Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

The Directory.

Under the new arrangement the executive was placed in the hands of five Directors. One was to retire every year and was not eligible for re-election; his successor was to be chosen by the Legislature. In order to secure an entire separation between the members of the Directory and of the Legislature, no member of the latter could be elected a Director until twelve months had elapsed after the resignation of his seat. The Directors were to appoint the Ministers, who were to have no connection whatever with the Legislature, and who were to act as the agents of the Directors. The individual Directors were to exercise no authority in their own names. They were to live under the same roof in the Palace of the Luxembourg at Paris. They were to meet daily, and the will of the majority was to be taken as the will of the whole. They were to elect a President every month, who was to act as their mouthpiece at the reception of foreign ambassadors and on all occasions of ceremony. The control of the internal administration, the management of the armies and fleets, and all questions of foreign policy were entirely left to the Directors. But treaties, declarations of war and similar acts had to be ratified by the Legislature. The Directors had nothing whatever to do with the work of legislation, and their assent was not needed to new laws. With regard to the revenue, the administration of the finances and of the treasury rested with the Directors, but they could not impose fresh taxes without the assent of the Legislature.

The Legislature.

The Legislature, under the Constitution of the Year III. consisted of two chambers—the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred. It is a curious commentary upon the debates which took place in the Constituent Assembly in August 1789, when the establishment of two chambers was rejected with scorn as being an obvious imitation of the English Parliament, that in 1795 this very principle was almost unanimously adopted. The experience of the three great revolutionary assemblies had convinced Sieyès and his colleagues of the inexpediency of leaving important measures to be decided in a single chamber. The delay necessitated by a law being obliged to pass before two distinct deliberative bodies now appeared most advantageous, when compared with the headlong precipitation which had marked all the earlier stages of the Revolution. The Council of Ancients was to consist of men forty-five years old and upwards, and, therefore, presumably not liable to be carried away by sudden bursts of enthusiasm. For the Council of Five Hundred there was no limitation of age, and elderly men were not precluded from being returned to it. The Council of Five Hundred consisted, as its name implies, of five hundred deputies; the Council of Ancients of two hundred and fifty. Dictated by experience, also, were the measures taken for the election of deputies. In order to avoid the inconvenience which had resulted from the election of an entirely new body of representatives at one and the same moment, as had happened in 1791, it was resolved that one-third of the two Councils should retire yearly. Deputies were to be chosen by an elaborate system of primary and secondary assemblies held in each department of France, and a property qualification was demanded both for the electors and the deputies. With these safeguards Sieyès and his colleagues believed they had secured a practical means of obviating all the errors of the past. The Council of Five Hundred had allotted to it as its special function the initiation of all fresh taxation and the revision of all money bills. The Council of Ancients was the court of appeal in diplomatic questions, such as the declaration of war. In actual legislation the consent of the majority of both chambers was needed for a new law. For their most important function—the yearly election of a new Director—the two chambers were to form one united assembly.

Local Administration of France.

By this Constitution, the conspicuous drawbacks of the two former Constitutions, namely, the enforced weakness of the executive and the undefined powers of the Legislature were avoided. But the local administration established by the Constitution of 1791 had proved so excellent that it was only slightly modified and not radically altered. The great achievement of the Constituent Assembly—the abolition of old provincial jealousies by the division of France into departments—was maintained. The wise step which had been taken by the Great Committee of Public Safety in abolishing the directories of the departments and of the districts was sanctioned, and the council-generals were left to act alone. The main distinction between the administrative systems of 1791 and 1795 was that the elected procureurs-syndics and procureurs-généraux-syndics, established by the former, were replaced by officials nominated by the supreme executive at Paris. These officials went under the name of agents during the Directory, but possessed the same authority and carried out the same functions as the sous-préfets and préfets afterwards appointed by Napoleon. The courts of justice, whether local, appellant, or supreme, established by the Constitution of 1791, were left untouched by the Constitution of the Year III.

The Insurrection of Vendémiaire.

