French Directory

• 1. Introduction

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  The French Directory was born in the wreckage of terror. When five men walked into the Luxembourg Palace on the 1st of November 1795 to take up their offices as the new rulers of France, they found rooms stripped bare of furniture. The Committee of Public Safety, the body that had guillotined thousands, had occupied those same rooms just days before. The new directors had to scrounge for firewood and a table just to begin their work.

  France in 1795 was exhausted. The paper money, the assignat, had collapsed almost to nothing. Bread prices were climbing so fast that the government could not print money quickly enough to keep up with its own spending. The treasury was empty. The army was spread across Europe, fighting Britain, Austria, Prussia, the Kingdom of Naples, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire all at once. And within France itself, two forces were ready to tear the new government apart: the Jacobins, who wanted to drag France back into revolutionary fire, and the royalists, who wanted to restore the king.

  The Directory was a constitutional experiment designed specifically to prevent any one person from seizing absolute power. Five directors would share executive authority, with one replaced every year. There would be two elected councils. The whole apparatus was constructed so that no Robespierre could ever rise again.

  For four years it held. Then, on the 9th of November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte stepped in.

• 2. Designing Against Tyranny

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  Pierre Daunou and Boissy d'Anglas were the principal architects of the Constitution of Year III, and they worked under one overriding fear: never again. Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety had shown what a single unchecked authority could do. Archival records counted at least 16,600 people executed on charges of counter-revolutionary activity between September 1793 and July 1794, with another 40,000 possibly summarily executed or dead while awaiting trial.

  D'Anglas spelled out the logic of the new executive in a letter to the Convention: a five-member directory, he argued, would be "concentrated enough that it will be swift and firm, but divided enough to make it impossible for any member to even consider becoming a tyrant." One chief, he wrote plainly, would be dangerous.

  The new legislature had two chambers. The Council of Five Hundred drafted legislation; the Council of Ancients, a body of 250 men over the age of forty, reviewed and could veto it. Neither chamber could remove the Directors unless they actually broke the law. And the Directors, for their part, had no voice in legislation or taxation, and could not sit in either house. Power was deliberately fractured.

  Voting was restricted. In towns with over six thousand people, a voter had to own or rent property generating revenue equal to at least one hundred fifty to two hundred days of work, and had to have lived there for at least a year. Of roughly five million eligible voters, only 1,057,390 approved the Constitution in the national referendum, while 49,978 opposed it. This was hardly a ringing popular mandate, and the members of the old Convention took note: they inserted a rule requiring that five hundred of their own number remain in the new legislature regardless of the election results. Only 205,498 votes endorsed that arrangement, against 108,754 opposed. The new republic began life with its founders firmly entrenched inside it.

• 3. Five Men, No Furniture

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  Paul Barras was the dominant personality among the first five directors, a fact his colleagues recognized and resented. Lazare Carnot, who shared the directory with him, described Barras as "without faith and without morals... in politics, without character and without resolution... He has all the tastes of an opulent prince, generous, magnificent and dissipated." Barras had been a revolutionary envoy to Toulon, where he first met the young Napoleon Bonaparte and arranged his promotion to captain. He had survived Robespierre by helping to organize Robespierre's downfall.

  Carnot himself was a very different figure. An army captain at the start of the Revolution, he had been elected to the Convention and joined the commission on military affairs, becoming a fierce critic of Robespierre. Napoleon, who later made him Minister of War, described him as "a hard worker, sincere in everything, but without intrigues, and easy to fool." Carnot had restructured the French military so efficiently that he earned the title "The Organizer of the Victory."

  Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux was a fierce republican and fierce anti-Catholic. He had proposed executing Louis XVI after the king's flight to Varennes, and he was busy promoting a new religion called theophilanthropy to replace Christianity altogether. Jean-François Rewbell handled foreign relations and was Barras's closest ally, a moderate republican who had voted for the death of the king but also opposed the extremes of Jacobin rule. Étienne-François Le Tourneur, a former captain of engineers, was Carnot's closest ally inside the Directory and handled military and naval affairs.

