The Directory, then, was in a minority in the country, and had to be ever on the alert against faction; all possible methods seemed legitimate, and during two years appeared successful. Order was maintained in France, even the Struggle against the royalists.
Struggle against the republican democrats and the socialists. royalist west being pacified, thanks to Hoche, who finished his victorious campaign of 1796 against Stofflet, Charette and Cadoudal, by using mild and just measures to complete the subjection of the country. The greatest danger lay in the republican-democrats and their socialist ally, François Noel (“Gracchus”) Babeuf (q.v.). The former had united the Jacobins and the more violent members of the Convention in their club, the Société du Panthéon; and their fusion, after the closing of the club, with the secret society of the Babouvists lent formidable strength to this party, with which Barras was secretly in league. The terrorist party, deprived of its head, had found a new leader, who, by developing the consequences of the Revolution’s acts to their logical conclusion, gave first expression to the levelling principle of communism. He proclaimed the right of property as appertaining to the state, that is, to the whole community; Babeuf. the doctrine of equality as absolutely opposed to social inequality of any kind—that of property as well as that of rank; and finally the inadequacy of the solution of the agrarian question, which had profited scarcely any one, save a new class of privileged individuals. But these socialist demands were premature; the attack of the camp of Grenelle upon constitutional order ended merely in the arrest and guillotining of Babeuf (September 9, 1796-May 25, 1797).
The liquidation of the financial inheritance of the Convention was no less difficult. The successive issues of assignats, and the multiplication of counterfeits made abroad, had so depreciated this paper money that an assignat of 100 Financial policy of the Directory. francs was in February 1796 worth only 30 centimes; while the government, obliged to accept them at their nominal value, no longer collected any taxes and could not pay salaries. The destruction of the plate for printing assignats, on the 18th of February 1796, did not prevent the drop in the forty milliards still in circulation. Territorial mandates were now tried, which inspired no greater confidence, but served to liquidate two-thirds of the debt, the remaining third being consolidated by its dependence on the Grand Livre (September 30, 1797). This widespread bankruptcy, falling chiefly on the bourgeoisie, inaugurated a reaction which lasted until 1830 against the chief principle of the Constituent Assembly, which had favoured indirect taxation as producing a large sum without imposing any very obvious burden. The bureaucrats of the old system—having returned to their offices and being used to these indirect taxes—lent their assistance, and thus the Directory was enabled to maintain its struggle against the Coalition.
All system in finance having disappeared, war provided the Directory, now in extremis, with a treasury, and was its only source for supplying constitutional needs; while it opened a path to the military commanders who were External policy. to be the support and the glory of the state. England remaining invulnerable in her insular position despite Hoche’s attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, the Directory resumed the traditional policy against Austria of conquering the natural frontiers, Carnot furnishing the plans; hence the war in southern Germany, in which Jourdan and Moreau were repulsed by an inferior force under the archduke Charles, and Bonaparte’s triumphant Italian campaign. Chief of an army that he had made irresistible, not by honour but by glory, and master of wealth by rapine, Bonaparte imposed his will upon the Directory, which he provided with funds. After having separated the Piedmontese from the Austrians, whom he drove back into Tyrol, and repulsed offensive reprisals of Wurmser and Alvinzi on four occasions, he stopped short at the preliminary negotiations of Léoben just at the moment when the Directory, discouraged by the problem of Italian reconstitution, was preparing the army of the Rhine to re-enter the field under the command of Hoche. Bonaparte thus gained the good opinion of peace-loving Frenchmen; he partitioned Venetian territory with Austria, contrary to French interests but conformably with his own in Italy, and henceforward was the decisive factor in French and European policy, like Caesar or Pompey of old. England, in consternation, offered in her turn to negotiate at Lille.
These military successes did not prevent the Directory, like the Thermidorians, from losing ground in the country. Every strategic truce since 1795 had been marked by a political crisis; peace reawakened opposition. The constitutional Struggle against the royalists. party, royalist in reality, had made alarming progress, chiefly owing to the Babouvist conspiracy; they now tried to corrupt the republican generals, and Condé procured the treachery of Pichegru, Kellermann and General Ferrand at Besançon. Moreover, their Clichy club, directed by the abbé Brottier, manipulated Parisian opinion; while many of the refractory priests, having returned after the liberal Public Worship Act of September 1795, made active propaganda against the principles of the Revolution, and plotted the fall of the Directory as maintaining the State’s independence of the Church. Thus the partial elections of the year V. (May 20, 1797) had brought back into the two councils a counter-revolutionary majority of royalists, constitutionalists of 1791, Catholics and moderates. The Director Letourneur had been replaced by Barthélemy, who had negotiated the treaty of Basel and was a constitutional monarchist. So that the executive not only found it impossible to govern, owing to the opposition of the councils and a vehement press-campaign, but was distracted by ceaseless internal conflict. Carnot and Barthélemy wished to meet ecclesiastical opposition by legal measures only, and demanded peace; while Barras, La Révellière and Reubell saw no other remedy save military force. The attempt of the counter-revolutionaries to make an army for themselves out of the guard of the Legislative Assembly, and the success of the Catholics, who had managed at the end of August 1797 to repeal the laws against refractory priests, determined the Directory to appeal from the rebellious parliament to the ready swords of Augereau and Bernadotte. On the 18th Fructidor (September 18th Fructidor. 4, 1797) Bonaparte’s lieutenants, backed up by the whole army, stopped the elections in forty-nine departments, and deported to Guiana many deputies of both councils, journalists and non-juring priests, as well as the director Barthélemy, though Carnot escaped into Switzerland. The royalist party was once more overthrown, but with it the republican constitution itself. Thus every act of violence still further confirmed the new empire of the army and the defeat of principles, preparing the way for military despotism.
