RETURNING TO FRANCE IN MID-1795 AFTER SEVERAL YEARS IN EXILE, MADAME de Staël recognized that hardly anyone loved the new Directorial constitution. Determined to regain the influence she had wielded through her salon in the first years of the Revolution, she set out to persuade her friends that “the founders of the constitution of 1791 should be the defenders of the constitution of 1795.” Most of her friends would have preferred a constitutional monarchy. But although France, Madame de Staël wrote, could “stay as a republic,… to become a constitutional monarchy she would have to pass through military dictatorship.”1 The common people might resent the elitist nature of the new government, but the experience of the Terror had left them too disillusioned to rise up against it. Madame de Staël’s ambivalent endorsement of the Directorial republic reflected the challenge facing the new regime: it had few true supporters, and the strongest argument in its favor was that the alternatives—the return of the intransigent Louis XVIII or a resurgence of militant Jacobinism—were too frightening to contemplate. Madame de Staël hoped that the same reasoning that had converted her to republicanism would convince the country’s leaders to put aside partisan and personal differences. That was a lot to ask of them, however. Many of the politicians charged with making the government function now had to work with colleagues who had sent them to prison during the Terror or who had threatened them with execution.
The unpopular Two-thirds Decree that gave a majority of seats in the councils to former Convention deputies ensured that most of the new legislators had at least some reason to want the new constitution to succeed. In spite of the law of 3 brumaire Year IV (October 25, 1795) excluding relatives of émigrés, refractory priests, and other presumed counterrrevolutionaries from the carefully crafted electoral assemblies, however, the voters consistently chose the most moderate members of the Convention, along with new men who were often suspected of royalist sympathies. François Boissy d’Anglas, the man who had stood up to the prairial demonstrators, was elected in thirty-six different departments, and Jean Denis Lanjuinais, a conservative former Girondin, in over thirty. Largely excluded from national government and often fearful of the local officials installed during the thermidorian period, the former supporters of the Jacobin movement and the revolutionary government of Year II saw the new constitution as an abandonment of the democratic ideals embodied in the Constitution of 1793. Republican militancy was still widespread in the armies, as soldiers remembered comrades who had died to defend the Revolution; the generals, however, could easily imagine themselves replacing the squabbling politicians in Paris.
The first obligation of the two new councils was to elect the five members of the Directory who were to form the government’s executive branch. Emmanuel Sieyès, resentful about the Convention’s rejection of his constitutional proposals, refused a seat on the Directory, a sign that the new political system did not even have the support of key members of the republican elite. The men chosen were a representative sample of the deputies who had survived the Terror without abandoning their republican convictions. All had voted for the execution of the king, giving them a strong reason to oppose the return of the Bourbons. Only one director, Jean-François Rewbell, had been a member of the National Assembly. Lazare Carnot, a former member of the Committee of Public Safety of the Year II, had survived the thermidorian purges that his fellow director Paul Barras had helped engineer, but questions about his political past still lingered, whereas Étienne-François Letourneur was regarded as a political nonentity. Louis-Marie Larevellière-Lépeaux had been forced to go into hiding during the Terror because of his ties to the Girondins, and he retained a strong suspicion of former Montagnards, including Carnot, Rewbell, and Barras. The director with the highest public profile was Barras, a former aristocrat whose unsavory reputation for corruption was offset by his record of overseeing campaigns against the federalist revolts in the Midi and organizing the defense of the Convention during the prairial and vendémiaire uprisings. Fairly or not, Barras’s controversial personality and his longevity—he was the only director to keep his place throughout all four years of the regime’s existence—made him a symbol of a government whose other members were mostly men earnestly struggling to avoid political catastrophe.
To underline the fact that the new constitution made the executive branch of the government independent of the legislature, the directors and their families were housed in the Luxembourg Palace, more than a mile from the Tuileries, where the councils held their sessions. On official occasions, the directors wore elaborate costumes: their embroidered cloaks and elaborately feathered hats were a windfall for satirical cartoonists and marked a sharp break with the affected simplicity that had prevailed during the Terror. Larevellière-Lépeaux worried that the palace’s luxury—and the company of Barras, “a real spreader of corruption”—would be bad for his teenage daughter. Hoping to avoid constant squabbles, the directors divided up their responsibilities. Carnot, as he had during the Terror, oversaw military affairs, while Letourneur managed the navy. Larevellière-Lépeaux claimed domestic issues as his domain; he had a special interest in religious affairs, where he actively promoted a deist cult, Theophilanthropy, and opposed concessions to the Catholic Church. The irascible Rewbell was the Directory’s main voice on foreign policy. Barras supervised the police and kept a close eye on the various factions competing for influence in the capital.
The architects of the 1795 constitution had given the new government precious time to consolidate its hold on power. The first legislative elections were not due to be held until April 1797, but the time was needed, for the Convention had also left its successors a host of unresolved problems. The harvest that year was insufficient to reassure the population about the food supply; the Paris police continued to warn their superiors about the frustrations of the women who gathered in the streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where “the most outrageous epithets are hurled at the government.”2 Despite the defeats of the uprisings of 1795, the agents were convinced that neither the former revolutionary militants nor the counterrevolutionary agitators of the jeunesse dorée had given up their hopes of overturning the new regime. The provinces were no calmer: although peasant protests were on the wane, local governments remained as desperate as the authorities in Paris to find grain for their populations, even at the price of confrontation with farmers. Years of upheaval had created an atmosphere of lawlessness in many regions, where robber bands, some of them with a distinct royalist coloration, spread fear and insecurity.
The collapse of the Revolution’s paper currency was a major source of unrest; the assignat had lost so much value that the smaller denominations were literally not worth the paper they were printed on. Peasants with scarce grain to sell demanded payment in coin, while urban workers who paid in assignats faced ever-higher prices for bread and other necessities. Among the victims of the currency’s depreciation was Jacques Ménétra, who sold his workshop in exchange for a payment due six months later, “when it was no longer worth the trouble to collect.” In March 1796, the Directory abandoned the assignat and replaced it with a new form of paper money, the mandat, backed by the real estate the government still possessed and planned to put on the market. Within a month, the new currency lost 80 percent of its value. Writing more like a financial analyst than a policeman, the author of one police report accurately predicted that the confiscated lands, “which are the only resources of the government to meet the indispensable expenses of the war, will not produce the sums that one would have expected; they are going to fall into the hands of speculators who, flush with mandats they have acquired at bargain prices, will give them to the government at their face value and resell [the purchased national lands] for metallic money under the very eyes of the authorities whom they blame for the situation.” The fact that public officials often bought such properties and even justified their gains added to the Directory’s image problem. “From the start of the Revolution,” one deputy wrote, “I thought that one should do things honestly… but not take stoicism to the point of neglecting one’s own interests.”3
By the end of the year, the government decided that it had no choice but to abandon paper currency altogether. To prevent the complete ruin of individuals who had made contracts during the period of inflation, debts were calculated according to the approximate value of paper currency at various dates during the Revolution, making the settlement of financial affairs immensely complicated. To convince public opinion of the necessity of the severely deflationary return to metallic currency, the private Dijon Company was given the right to collect whatever mandats remained in public treasuries around the country in exchange for an advance of solid currency to the government. The company amassed a much larger sum in mandats than the government expected and swiftly sold them to other speculators, who used them to buy up national lands at fire-sale prices before the government’s deadline for their retirement. A lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the Dijon Company kept the scandal in the news for more than a year, severely damaging the Directory’s public standing.
