National Constituent Assembly (France, 1848–1849)

The election was held on Easter Day, 23 April 1848: the first under male universal suffrage since 1792, with a turnout of 84 per cent. In many villages voters went to the canton seat in procession, the priest at their head. The deputies came almost exclusively from the bourgeoisie and the nobility; there was not a single peasant, and workers and artisans numbered about fifteen of some 800. Nearly 300 were monarchists disguised as "republicans of the morrow", about a hundred Legitimists such as Berryer and Falloux and about two hundred Orléanists such as Odilon Barrot and Charles de Rémusat. Disappointed republicans clashed with supporters of the "camouflaged" candidates in Rouen, Limoges and elsewhere.

Meeting on 4 May, the Assembly replaced the Provisional Government with the Executive Commission, removing the socialists Louis Blanc and Albert. On 10 May it rejected Louis Blanc's proposal for a ministry of labour, and on 15 May, after a failed demonstration for Poland, it had Blanqui, Raspail, Barbès and Albert arrested. The by-elections of 4 June returned Thiers and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, while Paris also elected the democrat and socialist Proudhon and Pierre Leroux. Strengthened, the conservative majority had the National Workshops closed; the people of Paris rose, and the June insurrection was crushed in blood by the army, the National Guard and the Mobile Guard under General Cavaignac. Captured insurgents were deported to Algeria without trial. The Assembly made Cavaignac head of government, kept the state of siege and in August passed restrictive press laws.

In May the Assembly set up a constitutional committee of eighteen members, and it adopted the Constitution on 4 November 1848. After Louis-Napoléon won the presidential election of 10 December he appointed a monarchist ministry under Barrot. The president and the Party of Order wanted the Assembly gone before it could pass the organic laws completing the constitution; on 6 January 1849 the deputy Rateau proposed its dissolution, and, intimidated by troop movements, the Assembly voted on 29 January to dissolve itself. In its last months it approved the expedition to Rome and, when French troops attacked the Roman Republic, censured the government on 30 April.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx divided February 1848 to December 1851 into three periods: "the February period; the period of the constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly", from May 1848 to 28 May 1849; "and the period of the constitutional republic or the Legislative National Assembly", from 28 May 1849 to 2 December 1851. He wrote that its bourgeois republican majority treated the demands of the Paris proletariat as utopian nonsense to be done away with, and that "to this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection".