commission consisted of Messrs. Arago, Marie, GarnierPagès, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin. The radical element was thus eliminated, and space left for the spirit of reaction which precipitated the events of June. The commission on the constitution consisted of eighteen members, who were to be chosen at random from its own body by an assembly wholly without guides or leaders, and whose members were for the most part strangers to each other. De Tocqueville was elected on the first ballot, receiving 496 votes; but it required several days and many repeated ballotings to complete the number.

In considering the commission as a whole it was easy to see that it would be hopeless to expect remarkable work. Among its members some had passed their lives in directing or controlling administration under the last government. They had never seen or studied or understood anything but the monarchy. Indeed, they had applied rather than studied the principles of that. They had hardly raised themselves above practical affairs. Charged now with realizing theories which they had always misunderstood or opposed and which had obtained their submission but not their conviction, it was very difficult for them to bring to their work other than monarchical ideas; or if they entered at all into republican ideas, they had to do it sometimes with timidity and sometimes with impetuosity, but always by a sort of chance, like novices.

As for the Republicans, properly so called, who were upon the commission, they had few ideas of any kind, unless it was those which they had conceived in reading newspapers or writing for them, for several were journalists. Marrast had directed the National for ten years. Dornès was then its editor-in-chief. Vaulabelle, a serious character, but coarse and even cynical, wrote habitually for the same paper. He was justly astonished to find himself a month later Minister of Public Works and Education. All this bore little resemblance to the men, so sure of their object and so well informed as to the means of obtaining it, who under the presidency of Washington drew up the Constitution of the United States.

But if the commission had been capable of good work, the want of time and the preoccupation as to that which was passing outside would have prevented it. There is no nation which is less attached to those who govern it than the French, nor which knows less how to do without government. As soon as it sees itself obliged to go alone it experiences a sort of vertigo which makes it believe every

instant that it is going to tumble into an abyss. At the moment of which I speak it desired with a sort of frenzy that the work of the constitution should be accomplished, and that the public power should have a base, if not solid, at least permanent and regular. What it wanted was less a good constitution than a constitution of some kind. The Assembly showed this eagerness and did not cease to spur us, of which in fact we had very little need. The remembrance of the 15th of May, the apprehension of the days of June, and the sight of the divided, enervated, and incapable government which directed affairs, were sufficient to urge us on. But that which it must be confessed deprived the commission of all presence of mind was the fear of outside events and the impulse of the moment. It is difficult to imagine what an effect was produced by this pressure of revolutionary ideas even upon the minds least disposed to adopt them, and how it forced even those to go almost unconsciously further than they wished."

The Convention began its deliberations on the 22d of May and finished them on the 19th day of June, thus doing in four weeks, and under such circumstances, that to which our Constitutional Convention devoted four months in the quiet city of Philadelphia.

The decision in favor of a single chamber, though contrary to all experience of parliamentary government, is not one which can be condemned without question in the abstract.

The only part of our work which was treated with superiority and regulated with wisdom was that which related to justice. On this ground the commission was at home, most of its members having been or still being lawyers. Thanks to them we were able to save the principle of the permanence of judges. That held firm, as in 1830, against the current that carried away everything else.

All were

The most crucial question was that of executive power. agreed in confiding it to a single man. But what prerogatives and

1 How should it be otherwise, when for nearly three centuries the government has never allowed the nation to take any independent action ?

2 De Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 262.

Ibid., p. 281. While the Constitution of the United States preserved the same principle, if we consider that all but one or two states of the Union have adopted one of the worst of political evils, an elective judiciary, we may be more sparing in our condemnation of the French.

what agents to give him, what responsibility to put upon him? In a country without monarchical traditions in which the executive power has always been weak there is nothing wiser than to charge the nation with choosing a representative. A president who should not have the strength which he derives from this origin would be the puppet of assemblies, but the conditions among us were quite different. We had come from a monarchy, and the habits of the Republicans themselves were still monarchical. Centralization, besides, was enough to render our situation wholly exceptional; according to its principles the whole administration of the country, in the smallest as well as the greatest affairs, could only belong to the president; the thousands of functionaries who hold the whole country in their hands would depend upon him alone. This was the case even after the Revolution of February, for we had preserved the spirit of the monarchy while losing the taste for it. Under such conditions how could a president elected by the people be other than a pretender for the crown?1

