| 644 | 645 | 646 | 647 | 648 |
| 1 | 171 | 343 | 514 | 685 |
|
the Republican minority, which was bravely doing its duty in denouncing
it to the people; this Assembly had had a very long cohabitation and a
most fatal complicity with the Man of Crime, who had ended by strangling
it as a robber strangles his concubine in his bed; but whatever may be
said of this fateful Assembly, it did not exhibit that wretched
vanishing away which Louis Bonaparte hoped for; it was not a coward.
This is due to its having originated from universal suffrage. Let us
mention this, for it is an instructive lesson. The virtue of this
universal suffrage, which had begotten the Assembly and which the
Assembly had wished to slay, it felt in itself to its last hour.
The sap of a whole people does not spread in vain throughout an
Assembly, even throughout the most decrepit. On the decisive day this
sap asserts itself.
The Legislative Assembly, laden as it may be with formidable
responsibilities, will, perhaps, be less overwhelmed than it deserves by
the reprobation of posterity.
Thanks to universal suffrage, which it had deceived, and which
constituted its faith and its strength at the last moment, thanks to the
Left, which it had oppressed, scoffed at, calumniated, and decimated,
and which cast on it the glorious reflection of its heroism, this
pitiful Assembly died a grand death.
646
Page
Quick Jump
|