French Constitution of 1848

In May 1848 the National Constituent Assembly elected a constitutional committee of eighteen. It was chaired by the moderate republican Cormenin, with Armand Marrast as rapporteur, and included Tocqueville, the Orléanists Odilon Barrot and Jules Dufaure and the socialist Victor Considerant. The draft was heavily revised after the June Days. The fiercest dispute was over the right to work: republicans and socialists wanted it in the constitution, Thiers argued that it was dangerous to promise that work could always be provided, and Tocqueville saw in it the introduction of communism. In the end it was replaced by a vague right to assistance. The constitution was adopted on 4 November with only thirty votes against.

The preamble set "the family, work, property and public order" beside liberty, equality and fraternity as the foundations of the republic. The constitution enshrined the abolition of slavery, abolished the death penalty for political crimes, and proclaimed freedom of the press, of worship and of association together with property. Legislative power belonged to a single assembly of 750 members aged at least 25, elected for three years, which could not be dissolved. Executive power belonged to a president elected directly by male universal suffrage for four years, who could stand again only four years after his term ended and was paid 600,000 francs a year; an amendment to bar members of the former ruling families was rejected. Revision required three votes a month apart, in the last year of the legislature, each carried by three quarters of the deputies.

Both powers thus drew legitimacy from universal suffrage, but there was no peaceful way to resolve a conflict between them, and while the president's legitimacy was concentrated in one man, the Assembly's was spread across 750 deputies of every political shade. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's landslide in December 1848 and the monarchist majority elected in May 1849 meant that the regime never worked as its framers had intended. The coup of 2 December 1851 overthrew the republic, and the constitution was replaced on 14 January 1852. Yet it was this constitution that the republicans remembered when they returned to power in 1870.

In chapter II of The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx compared the constitution to Achilles: made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, it was nevertheless "like Achilles, vulnerable in one point", not in the heel but in the head, "or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other." He mocked Article 45, which barred the president's re-election, as crying to him every day "Frère, il faut mourir!", and wrote that the republicans had tried in vain to outwit fate with Article 111, which made revision so difficult.