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A member requested that in the first place the meeting should declare
itself to be the National Assembly, and constitute itself by immediately
appointing a President and Secretaries. I remarked that there was no
need to declare ourselves the Assembly, that we were the Assembly by
right as well as in fact, and the whole Assembly, our absent colleagues
being detained by force; that the National Assembly, although mutilated
by the coup d'état, ought to preserve its entity and remain constituted
afterwards in the same manner as before; that to appoint another
President and another staff of Secretaries would be to give Louis
Bonaparte an advantage over us, and to acknowledge in some manner the
Dissolution; that we ought to do nothing of the sort; that our decrees
should be published, not with the signature of a President, whoever he
might be, but with the signature of all the members of the Left who had
not been arrested, that they would thus carry with them full authority
over the People, and full effect. They relinquished the idea of appointing
a President. Noël Parfait proposed that our decrees and our resolutions
should be drawn up, not with the formula: "The National Assembly
decrees," etc.; but with the formula: "The Representatives of the People
remaining at liberty decree," etc. In this manner we should preserve all
the authority attached to the office of the Representatives of the People
without associating the arrested Representatives with the responsibility
of our actions. This formula had the additional advantage of separating
us from the Right. The people knew that the only Representatives
remaining free were the members of the Left. They adopted Noël Parfait's
advice.
I read aloud the decree of deposition. It was couched in these words:--
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