More aggressively than previous revolutionary regimes, the Directory tried to use newspapers to build support for itself by subsidizing papers representing different currents of post-thermidorian republicanism. The favoritism shown to these loyal journalists irked their competitors, even when they shared the political views of the subsidized papers, and it did nothing to diminish the popularity of newspapers critical of the Directory. Left-wing journalists, who now looked back nostalgically on the days of Robespierre, were as active as the royalists. The Journal des hommes libres kept the Jacobin tradition alive, and René Lebois’s Ami du peuple laid claim to the heritage of Jean-Paul Marat. A political amnesty was proclaimed as the new constitution went into effect, allowing the counterrevolutionary journalists who had incited the vendémiaire uprising to resume their attacks on the government.
Alarmed by the popularity of newspapers advocating either the restoration of the monarchy or a return to democratic radicalism, in April 1796 the Directory encouraged the councils to pass a heavy-handed law imposing the death penalty on anyone who advocated changes to the Constitution of 1795. The Directory also encouraged writers to make the case for its version of socially conservative republicanism as the only alternative to the extremes of royalism or anarchie (anarchy), the government’s label for Jacobin democracy. Madame de Staël’s new lover, the Swiss-born Benjamin Constant, became the most articulate proponent of this argument. In a widely read pamphlet titled The Strength of the Present Government of France, he contended that whereas it had been legitimate for the philosophes of an earlier generation to criticize the abuses of the long-established French monarchy, the very fragility of the new republican order made it a moral duty for responsible citizens to avoid driving men in power to extremes. If conservatives would recognize that the major accomplishments of the Revolution could not be undone, Constant promised, they could have a constructive influence, but he feared that they were bent on doing just the opposite. “They see that the Revolution was a terrible and disastrous thing, and they conclude from this that what they call a counter-revolution will be a happy event. They are not aware that this counter-revolution will itself only be a new revolution.”4 Reversing Constant’s argument in another pamphlet, On the Weakness of a Newly Founded Government, Adrien Lezay replied that in a constitutional system, it was the government that needed to follow the dictates of public opinion, not the other way around. “The authorities can vex, oppress, insult the class of citizens called the honnêtes gens [wealthy property-owners]” whom Constant was urging to give up their conservative sentiments, Lezay wrote, but they would “always be the key to a national majority.”5
As much as they differed with one another, Constant and Lezay were united by their opposition to any kind of social radicalism, such as the campaign Gracchus Babeuf launched in the winter of 1795–1796 in his Tribun du peuple. Babeuf’s prerevolutionary occupation as a feudiste, an expert in the drafting of documents concerning seigneurial rights, had given him an intimate acquaintance with the ways in which wealthy landowners exploited the poor. Attracted to radical ideas even before 1789, he had led a troubled career on the fringes of revolutionary politics and journalism and spent the Terror period in prison. Released after thermidor, he founded a Journal de la liberté de la presse (Journal of the freedom of the press) that denounced Robespierre for having silenced the popular movement. He quickly decided that the plotters who had overthrown the Incorruptible and ended the Terror were an even greater danger to the common people than the Montagnards, however, and renamed his paper the Tribun du peuple, claiming to speak for the interests of the poor.
Until the fall of 1795, little had distinguished Babeuf from other militants calling for the implementation of the democratic constitution of 1793. Now he went beyond his predecessors by calling for a world in which all people would truly be equal. This would be accomplished through the abolition of private property and the creation of a society in which all goods would be held in common and shared equally among the population. According to the laws of nature, Babeuf proclaimed, “land doesn’t belong to anyone, it belongs to all.… Whatever anyone has taken beyond what is needed to feed him is a theft from society.” Babeuf had no sympathy for the idea that hard workers or talented individuals should receive extra rewards from society. “It is absurd and unjust to claim greater compensation for someone whose job requires more intelligence and more effort and thought; none of that increases the needs of his stomach.”6
Babeuf envisioned a communistic society that would end all the ills besetting humanity. “This government will do away with… envy, jealousy, greed, pride, deception, duplicity, all the vices. What is more (and this is no doubt the essential point), with the universal, special, perpetual worry that eats away at each of us about how we will live tomorrow, next month, next year, in our old age, and what will become of our children and their children.” The regime of private property rights created by the Constitution of 1795, Babeuf claimed, was worse than the slave code that “the harsh colonists imposed on the blacks in our islands.” For those who know how the attempt to create communist societies in the twentieth century led to the development of oppressive bureaucracies, Babeuf’s optimism about a “common administration” that would “suppress private property, assign everyone with skills to the task he knows and oblige him to deposit what he makes in the common warehouse” is hard to credit. His assurance, in a response to his critics, that “the people responsible for preserving this system” would “never be tempted to preserve their authority in defiance of the will of the people” now seems as unconvincing as his cavalier unconcern about the limits on individual freedom that would be necessary to ensure that everyone would contribute fairly to the common welfare.7
Described in glowing terms in the early nineteenth century by his Italian disciple Filippo Buonarroti, Babeuf’s communist ideas inspired generations of revolutionaries, from Karl Marx to the Bolsheviks. They were determined to realize the promise that Babeuf’s followers had made when they predicted that the French Revolution would prove to be only “the forerunner of a greater and more imposing revolution, which would be the last one.”8 In 1796, however, even Babeuf’s small circle of followers recognized that his ideas were too extreme to attract a mass following. The sans-culottes who had poured into the streets during the revolutionary journées and the peasants who had forced the abandonment of seigneurial rights dreamed of making themselves economically independent, not of doing away with private property. Nevertheless, the all-too-obvious suffering of the poor under the Directory convinced Babeuf that if the masses were properly led, they could be inspired to rise up and topple the regime, creating an opportunity for a determined group of leaders to implement his ideas. Along with being the forerunners of modern communism, Babeuf and his followers were thus the first to imagine revolution as a calculated process directed by a vanguard of conspirators whose goals might be unknown to the mass of their followers.
