第24章

Meanwhile Piedmont was beaten, Charles-Albert had abdicated, and the Austrian army knocked at the gates of France.Ledru-Rollin vehemently interpellated.The ministry proved that it had only continued in North Italy the policy of Cavaignac and Cavaignac only the policy of the Provisional Government, that is, of Ledru-Rollin.This time it even reaped a vote of confidence from the National Assembly and was authorized to occupy temporarily a suitable point in Upper Italy to give support to peaceful negotiations with Austria concerning the integrity of Sardinian territory and the question of Rome.It is known that the fate of Italy is decided on the battlefields of North Italy.Hence Rome would fall with Lombardy and Piedmont, or France would have to declare war on Austria and thereby on the European counterrevolution.

Did the National Assembly suddenly take the Barrot Ministry for the old Committee of Public Safety? Or itself for the Convention? Why, then, the military occupation of a point in Upper Italy? This transparent veil covered the expedition against Rome.

On April 14, 14,000 men sailed under Oudinot for Civita Vecchia;on April 16 the National Assembly voted the ministry a credit Of 1,200,000francs for the maintenance of a fleet of intervention in the Mediterranean Sea for three months.Thus it gave the ministry every means of intervening against Rome, while it adopted the pose of letting it intervene against Austria.It did not see what the ministry did; it only heard what it said.

Such faith was not found in Israel; the Constituent Assembly had fallen into the position of not daring to know what the constituted republic had to do.

Finally, on May 8, the last scene of the comedy was played; the Constituent Assembly urged the ministry to take swift measures to bring the Italian expedition back to the aim set for it.Bonaparte that same evening inserted a letter in the Moniteur in which he lavished the greatest appreciation on Oudinot.On May ii the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment against this same Bonaparte and his ministry.And the Montagne, which instead of tearing this web of deceit to pieces took the parliamentary comedy tragically in order to play in it the role of Fouquier-Tinville, did not betray its natural petty bourgeois calf's hide under the borrowed lion's skin of the Convention!

The latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly is summarized thus: On January 29 it admits that the royalist bourgeois factions are the natural superiors of the republic constituted by it; on March 21, that the violation of the constitution is its realization; and on May 11, that the bombastically proclaimed passive alliance of the French republic with the struggling peoples means its active alliance with the European counterrevolution.

This miserable Assembly left the stage after it had given itself the satisfaction, two days before its first birthday, May 4, of rejecting the motion of amnesty for the June insurgents.Its power shattered, held in deadly hatred by the people, repulsed, maltreated, contemptuously thrown aside by the bourgeoisie, whose tool it was, forced in the second half of its life to disavow the first, robbed of its republican illusions, without having created anything great in the past, without hope in the future, and with its living body dying bit by bit, it was able to galvanize its own corpse into life only by continually recalling and living through the June victory over and over again, affirming itself by constantly repeated damnation of the damned.A vampire living on the blood of the June insurgents!

It left behind a state deficit increased by the costs of the June insurrection, by the loss of the salt tax, by the compensation it paid the plantation owners for abolishing Negro slavery, by the costs of the Roman expedition, by the loss of the wine tax, whose abolition it resolved upon when already at its last gasp -- a malicious old man, happy to impose on his laughing heir a compromising debt of honor.

With the beginning of March the agitation for the election of the Legislative National Assembly had commenced.Two main groups opposed each other, the party of Order and the democratic socialist, or Red, party;between the two stood the Friends of the Constitution, under which name the tricolor republicans of the National sought to put forward a party.