18

FROM FRUCTIDOR TO BRUMAIRE

September 1797–November 1799

LIKE THE DEFEAT OF THE GIRONDINS ON MAY 31, 1793, AND THE CRUSHING of the royalist insurrection on 13 vendémiaire Year IV (October 5, 1795), the blow struck against moderates and counterrevolutionaries on 18 fructidor Year V (September 4, 1797) was followed by a surge of republican militancy. Fortified with two new reliably republican members, Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai and Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau, the Second Directory took strong measures to ensure that the regime would not be threatened by hostile political forces. Abroad, French armies made the year following the coup the peak of republican expansion. Under the tricolor flag, the republic’s troops drove British invaders out of the positions they had occupied in Saint-Domingue, reached the summits of the Swiss Alps, overthrew the governments of the southern half of the Italian Peninsula, and crossed the Mediterranean to win battles on the banks of the Nile. The Second Directory’s successes intensified the conviction that France was a “great nation, accustomed to victory,” as the poet and legislative deputy Marie-Joseph Chénier wrote.¹ Even as the regime demonstrated its ability to defeat its enemies at home and abroad, however, its leaders remained aware that they still had not won the hearts of their own population, many of whom refused to accept the republican institutions that were supposed to transform them into loyal citizens. Indeed, even among the republic’s governing elites there was much dissatisfaction with the system created in 1795. When the tide of war turned against the French in 1799, the republic’s survival was quickly put into question.

The victors of fructidor lost no time in following up their triumph. The republican press formed a thunderous chorus to justify the coup. “In great political crises, it is simply impossible to stick to the ordinary legal procedures that conspirators never appeal to except when they are trying to overturn them,” the Décade philosophique, the organ of the country’s secular intellectuals, intoned.² Benjamin Constant, eager to be recognized as the regime’s designated political philosopher, insisted that “in the entire republic, there should not be a single officeholder, from the administrator of the smallest commune to the holders of supreme executive authority… who is not committed to republican liberty.”³ In addition to ousting supporters of the Clichy Club from the Directory and the councils and banning their newspapers, the Directory systematically purged local administrations throughout the country, making sure they would follow orders from Paris. The councils joined in by reinstating harsh laws against émigré nobles and priests. Emboldened by their strengthened position, the directors declared a partial bankruptcy, disguising it as a consolidation of the state’s obligations, thus finally freeing themselves from the unsustainable burden of debt that had brought down the monarchy. Bondholders were told that they would receive only one-third of what they were owed. They had to take what comfort they could in the promise that at least a part of their investment would now be secure.

Debates in the post-fructidorian legislature sometimes veered toward actions reminiscent of the Terror. In a fit of ideological zeal, the legislators approved a law depriving all former nobles remaining in France of their civic rights, in spite of objections that the measure punished thousands of individuals who had never violated any laws. The government needed “all possible means to defeat the enemies of the social contract,” one journalist proclaimed.⁴ In practice, exemptions were made for nobles who had been elected to any of the previous revolutionary assemblies and for those who were currently holding office or serving in the army; otherwise, figures as prominent as the director Paul Barras would have had to give up their positions. Émigré priests whose return had been tolerated before the coup were not as fortunate as former nobles: between 10,000 and 11,000 of them were arrested in the two years after fructidor, and some 1,500 were interned on islands off France’s west coast. The republican rhetoric against the clergy reached levels not seen since the de-Christianization campaign of 1793. “A man who becomes a priest has abandoned his reason; he is an imbecile or a hypocrite,” one polemicist declared.⁵

The fructidorians’ assertion that the republic had only narrowly escaped being overthrown by royalists had a consequence the coup leaders had not anticipated: it encouraged the revival of a genuine popular republicanism. Constitutional Circles quickly spread throughout Paris and popped up in cities and towns all over the country. Once again, as they had during the time of the National Convention, artisans, shopkeepers, and clerks, “men without much education who have no assets other than their moral and political virtue,” as a police commissioner in Bordeaux put it, insisted on their right to participate actively in civic affairs.⁶ The success of the movement showed that neither the memory of the excesses committed during the Terror nor the repression of activism in the years since thermidor had stamped out the desire for a more democratic society. Even more threatening to conservatives were new stirrings of activism among some of the working-class women of the capital. When a group of them staged a demonstration, one journalist asked how the government could tolerate these “shameless women, who could become at any moment, as they were more than once, the nucleus of a formidable riot.”⁷

In the face of this recrudesence of popular politics, the government’s propagandists reverted to the claim that it was protecting the country from both royalism and “anarchy,” their code word for the Jacobin spirit. The supporters of the Constitutional Circles responded vigorously. “When an architect rebuilds a house, he does not call the inevitable disorder of the shapeless materials assembled with great difficulty ‘anarchy,’” the Courrier de la Gironde editorialized.⁸ To counter the spread of the Constitutional Circles, the government imposed a stamp tax on newsprint, forcing editors to raise the price of subscriptions. As the Journal des hommes libres complained, the law was openly aimed at papers intended for a popular audience, whose readers “are not rich, but nevertheless have need of an antidote to evil opinions.”⁹ Directorial officials cracked down on the Constitutional Circles’ practice of ambulation, in which members of one club would get around the ban on club networks by walking to a neighboring town or village to meet with fellow activists. The Directory’s version of republicanism consisted above all in an intensified effort to impose law and order in the countryside. The gendarmerie, a police force authorized before fructidor, was turned into a larger and more professional organization. A law passed in mid-January 1798 allowed members of robber bands to be tried by military commissions, which worked faster than the regular courts and meted out harsher punishments.

The government’s hardline policies within the country were mirrored by a more aggressive foreign policy. In the months prior to fructidor, France had been engaged in peace talks with the British government. Blaming the British for the supposed royalist conspiracy that had provoked the coup, the Directory broke off these negotiations. Recognizing that they could not hope for any further concessions from France, where the Directory was now exhorting Bonaparte to make even greater demands, the Austrians hurried to conclude an official treaty that would consolidate the informal agreement made at Leoben six months earlier. By the terms of the Treaty of Campo-Formio, signed on October 17, Bonaparte turned over Venice and its territories on the Italian mainland to the Austrians. In exchange, they recognized the independence of the Cisalpine Republic and abandoned their claims to their former province of Lombardy. The Austrians recognized France’s acquisition of Belgium and promised to support the French demand for the German territories on the west bank of the Rhine River; in return, the French would see that Austria was eventually compensated at the expense of smaller German states in the Holy Roman Empire.

The Directory was not happy with the Campo-Formio treaty, and two of its five members even refused to sign it. They had wanted a firmer Austrian agreement to recognize French gains along the Rhine, and they were upset that Bonaparte, by turning over Venice and its surrounding territories to Austria, had left the enemy with a strategic foothold in Italy. Nevertheless, when the general returned to Paris at the end of November 1797, the government had no choice but to honor him with an elaborate public ceremony in the courtyard of the Luxembourg Palace. The foreign minister Talleyrand, who had returned from exile the previous year, praised Bonaparte’s achievements and his modesty and insisted that as they honored his accomplishments, “all French republicans should feel greater.” Bonaparte’s own speech was short and devoid of exaggerated rhetoric, but his concluding words—“When the happiness of the French people will be secured by better organic laws, all of Europe will become free”—conveyed the message that he did not regard the Constitution of 1795 as satisfactory. Bonaparte gave a picture of what he meant by “better organic laws” in a letter addressed to the leaders of the “Ligurian Republic” he had established in Genoa. In the letter, he blamed revolutionary policies for having alienated the Church and the nobility in France, thereby creating endless domestic conflicts, and called for “coolness, moderation, wisdom, reason in the conception of decrees.” At a moment when the Directory was intensifying its rhetoric against priests and former aristocrats, its leading general was clearly thinking in very different terms.¹⁰

Having defeated kings, instituted republics, and negotiated treaties in Italy, Bonaparte was ready to claim a major role in France for himself. In public, he cultivated an air of humility; when a theater audience, learning that he was in attendance, called for him to take a bow, he refused to show himself. Elected as a member of the Institut national’s section on science and technology, he flattered the intellectuals who had honored him by saying that “before I become their equal, I will for a long time be their pupil.”¹¹ Privately, he sounded out politicians about the possibility of changing the age requirement for election to the Directory so that he could claim a seat, or about altering the constitution; he also talked to other generals to test their willingness to support a military coup.

