French Constitution of 1848

The French Constitution of 1848 established the Second Republic after the fall of the July Monarchy, creating a president elected separately by universal male suffrage alongside a bicameral legislature made up of a Senate and a National Assembly, and it was adopted by the Assembly on 4 November 1848 in place of the Charter of 1830. Its drafting committee of sixteen included the political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that two legislative chambers were necessary to check abuses of executive power, though most delegates had initially favored a single legislative body. The constitution proved short lived: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, elected president under its terms, seized power in a coup in December 1851, and the constitution was formally repealed on 14 January 1852 in favor of a new constitution that laid the legal foundation for his Second Empire. Its rapid collapse reflected how unresolved the young republic's tensions between executive and legislative power still were. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/