of the Chamber concluded with the outright rejection of the project, deemed unconstitutional in light of the provisions of Article 111 of the Constitution of 1848 (corresponding to Article 107 of the current Constitution). The objection was not without foundation.

This led to the theatrical coup d'état. The moment the reading of this report was completed, at the session of the Chamber on 9 January 1854, Prime Minister Simons pulled from his pocket the decree proclaiming the closure of the parliamentary session. Anticipating the failure of his project to restore the communal law of 1843, the government was thus temporarily getting rid of the Chamber of Deputies, awaiting the opportunity to dismiss it permanently. This happened four months later, in May 1854, without the Chamber having had the opportunity to meet in the meantime. It was, therefore, the planned revision of the municipal law that was the immediate cause of the dissolution of the Chamber in 1854.

A new Chamber was elected on 14 June 1854. The government had exerted strong pressure on the voters, using all its agents, from district commissioners to rural constable and forest wardens. Its supporters brandished the banner of the "party of order" and practised coup d'état blackmail. They threatened that if the people did not elect a docile Chamber, the King would break the 1848 constitution, and the country would see dictators like Stifft and Hassenpflug again.

In the Chamber that emerged from the ballot boxes, the Simons cabinet now had a majority willing to work with it, not a servile majority. Seeing that it would not achieve the desired municipal law reform, the government withdrew its previous year's project and presented a more acceptable one. The new project raised the property qualification from 5 to 10 francs, reducing the number of voters by a third. However, the big question was the procedure for the appointment of mayors, and there the majority was not willing to follow the government.

Since 1848, the mayor had been appointed by the sovereign from a list of 3 candidates chosen by the municipal council from within itself. The government's project reinstated the possibility of choosing the mayor outside the council. Such a possibility did exist at the time in Belgium, but with a wise correction to prevent abuses of power: the mayor could only be chosen outside the municipal council with the unanimous consent of the Permanent Deputation of the Provincial Council, that is, the executive organ of a body formed by elected representatives of the population.

In the Chamber of Deputies, the debates on the government's municipal law project were curious. In the past, during the discussion in the States on the communal law of 1843, Emmanuel Servais and Vendelin Jurion, on behalf of liberalism, had spoken against the choice of mayors outside municipal councils. And during the discussion of the progressive law of 1848, Mathias Simons had done the same. Now, these three figures were members of the government, and they ardently defended the opposite point of view. As for the government member responsible for communal affairs, Edouard Thilges, he observed the deepest silence during the discussion. The debates were a contest between Simons and Jurion on one side and the lawyer and deputy Michel Jonas on the other.

According to the communal law of 1848, which was to be abolished, aldermen were elected by secret ballot by the municipal council. The government proposed to revert to the provision of the 1843 law: aldermen in cities would be chosen by the king, those in rural municipalities by the government.

Similarly, according to the 1848 law, the municipal secretary and treasurer were appointed by the Council, subject to government approval. Here too, the project returned to the 1843 law, where these officials were chosen by the government from a list of candidates presented by the municipal authorities.

The discussion led to a compromise. The sovereign received the right to appoint aldermen in cities, and the government had the right to appoint those in rural municipalities. The electoral property qualification was raised to 10 francs. But in the appointment of mayors, the Chamber did not yield: appointed by the sovereign, they had to be chosen from within the municipal council, and if the sovereign believed that it did not contain a suitable candidate, he had the option of dissolving the council. Thus, the municipal law of 15 November 1854 was born, passed by 37 votes against 5.

On 27 November 1856, the coup d'état occurred. As a result, the Chamber of Deputies had lived its life. Now, the government had a free hand to give the country a communal organization according to its heart. On 25 September 1857, a decree, without the participation of the legislative power, reinstated the provisions of the 1843 communal law that the Chamber had rejected, including the choice of mayors outside the council and the appointment of municipal secretaries and receivers. Then, a second ordinance, on 17 November 1857, abolished the 1848 law on communal elections and restored the principle of the publicity of votes.

After these demolitions of the liberating work of 1848, communal liberties and the independence of communal organs had come to an end. It took the reaction that followed the autocratic ordinances of 1857, manifested by the conciliation law of 15 July 1859, to gradually see the commune, that is, the political organism that most affects the citizen, regain its autonomy.