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