In the fall of 1795, as Babeuf was setting down his ideas in his newspaper, other radicals tried to revive the club movement in Paris. The Jacobin Club remained banned, but a new “Club du Panthéon,” so called because it met near the shrine to the heroes of the Revolution, provided a forum for agitation against the socially conservative Directory and in favor of the implementation of the more radical constitution of 1793. Whether or not they fully grasped the fact that Babeuf’s ideas went far beyond a return to the principles of that document, many former Jacobins—including thirty-two former Montagnard Convention deputies and the widows of the revolutionary martyrs Michel Lepeletier and Marat—subscribed to his newspaper. Ex-revolutionaries in the provinces also embraced it. When he announced that a new installment of the journal had been published, the leader of a group in the Burgundian town of Autun wrote to Babeuf, “the greatest silence descends, joy is depicted on every face, our spirits are enlivened, courage is reborn, and we are ready to fall on the enemy.”9 Concerned about this resurgence of militant Jacobinism, the Directory ordered General Bonaparte, the commander of its interior forces, to shut the Pantheon Club; his execution of the order showed how completely the onetime protégé of Augustin Robespierre had now separated himself from any association with the revolutionary left.
Driven underground, Babeuf and his closest supporters resorted to conspiratorial methods. By the end of March 1796, he and three close associates, Félix Lepeletier, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, and the atheist playwright Sylvain Maréchal, had constituted themselves as an “Insurrectional Directory of Public Safety.” Unable to operate openly, they relied on the subscription list of Babeuf’s Tribun and their familiarity with former revolutionary activists to identify potential supporters. In the “Declaration of Insurrection” that they planned to issue when they launched their movement, the Babouvists denounced the Directorial government as “oppressors” who had “outraged, degraded, and done away with the qualities and the institutions of liberty and democracy” and “murdered the best friends of the republic.” In his memoirs, Buonarroti admitted that the uprising would have begun with “a day of justified and healthy terror,” but once the directors and their allies in the legislature had been eliminated, “indulgence and forgetting would have followed.”10
The Babouvists found support among former sans-culotte militants as well as among the soldiers of the Legion of Police, a force recruited to guard the Directory and other government institutions. The plotters also hoped to win the support of some former Montagnard deputies. They did manage to enlist one celebrated figure, Drouet, the provincial postmaster who had recognized Louis XVI in Varennes in June 1791, and some of their agents had contacts with the director Barras, a political chameleon who at least wanted to know what was brewing in militant circles. Unlike Barras, the other directors were alarmed by the growing agitation and reports of the Police Legion’s untrustworthiness. Carnot, in spite of his past as a member of the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, took the lead in demanding measures to quash any radical agitation. Thanks to a double agent, on May 10, 1796, the police were able to round up the leading Babouvists and finally the Tribun du peuple himself, who had been living in hiding for several months.
Although many observers found it hard to take a plot seriously when it had been put together by a committee whose members were unknown even to their own supporters, the Directory seized the opportunity to portray itself as the defender of property and social order. The Nouvelles politiques, a conservative newspaper, put forward the official view: “However inconceivable the conspiracy that has just been discovered may appear, in view of the audacity of the enterprise, the atrocity of its goal, and the difficulties of its execution, it is nevertheless certain that it existed.”11 The Directory launched a nationwide wave of arrests of revolutionary militants, over a hundred of whom were accused of involvement. The government’s decision to indict Drouet, a sitting member of the legislature, complicated plans for trying the Babouvists: under the constitution, charges involving deputies had to be heard by a special “High Court,” and the trial did not begin until February 1797. The delay gave the republican opposition time to reorganize itself in order to counter accusations that its members adhered to Babeuf’s communist ideas.
The members of the Directory hoped that the arrest of Babeuf and his supporters would win them support from moderates and property-owners. Although the authors of the Constitution of 1795 had tried to turn property-owners into the pillars of a conservative republic, the property-owners were reluctant to give the regime real support. But they also frustrated the advocates of a return to monarchy. From his observation post in the Swiss capital of Bern, the well-informed journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan described the majority of them as “royalists of opinion”: they “admitted the necessity of a king,” he said, “but they want one who will be a child of the Revolution, chosen by the nation.… They hope thus to guarantee their security, dispel the fear of vengeance, and reassure the purchasers of national properties.”12 In the absence of a plausible alternative to Louis XVIII, these “royalists of opinion” saw themselves as obliged to compromise with the Directory and accept a government headed by men who had voted for the execution of the king.
Mallet du Pan recognized that there were also “royalists of conspiracies,” men who remained convinced that the population would welcome a Bourbon restoration if they could strike a sudden blow against the republic. He also realized, however, that the disastrous landing at Quiberon in 1795 and the subsequent defeat of the vendémiaire uprising had left them demoralized. Royalist agents hoped that Jean-Charles Pichegru, the commander of the Army of the Rhine, might turn against the republic. Pichegru accepted money from the royalists and encouraged them to circulate propaganda among his troops. In March 1796, however, he was recalled to Paris. His replacement, Jean-Victor Moreau, shared his lack of enthusiasm for the republican cause but was not prepared to try to stage a military coup. The royalist cause faced further setbacks in the early months of 1796, as the firmly republican General Lazare Hoche suppressed a revival of chouannerie in Brittany. Two of the main chouan leaders, Jean-Nicolas Stofflet and François Charette, were captured and executed.
Although the practical chances of a return to the old regime remained slim, the early years of the Directory were a time of creative ferment among counterrevolutionary thinkers, particularly those who found themselves stranded in the scattered refuges of the emigration outside France. The revolutionary regime’s continued survival, even after the excesses of the Reign of Terror, challenged conservatives to explain how such a disaster could have occurred and to put forward new arguments as to how it might be defeated. One influential answer was offered by a French émigré priest, the abbé Augustin Barruel. As early as 1793, Barruel had argued that the Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy “meditated for a long time in France by men who, under the name of philosophes, seemed to have divided up the tasks. Some wanted to overthrow the throne, others the altar.”13 In publications during the Directory period, Barruel elaborated on his theory, claiming that the Enlightenment authors, the Freemasons, and the German Illuminati, a secret society founded in the 1780s, had worked together to subvert monarchies and the Christian faith, and that the French Revolution had been the culmination of their destructive plans. Barruel’s conspiracy theory has continued to attract disciples down to the present day, despite the implausibility of his claim that the entire European Enlightenment was a conspiracy to overthrow the French monarchy. In fact, the radical revolutionaries of 1793 had closed the Masonic lodges that Barruel blamed for the upheaval.
