If the Constituent Assembly, as against the President and the ministers, was driven to insurrection, the President and the ministers, as against the Constituent Assembly, were driven to a coup d'etat, for they had no legal means of dissolving it.But the Constituent Assembly was the mother of the constitution and the constitution was the mother of the President.With the coup d'etat the President tore up the constitution and extinguished his republican legal title.He was then forced to pull out his imperial legal title, but the imperial legal title woke up the Orléanist legal title and both paled before the Legitimist legal title.The downfall of the legal republic could shoot to the top only its extreme antipode, the Legitimist monarchy, at a moment when the Orléanist party was still only the vanquished of February and Bonaparte was still only the victor of December 10, when both could oppose to republican usurpation only their likewise usurped monarchist titles.The Legitimists were aware of the propitiousness of the moment; they conspired openly.They could hope to find their monk in General Changarnier.The imminence of the white monarchy was as openly announced in their clubs as was that of the red republic in the proletarian clubs.
The ministry would have escaped all difficulties by a happily suppressed rising."Legality is the death of us," cried Odilon Barrot.
A rising would have allowed it, under the pretext of salut public [public safety], to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, to violate the constitution in the interests of the constitution itself.The brutal behavior of Odilon Barrot in the National Assembly, the motion for the dissolution of the clubs, the tumultuous removal of fifty tricolor prefects and their replacement by royalists, the dissolution of the Mobile Guard, the ill treatment of their chiefs by Changarnier, the reinstatement of Lerminier, the professor who was impossible even under Guizot, the toleration of the Legitimist braggadocio -- all these were just so many provocations to mutiny.But the mutiny remained mute.It expected its signal from the Constituent Assembly and not from the ministry.
Finally came January 29, the day the decision was to be taken on the motion of Mathieu (de la Dr6me) for unconditional rejection of Rateau's motion.Legitimists, Orléanists, Bonapartists, Mobile Guard, Montagne, clubs -- all conspired on this day, each just as much against the ostensible enemy as against the ostensible ally.Bonaparte, on horseback, mustered a part of the troops on the Place de la Concorde; Changarnier play-acted with a display of strategic maneuvers; the Constituent Assembly found its building occupied by the military.This Assembly, the center of all the conflicting hopes, fears, expectations, ferments, tensions, and conspiracies, this lionhearted Assembly did not falter for a moment when it came nearer to the Weltgeist [world spirit] than ever.It was like the fighter who not only feared to make use of his own weapons but also felt himself obliged to maintain the weapons of his opponent unimpaired.Scorning death, it signed its own death warrant and rejected the unconditional rejection of the Rateau motion.Itself in a state of siege, it set limits to a constituent activity whose necessary frame had been the state of siege of Paris.It revenged itself worthily when on the following day it instituted an inquiry into the fright that the ministry had given it on January 29.In this great comedy of intrigues the Montagne showed its lack of revolutionary energy and political understanding by allowing itself to be used by the party of the National as the crier in the contest.The party of the National had made its last attempt to continue to maintain, in the constituted republic, the monopoly of rule it had possessed during the inchoate period of the bourgeois republic.It was shipwrecked.
While in the January crisis it was a question of the existence of the Constituent Assembly, in the crisis of March 21 it was a question of the existence of the constitution -- there of the personnel of the National party, here of its ideal.There is no need to point out that the respectable republicans surrendered the exaltation of their ideology more cheaply than the worldly enjoyment of governmental power.
On March 21 Faucher's bill against the right of association: the suppression of the clubs was on the order of the day in the National Assembly.
Article 8 of the constitution guarantees to all Frenchmen the right to associate.The prohibition of the clubs was therefore an unequivocal violation of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly itself was to canonize the profanation of its holy of holies.But the clubs -- these were the gathering points, the conspiratorial seats of the revolutionary proletariat.