  The first director chosen, Abbé Sieyès, refused the position outright, saying it did not suit his interests or his personality. Carnot was elected in his place. A sixth figure, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, would return to play a decisive role four years later, when he engineered Bonaparte's coup to bring the whole structure down.

• 4. The Economy in Freefall

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  La Révellière-Lépeaux described what the Directory inherited when it took office: "The national Treasury was completely empty; not a single sou remained. The assignats were almost worthless; the little value which remained drained away each day with accelerated speed. One could not print enough money in one night to meet the most pressing needs of the next day.... The public revenues were nonexistent; citizens had lost the habit of paying taxes."

  The gold Louis d'or illustrates the collapse. Worth 2,000 livres in paper money at the start of the Directory, it soon climbed to 3,000, then 5,000. A liter of wine went from 2 livres 10 sols in October 1795 to 10 livres and then 30. A measure of flour that cost 2 livres in 1790 had reached 225 livres by October 1794. The government printed assignats as fast as it could, but even printing one hundred million in a single day covered only one-third of what it needed to spend.

  The Directory tried several remedies at once. In December 1795 it imposed a forced loan of 600 million livres on wealthy citizens, requiring individual payments between 50 and 6,000 livres. It minted 72 million silver coins from candlesticks, silverware, and other objects confiscated from churches and the nobility. On the 19th of February 1796, the government held a public ceremony in the Place Vendôme to destroy the printing presses that had produced the assignats.

  That ceremony, however, left more than two billion four hundred million assignats still circulating as claims on confiscated property. Once they had some value again, holders rushed to exchange them for state mandates, which they used to buy châteaux and church buildings at vastly reduced prices. Property in Paris began changing hands several times in a single day. In September-December 1797, the Directory declared bankruptcy on two-thirds of the national debt and guaranteed payment only on the remaining third. This wiped out the bondholders but steadied the currency. The taxes that kept the treasury solvent thereafter fell on property owners, based on the number of fireplaces, chimneys, and windows in their homes.

• 5. Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals

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  François-Noël Babeuf, who went by the name Gracchus, published a newspaper called Le Tribun du peuple and argued for a form of economic equality France had never attempted. He did not call for abolishing private property outright; peasants should own their land, he wrote. But all wealth above basic subsistence should be shared equally, all citizens capable of working would be required to work, and all would receive the same income. Babeuf did not trust the mass of French people to govern themselves yet, so he proposed a dictatorship under his own leadership until they were educated enough to take charge. "People!", he wrote, "Breathe, see, recognize your guide, your defender.... Your tribune presents himself with confidence."

  He drew his inspiration from the ancient Roman brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, whose agrarian reforms had sought to share land in common. Babeuf had been thinking along these lines since 1789, though by the fall of Robespierre he had moved well beyond agrarian reform toward a more complex socialist scheme. His movement grew as the assignat collapsed, because the falling currency meant falling wages and rising bread prices, and the working-class neighborhoods of Paris began listening.

  On the 29th of March 1796, Babeuf formed the Directoire secret des Égaux, the Secret Directory of Equals, organized so that members in the outer rings knew nothing about those at the center. This cell structure was later adopted by Marxist movements. The Directory had already infiltrated the conspiracy, however. Bonaparte, as commander of the Army of the Interior, was ordered to close the Panthéon Club, the main Jacobin meeting place in Paris, which he did on the 27th of February 1796. A Legion of Police dominated by Jacobins was absorbed into the regular Army.

  Babeuf was arrested on the 10th of May 1796 in his hiding place, and the arresting agents found beside him the complete records of the conspiracy, every name included. A subsequent attempt on 9-the 10th of September 1796, when between four hundred and seven hundred Jacobins marched on the army camp at Grenelle and a column simultaneously moved on the Luxembourg Palace, was crushed by dragoons who had been warned the night before. Babeuf and his principal co-conspirator, Augustin Alexandre Darthé, were tried in Vendôme between the 20th of February and the 26th of May 1797. Both attempted suicide before their verdicts. Both survived, and both were guillotined on the 27th of May 1797.