Some journalists were already hailing him as a providential figure. “Bonaparte the demigod has appeared to achieve victory, to fulfill the idea I have conceived of man, and to show us the value of wisdom conjoined with valor,” one wrote. Madame de Staël found him different from any of the other political figures she had met. “I had seen men very worthy of respect; I had also seen dangerous-seeming men: nothing in the impression that Bonaparte made on me recalled any of them.” Bonaparte, for his part, found the ambitious de Staël irritating; when she asked him whom he considered “the first among women,” he snapped, “the one who bears the most children.” Crowds gathered whenever he appeared in public and the press reported his every move, but Bonaparte did not let this popularity go to his head. When his companion and aide Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne remarked that “it must be nice to see his fellow citizens so eager to see him,” Bonaparte replied, “They would be just as eager to see me if I were being taken to be executed.”¹² Concluding that the time was not right for an attempt to overthrow the Directory, he accepted a mission to inspect troops being assembled for a possible invasion of England and left the capital.

As the Directory pondered what to do with one ambitious general, another military man was also causing concerns. By mid-1797, Toussaint Louverture had won his battle of wills with the French civil commissioner Sonthonax, peremptorily ordering him to return to France as a legislative deputy for Saint-Domingue. Sonthonax’s commitment to defending the freedom of the black population remained unswerving: he strongly supported a new law on the colonies, passed on January 1, 1798, that outlined procedures for dividing the overseas territories into departments with the same civil institutions as in metropolitan France; it also guaranteed that “black or colored individuals… [would] enjoy the same rights as an individual born in French territory.” But Sonthonax also warned the government against Louverture’s growing ambitions and claimed that the black general’s “superstitious and unenlightened mind has made him dependent on counter-revolutionary priests who, in Saint-Domingue as in France, use all possible means to overthrow liberty.” The Directory replaced Sonthonax with Joseph Hédouville, a general known for having sternly repressed rebels in the Vendée, but Hédouville quickly realized that he was helpless in the face of Louverture’s firm control of the black troops in the colony. “With him, you can do anything; without him, you are powerless,” a veteran white officer in Louverture’s army told Hédouville.¹³

Like Bonaparte, Louverture conducted his own foreign policy. In August 1798, he negotiated a treaty with the commander of the British forces, Thomas Maitland, providing for the redcoats’ withdrawal from the territories they had occupied since 1793; in exchange, he tipped the British off about a Directory-backed plot to provoke a slave insurrection in Jamaica. Louverture also established his own connections with the United States, undermining the French position in the ongoing “quasi-war” between the two republics. Franco-American relations had already deteriorated because of French seizures of American merchant ships; they became even worse when Talleyrand demanded a hefty bribe from American representatives who had come to Paris to try to resolve the conflict between the two countries. Known as the “XYZ Affair,” because the American government referred to Talleyrand’s intermediaries as X, Y, and Z, rather than publishing their names, this demand scandalized the Americans. President John Adams’s supporters in the United States proceeded to push for a declaration of war against France. Toussaint Louverture courted American sympathy by forbidding French privateering raiders from using Saint-Domingue as a base. Although Americans from the southern states had qualms about forging ties with an island of blacks who had successfully revolted against slavery, a law imposing a trade embargo on France, passed in February 1799, contained an exemption, known as “Toussaint’s clause,” permitting American commerce with Saint-Domingue.

While the French colony of Saint-Domingue was threatening to escape from the Directory’s control, the French government was tightening its control over the sister republics it had sponsored in the Netherlands and Italy and extending French influence to new parts of Europe. Ever since the French invasion in 1795, Dutch republicans had been deadlocked between a radical “unitary” faction that wanted a strong centralized government and a “federalist” party that hoped to preserve a significant role for the country’s historic provinces. On January 22, 1798, the advocates of centralism, supported by Dutch and French troops, arrested their leading opponents and imposed a constitution reflecting their ideas. The coup in the Netherlands served as a model for a similar reshaping of the government in the Cisalpine Republic, where the newly created legislative councils tried to assert some independence from France by objecting to the terms of a proposed treaty of alliance. The treaty required the Italians to pay eighteen million francs a year to support a French army and stipulated that the French would be allowed to name the commander of the Cisalpine’s own troops. The more militant Italian Jacobins exploited the Directory’s annoyance with this resistance to eliminate their moderate rivals.

Meanwhile, Switzerland had been added to the list of French-dominated sister republics. Like the Netherlands and Venice, Switzerland had been one of Europe’s traditional republics; the legendary hero William Tell, leader of a revolt against Austrian rule in the fourteenth century, was part of the pantheon of revolutionaries the French themselves honored as predecessors. As in other old-regime republics, however, wealthy urban elites dominated the rest of the population, and even some peasants were prepared to welcome the French and their promise to promote social equality. The director Jean-François Rewbell dismissed the country as a “crazy formless assemblage of governments… all despotic and all enemies of the French Republic.”¹⁴ Opponents of the oligarchical government in Bern, the center of the loose confederation of the Swiss cantons, secretly encouraged a French invasion, which took place in January 1798. By this time, the script for creating new republics was familiar: the new Helvetic Republic was proclaimed on March 22, 1798, and its constitution, edited beforehand by the French directors Rewbell and Merlin de Douai, was put into effect on April 12. Rather than destroying monarchy throughout Europe as they had promised in 1792, the French had now overthrown all of the continent’s historical republican regimes.

The crucial question of what kind of republicanism would prevail in France itself still remained unsettled. The purge of the councils in fructidor meant that more than half the deputies would be replaced in the elections of April 1798. During the winter, the directors sent agents, disguised as road inspectors, to report on the political atmosphere in the provinces. Many wrote back that the roads were indeed in bad shape—that is, that either unrepentant conservatives or resurgent neo-Jacobins threatened to dominate the upcoming vote. The energized supporters of the Constitutional Circles worked to bring about the success of the democratic values that had been eclipsed since the overthrow of Robespierre, and they had been figuring out the tactics necessary for success in an electoral system. A republican journalist in Marseille wrote that, “for the first time since the constitution was inaugurated, republicans are cheerful at the prospect of coming freely to the primary assemblies, without having to fear the arbitrary blows of magistrates who have sold out to the royalist faction.”¹⁵

As the first reports of the radicals’ strong showing in the electoral assemblies poured in, the Directory and its supporters struck back, claiming that royalists and neo-Jacobins were colluding to “assassinate the Republic,” as the government’s commissioner in Bordeaux proclaimed. “Both want to overthrow the republican government; both are aiming at the same goal, by different means, and that goal is nothing else but the reestablishment of monarchy, by frightening terror or atrocious reaction.”¹⁶ In fact, centrist deputies willing to support the Directory prevailed in most departments, but the government was determined to keep the candidates of the Constitutional Circles from scoring even a partial victory. Where it faced defeat, the Directory told its supporters to claim that legal procedures were being violated; they were then to create a schism by walking out of the electoral assemblies and forming their own rival group. Even when the breakaway assembly had many fewer participants than the original one, the government’s loyalists in the councils would pronounce its candidates legally elected. On 22 floréal Year VI (May 11, 1798), the directors staged a new coup d’état, overturning all or part of the results in nearly half the departments and ousting 127 newly elected legislators, including the prairial martyr Goujon’s loyal friend Tissot. The Décade philosophique justified what it admitted was a violation of legal principles in view of the necessity of teaching the voters “to be sensible in their choices.”¹⁷ The French Directory ordered coups modeled after the floréal purge carried out in the sister republics, where the radicals installed after fructidor were replaced by more moderate figures. This succession of upheavals directed from Paris undermined the pretense that the governments of the Batavian, Cisalpine, and Helvetic republics had any autonomy and discredited them in the eyes of their own populations.