Other émigré writers posed more thought-provoking challenges to the postulates underlying the revolutionary movement. Joseph de Maistre, a French-speaking nobleman who had been driven from his home in the kingdom of Savoy by the French invasion, and Louis de Bonald, a provincial nobleman from Auvergne in southern France, both published major works in 1796 that went beyond both Barruel and Edmund Burke in questioning the very possibility of a society based on rational deductions from the axiom that individuals possess natural rights. De Maistre saw the events of the Revolution as God’s way of demonstrating to humanity the profound sinfulness of faith in human reason. “The Divinity has never showed itself more clearly in any human event,” he wrote. “If it makes use of the vilest instruments, it is to punish in order to regenerate.” The revolutionaries had erred in thinking that a political constitution could emerge from the deliberations of an assembly and be reduced to writing, or that there were general principles common to all societies. “They cite America,” de Maistre commented. “Nothing makes one more impatient than the praise heaped on this baby in diapers: let’s see it grow up.” In any event, the idea that human beings were meant to live peaceful and happy lives contradicted de Maistre’s Christian convictions about God’s inscrutable purposes. In a chapter titled “On the Violent Destruction of the Human Species,” he argued that war was an inevitable and necessary aspect of the world and that the suffering of the innocent was part of the divine plan: “There is no punishment that does not purify.”14
De Maistre’s violent assault on the political correctness of his day made him a precursor of the militant Catholicism that would later be a major feature of nineteenth-century French life. Bonald shared de Maistre’s intense Catholicism and his rejection of the individualism and rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but the alternative he proposed was different. His fundamental postulate was that individuals had no existence outside of the social units to which they belonged, the family, the state and the religious community, and that, to prevent conflicts, each of these units needed a single ruler—the father in the family, the king in the state, and the pope in the church. “Man only exists for the sake of society, and society forms him only for its purposes,” he wrote, an assertion that turned the revolutionaries’ assumption that society was a creation to serve the needs of its individual members on its head.15 Bonald’s argument would have an important influence on the development of modern sociology.
Threatened by radical conspirators, faced with the barely concealed hostility of much of the country’s propertied class, and still mired in a desperate financial crisis, the directors hoped that military successes would shore up the regime’s position and provide a source of desperately needed revenue. Whether the republican armies could respond to these hopes was by no means sure. The number of soldiers had fallen by at least a third since its peak in early 1794. Short of funds, the government had been unable to pay the troops regularly or ensure adequate supplies. “The poor armies are reduced to a fragment of bread, sleeping on straw, badly clothed, without shoes, marching in snow-covered mountains,” one soldier wrote.16 Although regulations introduced in 1795 strengthened the authority officers had over their men and did away with elected soldiers’ councils, discipline was hard to maintain; this was especially true on foreign territory, where the hungry men could not be stopped from seizing provisions from the population. Years later, Jean-François Noël remembered with pride how he had stood up for his comrades when General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, commander of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, threatened to punish them for looting: “A lively indignation seized me; I advance to the middle of the long circle formed by the generals and superior officers; in a few words characterized by military frankness… I demand, in the name of my brothers in arms, that the soldier be given the food and equipment the law promises him.”17
All the French armies were in a similar condition in early 1796, but at the beginning of May, news reached Paris of the first of a stunning series of victories won by the Army of Italy under its new commander, the twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte. Ever since he had helped defeat the federalist uprising in Toulon in December 1793, Bonaparte had dreamed of leading a French invasion of northern Italy. During his time in Paris, he had drawn up campaign plans, and at the beginning of March, his patron Barras made sure he would have the opportunity to implement them. The older and more experienced officers already serving in the Army of Italy quickly recognized Bonaparte’s intelligence and force of will. “He questioned us on the position of our divisions, on their equipment, on the spirit and effective force of each corps, traced the course we were to follow, announced that the next day he would hold an inspection, and on the following day attack the enemy,” General André Masséna recalled.18 Bonaparte made an equally strong impression on the men, although the eloquent words with which he later claimed to have won their loyalty—“You are hungry and naked. The government owes you much; it can give you nothing”—and his promise to lead them “into the most fertile plains on earth,” where they would “find honor, glory, and riches,” were only composed when he dictated his memoirs after his defeat at Waterloo.19
Bonaparte managed to split the enemy armies facing him and quickly overwhelmed the war-weary Piedmontese. Going beyond the bounds of his authority, he acted as a diplomat as well as a general, sure that his promise to extort badly needed cash from the defeated Savoyard monarchy would assuage any concerns the Directory had about his conduct. Losing no time, he then headed for Milan, the capital of the Austrian province of Lombardy. The crucial battle took place at Lodi, where the French troops had to storm a bridge under heavy Austrian fire. After the victory, Bonaparte, acutely aware of the value of publicity, commissioned engravings showing him leading the perilous charge; it was one of the many exaggerations that would mark his career as a propagandist. Even though he had not been so reckless as to risk his own life, he had been able to inspire his men to heroic efforts, and they now dubbed him “the little corporal,” a token of their special loyalty to their commander. Lodi fired Bonaparte’s ambitions. “I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,” he said in his memoirs, “but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage.”20 While the Austrians retreated to the fortress of Mantua, blocking the road through the Alps to Vienna, the French general turned his attention to the small states of central Italy and the possessions of the papacy. Throughout the peninsula, the arrival of the French unleashed feverish political excitement; in Italian history, the triennio, the three years from 1796 to 1799, are remembered as the moment when the movement to unify the country began. In Italian cities, Enlightenment ideas had found an audience long before 1789, and Italian “Jacobins” now saw an opportunity to put them into practice. In contrast to the Netherlands, however, where the organized Patriot movement had been poised to take power as soon as the French arrived, in Italy revolutionary politics were a novelty, and there was no clear consensus on how the new ideas might be implemented.
While the bourgeois lawyers and journalists and the reform-minded nobles who made up the Italian Jacobin movement debated whether to support the creation of a unified nation-state or a federation that would respect the historical and cultural diversity of the peninsula, the French were primarily interested in appropriating the region’s resources. To satisfy Bonaparte’s demand for a “contribution” of twenty million francs, the Milanese had to turn over the contents of the province’s public treasury, the funds held by its charitable institutions, and even the objects held by the municipal pawnshop. As they had in the Low Countries, the French took part of their tribute in the form of paintings and other art objects, which were then sent to Paris as symbols of the republic’s claim to be the center of European culture. “By virtue of its power and the superiority of its culture and its artists,” the Moniteur said, “the French Republic is the only country in the world which can provide a secure refuge for these masterpieces.”21 Bonaparte sent some of the money extorted from the territories he occupied back to France, providing the Directory with badly needed funds; he was also able to pay his soldiers part of their wages in cash, solidifying their loyalty to him.
