ligible. Upon the First Consul was conferred power to
promulgate the laws, to appoint all civil and military officials, and
to do many other things of vital importance. Upon the second and (p. 295)
third consuls was bestowed simply a "consultative voice." Provision
was made for a ministry, and under the letter of the constitution no
act of the government was binding unless performed on the warrant of a
minister. But in point of fact the principle of irresponsibility
permeated the Napoleonic regime from the First Consul himself to the
lowliest functionary. The conferring upon Napoleon, in 1802, of the
consulship for life, and the conversion of the Consulate, in 1804,
into the Empire, but concentrated yet more fully in the hands of a
single man the whole body of governmental authority in France.[430]

[Footnote 430: The text of the constitution of the
Year VIII. is in Duguit et Monnier, Les
Constitutions, 118-129; Helie, Les Constitutions,
577-585; and Anderson, Constitutions, 270-281.
Summary in Block, Dictionnaire General, I.,
500-505. Cambridge Modern History, IX., Chap. 1.]

III. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE REVOLUTION OF 1848

*318. The Constitutional Charter, 1814.*--May 3, 1814,--three weeks
after Napoleon's signature of the Act of Abdication,--the restored
Bourbon king, Louis XVIII., entered Paris. Already the Senate had
formulated a document, commonly known as the "Senatorial
Constitution," wherein was embraced a scheme for a liberalized Bourbon
monarchy.[431] Neither the instrument itself nor the authorship of it
was acceptable to the new sovereign, and by him the task of drafting a
constitution was given over to a commission consisting of three
representatives of the crown, nine senators, and nine members of the
Legislative Body. The task was accomplished with despatch. June 4 the
new instrument, under the name of the Constitutional Charter, was
adopted by the two chambers, and ten days later it was put in
operation. With some modification, principally in 1830, it remained
the fundamental law of France until the revolution of 1848.

[Footnote 431: Duguit et Monnier, Les
Constitutions, 179-182; Anderson, Constitutions,
446-450; Block, Dictionnaire General, I., 505-506.]

The governmental system provided for in the Charter was in a number