With the opposition movements in France on both the right and the left temporarily sidelined, the “Directorials” were free to steer “the vessel of the Republic” on what they advertised as a middle course between “the two abysses that these factions keep open on both sides of it.” By this time, the utopian hopes that had energized the revolutionaries in the first years after 1789 had largely been forgotten, but François Poultier d’Elmotte, an otherwise obscure legislative deputy and editor of the most popular pro-Directory newspaper of the period, the Ami des lois, still had a vision of the goal that he wanted to believe France would eventually achieve. In a series of articles on “the hundredth year of the Republic” published in the summer of 1798, he imagined a society in which “general abundance, a more or less equal distribution of wealth, not as a result of a violent redistribution of land, but by the gradual influence of the laws on inheritance and taxation, will have made the excessive inequality of fortunes disappear, as well as all crimes, the result of extreme wealth and extreme need.” The revolutionary wars would have ended long ago, and Europe would peacefully accept the moral superiority of France, which would intervene whenever necessary to protect the oppressed against tyrants. The five-member Directory would still be lodged in the Luxembourg Palace, where they would receive the public every décadi and resolve all their complaints. Although he was a deputy himself, Poultier did not even mention the legislature, the constitutional mechanism by which the people’s will was supposed to be represented. Poultier’s dream failed to anticipate the dramatic changes in technology and society to come: changes that would transform France from a country of oxcarts and villages to one of railroads and cities by the time one hundred years had passed. In 1798, with the memory of the upheavals of the previous few years still fresh in everyone’s mind, the notion of liberty and equality having been achieved without further conflict was an attractive one.¹⁸

François de Neufchâteau, who was appointed as interior minister in 1798 after a short term as a member of the Directory, bombarded the government’s commissioners in the departments with circulars aimed at making Poultier’s vision a reality. A lengthy set of instructions sent out in September 1798 told them to make sure to visit every corner of their assigned territories on a regular basis. They were to take the pulse of the local “public spirit” and try to improve it by promoting the opening of schools and public libraries. The government wanted its agents to promote new farming methods that promised to increase production. They were to be equally active in encouraging commerce and manufacturing. A precocious environmentalist, the minister lamented the widespread destruction of woodlands by peasants seeking firewood; he went into raptures about “the attraction that we cannot avoid having” to newly planted trees. To pay for all this, the commissioners were to make sure that taxes were being collected. At the national level, one of François de Neufchâteau’s more successful innovations was the staging of annual expositions of agricultural products and manufactures. The first industrial exposition, held in the summer of Year VI, served as an opportunity to celebrate new technologies: a prize was awarded, for example, to a factory from the Vendée for its textiles. The offerings in the exhibits showed that the country was recovering from “the disasters of a war that ravaged everything there,” according to the official report on the exposition, which boasted that France was overcoming Britain’s lead in technology.¹⁹

The Directorial republic’s positive ambitions were always paired with concern that nefarious enemies might sabotage its initiatives. François de Neufchâteau’s circulars, even as they instructed local officials to be sure that hospitals and other institutions serving the poor in their area were properly managed, veered off into attacks on the religious charities of the past, which “were too indulgent of laziness.” The poor were to be put to work, and the money spent to feed them was to be kept to a minimum. A long and detailed circular about schools, which were seen as crucial institutions for promoting social equality, mixed progressive notions, such as the abolition of physical punishments and the creation of student councils to administer discipline, with warnings against any reversion to religious traditions.²⁰

All of François de Neufchâteau’s ideas about improving the lives of French citizens depended on the government having enough revenue to pay its expenses and enough soldiers to maintain its armies. The National Assembly had enacted a basic tax on land and a business license tax. The Second Directory added two new taxes, one on luxuries that fell primarily on the rich and one based on counting the doors and windows in buildings, a rough measure of property value. The basic taxes put in place under the Directory became the basis of the national revenue system and successfully kept French governments out of the kind of financial crises that had brought down the old regime, at least until the immensely expensive wars of the twentieth century forced the imposition of new levies, including an income tax.

After the levée en masse, which had provided the men for the mass armies that saved the country in 1793 and 1794, republican France had no regular system for conscripting new soldiers. With no end to the war in sight, in September 1798 the councils established a permanent system of military conscription. The plan, proposed by General Jourdan, made all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five liable to be called for service for up to five years, with the actual number to be drafted each year determined by the army’s needs. The law fell equally on the rich and the poor: there was no provision to allow wealthier families to pay a substitute to take their son’s place, as had been permitted under the first revolutionary draft calls. Republican journalists applauded the idea of universal military service. Young men would be cured of “all the false ideas contrary to the interests of their country… all the germs of royalism or anarchism,” one wrote, adding that it would result in an army “with which no ambitious chief can become dangerous for the Republic.” The Jourdan law was passed during a momentary lull in major military operations, and it was initially assumed that only a minority of the men eligible each year would actually have to serve. But when the war flared up again at the end of 1798, draft quotas were immediately raised. As in 1793, protests erupted in regions where opposition to the republican regime was strong. In the Belgian departments annexed in 1795, protesters called on “all young men affected by the requisition” to join an uprising “to fight for our fatherland and our religion against the French barbarians.”²¹ Despite this resistance, the Jourdan law created the basic mechanism by which Napoleon would later fill the ranks of his armies.

While ministers and deputies grappled with the practical difficulties of establishing a functioning regime, intellectuals like Madame de Staël outlined a theoretical justification for the Second Directory’s top-down republicanism. In a long manuscript titled On the Current Circumstances That Could End the Revolution and the Principles That Should Found the Republic in France, de Staël argued that what citizens really needed was freedom to pursue their own private interests rather than the right to participate actively in politics. The Revolution had brought about some crucial changes that needed to be protected, she claimed, including the abolition of hereditary social privileges and the substitution of a republic for the monarchy, but the people were not yet educated enough to fully appreciate them. “It is necessary, in France, until the moment when public instruction will have trained a new generation in liberty, to extend several portions of the conserving power among the hands of republicans,” she wrote, indicating her approval of the coups of fructidor and floréal. Not only did Staël want to restrict the freedom of voters; she also demanded limits on the freedom of the press, since newspapers were “capable of leading citizens into error about what they should do.” Indeed, they constituted “a means of governing or revolutionizing so powerful that one cannot remove it from the authorities’ surveillance.”²²

De Staël differed from the directors and from the intellectuals who formed a good part of her circle of friends because of her conviction that, rather than trying to impose an unhistorical civic religion on the population, the French Republic ought to adopt the Protestantism she shared with her friend and lover, Benjamin Constant. The rationalist scientists and philosophers who had filled the places in the Institut national opposed the thought of making any concession to Christian beliefs. Pleased to be freed from the restrictions of the old regime that had so irritated the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and supported by the government against the attacks on elitism that had threatened them during the Revolution’s radical phase, the country’s academics were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the socially conservative republic established in 1795. Several of them, such as the prominent doctor Pierre Cabanis, were deputies or held other political positions, and their prestigious magazine, the Décade philosophique, gave the regime its unqualified endorsement.

