hich it ran out-the Legislative Assembly,
on the one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the
Constitution and it will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the
relation of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined, are
absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable.

Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own
position. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the
National Assembly can constitutionally remove the President, but the
President can set aside the National Assembly only unconstitutionally,
he can set it aside only by setting aside the Constitution itself.
Accordingly, by these provisions, the National Assembly challenges its
own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character
of 1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
executive powers, plays permanent "vabanque" in the Constitution of
1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and
qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last
instance over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the
power to grant amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually
maintains the foreground on the stage; on the other, a President, clad
with all the attributes of royalty, with the right to appoint and remove
his ministers independently from the national assembly, holding in his
hands all the means of executive power, the dispenser of all posts, and
thereby the arbiter of at least one and a half million existences in
France, so many being dependent upon the 500,000 civil employees and
upon the officers of all grades. He has the whole armed power behind
him. He enjoys the privilege of granting pardons to individual
criminals; suspending the National Guards; of removing with the consent
of the Council of State the general, cantonal and municipal Councilmen,
elected by the citizens themselves. The initiative and direction of
all negotiations with foreign countries are reserved to him. While the
Assembly itself is constantly acting upon the stage, and is exposed
to the critically vulgar light of day, he leads a hidden life in the
Ely