Political and financial coups d’état were not enough for the directors. In order to win back public opinion, tired of internecine quarrels and sickened by the scandalous immorality of the generals and of those in power, Aggressive policy of the Directory. and to remove from Paris an army which after having given them a fresh lease of life was now a menace to them, war appeared their only hopeful course. They attempted to renew the designs of Louis XIV. and anticipate those of Napoleon. But Bonaparte saw what they were planning; and to the rupture of the negotiations at Lille and an order for the resumption of hostilities he responded by a fresh act of disobedience and the infliction on the Directory of the peace of Campo-Formio, on October 17, 1797. The directors were consoled for this enforced peace by acquiring the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium, and for the forfeiture of republican principles by attaining what had for so long been the ambition of the monarchy. But the army continued a menace. To avoid disbanding it, which might, as after the peace of Basel, have given the counter-revolution further auxiliaries, the Directory appointed Bonaparte chief of the Army of England, and employed Jourdan to revise the conscription laws so as to make military service a permanent duty of the citizen, since war was now to be the permanent object of policy. The Directory finally conceived the gigantic project of bolstering up the French Republic—the triumph of which was celebrated by the peace of Campo-Formio—by forming the neighbouring weak states into tributary vassal republics. This system had already been applied to the Batavian republic in 1795, to the Ligurian and Cisalpine republics in June 1797; it was extended to that of Mülhausen on the 28th of January 1798, to the Roman republic in February, to the Helvetian in April, while the Parthenopaean republic (Naples) was to be established in 1799. This was an international coup de force, which presupposed that all these nations in whose eyes independence was flaunted would make no claim to enjoy it; that though they had been beaten and pillaged they would not learn to conquer in their turn; and that the king of Sardinia, dispossessed of Milan, the grand-duke of Tuscany who had given refuge to the pope when driven from Rome, and the king of Naples, who had opened his ports to Nelson’s fleet, would not find allies to make a stand against this hypocritical system.
What happened was exactly the contrary. Meanwhile, the armies were kept in perpetual motion, procuring money for the impecunious Directory, making a diversion for internal discontent, and also permitting of a “reversed Coup d’état of the 22nd Floréal. Fructidor,” against the anarchists, who had got the upper hand in the partial elections of May 1798. The social danger was averted in its turn after the clerical danger had been dissipated. The next task was to relieve Paris of Bonaparte, who had already refused to repeat Hoche’s unhappy expedition to Ireland and to attack England at home without either money or a navy. The pecuniary resources of Berne and the wealth of Rome fortunately tided over the financial difficulty and provided for the expedition Bonaparte in Egypt.
The second coalition. to Egypt, which permitted Bonaparte to wait “for the fruit to ripen”—i.e. till the Directory should be ruined in the eyes of France and of all Europe. The disaster of Aboukir (August 1, 1798) speedily decided the coalition pending between England, Austria, the Empire, Portugal, Naples, Russia and Turkey. The Directory had to make a stand or perish, and with it the Republic. The directors had thought France might retain a monopoly in numbers and in initiative. They soon perceived that enthusiasm is not as great for a war of policy and conquest as for a war of national defence; and the army dwindled, since a country cannot bleed itself to death. The law of conscription was voted on the 5th of September 1798; and the tragedy of Rastadt, where the French commissioners were assassinated, was the opening of a war, desired but ill-prepared for, in which the Directory showed hesitation in strategy and incoherence in tactics, over a disproportionate area in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Military reverses were inevitable, and responsibility for them could not be shirked. As though shattered by a reverberant echo from the cannon of the Trebbia, the Directory crumbled to pieces, succumbing on the 18th of June 1799 beneath the reprobation showered on Treilhard, Merlin de Douai, and La Révellière-Lépeaux. A few more military disasters, royalist insurrections in the south, Chouan disturbances in Normandy, Orleanist intrigues and the end came. To soothe the populace and protect the frontier more was required than the resumption, as in all grave crises of the Revolution, of terrorist measures such as forced taxation or the law of hostages; the new Directory, Sieyès presiding, saw that for the indispensable revision of the constitution “a head and a sword” were needed. Moreau being unattainable, Joubert was to be the sword of Sieyès; but, when he was killed at the battle of Novi, the sword of the Revolution fell into the hands of Bonaparte.