In 1798, one of the group’s leading figures, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, published several essays outlining a “science of ideas,” which he called idéologie—he and his colleagues came to be called “the Idéologues.” Building on the ideas of Condorcet, whose posthumously published Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind served as an inspiration, and of the French Enlightenment philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Idéologues were convinced that their rationalist methods could unify all human knowledge, from psychology and medicine to physics and astronomy.

The Idéologues’ efforts to promote empirical scientific methods laid the basis for the development of modern social science and for genuine advances in medicine and in the natural sciences. They promoted clinical studies, for example, in medical research. The Idéologues were among the leading supporters of the Second Directory’s vigorous campaign to impose the republican calendar on the population. Between April and September 1798, four new decrees and laws sought to ban references to the old months and days of the week and impose the ten-day rhythm of the décade on every aspect of public life. To promote the civic ceremonies held on the décadi, the laws required public officials and schoolchildren to attend and made it the only day on which marriage ceremonies could be performed. As local officials in the Lot-et-Garonne department explained, citizens’ “civil conduct, their pursuit of their affairs, even the choice of their pleasures should be regulated from now on by a calendar that does not belong to any one religion.”

The director Larevellière-Lépeaux made himself the patron of the cult of Theophilanthropy, an effort, like Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, to create a new form of worship that could take the place of the Church. The promoters of the new religion invented ceremonies to accompany the registration of births, marriages, and deaths and wanted to institute catechism classes to teach their principles to children. Peasants dragooned into attending ceremonies on the décadi made a point of coming in their work clothes, and women, still the backbone of resistance to religious innovation, sometimes staged riots to prevent government-imposed ceremonies from being held in the churches. However much the notion of changing the nation’s religious practices might appeal to intellectuals and republican militants, the effort was one of the most resented aspects of the Directory’s policies.

The union of politicians and intellectuals that promoted the unsuccessful effort to remake France’s religious practices had more success in promoting a new colonial policy. The abolition of slavery triggered a rethinking of the purpose of extending French rule to overseas territories. In 1796, advocates of a different kind of overseas expansion, under the leadership of Henri Grégoire, revived the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and added “and the Colonies” to its name. They argued that if France did nothing, Britain would dominate the non-European world. The French republic, they proposed, should try to gain influence in Africa by bringing civilization to benighted populations. “In their native land, the Africans are unaware of all the advantage they can draw from their soil and their climate for their own use and that of others.… Do they not have an urgent need for moral and physical instruction?”²³ The prospect of acquiring new colonies in sub-Saharan Africa was remote as long as the British controlled the Atlantic, but there were opportunities elsewhere. In an Essay on the Advantages to Be Gained from New Colonies, the Directory’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, pointed to Egypt, whose climate, he claimed, was suitable for growing the sugar and cotton France could no longer obtain from its Caribbean islands.

Recently returned from three years of exile in the United States, Talleyrand had concluded that territorial expansion was one way of diverting the restless energy generated by the Revolution away from internal political disputes. Napoleon Bonaparte, the very incarnation of restless energy, was already dreaming of Egypt himself. In the summer of 1797, he had written to the Directory that “the time is not far off when we will realize that, in order to truly destroy England, we need to take Egypt.” By taking Egypt, France would be able to threaten Britain’s connection to India, its most valuable overseas holding. In addition to what the capture of Egypt could do for France’s strategic position, Bonaparte, inspired by the example of Alexander the Great, dreamed of what such a conquest could do for him. “I do not have enough glory,” he told his loyal aide, Bourrienne. “This little Europe doesn’t offer enough. It is necessary to go to the Orient, all the great reputations come from there.”²⁴

The Egyptian expedition sealed the alliance between the general and the republican intellectual elite who had already welcomed Bonaparte as a member of the Institut national. A long two-part article in the Idéologues’ journal, the Décade philosophique, made the case for what would come, in the nineteenth century, to be called France’s mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) in the non-European world. The Middle East, the article’s author announced, was the region of the world where “the fate of people is the most deplorable, and where it would be the most useful to change it.” The Décade’s editorialist admitted that it would be hard to deal with the native population’s “religious fanaticism,” but he was confident that “the invincible ignorance of the Muslims, or the contempt that they profess for those they call unbelievers,” could be overcome. Anticipating one of the great dividing lines between Europeans and Muslims down to our own day, he concluded that the only real obstacle to a successful transformation of the Middle East would be “the system of morality, especially with regard to women.”²⁵

Recognizing that the Arab populations of Egypt and Syria would resist any effort to transform their countries in line with enlightened principles, the author of the Décade article put forward another revolutionary proposal: the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Europe’s Jews would provide the resources and the energy to bring the region into the modern world. “We know how much they long for their ancient homeland and the city of Jerusalem!… They will come running from the four corners of the world, if one gives them the signal.” Another pro-Directory journalist expanded these ideas into a proposal for the convocation of a Jewish national assembly that would make a formal treaty with France and finance the establishment of a sister republic in the ancient Holy Land. The Directory’s ambitions thus led both to the idea of a European mandate to spread its civilization to the rest of the world and to the first manifesto of modern Jewish nationalism or Zionism, even though this proposal for a Jewish homeland was probably drawn up by a non-Jew.²⁶

Bonaparte’s expeditionary force set sail for Egypt on May 19, 1798. In total, there were 56 warships and 309 merchant vessels carrying 36,800 men and their supplies. Among the voyagers were some 170 scientists, artists, and experts on antiquities, tokens of the French ambition to bring European civilization to Egypt and to uncover the country’s legendary past. The French evaded the British admiral Horatio Nelson, who had been sent to intercept them, and came ashore at the historic city of Alexandria. Bonaparte issued a proclamation designed to win over the local population. He claimed that the French had come to free Egypt from the tyranny of the Mamelukes, the military caste employed by the Ottomans to control the country. “Egyptians, you will hear that I have come to destroy your religion; it is a lie, do not believe it!… I respect, more than the Mamelukes, God, his prophet Mohammed and glorious Koran.” The Ottoman envoys in Paris, who had been honored by the directors and who had even invited Bonaparte and his wife to dinner, were shocked that the French, “exhibiting dishonesty, deception and perfidy… allowed their hypocritical actions to become public in attacking without warning, like thieves, the sacred land of Egypt.”²⁷

Advancing as quickly as possible across the desert terrain, the French neared Cairo, where Egyptian forces confronted them on the banks of the Nile, within sight of the pyramids. “Soldiers, forty centuries look down on you!” Bonaparte told his troops. The French won a decisive victory, and four days later, Bonaparte entered the city and set up his headquarters. He ordered the creation of an assembly of local inhabitants to govern the city and promised its members that he would “bring justice, respect for properties, enlightenment, and thereby reopen, for a people worthy of improvement, the sources of happiness.” Given that “the army’s treasury faced many difficulties in meeting the needs of the soldiers,” as Bonaparte delicately put it in his memoirs, the local population, like those in other countries the French had occupied, found themselves forced to pay a heavy indemnity. As Bonaparte was settling into his role as ruler of Cairo, news reached him of a disaster on the coast: on August 2, 1798, Nelson’s fleet caught the French at anchor off the port of Aboukir. “The whole beach was covered with the debris of our vessels,” a French officer wrote.²⁸ Napoleon’s army was now trapped in the country it had conquered, with no way to get home.

