all those freedoms, as, well as the democrats, who had demanded them
all--appeal with full right to the Constitution: Each paragraph of
the Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower
House-freedom as a generalization, the abolition of freedom as
a specification. Accordingly, so long as the name of freedom was
respected, and only its real enforcement was prevented in a legal way,
of course the constitutional existence of freedom remained uninjured,
untouched, however completely its common existence might be
extinguished.

This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like
Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or
rather, in the two heads into which it ran out-the Legislative Assembly,
on the one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the
Constitution and it will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the
relation of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined, are
absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable.

Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own
position. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the
National Assembly can constitutionally remove the President, but the
President can set aside the National Assembly only unconstitutionally,
he can set it aside only by setting aside the Constitution itself.
Accordingly, by these provisions, the National Assembly challenges its
own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character
of 1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
executive powers, plays permanent "vabanque" in the Constitution of
1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and