The French republic’s supposed alliance with struggling peoples was actually alliance with counterrevolution.

Evidence

As Marx expressed it in The Class Struggles in France : “Piedmont was beaten, Charles-Albert had abdicated and the Austrian army knocked at the gates of France.” Marx goes on to describe how the French expedition in Italy, instead of following its proclaimed aim of support for the Italians against Austria, in fact intervened against the Roman Republic. On 11 May the National Assembly rejected a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers, and as Marx put it: “the Constituent Assembly … admits ... on 11 May that the bombastically proclaimed passive alliance of the French republic with the struggling peoples means its active alliance with the European counterrevolution”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1970

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the French Second Republic’s betrayal of the Roman Republic — relevant to how nominal revolutionary states act as counterrevolutionary agents, paralleling later Islamophobia readings of liberal states’ rhetoric.