The scientists and intellectuals Bonaparte had brought along wasted no time in creating an “Egyptian Institute” modeled after the institute in France. The French savants undertook research on practical problems, such as water purification, and explored the antiquities they encountered that had previously been unknown to Europeans. The inscriptions on one of their discoveries, which became known as the Rosetta stone, eventually provided the key to reading ancient hieroglyphics, thus opening the way to understanding the civilization that had created the pyramids. A few members of Egypt’s religious minorities were admitted to the Egyptian Institute, but Muslims kept their distance. Despite their professions of respect for Islam, one wrote, the French “are a sect of philosophers who reject the Law and claim that they obey nature.” Efforts to compel local Muslim officials to wear the tricolor cockade antagonized them, as did the demolition of gates within the city and sacred tombs, which the French removed in an effort to make it easier for their troops to move around.

NAPOLEON IN EGYPT: The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of European colonial expansion in the Middle East. Napoleon’s expedition enjoyed enthusiastic support from republican France’s intellectual elite. This engraving, published in Italy at the time, shows Napoleon Bonaparte being greeted by local dignitaries. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Hostility toward the French exploded on October 21, 1798, when the population rose in revolt. The Egyptian chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti wrote that “the people went beyond all limits, committed every excess, assaulting and mistreating individuals, pillaging and stealing.”²⁹ Some 250 French were killed, and at least ten times as many Egyptians. Despite Bonaparte’s promise to respect religion, the French soldiers who put down the revolt showed little regard for Muslim holy places. When they entered the famous Al-Azhar Mosque, one of the strongholds of the rebellion, “they treated the books and Qu’ranic volumes as trash, throwing them on the ground,” al-Jabarti wrote. “They guzzled wine and smashed the bottles in the central court.” Any illusion that the ideas of the French Revolution could easily be transposed to the Middle East was shattered. Bonaparte now dismissed the Cairo population as “the most brutish and savage rogues who exist in the world.”³⁰

Bonaparte now found himself stranded in the Middle East, with no way of extricating his army. Fearing that Turkish forces might attack Egypt from the north, he decided to take the initiative and invade Palestine, resulting in atrocities that badly stained his reputation. When the city of Jaffa refused to surrender, French troops “slaughtered men, women, the elderly, children, Christians, Turks,” the mathematician Étienne-Louis Malus wrote. One of Bonaparte’s subordinates had persuaded the Turkish garrison to surrender in exchange for a promise that their lives would be spared, but Bonaparte decided that he could neither leave several thousand enemy soldiers behind as he continued his advance nor spare the food and resources to care for them. French troops, ordered to execute the unarmed prisoners, ran out of ammunition and had to wade into piles of fallen bodies to finish off the wounded with their bayonets. “I could not stand the horrible sight,” one officer wrote. “I fled, ashen and ready to faint.”³¹ The massacres at Jaffa widened the gulf between the French claims that they were bringing civilization to the Middle East and the reality of military occupation. They also demonstrated the lengths to which Bonaparte would go to achieve his aims. From Jaffa, he continued his advance north, but found himself stopped at the port of Acre, where he had to undertake a lengthy siege while an epidemic of plague decimated his troops.

Meanwhile, events in Europe were threatening to end any chance of Bonaparte seizing power. The Treaty of Campo-Formio that he had negotiated had ended the war against Austria, but it was a fragile agreement. When the French aided local revolutionaries in February 1798 in creating a republican government in Rome that drove Pope Pius VI into exile, the Austrians complained that France was expanding its sphere of influence without offering them any offsetting compensation. Austria responded by making an alliance with the last remaining independent Italian state, the kingdom of Naples, which occupied the southern part of the peninsula. The ruling dynasty of Naples, a branch of the Bourbons, was irrevocably hostile to the French Republic, and the Neapolitans’ enthusiasm for a war with France only increased when Admiral Nelson arrived with his fleet after his victory at Aboukir. Through the influence of his lover Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador and a close confidante of the queen of Naples, Nelson saw that Naples was brought into an anti-French coalition that included not only Britain and Austria but also Russia. The Russian ruler, Tsar Paul I, the honorary head of the Knights of Malta, was eager to take revenge for Bonaparte’s occupation of that island on his way to Egypt. The British determination to find continental allies was intensified after the Directory sent French troops to assist the uprising of the United Irishmen, a revolt against British rule that broke out in the spring of 1798. Irish exiles had worked for years to cultivate French support for their cause, and the news of the revolt inspired orators at the Paris festival for July 14 to promise that “all France will arm if necessary to help you.”³² Although the French expedition was quickly defeated, rebellion in Ireland was the London government’s greatest fear. The British were convinced that the threat could only be eliminated by destroying the French Republic.

The French found themselves facing a formidable “Second Coalition” whose combined forces outnumbered the republic’s armies, which were now worn down by many years of almost continuous combat. The Neapolitan invasion of the Roman Republic on November 23, 1798, started a new round of fighting as furious as anything seen during the first years of the revolutionary wars. Enemy armies never crossed France’s frontiers during the conflict, but they threatened the nation’s predominance and the system of sister republics it had fostered to extend its influence. The French quickly beat back the Neapolitan invasion of Rome and drove south, forcing the Bourbon king, Ferdinand IV, to flee Naples and take refuge in the island of Sicily. Against the wishes of the Directory, which had no desire to become responsible for defending yet another distant client state, the French general Jean-Étienne Championnet oversaw the proclamation of a “Parthenopean Republic.”

Unlike Rome, whose life was dominated by the Catholic Church, Naples had a cultured elite imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment, and even educated members of the local nobility embraced the Jacobin cause. Eleanora Pimentel Fonseca, whose literary talents had earned her admission to the city’s learned academy before the Revolution, took a leading role in the movement and edited its newspaper, the Monitore Napoletano. The lower classes of the crowded city, the lazzaroni, and the impoverished peasants in the kingdom’s rural areas, in contrast, rallied to the banners of religion and monarchy. Pimentel was sure that “the people distrust the patriots because they do not understand them,” and that propaganda written in the local dialect would win them over, but her efforts had little effect.³³ The new republic found itself plunged into a civil war similar to the bloody conflict of the Vendée in France. Acting with the support of King Ferdinand, an aristocratic churchman, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, recruited peasants and the region’s endemic rural bandits to form an “Army of the Holy Faith.” It would go on to terrorize supporters of the republic and townspeople in general.

