Anastasio Bustamante's presidency and the centralist constitution lasted four years and five months. Both were replaced in October 1841 by Santa Anna, who, after manoeuvring himself to the head of a successful revolt, forced Bustamante to resign and replaced the constitution with a new set of bases more in tune with his priorities. In comparative terms, Bustamante's survival for four years, or half the term to which he had been elected, was something of an achievement, equalled only by Guadalupe Victoria's term in office for the first forty years after independence. But in absolute terms, the experiment of a centralized republican form of government controlled by hombres de bien was an abject failure and did nothing to resolve the country's political, economic or social problems. The promises of the conservative manifesto so carefully expounded in 1835 were not fulfilled, and all the hopes that Alamán, Carlos Bustamante, Sánchez de Tagle and their colleagues had of ordered progress were frustrated. Why did the new regime, seemingly so solidly based on the essential interests of the ‘well-off classes’, fail? Why did Bustamante, who had been welcomed with such fervour in 1837, fail to impose himself or the new constitution? Why did many of the hombres de bien become disillusioned with their own creation? Why, despite the clear resistance to a military dictatorship from 1834 to 1836, did the safeguards against it built into the constitution, especially with the fourth moderating power, not succeed?