ry anarchy, with
a President whose authority was at an end; with a parliament that
the party had long ceased to own, and with a people that it meant to
re-conquer. If it voted constitutionally for a revision, it knew that
it voted in vain and would constitutionally have to go under before the
veto of the republicans. If, unconstitutionally, it pronounced a simple
majority binding, it could hope to control the revolution only in case
it surrendered unconditionally to the domination of the Executive power:
it then made Bonaparte master of the Constitution, of the revision
and of itself. A merely partial revision, prolonging the term of the
President, opened the way to imperial usurpation; a general revision,
shortening the existence of the republic, threw the dynastic claims into
an inevitable conflict: the conditions for a Bourbon and those for an
Orleanist restoration were not only different, they mutually excluded
each other.

The parliamentary republic was more than a neutral ground on which the
two factions of the French bourgeoisie--Legitimists and Orleanists,
large landed property and manufacture--could lodge together with equal
rights. It was the indispensable condition for their common reign,
the only form of government in which their common class interest could
dominate both the claims of their separate factions and all the
other classes of society. As royalists, they relapsed into their old
antagonism into the struggle for the overlordship of either landed
property or of money; and the highest expression of this antagonism, its
personification, were the two kings themselves, their dynasties. Hence
the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of the Bourbons.

The Orleanist Representative Creton moved periodically in 1849, 1850 and
1851 the repeal of the decree of banishment against the royal families;
as periodically did the parliament present the spectacle of an Assembly
of royalists who stubbornly shut to their banished kings the door
through which they could return home. Richard III murdered Henry VI,
with the remark that he was too good for this world, and belonged in
heaven. They declared France too bad to have her kings back again.
Forced by the power of circumstances, they had become republicans, and
repeatedly sanctioned the popular mandate that exiled their kings from
France.

The revision of the Constitution, and circumstances compelled its
consideration, at once made uncertain not only the r