Faced with a widespread popular uprising, the Neapolitan republicans were dependent on French troops to defend them. Beginning in April 1799, however, the forces of the anti-French coalition, led by an energetic seventy-year-old Russian general, Alexander Suvorov, won victories in northern Italy that forced the French to hastily evacuate the peninsula, lest the troops there be cut off. Abandoned to their fate, the leaders of the Neapolitan movement surrendered to Ruffo’s forces in exchange for a promise that their lives would be spared. Returning from his Sicilian exile, King Ferdinand was in no mood to spare his enemies. Admiral Nelson encouraged his vindictive instincts, and 119 of the leading figures in the Parthenopean Republic, including Eleanora Pimentel, were hanged from the yardarms of his ships, a warning to republicans everywhere of the fate threatening them if France was defeated. Meanwhile, the French were engaged in a desperate struggle against Suvorov’s army in Switzerland. The cascade of bad news from the armies, exaggerated by royalists who circulated reports from foreign newspapers, did nothing to encourage young men to respond to their draft notices. The Directory tried to revive patriotism by exploiting an outrage committed by the Austrians, whose troops had waylaid three French deputies returning home from the German city of Rastadt in May, after negotiations about the implementation of the Treaty of Campo-Formio were broken off. Two deputies were killed, and their diplomatic papers were stolen. “There are crimes that only need to be told to the people in order to exhort it to vengeance,” one pro-government paper wrote. But the population, according to the police, reacted with indifference.³⁴

The bad news from the armies coincided with the annual election season in France. The interior minister, François de Neufchâteau, supervised an all-out campaign to influence the voters’ choices, and especially to warn them against “the successors of Robespierre and Marat.” His heavy-handed purge of local officials in the run-up to the elections proved counterproductive: in many communities, men ousted from office took the lead in opposing the candidates the government endorsed. The electoral assemblies were tumultuous. Crowds often surrounded the meeting rooms and even interfered in the proceedings: in one canton in the southwestern department of the Landes, a woman grabbed the urn used to hold the ballots and broke it over an opponent’s head. In Marseille, the governmental commissioner complained that the local National Guard had backed the anarchists. “Instead of the majestic and respectable spectacle of a united people summoned to exercise its rights,” he wrote, the city’s primary assemblies “presented only a scandalous assemblage of smokers, drinkers and babblers crazed by revolutionary maxims.”³⁵ As in 1798, many assemblies split into two or even three rival groups, each claiming that the members of the other had violated legal procedures.

The results were a clear repudiation of the Directory: only 56 of its 141 officially endorsed candidates were chosen. What the voters actually wanted was less clear. Candidates backed by the Constitutional Circles did well. They found allies among more moderate republicans who were alarmed by the military defeats that the Directory seemed unable to halt and disheartened by the atmosphere of corruption that hung over the regime. In contrast to what had happened in 1798, however, the deputies who had not been up for reelection, charged with deciding between rival claimants when the electoral assemblies had split, followed a consistent policy of seating the candidate backed by the largest number of voters. This approach allowed a number of neo-Jacobins to take their seats. The annual drawing of lots among the directors forced Rewbell, one of the group’s strongest personalities, to give up his position. The councils showed their attitude toward the directors by replacing him with Sieyès, who had never ceased to criticize the Constitution of 1795 and call for its revision or replacement.

Sieyès “brought nothing to the government except a difficult character, a spirit of discontent, an extreme fear of revolutionaries, and projects for overturning the constitution that he hoped to modify to suit his own ideas,” Goujon’s friend Pierre-François Tissot later wrote.³⁶ In the councils, the new deputies wasted no time in attacking the remaining members of the Second Directory. They demanded that the Directory explain how it had happened that “two months have barely gone by since Italy was republican and victorious under our banners,” and that it was now “invaded by a ferocious victor.” They also wanted to know what the executive branch of the government planned to do to revive the economy and to reassure “the friends of liberty, so long proscribed and pursued by royalists,” in the provinces.³⁷

When the directors made no response, on 28 prairial Year VII (June 16, 1799) the two councils declared themselves in permanent session and forced the director Jean-Baptiste Treilhard from office, charging that he had not met the strict constitutional requirements when he was elected a year earlier. He was replaced by Louis-Jérôme Gohier, who was considered to be close to the neo-Jacobins. Behind the scenes, Barras, always determined to end up on the winning side, and Sieyès pressured Larevellière-Lépeaux and Merlin, the two remaining holdover members of the Directory, to resign. In the Council of Five Hundred, the deputy Bertrand du Calvados thundered, “You have no power to do any good, you will never have the confidence of your colleagues or that of the people or that of its representatives.”³⁸ The two recalcitrant directors finally gave in two days later. Their immediate replacements were Roger Ducos, an ally of Sieyès, and Jean-François-Auguste Moulin, one of the many generals who had complained about the Second Directory’s failure to provide the army with adequate resources.

As he reluctantly wrote out his resignation, Larevellière-Lépeaux grumbled, “I tell you, the republic is doomed.”³⁹ The “coup” of 30 prairial (June 18) was the third time in less than two years that political pressures had resulted in the overturning of constitutional procedures. Whereas the coups of fructidor and floréal had clear winners and losers, however, the coup of 30 prairial was more ambiguous. Some of the political figures who carried it out were neo-Jacobins eager to revive the democratic energy of the Revolution’s radical period; others shared Sieyès’s view that the republic needed a new constitution that would make the government more independent of the electorate. In the wake of the coup, the councils quickly moved to dismantle several of the Second Directory’s policies. The restrictions imposed on the press after the fructidor coup were struck down, and a new electoral law prohibited the tactic of initiating deliberate schisms in the electoral assemblies. Journalists of all political colors immediately took advantage of their restored freedom. Once again, the Père Duchêne appealed to the common people, thanks to the efforts of René Lebois, a veteran of the far left. Royalist writers who had been in hiding since fructidor also resurfaced, denouncing the republican government and the continuing persecution of the Catholic Church.

A new Jacobin club began to hold public sessions in the Manège, the former meeting hall of the Convention in the Tuileries Palace. “Ask liberty to tell you what she calls her children,” the new Père Duchêne wrote. “She will respond, ‘Jacobins.’” The Journal des hommes libres, as ever the voice of the neo-Jacobin movement, ran articles arguing that the revolutionary dictatorship of Year II had been necessary to save the republic; it hinted that similar measures were needed again. Tissot insisted that “if, within a month, the legislature hasn’t taken great measures, the slaughter of the patriots is assured.” Alarmed by this sign of revived republican militancy, opponents gathered outside the meeting hall, shouting, “Down with the Jacobins! Down with the blood-drinkers!” and even “Long live the king!” A royalist journalist told readers that it was unnecessary to report on club meetings “where they did nothing but give out inarticulate cries,” but they could be assured that they would be told “what is most important, that is, most horrible.”⁴⁰

During the first month after the 30 prairial coup, the councils passed several decrees that reflected the influence of the Jacobin movement. A revised version of Jourdan’s conscription law summoned five years’ worth of draftees at once to rebuild the beleaguered armies. To suppress counterrevolutionary agitation in the provinces, the legislators voted for a “law of hostages” on 24 messidor (July 12) to deter “attacks and acts of brigandage committed out of hatred for the republic.” Under the law, relatives of émigrés and former nobles could be arrested and their property seized, regardless of whether there was any evidence that they had been involved in criminal acts. The former philosophe André Morellet objected, asking, “Is this the freedom that this same Republic that has given to the blacks of our colonies the rights of man… gives to the French?”⁴¹ There was also vigorous debate about a law requiring wealthier taxpayers to contribute to a forced loan, which was finally approved in early fructidor (mid-August).

The neo-Jacobins’ successes in the first month after the prairial coup were made possible because a number of more moderate deputies joined them in dismantling the policies of the Second Directory. Soon, however, this tactical alliance began to fall apart. On 29 thermidor (August 16), the neo-Jacobins tried to persuade the Council of Five Hundred to indict the three former directors who had been ousted in prairial. The prospect of a return to the high-profile public trials of the past scared the moderates, even though a neo-Jacobin spokesman promised that the only punishment they wanted to inflict on the former directors was to make them sweep the streets of Paris while dressed in their official costumes. Sieyès immediately went to work to undermine the neo-Jacobin allies with whom he had cooperated just two months earlier. Among those who joined him was Bonaparte’s younger brother Lucien, who had succeeded in claiming a seat in the Council of Five Hundred as a representative for Corsica, the family’s place of origin. In a widely noted speech, he swore that France would see “no more scaffolds, no more terror, no more of the execrable regime of 1793.”⁴² A few days later, Sieyès persuaded his colleagues to name Joseph Fouché, the former terrorist and leader of the thermidor conspiracy against Robespierre, as minister of police. Having long since renounced any sympathy with the radicalism of 1793–1794, Fouché put his formidable organizational skills to use to repress the neo-Jacobins, whose club was closed in mid-August.