• 6. Bonaparte in Italy

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  The plan Carnot drew up against Austria in 1796 assigned Bonaparte's Army of Italy a secondary, diversionary role. The real blow was supposed to come from General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and General Jean Victor Moreau's Army of the Rhine and Moselle, which together would march to Vienna. Bonaparte, then twenty-eight years old, was named commander of the Army of Italy on the 2nd of March 1796 largely through the influence of his patron Barras.

  Jourdan's army captured Mayence and Frankfurt before being defeated by the Austrians at the Battle of Amberg on the 14th of August 1796 and again at the Battle of Würzburg on the 3rd of September. Moreau, without Jourdan's support, was forced back to the Rhine. The diversionary operation in Italy, meanwhile, had overturned all expectations.

  Bonaparte faced the combined armies of Austria and Sardinia, which numbered seventy thousand men. He drove a path between them and defeated them in a series of engagements, culminating at the Battle of Mondovi against the Sardinians on the 22nd of April 1796 and the Battle of Lodi against the Austrians on the 10th of May. King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia was forced to cede Nice and Savoy to France. When Austria sent two fresh armies to drive Bonaparte out at the end of 1796, he defeated the first at the Battle of Arcole on the 17th of November 1796 and the second at the Battle of Rivoli on the 14th of January 1797.

  The Treaty of Campo Formio, signed in October 1797, gave France the left bank of the Rhine down to Andernach, Belgium, and the Ionian Islands. Austria received the Veneto and Venetian Dalmatia in compensation. Bonaparte also demanded gold or silver from each Italian city he conquered, threatening destruction if they refused, and these payments supplied France with the hard currency it desperately needed. The Vatican treasury alone, thirty million francs, was sent to Paris and helped finance the Egypt expedition that followed.

• 7. Royalists, Coup, and Collapse

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  The elections of March and April 1797 shattered the old guard. Of 216 members of the old Convention who stood for reelection, 205 were defeated. The royalists surged, winning roughly 160 seats divided between partisans of absolute monarchy and supporters of a constitutional monarchy on the British model. Among the constitutional monarchists elected was Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who later emigrated to the United States; his son Éleuthère Irénée du Pont went on to found the chemical company that bears his name.

  General Jean-Charles Pichegru, one of the Revolution's most successful commanders, became president of the new Council of Five Hundred. What the Directory learned, through captured correspondence, was that Pichegru had been in secret contact with the exiled Louis XVIII and with William Wickham, the British spymaster operating out of Switzerland. Barras used this intelligence to organize a military coup before the royalists could consolidate their gains.

  General Pierre Augereau, a close subordinate of Bonaparte, arrived in Paris on the 7th of August 1797 with troops, in plain violation of the constitutional rule prohibiting soldiers within twelve leagues of the city without the Councils' consent. On the 4th of September 1797, the Coup d'état of 18 Fructidor, Year V, was set in motion. Augereau's soldiers arrested Pichegru and the leading royalist deputies. The Directory annulled the elections of about two hundred deputies in 53 departments, closed 42 royalist newspapers, and deported 65 journalists and editors. Carnot and fellow director Barthélemy were removed; Carnot fled to Switzerland. Pichegru was sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana, escaped, made his way to the United States and then England, returned secretly to Paris during the Consulate, and was captured on the 28th of February 1804. He died in prison on the 6th of April 1804.

  The Jacobin-dominated second Directory that followed proved no more stable. By 1799, successive military defeats and a new coalition of Britain, Austria, and Russia had left France on the defensive. In October of that year, Bonaparte slipped back from Egypt, and Abbé Sieyès, who had refused a seat in the original Directory four years before, engaged him to carry out a parliamentary coup. On 9-the 10th of November 1799, the Directory was abolished and replaced by the Consulate. Bonaparte was thirty years old.