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.
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