As it contended with the neo-Jacobins in Paris and the provinces, where nearly 250 clubs had sprung up, the Directory also had to face a new royalist uprising, timed to coincide with offensives by the republic’s foreign enemies. The rebels began an insurrection in the countryside around the southwestern city of Toulouse on August 5, 1799, counting on support from royalist groups in Brittany and the Vendée. They hoped that a planned landing of British and Russian troops in the Netherlands, as well as the advance of Austrian and Russian troops in Italy and Switzerland, would keep the Directory from sending troops to oppose them. News of the royalist uprisings inspired the neo-Jacobins in Paris to make one more attempt to swing the majority of the legislative councils in their favor. General Jourdan’s motion to declare “the country in danger,” however, seen as a prelude to revolutionary measures like those taken in 1792 and 1793, failed by a vote of 171 to 245.

The new Directory’s position should have been consolidated by a turn in the tide of the foreign war. On September 19, 1799, General Guillaume Brune inflicted a crushing defeat on the Anglo-Russian invasion force in the Netherlands. A week later, General André Masséna won a decisive victory over the Russians at Zurich, ending the threat to the Helvetic Republic. The improvement in the republic’s political and military situation did nothing to dissuade Sieyès from pursuing the goal he had had in mind since his election to the Directory three months earlier. Convinced that the Constitution of 1795 was fatally flawed, he was determined to replace it. He had decided early on that he would need a prominent general as a partner, preferably one without marked political ambitions of his own. During the summer he had settled on Barthélemy Joubert, a young commander who had served under Bonaparte in Italy. Hoping to build up Joubert’s reputation, Sieyès had him sent to Italy; in mid-August, his troops won a hard-fought victory at the Battle of Novi, but the general had the misfortune of being killed in the fighting. Sieyès turned to other options, but by the beginning of October he had still not found an officer willing to play the role of his “sword” in a coup. And then, on October 9, 1799, the commander of the Army of Egypt unexpectedly landed at the southern French port of Fréjus.

After his invasion of Palestine failed to produce a decisive victory over the Turks, Bonaparte had begun making preparations to return to France well before he finally took ship on August 22. Four months earlier, he had received a letter from his brother Joseph urging him to come home, both for political reasons and to deal with the infidelities of his wife, Josephine. After organizing the retreat of his forces back to Cairo and winning a battle at Aboukir against a Turkish army, which had been transported there by the British, Bonaparte decided that his soldiers would be able to hold out for some length of time without him. When he had negotiated an exchange of prisoners with the British following the affair at Aboukir, they had given him newspapers from Europe informing him that almost all of his conquests in Italy had been lost. Bonaparte realized that France was facing the possibility of military disaster. He did not have the courage to inform his soldiers, or even General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who would be left in command of the stranded expeditionary force, of his departure. “That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit,” Kléber exclaimed when he learned what Bonaparte had done.⁴³

Technically, Bonaparte had abandoned his post, and the director Barras later claimed that when he and his colleagues learned of his arrival in France, they discussed having him arrested and shot. By this time, however, the general had already been given ecstatic welcomes in all the towns he passed through as he headed to Paris. In Lyon, “all the houses were lighted up and covered with flags.… [T]here was dancing in the public squares, and the air was filled with cries of ‘Long live Bonaparte who comes to save the country.’”⁴⁴ Once he reached the capital, Bonaparte’s first order of business was to resolve a family drama. His brothers and sisters pressed him to break with Josephine, but he reconciled with her instead. He wanted to avoid being distracted by divorce proceedings while he pursued his main goal of finding a route to power. Reinstalled in his house on a street renamed rue de la Victoire in his honor, Bonaparte plunged into a round of encounters with political insiders to see what opportunities were open to him.

As he sized up the situation, Bonaparte had the assistance of several key figures who saw an alliance with him as a way of furthering their own ends. Talleyrand, who had been dismissed as foreign minister after the coup of 30 prairial, played a key role thanks to his broad range of contacts. Pierre-Louis Roederer, like Talleyrand, had connections across the political spectrum, as well as with the intellectuals of the Idéologue movement. The latter remained sympathetic to the general because he had brought them into his Egyptian venture. Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, a member of the Council of Five Hundred, was also deeply involved in these political intrigues. Many of Bonaparte’s fellow generals shared his contempt for the civilian politicians running the country and were prepared to accept his leadership. Some neo-Jacobins might have been prepared to cooperate with Bonaparte as well—one of their complaints against the Directory was that it had deliberately sent the general into “exile” in Egypt. He had a lengthy but acrimonious meeting with General Jean Bernadotte, the military leader closest to the neo-Jacobin party. The neo-Jacobins’ democratic program had no appeal for him, however. “After having triumphed with them,” he later said, “I would have had to triumph over them.”⁴⁵ He met with the two least political members of the Directory, Gohier and Moulin, to explore the possibility of getting himself appointed to that body, but they were not willing to help him.

Realizing that the opposition of these two directors left him with no way of gaining power through legal means, Bonaparte turned to potential allies who were open to the idea of a coup. Sieyès was the leading candidate. As soon as the news of Bonaparte’s return reached Paris, General Jean-Victor Moreau, with whom Sieyès had been negotiating, pointed out the obvious: “There is your man! He will make your coup much better than me.”⁴⁶ Sieyès would have preferred a general with a more pliant personality, but he had no real alternative. He had already worked out a plan in which the Council of Elders, where he had a firm group of supporters, would activate a constitutional provision allowing for the declaration of a state of emergency. That would trigger the transfer of both legislative assemblies to a location outside of Paris, where the Council of Five Hundred could be pressured into voting for a new regime.

From Bonaparte’s point of view, the main disadvantage of joining Sieyès’s plot was that the veteran revolutionary politician assumed that Sieyès would make the key decisions about the new constitutional arrangements to replace the Directory. The general would be expected to simply lend his popularity to the operation and accept a secondary role afterward. The alternative to Sieyès was Barras, who had helped launch Bonaparte’s career by calling on him to put down the counterrevolutionary vendémiaire uprising in 1795. A meeting between the two men on the night of October 30, 1799, did not go well: Barras told his former protégé that he was too inexperienced to assume a political role. By the following morning, when several of Barras’s former allies who had gone over to Bonaparte convinced him that he had made a terrible mistake, the general had already committed himself to Sieyès.

In just over a week, the plotters finalized their plans. Early on the morning of 18 brumaire Year VIII (November 9, 1799), letters were delivered to 150 members of the Council of Elders summoning them to an emergency meeting—another 100 who were considered unlikely to go along with the coup were not informed. One of the plotters told them that the country was menaced by a terrible conspiracy and that if they did not act at once, “there will be no more representative body, no more liberty, no more Republic.” The sleepy-eyed deputies were befuddled by the lack of any evidence of an imminent uprising, but they voted to appoint Bonaparte the commander of the troops in Paris and to order the transfer of the councils to the small town of Saint-Cloud west of the city. The plotters had chosen this location because it would keep crowds from forming who might oppose their plans; it would also allow them to surround the deputies with loyal troops.

