e minimum age
of electors was reduced from thirty to twenty-five years, and of
deputies from forty to thirty. Subsequently, April 19, 1831, a law was
passed whereby the suffrage--so restricted at the close of the
Napoleonic regime that in a population of 29,000,000 there had been,
in 1814, not 100,000 voters--was appreciably broadened. The direct tax
qualification of three hundred francs was reduced to one of two
hundred, and, for certain professional classes, of one hundred. By
this modification the number of voters was doubled, though the
proportion of the enfranchised was still but one in one hundred fifty
of the total population, and it would be a mistake to regard the
government of the Orleanist period as in effect more democratic than
that by which it was preceded. At the most, it was a government by and
for the well-to-do middle class.[436]

[Footnote 436: For the act of the Chambers relative
to the modification of the Constitutional Charter
and to the accession of Louis Philippe, see Duguit
et Monnier, Les Constitutions, 213-218; Helie, Les
Constitutions, 987-992; and Anderson,
Constitutions, 507-513. The electoral law of 1831
is in Duguit et Monnier, 219-230. Cambridge Modern
History, X., Chap. 15; G. Weill, La France sous la
monarchic constitutionnelle, 1814-1848 (new ed.,
Paris, 1912).]

IV. THE SECOND REPUBLIC AND THE SECOND EMPIRE

*321. The Republican Constitution of 1848.*--With the overthrow of the
Orleanist monarchy, in consequence of the uprising of February 24,
1848, France entered upon a period of aggravated political
unsettlement. Through upwards of five years the nation experimented
once more with republicanism, only at the end of that period to emerge
a monarchy, an empire, and the dominion of a Bonaparte. By the
provisional government which sprang from the revolution a republic was
proclaimed tentatively and the nation was called upon to elect, under
a system of direct manhood suffrage, an assembly to frame a constitution.
The elections--the first of their kind in the history of (p. 298)
France--were held April 23, 1848, and the National Constituent
Assembly, consisting of nine hundred members, eight hundred of whom
were moderate republicans, met May 4 in Paris. During the summer the
draft of a