The Orleans monarchy, for instance, through the mouths of its friends, denied Sovereignty to the people, without being able to claim it for the King; and this insecurity of its legal framework was an indirect cause of a violent explosion of effective popular Sovereignty in 1848.

The apologists for the Second Empire admitted the theory of a Sovereign people, but claimed that the Sovereign power could be safely and efficiently used only in case it were delegated to one Napoleon III--a view the correctness of which the results of the Imperial policy eventually tended to damage.

There is in point of fact no logical escape from a theory of popular Sovereignty--once the theory of divinely appointed royal Sovereignty is rejected.

An escape can be made, of course, as in England, by means of a compromise and a legal fiction; and such an escape can be fully justified from the English national point of view; but countries which have rejected the royal and aristocratic tradition are forbidden this means of escape--if escape it is.

They are obliged to admit the doctrine of popular Sovereignty.