The best way to make sense of the complex events of these years is to divide the period into two. From the summer of 1794 until the summer of 1797, objectives that were closely entwined preoccupied the men of the revolution:
how to dismantle the Jacobin dictatorship without at the same time clearing the way for a revival of domestic royalism that might serve as the curtain-raiser to a Bourbon restoration. But from the autumn of 1797 until the summer of 1802 when Bonaparte, as First Consul, was prolonged in office for life (see Chapter 7), the emphasis increasingly shifted from constitutionalism to authoritarianism. Thanks to the coup of 18 Fructidor V (4 September 1797), which was carried out with the assistance of the army, the political threat of resurgent royalism declined. Instead, Directorial republicans and their suc-cessors in the councils of the Consulate grew to fear that neo-Jacobins – the men who had last held power during the Terror – would take over the regime from within. In order to stop them, they resorted to blatantly unconstitutional actions of which General Bonaparte’s intervention was merely the most arresting example. The Executive Directory can therefore be visualised as a see-saw regime which was periodically assailed by individuals representing the extremes of the political spectrum spawned since 1789. To be sure, its upholders were committed republicans, but they were also firmly attached to the philosophy of political liberalism. The challenge they set themselves was to detach the idea of the republic from its embattled and blood-soaked origins and to harness
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it instead to the principles of the early revolution. Their ultimate failure to achieve this synthesis was not a failure of political will so much as a reflection that the nation – post-Thermidor – appeared irretrievably divided.
The speed of the reaction against Jacobinism in the Convention and all it stood for once the powers of the Committee of Public Safety had been curtailed surprised everyone. The Paris Sections were prevented from holding meetings, legislation banned collective petitioning by the clubs or any other corporate bodies, and brawling between moderates and militants was used as a pretext to shut down the mother Jacobin club altogether. All the irksome policies to which the deputies of the Plain had agreed under duress were now put into reverse. The savage law of 22 Prairial II (10 June 1794), which pushed the conviction rate in the Revolutionary Tribunal to 80 per cent, had already been rescinded, and during the autumn all the restraints that had been placed on the economy under pressure from the Sections were removed. Price control was abandoned, the stock market reopened, and merchants and contractors recovered the freedom to go about their business unhindered. The consequences were immediate and predictable. Galloping inflation destroyed the purchasing power of the assignat, and the cost of living spiralled. By January 1795, real prices for day-to-day commodities were very nearly six times higher than they had been five years earlier. The savage winter of 1794 – 95 only made matters worse.
Distress rose to levels without parallel in the cities. Suicide became com-monplace: in Rouen the death rate doubled in the year after Thermidor.
Famine and even starvation accompanied the retreat from the Terror, then, and provided fuel for political resentments. From the spring, the deputies began to receive reports from the south and south-east of the country concerning the activities of extra-legal punishment squads (the so-called ‘White’ Terror).
These gangs were systematically targeting for violence and intimidation anyone who had held office during the climactic phase of Revolutionary Government.
The dilemma that ran like a thread through these years was already apparent by the summer of 1795, therefore. Each act of relaxation and would-be reconciliation appeared simply to reinforce the extremes. The deputies sought to pacify their armed opponents in the west (known as chouans) with an amnesty that included the freedom to worship as they pleased. In fact, a general law of religious pacification was introduced not long afterwards, which for a time restored to both juring and non-juring priests the use of churches all over the country. But the loosening grip of the Convention served only to encourage the western rebels to renew their struggle against the republic. The late king’s one surviving son had died in prison and his uncle, the Comte de Provence, now claimed the succession. Styling himself Louis XVIII, Provence issued a grudging Declaration from Verona which made it clear that whilst ‘constitutional’ royalists might hope to secure control of France by parliamentary means, the ‘pure’ royalists remained
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committed to counter-revolution via the armed struggle. The failure of the Quiberon Bay expedition, when British warships landed a large force of émigrés on the coast of Brittany, demonstrated the futility of this approach.
Indeed, the deputies were far more alarmed by the insidious spread of royalism as priests returned from exile and churches reopened. With a new constitution in the making and elections impending, the royalists saw the chance to weave together the many different strands of discontent. But the Convention also spotted the danger and riposted with decrees requiring that two-thirds of the new representatives be chosen from among the existing deputies. A prudent move to maintain continuity in a context of accelerating political reaction, or a cynical manoeuvre to save their own skins? Both, probably, and the measure was greeted with a violent royalist insurrection on the streets of Paris and with extreme distaste in the country at large.
France finally emerged from the limbo of Revolutionary Government and returned to the path of constitutional legality on 28 October 1795 in the shape of a regime known as the Executive Directory. During the preceding months, a new constitution (the Constitution of the Year Three) had been voted and ratified, which reinstated a broad franchise based on a threshold tax qualification. If not exactly universal manhood suffrage, around 51/2million adult males out of some 8 million were entitled to participate in primary elec-toral assemblies. Significantly, it was accompanied by a re-issued Declaration of the Rights and the Duties of Man which referred not to natural rights (as in 1789 and 1793), but to rights acquired in society. In other words, the architects of the new regime were now stepping back from the universalistic claims which had served as the launchpad for the revolution. The emphasis on equality and sovereignty as a power rooted in the people was watered down.