A short time only was needed to justify this reasoning, but it is more than doubtful whether the election of a president by the Assembly, which is much worse in principle, would have had any better result. We shall have occasion later to consider the effect of that method. The same arguments may be applied to the electorate. The electoral law, established by the Provisional Government for the creation of the Constituent Assembly, gave the vote to every Frenchman twenty-one years of age who had resided six months in the place of election, and made all Frenchmen eligible who had reached twenty-five years, giving to the elected deputies a payment of twenty-five francs per day. The jump from two hundred thousand electors to nearly eight millions, the first instance in French history of the application of direct universal suffrage, was tremendous, and resulted in the Empire, but it is not at all sure that at that time the same result might not have followed from the limited electorate of Louis Philippe's reign.

1 Ibid., pp. 273-275. Louis Blanc, in his "History of the Revolution of 1848," also says that it was a mistake to make the president elective by the people instead of the Assembly.

Beaumont proposed that the president should not be reëligible. I supported it strongly, and the proposition passed. We both fell on this occasion into a great error, which will have, I believe, very evil consequences. We had always been much struck with the danger to public liberty and morality which would be caused by a reëligible president, who should employ in advance to promote his reëlection, as could not fail to happen, the immense means of constraint or corruption which our laws and our manners accord to the head of executive power. Our minds were not supple and prompt enough to turn round in time and perceive that from the moment when it had been decided that it would be the citizens themselves who would directly choose the president, the evil, such as it was, was irremediable, and that it would be only increasing it to undertake rashly to restrict the people in their choice.1

That the result of this reasoning followed at once is not, perhaps, conclusive, but it accords with many other arguments to prove the worse than futility of what is sometimes advocated as a safeguard in this country.

It is not necessary to follow the immense difficulties, in such a revolution, of public finance, of foreign affairs, and of internal administration for the whole country. The key to the situation was in Paris. It is noteworthy that the first serious attempt to dictate to the government came from the prosperous classes. On the 27th of February the provisional government had decreed that every adult Frenchman should form a part of the National Guard. On the 14th of March it had ordered the dissolution of the companies which were made up of the richer classes, and that a new election of officers should take place by universal suffrage. While perfectly regular in form, it was the most revolutionary decree in substance which had yet appeared, being nothing less than a legal arming of the proletariat and its organized preponderance in an institution of which the original object had been to hold it in check. About the same time Ledru-Rollin, as Minister of the Interior, issued a circular to his agents

1 De Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 279.

throughout the country, investing them with full revolutionary authority. These things aroused the upper class of citizens, and they determined to make a formal manifestation. On the 16th of March two legions turned out under their officers and marched to the Hôtel de Ville.

They were met by a crowd assembled to defend the government, and an armed collision was narrowly avoided. When their delegates appeared in the Council Chamber they were severely lectured by Arago for setting such a bad example, and for stirring up hostility between the working classes and the National Guard. They retired in confusion, and the legions which had assembled soon after dispersed. The seed was, however, sown. The agitators and leaders of the clubs, seeing their opportunity, determined to have a counter manifestation on the next day, ostensibly as a rebuke to the aristocrats of the National Guard, but really to compel the government to put off the elections to the National Assembly and to remove the army from Paris. They meant thereby to test how far the mob could be relied on to follow the men of violence. In the afternoon of the 17th of March a procession was formed, headed by five or six hundred members of clubs, who were followed by workmen, formed according to trades with their respective banners. The multitude filled the Place de Grêve, while delegates proceeded to an interview with the government in the Hôtel de Ville. Its members stood well together, and, in the argument which followed, so far succeeded in gaining over the delegates of the workmen, that those of the clubs did not venture to proceed to extremities. The members then appeared on the balconies and were received by the crowd, which did not even know the result of the interview, with loud applause, the members regarded as most revolutionary, however, receiving the largest share. After a speech from Louis Blanc the crowd, estimated at one hundred thousand persons, peace