Bonaparte’s successes in Italy set him apart from the other French generals. In Paris, Carnot regarded Germany, where the largest French forces were engaged, as the principal theater of war. However, the campaign there in 1796, which began with the armies of Generals Jourdan and Moreau crossing the Rhine and advancing into enemy territory, ended in defeat in late August. Both French armies had to fight their way back to their starting points, leaving behind them a population thoroughly antagonized by the invaders’ seizure of food supplies and anything else they could get their hands on. Meanwhile, in northern Italy, Bonaparte successfully repelled repeated Austrian attempts to break the siege of Mantua. The fortress finally surrendered on February 2, 1797, after celebrated Napoleonic victories at Arcole and Rivoli. The loss of Mantua not only ended any further Austrian hopes of recovering their possessions in northern Italy, but left their own capital of Vienna vulnerable to a French attack from the south.
Well aware ever since Dumouriez’s invasion of Belgium in 1792 of the ways in which ambitious generals tended to develop their own policies, the Directory’s agents tried to keep Bonaparte from defying the government’s instructions. By this point, French politicians had abandoned any interest in spreading the ideals of liberty and equality. “There can be no question of republicanizing Italy. The people are not at all inclined to accept liberty, neither are they worthy of this boon,” the Directory’s representative in Genoa wrote. Nor did the Directory have any interest in promoting the unification of the small states into which the peninsula was divided into a larger entity, “a giant whose great size would be a cause of embarrassment to us one day,” as Barras put it.22 As far as the directors were concerned, Bonaparte’s conquests were worthwhile only for the resources that could be wrung out of them and because they might be used as bargaining chips to bring Austria to the peace table, where they might obtain its consent to the French annexation of German territory on the west bank of the Rhine.
Bonaparte, however, had his own ideas. In the fall of 1796 he allowed the formation of a “Cispadane Republic” to unify the small principalities and the portions of the Papal States he had occupied south of the Po River. He assured the Directory that he would see that the new republic’s constitution would reflect the views of Italian moderates and not those of supporters of “pure democracy.” The moderates, he wrote, were “the rich property-owners and priests who, in the last analysis, always sway the mass of the people,” and they were the ones who had to be won over if the French cause was to triumph.23 Although Bonaparte ruthlessly repressed any opposition that might threaten the French grip on the areas he had conquered, he was eager to conciliate the Catholic Church and prevent the development of anything resembling the Vendée revolt in France. “As long as ministers of religion hold true principles… I will respect them, their property and their customs, as they contribute to public order and the common weal,” he promised. He made no objection to the Cispadane Republic declaring Catholicism as the state religion, even though the idea ran strongly counter to the Directory’s policy in France.24
The end of 1796 brought the usual halt to military operations in northern Europe, and bad weather disrupted the most ambitious French military project, an attempt to land troops in Ireland to spark an uprising of the population against British rule. There was no slowdown in Bonaparte’s operations in Italy, however. After capturing Mantua, he turned his attention south. When he took Ancona, a port in the pope’s territories along the Adriatic Sea, his mind was captivated by the prospect of establishing French dominance over the eastern Mediterranean: “From here one can… be in Constantinople in ten days.”25 His immediate goal was to compel the papal diplomats to accept a draconian treaty as the price of keeping him from marching on Rome. In the Peace of Tolentino, the Vatican ceded much of its Italian realm to the Cispadane Republic. Bonaparte demanded a payment of thirty million livres and the usual tribute of art treasures to be sent to Paris.
Bonaparte’s soldiers soon found themselves marching north again as their commander set out to impose his will on the Austrian enemy that France had been fighting for five years. By April 7, 1797, the French army was at Leoben, barely twenty miles from Vienna. Rather than conquering Vienna in the name of the Revolution, Bonaparte wanted to make a deal: he hoped to secure Austrian consent to France’s annexation of Belgium and the German territories west of the Rhine, as well as recognition of the republic he had created in northern Italy. In exchange, he was prepared to promise the Austrians that France would invade the centuries-old Republic of Venice, a neutral state that had tried to stay out of the conflicts in the peninsula, and then turn its territory over to them. It was a proposal as cynical as the partition of Poland that Austria, Prussia, and Russia had recently concluded, and for the time being it had to be kept secret, not only from the Venetians, but also from the Directory in France, which had not given its ambitious general authority to do any such thing. The public accord Bonaparte reached with the Austrians at Leoben was much more limited: it gave France Belgium but not the Rhineland or northern Italy. Knowing that the Directory, whose own priority was to plant France’s frontier on the Rhine, would not be pleased, Bonaparte threatened to resign and return to Paris: he was sure that the shaky government would not take the risk of disavowing its most glorious general.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Toussaint Louverture, the black leader whose switch from the Spanish to the French side in 1794 had saved the Caribbean colony for the republic, was, like Bonaparte, converting military success into political power. After joining the French ranks, Louverture assiduously courted the French military governor, Étienne Laveaux, who was left in command when the civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel were recalled in June 1794. Louverture professed affection for Laveaux, addressing him as “Papa,” and urged the black population to show gratitude for the French republic that had freed them from slavery. But he also called on them to remember that “it was I who first raised the standard of insurrection against tyranny,”26 and therefore, it was his orders that must be obeyed. Like Bonaparte, he won the loyalty of his soldiers by making sure they had food, ammunition, and uniforms and by leading them to success in battle. Most of Laveaux’s white troops had succumbed to tropical diseases, and he was grateful for Louverture’s support. He recommended him for appointment as a general in the French army, and the thermidorian Convention accepted this advice in the summer of 1795.
Just as Bonaparte skillfully navigated the many crosscurrents of Italian politics, Louverture managed the complexities of Caribbean colonial society. He balanced expressions of concern for the black population with gestures to win the trust of the remaining whites, as well as of the mixed-race population, which had been legally free before the abolition of slavery. Most of the former slaves longed to divide up the plantations and claim plots of land for themselves, but Louverture upheld the rights of landowners and insisted that the blacks needed to prove themselves worthy of freedom “by their submission to the laws, by their work and by their obedience.” He expected the whites to recognize his essential role in keeping the black population in check. In December 1795, when he stage-managed the election of deputies to represent the West Province of Saint-Domingue in the French legislature, he instructed them to report “the great and memorable services he had rendered to the country and to all the citizens who lived under his kind and humane command.” Like Bonaparte, Louverture rejected the Directory’s hostility to the Church; at one point, he urged the republican Laveaux to “imitate Jesus Christ who died and suffered so much for us.”27
Reassured that the threat of a British takeover of Saint-Domingue had receded, in January 1796 the Directory dispatched a new civil commission to the colony. Its most prominent member was Sonthonax, who had granted freedom to the black population there in 1793; one of his colleagues was Julien Raimond, the longtime representative of the free colored population, who thus became the first man of part-African descent appointed to such a position. Sonthonax was now married to a woman of color whom he had met in Saint-Domingue on a previous mission, giving him additional credibility with the population.