As the Council of Elders was meeting, Bonaparte assembled other military leaders at his own home. Once he received the decree appointing him as military commander of Paris, he set off for the Tuileries, the seat of the legislature. Addressing the troops assembled around the building, he justified his action as a matter of national security. “In what shape did I leave France, and in what shape do I find it now! I left you in peace, and I find war! I left you with conquests, and the enemy threatens our frontiers!… [T]his state of things cannot last; in three months it would have led us to despotism. But we want the Republic… based on equality, morals, civil liberty and political tolerance. With a good administration all will forget the factions of which they were members in order to become French.”⁴⁷

While Bonaparte was busy at the Tuileries, Talleyrand took charge of ousting the three potentially hostile directors from the Luxembourg. Barras was given a generous bribe and exiled to his country estate, his political career at an end; his colleagues Gohier and Moulin realized that resistance was futile. Meanwhile, printed posters and pamphlets prepared in advance were being distributed throughout the city celebrating Bonaparte and justifying the coup. “It cannot be that a man so eminent by his services remains excluded from leadership,” one propaganda piece insisted.⁴⁸ None of the publications announcing the coup made any mention of Sieyès, the man who had really set it in motion.

The day of 18 brumaire had gone off without a hitch, but the plotters still had to deal with the councils, which were due to reassemble at the former royal palace in Saint-Cloud on the following morning. At a meeting on the evening of 18 brumaire, Sieyès, Bonaparte, and the other principal conspirators argued for hours about how to persuade the legislators to agree to abandon the Constitution of 1795. Sieyès, the civilian, favored forceful action: he wanted to arrest the neo-Jacobin deputies in the Council of Five Hundred before they could voice any opposition. Bonaparte, the military man, demurred: he wanted to maintain a facade of legality, so that the new regime would not bear the stigma of having been imposed by force. Both Bonaparte and Sieyès realized that their scheme could still fall apart if the deputies really stood up to defend the existing constitution, as they had six months earlier when they forced the members of the Directory to resign. On the morning of 19 brumaire (November 10), as a carriage transporting him to Saint-Cloud crossed the Place de la Révolution, where Louis XVI and Robespierre had both been executed, Bonaparte’s aide, Bourrienne, said to his companion, “Tomorrow we will sleep at the Luxembourg or we will end up here.”⁴⁹

If the 18th of brumaire had been a model of a well-executed coup d’état, the 19th was a lesson on the dangers of improvisation. Whereas the plotters had succeeded in keeping potential opponents from attending the previous day’s early-morning session of the Council of Elders, this time the full membership of both assemblies arrived, including the neo-Jacobin deputies. They were accompanied by several thousand soldiers, including the councils’ official guards, who could not be counted on to support the coup, and by a large crowd of civilian spectators. It was well past noon before the two councils officially began their sessions in their improvised chambers. The conspirators’ plan was to have the Council of Elders immediately approve a decree appointing three provisional consuls to replace the Directory and small committees drawn from the two councils to draft a new constitution. Lucien Bonaparte, the president of the Council of Five Hundred, would then ram the measure through that body, and the two councils’ meetings would be suspended.

Instead of bowing to the conspirators’ pressures, the Council of Elders held an angry debate. The deputies who had been kept away from the previous day’s session demanded evidence of the conspiracy that justified their transfer to Saint-Cloud. “We are no longer in the times when the Committee of Public Safety said, ‘Take my word,’ and dictated decrees to the representatives of the nation,” one deputy exclaimed.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, the neo-Jacobin opponents of the coup in the Council of Five Hundred ignored Lucien Bonaparte’s efforts to silence them and demanded instead that all the council members individually swear a new oath of loyalty to the Constitution of 1795. By 4:00 p.m., Napoleon Bonaparte, his nerves on edge, had decided to address the Council of Elders in person. Challenged to declare whether he supported the constitution, he turned on the deputies, telling them, “The Constitution! Every faction invokes it, and every faction violates it; all of them despise it; it cannot save us, since no one respects it anymore.” Called on to provide evidence that the republic was in such jeopardy that emergency measures were needed to save it, he repeated his claim that only he represented “the great party of the French people.” Finally, discarding any effort at persuasion, he addressed himself to “the brave soldiers whose bayonets I see,” openly threatening the legislators. “Remember that I march accompanied by the god of victory and the god of good fortune!” he told the recalcitrant deputies.⁵¹

Even the loyal Bourrienne admitted that “there was not the slightest sense in everything he managed to get out.… Bonaparte was no orator.” As soon as he left the meeting room, new opposition to his allies’ demands for action broke out. “All measures should be approved by the whole legislative body, and in accordance with the constitution,” one deputy insisted.⁵² Meanwhile, Bonaparte, accompanied by two grenadiers, had forced his way into the palace’s Orangerie, where his brother Lucien was surrounded by angry Jacobin deputies shouting, “Death to the tyrant! Down with the dictator! Long live the Republic and the Constitution of the Year III!” As they saw Napoleon Bonaparte advancing toward the speaker’s podium, the Jacobins turned on him, screaming, “Outlaw him! Outlaw him!” Dragged out of the room by the grenadiers and several officers who had rushed to his defense, Bonaparte seemed stunned and unable to speak coherently. Inside, Lucien struggled to keep the deputies from immediately voting to declare his brother “outside the law.”

Once Bonaparte recovered his wits, he, Sieyès, and the other plot leaders appealed to the soldiers gathered outside the palace. Lucien Bonaparte emerged to galvanize them with the false claim that “the immense majority of the Council is at this moment terrorized by a few deputies with stilettos.” Napoleon Bonaparte himself seconded him, saying, “I wanted to speak to them; they have responded to me with daggers.” Led by General Joachim Murat, soldiers entered the Orangerie. The pretense that a transfer of power was being carried out through legal means was completely abandoned. “All honest men leave or I will no longer be answerable for my actions!” an officer announced. The Council of Elders, informed that its sister body had been forcibly dispersed, made a last effort to assert itself, passing a resolution that announced the appointment of a provisional government but that also called for the reconvening of the two assemblies a month later, a move that exasperated the plotters. To make sure of their success, they were obliged to round up enough of the now dispersed members of the Council of Five Hundred to hold a semblance of a parliamentary session. There, the members of the council were intimidated into voting for a resolution naming Sieyès, Ducos, and Bonaparte to run the government as provisional consuls and replacing the councils with two committees that would draw up a new constitution. The remaining members of the Council of Elders were then pressured to approve the measure. It was not until 3:00 a.m. on 20 brumaire (November 11) that the newly named consuls could take their oath of office. Lucien Bonaparte proclaimed that “from today, all the convulsions of liberty are at an end.”⁵³

As the exhausted participants in the drama of Saint-Cloud straggled back to Paris, they had little real idea what the events of the past two days portended for the republic and the legacy of the Revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte’s stumbling performance had created doubts about his ability to play the leading role he had cast for himself; perhaps he would soon find himself outmaneuvered by Sieyès and the other veteran politicians who had organized the overthrow of the Directory. At the same time, however, the use of troops to chase the elected representatives of the nation out of their meeting hall raised the specter of a genuine military dictatorship. In his angry harangue to the Council of Elders, Bonaparte had accused the republic’s own leaders of discrediting the Revolution’s principles, citing the coups they had carried out on 18 fructidor Year V (September 4, 1797); 22 floréal Year VI (May 11, 1798); and 30 prairial Year VII (June 18, 1799). The absence of popular reaction to the overthrow of the Directory showed how little support there was for the regime created in 1795. The lack of enthusiasm for the Constitution of 1795 was not a mandate for its replacement by one-man rule, however. Much would still have to happen before, in December 1804, the French would again find themselves living under a hereditary ruler.