In spite of the glories of the conquest of Holland, the passage of the Rhine, the victory of Quiberon, and the invasion of Spain,—in spite of the even greater credit justly earned by the Treaties of Basle,—in spite of the new Constitution, which, if faulty in places, was superior to those which had preceded it—the Thermidorians were intensely unpopular in France. The recollection of the Reign of Terror weighed upon the imaginations of the people even after the death of Robespierre, the deportation of Billaud-Varenne, and the closing of the Jacobin Club. The Convention was still in the minds of men shrouded by the remembrance of the innocent blood that had been shed. The inauguration of the new constitutional system was looked upon as an opportunity for driving the members of the Convention from power, and threats of vengeance were everywhere heard against them. Intriguers, some of them possibly royalists, who desired the return of the Bourbons, but most of them bourgeois or aristocrats who had personal reasons for desiring revenge, hoped to take advantage of this general feeling to overthrow the Republic. But the mass of Frenchmen were sincerely republican, and were clear-sighted enough to perceive that the return of the Bourbons would be followed by the loss of the material advantages that had been gained by the sale of the lands of the Church and the nobility. The members of the Convention understood the intentions of the intriguers, and understood also that the French people sincerely loved the Republic. They proceeded to frustrate the designs of their enemies by decreeing that two-thirds of the new Legislature must be elected from among the deputies of the Convention. The intriguers in Paris, thus foiled in their expectations of a certain majority in the new Legislature, tried to rouse the people of Paris into active insurrection. There can be no doubt that not only in Paris, but throughout France, the action of the Convention in ordering the election of so large a proportion of the old deputies was profoundly unpopular, but it was one thing to dislike a measure and another thing to involve France in a fresh revolution. In the provincial towns there was universal grumbling but no active opposition. In Paris, however, where the intriguers abounded, it was hoped that the jeunesse dorée, who had played so great a part in the previous winter, assisted by the bourgeois Sections, would be able by making an imposing display of force to compel the Convention to revoke the obnoxious decree.

Fighting in Paris, 13th Vendémiaire (5th October 1795).

This project of the agitators in Paris was soon known in the Convention, and had the result of causing the divided forces of the Thermidorians to close up their ranks. The three chief groups in this party were the returned Girondins, the leaders of the Plain, and the former adherents of the Terror. The leaders of all these groups united in the presence of a common danger, for they felt that the dissolution of the Convention without some such measure of security as the re-election of the two-thirds to the forthcoming Legislature would lead to their own proscription. They therefore appointed Barras, who had commanded in the attack upon the Hôtel-de-Ville upon the 9th Thermidor of the previous year, and overthrown the supporters of Robespierre assembled there, to watch over their safety. Barras summoned to his assistance Napoleon Bonaparte, who was then in Paris engaged in protesting against his recall from the Army of Italy. The antecedents of this young general, his well-known Jacobin principles and his former friendship for Augustin Robespierre, had led to his recall and to his being placed upon the unemployed list. Barras had under his command the garrison of regular troops quartered in Paris and the armed guards of the Convention. The Royalist agitators counted on the jeunesse dorée and the bourgeois Sections. Bonaparte perceived that in numbers each party was evenly matched, and he at once sent for the artillery quartered at Meudon. The Convention declared itself en permanence, the troops were stationed round the Tuileries, Bonaparte’s guns were mounted in the gardens and the Place du Carrousel. The attack on the Convention was made on the 13th Vendémiaire (5th October) in a very slovenly manner. No effort had been made to concentrate the force of the assailants at a given moment, and as the first column marched carelessly down without recognised leaders, it was fired upon and almost entirely cut to pieces by Bonaparte’s artillery. Nevertheless column after column of devoted national guards approached the Tuileries with the utmost gallantry to meet the same fate. The insurrection of 13th Vendémiaire cannot be compared with the other famous insurrections of the 14th July 1789 and 10th August 1792, for not one of the defenders of the Convention was wounded. It was a butchery, not a battle.