The civil commissioners arrived in June 1796, just after a political crisis had significantly altered the balance of power in the colony. On March 20, one of Louverture’s rivals, the mixed-race general Jean-Louis Villatte, had staged a coup, arresting Laveaux and proclaiming himself governor. Assembling his black troops, Louverture had restored Laveaux to office, but it was now clear that Louverture himself was the one who held the real power in Saint-Domingue. Although both Sonthonax and Louverture were strongly committed to the abolition of slavery, the two men were soon locked in a struggle for control of the colony. Many blacks revered Sonthonax for giving them freedom, and Louverture resented the white man’s popularity. He strengthened his own position by arranging to have Laveaux elected to the French legislature, where he became a strong defender of the black general; after Laveaux’s departure for France in late 1796, Louverture replaced him as the colony’s governor. The French general Donatien Rochambeau, who had accompanied Sonthonax, met with Louverture and recognized his ambition; he predicted that “he will someday oblige the agents of the Directory to give way to all his wishes.”28
Saint-Domingue was not the only colony the Directory had to worry about. The French commissioner Victor Hugues had retaken Guadeloupe from the British in mid-1794. He then executed many of the white plantation-owners who had earlier welcomed the invaders and ruled the island as a virtual dictator until 1798. Ignoring orders from the metropole to implement the Constitution of 1795, Hugues refused to grant full freedom to the former black slaves. Blacks nevertheless made up most of the army. They also made up most of the crews of the numerous privateering vessels that Hugues armed to disrupt British commerce in the region. Hugues’s privateers seized American merchant vessels engaged in trade with the British colonies as well. Hugues thus dragged France into a “quasi-war” with the United States that widened the gulf between the republics on the two sides of the Atlantic. Slavery was ordered abolished in Cayenne, the thinly populated French colony on the South American mainland, but the Directory introduced a new form of servitude there by designating it as a penal colony for political prisoners deported from France. In February 1796, the Directory dispatched commissioners to France’s two remote island colonies in the Indian Ocean, the only French territories where the 1794 abolition decree had not yet been implemented. When the commissioners finally reached the Île de France after their four-month voyage, the white colonists hustled them back onboard before they could proclaim the law. The Directory took no action against the rebellious white colonists, fearing that if it antagonized them, they would turn the island over to the British. The government’s passivity raised doubts about its determination to maintain the abolition of slavery.
Meanwhile, politics in France itself devolved into a tense stalemate. The arrest of the Babouvists alienated the Directory from the remaining Jacobins, but it did not win the government any genuine support from royalists, who were already looking forward optimistically to the legislative elections scheduled for April 1797. A republican friend of Carnot’s, alarmed that the former member of the Committee of Public Safety had led the repression of the Babeuf plot, warned him that the royalists were just waiting for the opportunity to try to seize power, telling him, “You deprive yourself every day of the support of those whose survival is attached to yours.”29 An attack on the army camp of Grenelle in early September 1796, blamed on left-wing agitators, only widened the gap between the government and the republicans. In the streets, according to the police, people called the arrested suspects “workers who were led astray”; they refused to believe that “unfortunates without resources, without weapons, without money could have come up with the idea of attacking a well-defended camp.”30
Determined to show that it was on guard against any revival of militant republicanism, the Directory took a more ambivalent attitude toward the right-wing movement. Carnot was convinced that the Directory needed to reach an understanding with the more moderate members of this group, as they represented the opinions of the restricted electorate created by the Constitution of 1795. Other members of the Directory, however, feared that concessions to the right would lead to an eventual restoration of the monarchy. The deputies, journalists, and royalist agents who made up the political right were themselves divided, both about their ultimate goals and about the best strategy for pursuing them. Since late 1794, conservative politicians had been meeting at a member’s home on the rue de Clichy. At this “Clichy Club,” the differences between the rival currents were aired. At one extreme were the true royalists, who were determined to restore the Bourbon dynasty and willing to resort to force to overthrow the Directory. At the other were cautious republicans who thought that Louis XVIII’s stubbornness made a return of the monarchy impossible; they wanted to concentrate on consolidating social order and giving the Constitution of 1795 a conservative interpretation. In the middle were constitutional monarchists who considered any republican government fundamentally unworkable; they were equally unhappy, however, with the prospect of a return to the old monarchy. The British agent William Wickham, charged by his government with making sense of “that strange mass of persons and parties that forms the present feeble opposition to the Government at Paris,” concluded that little was to be hoped for from them.31
In public, the conservative deputies and the journalists who were allied with them limited themselves to pushing for revisions to the social legislation passed during the Revolution’s radical phase. A proposal for a comprehensive civil law code, put forward in June 1796, would have restored the exclusive right of husbands to manage family property. It would also have reduced the inheritance rights of adopted children and children born out of wedlock. Only a narrower law excluding illegitimate children from any share of their father’s estate was actually passed. Denunciations of the divorce law—one speaker said it “allow[ed] a man to change wives like his clothes, and women to change husbands like their hats”—drew applause, but failed to win legislative approval.32 The conservatives also cast themselves as the “peace party.” They were willing to abandon goals such as the annexation of the German territories on the west bank of the Rhine and spoke critically of Bonaparte’s aggressive policy in Italy. “In propagating the Revolution beyond our borders, we make war perpetual,” the journalist Charles Lacretelle wrote.33 Such criticisms alienated the increasingly influential generals and allowed the Directory’s supporters to question their opponents’ loyalty to the nation. Since the Directory had committed itself to maintaining the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue, the conservatives made common cause with the displaced white plantation-owners, claiming that the government was doing nothing to protect their rights to their land in the colony. “What white man would be brave enough to live without protection or any guarantee in the midst of these same individuals whose hands are stained by the blood of his fellows?” one colonist demanded.34
At the beginning of 1797, the government arrested a group of royalist plotters led by the abbé Brottier, hoping to show that it was targeting extremists on both the right and the left. Its propaganda campaign enjoyed only limited success, however. Right-wing journalists were exasperated at having their cause tarred by association with a plot that “could not have any real hope of success and that had only one purpose, that of troubling, dividing, and rupturing the constitutional order.” The response reflected their irritation at seeing their plan of taking over the government by legal means disrupted.35 According to the constitution, elections to replace one-third of the deputies in the two councils were to take place in April. The conservatives and the royalists could hardly conceal their impatience: they were sure that the electoral assemblies, made up of wealthy property-owners with bad memories of the Terror, would favor them. “Tremble, you who were the plague of your country!” a widely circulated pamphlet warned the ex-conventionnels who had to stand for reelection.36 Divided among themselves, the members of the Directory did nothing to ward off the looming republican debacle; the start of the trial of Babeuf and his fellow conspirators, which overlapped with the election campaign, riveted the attention of the remaining republican radicals but served to remind conservatives of the dangers of anarchy.
