Without a local government in Rome, for the first time in recent history, popular assemblies gathered. Margaret Fuller described the procession under a new flag, a "tricolore" sent from Venice, that set the flag in the hands of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Campidoglio, and the angry popular reaction to papal warnings of excommunication for political actions of November received from Gaeta and posted on the 3rd. The "Costituenti" decided to schedule direct and universal elections (electors were all the citizens of the State, male and over 21 years old) on the following 21 January 1849. Since the pope had forbidden Catholics to vote at those elections (he considered the convocation of the election "a monstrous act of felony made without a mask by the sponsors of the anarchic demagogy", an "abnormal and sacrilegious attempt... deserving the punishments written both in the divine and the human laws"), the resulting constitutional assembly (informally known as "The Assembly of the Damned") had a republican inclination. In each and every part of the Papal States more than 50% of the potential voters went to the polls.