seeks to secure the moral power to the National Assembly. Apart from
the circumstance that it is impossible to create a moral power through
legislative paragraphs, the Constitution again neutralizes itself in
that it causes the President to be chosen by all the Frenchmen through
direct suffrage. While the votes of France are splintered to pieces upon
the 750 members of the National Assembly they are here, on the contrary,
concentrated upon one individual. While each separate Representative
represents only this or that party, this or that city, this or
that dunghill, or possibly only the necessity of electing some one
Seven-hundred-and-fiftieth or other, with whom neither the issue nor the
man is closely considered, that one, the President, on the contrary, is
the elect of the nation, and the act of his election is the trump card,
that, the sovereign people plays out once every four years. The elected
National Assembly stands in a metaphysical, but the elected President in
a personal, relation to the nation. True enough, the National Assembly
presents in its several Representatives the various sides of the
national spirit, but, in the President, this spirit is incarnated. As
against the National Assembly, the President possesses a sort of divine
right, he is by the grace of the people.

Thetis, the sea-goddess, had prophesied to Achilles that he would die
in the bloom of youth. The Constitution, which had its weak spot, like
Achilles, had also, like Achilles, the presentiment that it would depart
by premature death. It was enough for the pure republicans, engaged
at the work of framing a constitution, to cast a glance from the misty
heights of their ideal republic down upon the profane world in order to
realize how the arrogance of the royalists, of the Bonapartists, of
the democrats, of the Communists, rose daily, together with their own
discredit, and in the same measure as they approached the completion of
their legislative work of art, without Thetis having for this purpose to