The right’s only problem was a lack of overall coordination. Supported by the British, the former National Assembly deputy Antoine d’André formed a royalist network, the Philanthropic Institute, which tried to select candidates who could be counted on to follow a common program. But he could not control the more than thirty right-wing newspapers publishing in Paris, many of them edited by men who thought they would make excellent deputies, or the dozens of local notables who were determined to put themselves forward with or without his organization’s endorsement. Reviewing the outcome six months later, another conspirator who had worked with d’André wrote that when he had begun his work, two months before the voting, “I had reason to believe that a party had been formed for the reestablishment of the monarchy [and] that this party had connections in the departments. How surprised I was to discover that all this only existed on paper.… Nothing had been done! Even in Paris there was no party, no organization!”37 The electoral assemblies did indeed reject almost all the former members of the Convention, and the deputies they chose were overwhelmingly conservatives. But the new deputies were not in agreement on how to promote their ideas.
As the more experienced right-wing politicians tried to gather their colleagues in the Clichy Club, the directors argued among themselves about how to react to the election outcome. Rewbell wanted to declare the results invalid and prevent the new deputies from taking their seats, a policy that would have provoked an immediate constitutional crisis. Carnot argued that they should instead try to compromise with the more moderate conservatives. The outcome of the Babeuf trial, which had dragged on for three months in the provincial city of Vendôme, added to the difficulty of the government’s situation. The defendants and their skillful lawyer, Pierre Réal, successfully discredited much of the evidence designed to prove the existence of a conspiracy, even though Babeuf undermined this strategy by boasting of his intentions and arguing for his communist vision. In the end, most of the sixty defendants were acquitted; Babeuf and his associate Augustin Darthé were condemned to death, not for conspiracy but for violating the press law passed in 1796 that prohibited advocating a return to the policies of the Terror. Like the Montagnard “martyrs of prairial,” Babeuf and Darthé stabbed themselves, but they lived long enough to be dragged to the guillotine. The republican press denounced their “barbarous executions,” which seemed particularly excessive in view of the relatively light sentences imposed on the royalists who had been arrested in the Brottier conspiracy.38
Allowed to take their seats in the legislative councils, the conservative deputies of the “new third” showed their strengths and weaknesses immediately. They were able to dictate the choice of a new director to replace Letourneur, François Barthélemy. Barthélemy, a former aristocrat and diplomat, lacked energy and experience in domestic politics and soon proved unable to stand up to his more determined colleagues. Their choice to lead the Council of Five Hundred, General Pichegru, was a stronger personality, but his treasonous contacts with the royalists left him badly compromised. The republican directors learned of them in July 1797 thanks to correspondence seized by Bonaparte in Italy. The conservatives’ first legislative initiative, an attack on the Directory’s policy in Saint-Domingue, backfired. After denouncing the emancipation of the blacks in the colony as a measure adopted “more out of hatred for the whites than out of attachment to the Negroes,” the conservatives could not stop themselves from condemning the entire republican phase of the Revolution and the legislators who had supported it. “You know what evils the atrocious decrees slipped through for the past five years by these same men have caused in France,” a proslavery legislator declared. The comment provoked a furious response from the former Convention deputy Merlin de Thionville, a thermidorian who had been willing to compromise with the conservatives; he now objected that the speaker wanted “to start a trial of those who, in spite of him, founded the Republic.”39
The uproar caused by this debate damaged the chances of an alliance between the more aggressive members of the Clichy Club and the moderate republicans who might have been prepared to form a coalition with them. The Clichyens regained some momentum when Camille Jordan, a member of the new third, proposed loosening the restrictions on public religious observances and ending the ban on the ringing of church bells to announce Catholic services. Unlike the defenders of slavery, Jordan was able to appeal to the principle of religious freedom incorporated in the republic’s own constitution and even to revive the Jacobins’ sentimental language about the “simple and good men who cover our countrysides and make them productive through their useful work.” He demanded that these villagers be given the freedom to “follow in peace the religion of their heart.” He artfully compared the “philosophical superstition that makes us fear bells” to the “popular superstition that attaches the women of our villages to them.”40
By this time, the constant repetition of political clichés had deprived parliamentary speeches of the galvanizing effect they had often had earlier in the Revolution. Jordan’s defense of religious freedom was one of the last orations that truly made a public impact. He was undoubtedly correct in arguing that much of the population would have welcomed the return of church bells and religious burial ceremonies. The commentaries on his proposals showed how far apart the republicans and their opponents were. The Sentinelle, edited by Jean-Baptiste Louvet, one of the Girondin deputies the Montagnards had expelled from the Convention in 1792, opposed Jordan’s claim that religion had a positive impact on morality. Priests, he insisted, could not edify the people: “To enlighten men, one has to be enlightened oneself, and not have an interest in abasing the reason of one’s fellows.”41 The persuasiveness of Jordan’s promise that greater freedom for Catholics would end their hostility to the republic was also undercut by the right-wing newspapers. One of them complained that his “project seems to propose the toleration of a superstitious cult rather than the protection due to a true religion, a religion that one can call that of France.”42
To counter the royalists and the Clichy Club, the Directory looked for support from the army. Although Bonaparte’s policy in Italy was socially conservative, he was enraged by the French right-wingers’ denunciations of his invasion of the historic republic of Venice. When journalists demanded that he explain how he could “still talk about the inalienable sovereignty of peoples while trafficking in their blood and their rights,” he realized that he had no choice but to support the republican government in Paris.43 Although the French constitution forbade the army from taking political sides, Bonaparte encouraged his men to pass resolutions that echoed the radical rhetoric of the Year II. Bonaparte told his men, “I know that you are profoundly affected by the misfortunes that threaten the country.… Mountains separate us from France; you would cross them with the speed of an eagle, if necessary, to uphold the constitution, defend liberty, protect the government and the republicans.”44 Responding to secret orders from Barras, Hoche, another strongly republican commander, marched units from his army toward the capital. From the other side of the Atlantic, Toussaint Louverture, alarmed by news of the Clichy Club’s hostility toward black emancipation, sent a proclamation reminding the French that “it was the blacks who, when France was threatened with losing the colony, used their arms and their weapons to conserve it.” He warned that the black population, “with the Constitution in one hand… will defend the liberty it guarantees.”45
