The French Revolution: A Short History

by R. M. Johnston

The Russian field marshal Suvaroff, with an Austro-Russian army, was sweeping everything before him. On the 27th of April he defeated Moreau at Cassano; he then occupied Milan, and drove the French south into Genoa. {257} At this moment Macdonald, who had succeeded Championnet at Naples, was marching northwards to join Moreau. Suvaroff got between them and, after three days' hard fighting, from the 17th to the 19th of June, inflicted a second severe defeat on the French, at La Trebbia. These reverses shattered the whole French domination of Italy; their armies were defeated, their vassal republics sank, that of Naples under horrible conditions of royalist reprisal and massacre.

The Directoire suffered heavily in prestige by the events of a war which it had so lightly provoked and was so incompetent to conduct. In June the Councils made a further successful attack on the Executive and succeeded, in quick succession, in forcing out three of the Directors, Treilhard, Larevellière, and Merlin. For them were substituted Gohier, who was colourless; Moulin, who was stupid, and Ducos, who was pliable. Of the Thermidorians Barras alone remained, and Barras, after five years of uninterrupted power and luxury, was used up as a man of action; he was quite ready to come to reasonable terms with Sieyès, or, if matters should turn that way, with the Comte de Provence, whose agents were in touch with him.

{258} Sieyès who owed his position in great part to the support of the Jacobins in the Council of Five Hundred, now found them an obstacle. The defeats of the armies were making them unruly. They had formed a club, meeting in the Manège, that threatened to develop all the characteristics of the old Jacobin Club, and that caused widespread alarm. The Ancients ordered the closing of the Manège. But the Jacobins, led by Jourdan, Bernadotte, minister of war, and others, continued their meetings in new quarters. They began to clamour for a new committee of public safety.

Sieyès now selected Joubert to retrieve the situation. This young general had been one of Bonaparte's most brilliant divisional commanders. He had a strong following in the army, was a staunch republican, and was possibly a general of the first order. He was sent for, was told to assume command in Italy, and was given every battalion that could possibly be scraped together. With these he was to win a battle decisive not only of the fate of Italy but of that of the Republic and of the Directoire.

Joubert left Paris on the 16th of July. A month later, having concentrated all that was left of the Italian armies together with his {259} reinforcements at Genoa, he marched north. At Novi, half way to the Po, Suvaroff barred his advance. A great battle was fought; the French were heavily defeated; and Joubert was killed. One week later, just as the disastrous news of Novi was reaching Paris, General Bonaparte with a few officers of his staff embarked at Alexandria, and risking the English men of war, set sail for France.

Bonaparte now becomes the central figure on the historical stage, and the events that follow belong to his history more than to that of the Revolution. Here all that remains to be done is to indicate the nature of the change that now took place, his connection with the schemes of Sieyès for ridding France of the Directoire and placing something more effective in its stead.

While Bonaparte was sailing the Mediterranean,—seven long weeks from Alexandria to Fréjus,—the disgust and weariness of France increased. Jourdan and Bernadotte, in a blundering way, attempted to wrest power from the Directors, but proved unequal in prestige and ability to the task;—a more powerful and more subtle political craftsman was needed. Then in the gloom of the public {260} despondence three sudden flashes electrified the air, flash on flash. Masséna, with the last army of the Republic, turning sharply right and left, beat the Austrians, destroyed Suvaroff in the mountains of Switzerland about Zurich. Before the excitement had subsided, came a despatch from the depths of the Mediterranean, penned with Ossianic exaggeration by the greatest of political romanticists, in which was announced the destruction of a turbaned army of Turks at Aboukir by the irresistible demi-brigades of the old army of Italy. And then, suddenly, people ran out into the streets to be told that the man himself was in France; Bonaparte had landed at Fréjus.

Rarely has a country turned to an individual as France turned to Bonaparte at that moment. And he, playing with cool mastery and well-contained judgment on the political instrument fate had placed in his hands, announced himself as the man of peace, of reform, of strong civil government, of republican virtue. It was one long ovation from Fréjus to Paris.

At Paris Bonaparte judged, and judged rightly, that the pear, as he crudely put it, was ripe. All parties came to him, and Sieyès came {261} to him. The author of that epoch-making pamphlet Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat?, and the greatest soldier produced by the Revolution, put their heads together to bring the Revolution to an end.

Sieyès and Bonaparte effected their purpose on the 9th and 10th of November, the 18th and 19th of Brumaire. The method they adopted was merely a slight development of that used by Barras and Augereau at the Revolution of Fructidor two years earlier. Some of the Directors were put under constraint; others supported the conspiracy. But the Council of Five Hundred resisted strenuously, and it was only after scenes of great violence that it succumbed. It was only at the tap of the army drums and at the flash of serried bayonets, that the last assembly of the Revolution abandoned its post. The man of the sword, so long foreseen and dreaded by Robespierre, had come into his own, and the Republic had made way for the Consulate.