The coalition with the Mountain and the pure republicans, to which the party of Order found itself condemned in its fruitless efforts to keep possession of the military and to reconquer supreme control over the Executive power, proved conclusively that it had forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. The calendar and clock merely gave, on May 29, the signal for its complete dissolution. With May 29 commenced the last year of the life of the National Assembly. It now had to decide for the unchanged continuance or the revision of the Constitution. But a revision of the Constitution meant not only the definitive supremacy of either the bourgeoisie of the small traders' democracy, of either democracy or proletarian anarchy, of either a parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it meant also either Orleans or Bourbon! Thus fell into the very midst of the parliament the apple of discord, around which the conflict of interests, that cut up the party of Order into hostile factions, was to kindle into an open conflagration. The party of Order was a combination of heterogeneous social substances. The question of revision raised a political temperature, in which the product was reduced to its original components.
The interest of the Bonapartists in the revision was simple: they were above all concerned in the abolition of Article 45, which forbade Bonaparte's reelection and the prolongation of his term. Not less simple seemed to be the position of the republicans; they rejected all revision, seeing in that only a general conspiracy against the republic; as they disposed over more than one-fourth of the votes in the National Assembly, and, according to the Constitution, a three-fourths majority was requisite to revise and to call a revisory convention, they needed only to count their own votes to be certain of victory. Indeed, they were certain of it.
Over and against these clear-cut positions, the party of Order found itself tangled in inextricable contradictions. If it voted against the revision, it endangered the "status quo," by leaving to Bonaparte only one expedient--that of violence and handing France over, on May 2, 1852, at the very time of election, a prey to revolutionary 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 republic itself, but also the joint reign of the two bourgeois factions; and it revived, with the possibility of the monarchy, both the rivalry of interests which these two factions had alternately allowed to preponderate, and the struggle for the supremacy of the one over the other. The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could allay the struggle by a combination of the two dynasties through a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their respective royal houses. The true fusion of the restoration and the July monarchy was, however, the parliamentary republic, in which the Orleanist and Legitimist colors were dissolved, and the bourgeois species vanished in the plain bourgeois, in the bourgeois genus. Now however, the plan was to turn the Orleanist Legitimist and the Legitimist Orleanist. The kingship, in which their antagonism was personified, was to incarnate their unity, the expression of their exclusive faction interests was to become the expression of their common class interest; the monarchy was to accomplish what only the abolition of two monarchies--the republic could and did accomplish.