Hoping to ward off a violent outcome, the centrist deputy Antoine Thibaudeau scurried from meeting to meeting. He exploited his contacts at the salon of Madame de Staël to obtain information that he could use to persuade the directors to make concessions that would win over the more moderate right-wingers. Then he encountered deputies from the Clichy Club to argue against the royalists who were determined to provoke a violent confrontation with the government. Barras kept his intentions so well concealed that Carnot was deceived into thinking that he could count on him to support the kind of compromise Thibaudeau and others were promoting. On 27 messidor Year V (July 15, 1797), Carnot proposed that the Directory signal its willingness to accommodate the councils by dismissing the more markedly republican government ministers. To his consternation, Barras voted instead with his more militant colleagues, Rewbell and Larevellière-Lépeaux, to remove the ministers who were most open to compromise with the conservative legislators. At the same moment, reports reached Paris that Hoche’s troops had crossed the limit prescribed in the constitution, which stated that military units were not to come closer than twenty miles to the capital. Right-wing journalists called the Directory’s actions “a declaration of civil war.”46
Despite having soldiers at hand, the “triumvirs,” as the press now took to calling Barras, Rewbell, and Larevellière-Lépeaux, did not act. Barras had ordered Hoche to bring his soldiers to Paris without informing his two colleagues beforehand, and the general was not willing to back a military coup without their support. In the summer, throughout the month of thermidor and the first half of fructidor, the two rival camps watched each other warily. The Directory encouraged its supporters in the councils to form a reunion of their own, the Club de Salm, also known as the Constitutional Circle, to rival the gathering at Clichy, and its establishment inspired former Jacobins in some provincial cities to form their own Constitutional Circles. To replace the hesitant Hoche, Bonaparte dispatched one of his generals, Pierre Augereau, to be ready to command republican forces. Barras reached out to networks of former activists in the Paris faubourgs, making sure they would support the Directory if necessary. Sensing that they were in mounting danger, the right-wing deputies in the councils organized a military force of their own, officially designated as a guard for the independence of the legislature, and recruited civilian supporters from the former jeunesse dorée.
The tension building up in the capital reminded some observers of the weeks preceding the journée of August 10, 1792, but the confrontation, when it came, was almost bloodless. On the night of 17 fructidor Year V (September 3, 1797), printed proclamations announcing a coup were posted on the walls. These included copies of documents that Bonaparte had forwarded from Italy providing evidence of the treason of General Pichegru, one of the leaders of the Clichy Club. Uniformed soldiers surrounded the councils’ meeting halls. The recently elected director Barthélemy was arrested, while Carnot managed to escape.
On the morning of 18 fructidor (September 4), the deputies from the two councils whom the coup organizers considered trustworthy were told that the three triumvirs were acting to forestall an elaborate royalist plot. They were asked to endorse the arrest and deportation to Cayenne of sixty-five supposed counterrevolutionary conspirators, including the two other directors and fifty-three deputies. Election results in more than half of the country were invalidated, unseating over a hundred deputies, who were replaced with dependable republicans. Invoking the constitutional article that authorized restrictions on press freedom in case of an emergency, the Directory banned more than thirty right-wing newspapers and ordered the arrest of their editors and publishers. Most of the politicians and journalists on the list managed to evade the police. Madame de Staël, who had dined with Barras on the night before the coup, tipped off the thermidorian leader Boissy d’Anglas and other acquaintances, and the Directory showed little zeal in hunting down the escapees. Augereau’s troops made sure there was no overt resistance to the coup, and a few groups of excited republican militants who had responded to Barras’s appeals were told to disperse.
The coup d’état of 18 fructidor demonstrated that the post-thermidorian republican elite would not allow themselves to be ousted from power through the mechanisms of the constitution they themselves had created. To justify their actions, the police minister, Jean-Marie Sotin, presented a report on “the vast project for the restoration of royalty that, prior to the 18 fructidor, was carried out all over the Republic.” He had no trouble showing that numerous émigrés had been finding ways to return to France, often with the connivance of local officials, and that there was widespread support for the restoration of Catholic worship, or, as he put it, the “resurrection” of “fanaticism.” The enthusiasm for the deputies of the new third voiced in numerous letters intercepted by the police, he claimed, proved that “a large number of the members of the two Councils” were “supporters, protectors, correspondents, [and] accomplices” of the royalists.47 From the defeated right-wing movement’s point of view, the ease with which the unpopular republicans crushed them showed that they had never had the support they had counted on. Years later, the journalist Charles Lacretelle concluded that his readers may have shared his views, but what they really wanted were leaders who, “without excessively alarming the republicans, without costing us any effort, without asking us to take up arms, would one day pass this simple decree: Louis XVIII is proclaimed king of France.”48
Superficially, the coup seemed to demonstrate not only the weakness of the right-wing opposition but also the strength of the Directorial republic. Barras, Rewbell, and Larevellière-Lépeaux provided a textbook lesson on how an unpopular regime could outmaneuver its opponents. At the same time, unlike the victors of the revolutionary journées of 1792 and 1793, they managed to stay just within the letter of the law and to keep control of the situation after their victory. There was no upsurge of popular radicalism after fructidor, and the institutions of the regime—the Directory and the legislative councils—remained intact, even if the principle that the government should reflect the will of the electorate was clearly violated. The unceremoniously ousted Carnot and Barthélemy were replaced with dependable republicans, the vacancies in the councils were promptly filled, and the routine of parliamentary debate resumed. Even freedom of the press was not stamped out: many of the banned right-wing newspapers quickly reappeared under new names, and the republican newspapers continued to disagree among themselves vigorously enough to make it clear that public debate was still alive.
Despite these reassuring appearances, however, the fructidor coup did mark a major change in the nature of the republican regime. Even though the victors managed to give their actions a veneer of constitutionality, they had clearly violated the fundamental postulate of representative government, the principle that the will of the voters should be respected. To be sure, the narrowly restricted electorate created by the mechanisms of the Constitution of 1795 was hardly the whole of the French people, but the fructidor coup was not carried out in order to make the system more democratic. Instead, the self-proclaimed defenders of republicanism turned to the generals and their armies to provide the support they needed to defeat the royalists. Despite the constant references to the ways in which Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had used military force to overthrow the republican institutions of ancient Rome and Puritan Britain that punctuated French revolutionary debates, the leaders of the Directory took the risk of inviting the military into politics. For the moment, their gamble succeeded: the generals, even the ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte, accepted the authority of the “Second Directory” that emerged from fructidor. But the coup d’état that Barras and his colleagues had carried out set a precedent that would come back to haunt them.