Although Brune and Masséna retrieved the fight at Bergen and Zürich, and although the Allies lingered on the frontier as they had done after Valmy, still the fortunes of the Directory were not restored. Success was reserved Coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. for Bonaparte, suddenly landing at Fréjus with the prestige of his victories in the East, and now, after Hoche’s death, appearing as sole master of the armies. He manœuvred among the parties as on the 13th Vendémiaire. On the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. France and the army fell together at his feet. By a twofold coup d’état, parliamentary and military, he culled the fruits of the Directory’s systematic aggression and unpopularity, and realized the universal desires of the rich bourgeoisie, tired of warfare; of the wretched populace; of landholders, afraid of a return to the old order of things; of royalists, who looked upon Bonaparte as a future Monk; of priests and their people, who hoped for an indulgent treatment of Catholicism; and finally of the immense majority of the French, who love to be ruled and for long had had no efficient government. There was hardly any one to defend a liberty which they had never known. France had, indeed, remained monarchist at heart for all her revolutionary appearance; and Bonaparte added but a name, though an illustrious one, to the series of national or local dictatorships, which, after the departure of the weak Louis XVI., had maintained a sort of informal republican royalty.
On the night of the 19th Brumaire a mere ghost of an The Consulate, Sept. 11, 1799-May 18, 1804. Assembly abolished the constitution of the year III., ordained the provisionary Consulate, and legalized the coup d’état in favour of Bonaparte. A striking and singular event; for the history of France and a great part of Europe was now for fifteen years to be summed up in the person of a single man (see [Napoleon]).
This night of Brumaire, however, seemed to be a victory for Sieyès rather than for Bonaparte. He it was who originated the project which the legislative commissions, charged with elaborating the new constitution, had to discuss. Bonaparte’s The constitution of the year VIII. cleverness lay in opposing Daunou’s plan to that of Sieyès, and in retaining only those portions of both which could serve his ambition. Parliamentary institutions annulled by the complication of three assemblies—the Council of State which drafted bills, the Tribunate which discussed them without voting them, and the Legislative Assembly which voted them without discussing them; popular suffrage, mutilated by the lists of notables (on which the members of the Assemblies were to be chosen by the conservative senate); and the triple executive authority of the consuls, elected for ten years: all these semblances of constitutional authority were adopted by Bonaparte. But he abolished the post of Grand Elector, which Sieyès had reserved for himself, in order to reinforce the real authority of the First Consul himself—by leaving the two other consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun, as well as the Assemblies, equally weak. Thus the aristocratic constitution of Sieyès was transformed into an unavowed dictatorship, a public ratification of which the First Consul obtained by a third coup d’état from the intimidated and yet reassured electors-reassured by his dazzling but unconvincing offers of peace to the victorious Coalition (which repulsed them), by the rapid disarmament of La Vendée, and by the proclamations in which he filled the ears of the infatuated people with the new talk of stability of government, order, justice and moderation. He gave every one a feeling that France was governed once more by a real statesman, that a pilot was at the helm.
Bonaparte had now to rid himself of Sieyès and those republicans who had no desire to hand over the republic to one man, particularly of Moreau and Masséna, his military rivals. The victory of Marengo (June 14, 1800) momentarily in the balance, but secured by Desaix and Kellermann, offered a further opportunity to his jealous ambition by increasing his popularity. The royalist plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise (December 24, 1800) allowed him to make a clean sweep of the democratic republicans, who despite their innocence were deported to Guiana, and to annul Assemblies that were a mere show by making the senate omnipotent in constitutional matters; but it was necessary for him to transform this deceptive truce into the general pacification so ardently desired for the last eight years. The treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801 with Austria who had been disarmed by Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden, restored peace to the continent, gave nearly the whole of Italy to France, and permitted Bonaparte to eliminate from the Assemblies all the leaders of the opposition in the discussion of the Civil Code. The Concordat (July 1801), drawn up not in the Church’s interest but in that of his own policy, by giving satisfaction to the religious feeling of the country, allowed him to put down the constitutional democratic Church, to rally round him the consciences of the peasants, and above all to deprive the royalists of their best weapon. The “Articles Organiques” hid from the eyes of his companions in arms and councillors a reaction which, in fact if not in law, restored to a submissive Church, despoiled of her revenues, her position as the religion of the state. The Consulate. The peace of Amiens with England (March 1802), of which France’s allies, Spain and Holland, paid all the costs, finally gave the peacemaker a pretext for endowing himself with a Consulate, not for ten years but for life, as a recompense from the nation. The Rubicon was crossed on that day: Bonaparte’s march to empire began with the constitution of the year X. (August 1802).