‘That we gave the President too much power,’ said Beaumont, ’the event has proved.  But I do not see how, in the existing state of feeling in France, we could have given him less.  The French have no self-reliance.  They depend for everything on their administrators.  The first revolution and the first empire destroyed all their local authorities and also their aristocracy.  Local authorities may be gradually re-created, and an aristocracy may gradually arise, but till these things have been done the Executive must be strong.

’If he had been re-eligible, our first President would virtually have been President for life.  Having decided that his office should be temporary, we were forced to forbid his immediate re-election.

’With respect to his being left unprovided for, no man who had filled the office decently would have been refused an ample provision on quitting it.  As for this man, no provision that we could have made for him, if we had given him three or four millions a year, would have induced him to give up what he considered a throne which was his by descent.  He swore to the Constitution with an idee fixe to destroy it.  He attempted to do so on the 29th of January 1849, not two months after his election.

’I agree with you that the fault of the Constitution was that it allowed the President to be chosen by universal suffrage; and that the fault of the people was that they elected a pretender to the throne, whose ambition, rashness, and faithlessness had been proved.

’No new Constitution can work if the Executive conspires against it.  But deliberating and acting in the midst of emeutes, with a Chamber and a population divided into half a dozen hostile factions, the two Royalist parties hating one another, the Bonapartists bent on destroying all freedom, and the Socialists all individual property, what could we do?  My wish and Tocqueville’s was to give the election to the Chamber.  We found that out of 650 members we could not hope that our proposition would be supported by more than 200.  You think that we ought to have proposed two Chambers.  The great use of two Chambers is to strengthen the Executive by enabling it to play one against the other; but we felt that our Executive was dangerously strong, and we believed, I think truly, that a single Chamber would resist him better than two could do.  The provision which required more than a bare majority for the revision of the Constitution was one of those which we borrowed from America.  It had worked well there.  In the general instability we wished to have one anchor, one mooring ring fixed.  We did not choose that the whole framework of our Government should be capable of being suddenly destroyed by a majority of one, in a moment of excitement and perhaps by a parliamentary surprise.

’With respect to your complaint that, there being no power of dissolution, there was no means of taking the opinion of the people, the answer is, that to give the President power of dissolution would have been to invite him to a coup d’etat. With no Chamber to watch him, he would have been omnipotent.