In fact, the clause ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights’ was quietly dropped. These changes had the virtue of aligning constitutional theory with hard-won experience and some historians therefore detect in the transition of 1795 a fundamental shift in the political culture of the revolution ( Jainchill, 2008: 30). It is true that deputies on the Left were in no doubt that a retreat had been sounded from the values that had sus-tained the revolution until now. But this is to pre-judge the new regime and to deny it any capacity to evolve. Whatever the Thermidorian architects of the Directory may have intended, it would not lack democratic credentials.
As always, however, the declared aim was to begin afresh. Two days prior to its dissolution, the Convention voted to rename the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine had once stood, the Place de la Concorde. Moreover, in a more tangible gesture of reconciliation, a final decree granted an amnesty to those who had been charged with political crimes in the aftermath of the Terror. If only in terms of structure, the Directory was a very different regime from those that had preceded it. Such was the fear of dictators and dictatorial
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Committees that the constitution was built on the principle of a rigorous separation of powers. In order to curb the domineering tendency of the leg-islative arm of government, provision was made for two chambers on a model first proposed by the Monarchiens back in the summer of 1789. The authority to initiate and to examine legislation was entrusted to a Council of Five Hundred, whereas parliamentary approval of bills was lodged with a senate of more senior deputies, known as the Council of Elders. The executive arm com-prised five individuals, who were selected by the Council of Five Hundred to all intents and purposes, and who were known as Directors. While the Directors appointed the Ministers and the Commissioners – that is to say, the agents of the government in the departments – they had no authority to make or shape legislation. On the other hand, the power to conduct diplomacy, to supervise the armies and to handle appointments gave them very considerable scope to influence the formulation of policy. In the event of a stalemate or paralysis in the mechanisms of government, a procedure for constitutional revision could be invoked; however, a minimum delay of nine years was laid down before any changes could take effect. True, the Directors were subject to annual renewal, but one by one, and by random ballot. Constitutional revision was all but impossible, therefore, which helps to explain why the Directory both resorted to illegal acts and fell prey to the illegal acts of others.
As we have seen, the democratic credentials of the Directorial regime rested on a broad franchise. It is true, however, that voting remained indir-ect. Also, electors had to satisfy fiscal conditions that were much stiffer than they had been in 1790 and 1791. But the opportunities to vote at the primary level were now more numerous, since the constitution required that ballots would be held every year in the month of March. After the studied con-formism of Revolutionary Government, some vigour and vitality returned to national political life, in consequence. However, the Councils proceeded to cut one of the tap roots of revolutionary spontaneity in a bid to discourage the more anarchical features of mass political mobilisation. Elective village councils were abolished and replaced by canton-level municipalities instead.
Notwithstanding the hunger, the economic dislocation and the fragility of law and order in the south and the west, the early Directory years did prove conducive to the growth of a practice of participation rooted in electoral assemblies, newspaper readership and, for city dwellers, the reappearance of clubs. Some historians have even detected signs of the development of embryonic political parties in this period. However, the combination of elections and a vigorous marketplace for oppositional ideas also tended to provide a platform for those occupying the margins of the political spectrum – the more so as the Directory was not yet willing to use force against its opponents. The ‘républicains fermes’, as the Directory’s latter-day Jacobins were called, had benefited from the amnesty law, and although the royalists
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proved to be the chief gainers from the elections to fill the places of the out-going ‘third’, these neo-Jacobins posed the more palpable threat. Their clubs were infiltrated and their newspapers harassed; in fact the Pantheon Club, which regularly attracted many hundreds of nostalgic supporters of the pol-itics of the Terror, was closed down by the government in February 1796.
This action provoked a more sinister development, though. Led by Gracchus Babeuf, the publisher of Le Tribune du Peuple and a man who had dabbled in democratic politics since the start of the revolution, a small group of enthusiasts for the advanced social and democratic agenda outlined in the Constitution of 1793 began to plot an insurrection – or, more properly, a coup – against the regime. Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ was betrayed within a matter of months and it never amounted to much in any case.
Nevertheless, the Directory made the most of the ‘threat’, put the plotters in the dock and dressed up the case as a trial of Jacobinism as a whole. Babeuf and a fellow conspirator were guillotined in May 1797.
Despite the precautions taken by the Convention during its final weeks, the main beneficiaries of regime change turned out to be the royalists. The elections that launched the Directory in October 1795 returned over 100 to parliament, although they were by no means all ‘purs’ (i.e. counter-revolutionaries). On the contrary, many would have been content with a return to constitutional monarchy on the 1791 pattern, or something similar.
But at least the citadel of government was held firmly by the moderate re-publicans: the deputies who had been prolonged in office took care to make sure that the executive was filled by men of their own stamp. All five of the Directors had supported the death sentence meted out to Louis XVI in 1793. Still, the royalists had achieved an important bridgehead and would draw strength from the fact that the rampart constructed around the republic by the Convention could only erode in the years to come. When the next electoral renewal fell due in March 1797, the royalist leaders made a supreme effort of organisation and propaganda, and they swept the board. Only 11 of the 216 retiring deputies were re-elected and, in total, about 180 of 260 seats being contested were taken by royalist candidates of one persuasion or another.
This diluted considerably the political complexion of the Councils, with the regicides among the deputies now numbering barely one in five. As a con-sequence, the regime entered a phase of protracted crisis.