by Will Durant
On October 26 the Convention declared itself dissolved, and on November 2, 1795, the final phase of the Revolution began.
CHAPTER V
The Directory
November 2, 1795—November 9, 1799
I. THE NEW GOVERNMENT
IT was composed of five bodies. First, a Council of Five Hundred (Les Cinq Cents), empowered to propose and discuss measures, but not to make them into laws. Second, a Council of (250) Ancients, or elders (Les Anciens), who had to be married and forty or more years old; they were authorized not to initiate legislation but to reject, or ratify into law, the “resolutions” sent to them by the Five Hundred. These two assemblies, constituting the Legislature (Corps Législatif) were subject to annual replacement of a third of their membership by the vote of the electoral colleges. The executive part of the government was the Directory (Directoire), composed of five members, at least forty years of age, chosen for a five-year term by the Ancients from fifty names submitted by the Five Hundred. Each year one of the directors was to be replaced by the choice of a new member. Independent of these three bodies and of each other were the judiciary and the Treasury, chosen by the electoral colleges of the departments. It was a government of checks and balances, designed for the protection of the victorious bourgeoisie from an unruly populace.
The Directory, lodged in the Luxembourg Palace, soon became the dominant branch of the government. It controlled the Army and Navy and determined foreign policy; it supervised the ministers of the interior, of foreign affairs, of marine and colonies, of war and finance. By the natural centripetal tendency by which power flows to leadership, the Directory became a dictatorship almost as independent as the Committee of Public Safety.
The five men first chosen as directors were Paul Barras, Louis-Marie de Larevellière-Lépaux, Jean-François Rewbell, Charles Letourneur, and Lazare Carnot. All of these had been regicides, four had been Jacobins, one—Barras—had been a viscount; now they adjusted themselves to a bourgeois regime. All were men of ability, but, excepting Carnot, they were not distinguished by scrupulous integrity. If survival is the test of worth, Barras was the most able, serving first Louis XVI, then Robespierre, and helping both of them to their deaths; maneuvering safely through crisis after crisis, through mistress after mistress, gathering wealth and power at every turn, giving Napoleon an army and a wife, outliving them, and dying in easy circumstances in re-Bourbonized Paris at the age of seventy-four (1829);1 he had nine lives and sold them all.
The problems faced by the Directory in 1795 might by their diverse multitude excuse some failures of their government. The populace of Paris was always facing destitution; the British blockade joined conflicts within the economy to impede the movement of food and goods. Inflation deflated the currency; in 1795 five thousand assignats were needed to buy what a hundred had bought in 1790. As the Treasury paid interest on its bonds in assignats at their face value, the rentiers who had invested in government “securities” as a protection in old age found themselves joining the rebellious poor.2 Thousands of Frenchmen bought stocks in a wild race to cheat inflation; when values had been swollen to their peak, speculators unloaded their holdings; a wild race to sell collapsed stock prices; the innocent found that their savings had been harvested by the clever few. The Treasury, having forfeited public confidence, repeatedly faced bankruptcy, and declared it in 1795. A loan exacted from the rich resulted in price rises by merchants and the ruin of luxury trades; unemployment rose; war and inflation went on.
Amid the chaos and poverty the communistic dream that had inspired Mably in 1748, Morelly in 1755, Linguet in 1777*continued to warm the hearts of the desperate poor; it had found voice in Jacques Roux in 1793. On April 11, 1796, the working-class quarters of Paris were placarded with posters offering an “Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf.” Some of its articles:
1. Nature has bestowed on every man an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods.…
3. Nature has imposed on every man the obligation of labor; no one, without crime, can abstain from work.…
7. In a free society there should be neither rich nor poor.
8. The rich who will not part with their superfluity in favor of the indigent are the enemies of the people…
10. The purpose of the Revolution is to destroy inequality and to establish the common happiness.
11. The Revolution is not at an end, for the rich absorb all goods of every kind, and are in exclusive domination, while the poor labor as actual slaves, … and are nothing in the eyes of the state.
12. The Constitution of 1793 is the true law of the French.… The Convention has shot down the people who demanded its enforcement.… The Constitution of 1793 ratified the inalienable right of each citizen to exercise political rights, to assemble, to demand what he believes useful, to educate himself, and not to die of hunger—rights which the counterrevolutionary act [Constitution] of 1795 has completely and openly violated.3
François-Émile “Gracchus” Babeuf, born in 1760, first entered recorded history in 1785 as an agent employed by landlords to enforce their feudal rights over the peasantry. In 1789 he changed sides, and drew up for distribution a cahier demanding the abolition of feudal dues. In 1794 he settled in Paris, defended and then attacked the Thermidoreans, was arrested, and emerged in 1795 as a fervent communist. Soon he organized the Société des Égaux (Band of Equals). He followed up his “Analysis” with a proclamation entitled “Act of Insurrection,” signed by the “Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety.” A few articles:
10. The Council and the Directory, usurpers of popular authority, will be dissolved. All their members will be immediately judged by the people.…
18. Public and private property are placed in the custody of the people.
19. The duty of terminating the Revolution, and of bestowing upon the Republic liberty, equality, and the Constitution of 1793, will be confided to a national assembly, composed of a democrat from each department, appointed by the insurgent people upon the nomination of the Insurrectionary Committee.
The Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety will remain in permanence until the total accomplishment of the Insurrection.4
This sounds ominously like a call for another dictatorship, a change of masters from one Robespierre to another. In his journal Tribune du Peuple, Babeuf amplified his dream:
All that is possessed by those who have more than their proportional part in the goods of society is held by theft and usurpation; it is therefore just to take it from them. The man who proves that by his own strength he can earn or do as much as four others is none the less in conspiracy against society, because he destroys the equilibrium and … precious equality. Social instruction must progress to the point where they deprive everyone of the hope of ever becoming richer, or more powerful, or more distinguished by his enlightenment and his talents. Discord is better than a horrid concord in which hunger strangles one. Let us go back to chaos, and from chaos let a new regenerated earth emerge.5
An agent provocateur informed the Directory that an increasing number of Parisian proletaires were reading the placards and journals of Babeuf, and that an armed uprising had been planned for May 11, 1796. On May 10 an order was issued for his arrest and that of his leading associates: Filippo Buonarrotti, A. Darthé, M.-G. Vadier, and J.-B. Drouet. After a year’s imprisonment, during which several attempts to free them failed, they were tried at Vendôme on May 27, 1797. Buonarrotti served a prison sentence, Drouet escaped. Babeuf and Darthé, condemned to death, tried suicide, but were hurried to the guillotine before they could die. Their plan, of course, was so impracticable, so innocent of the nature of man, that even the proletariat of Paris had not taken it seriously. Besides, by 1797, poor and rich alike, in France, had found a new hero, the most fascinating dreamer and doer in the political history of mankind.
II. THE YOUNG NAPOLEON: 1769–95
“No intellectual exercise,” said Lord Acton, “can be more invigorating than to watch the working o
f the mind of Napoleon, the most entirely known as well as the ablest of historic men.”6 But who today can feel that he has truly and wholly known a man—though some 200,000 books and booklets have been written about him—who is presented by a hundred learned historians as the hero who struggled to give unity and law to Europe, and by a hundred learned historians as the ogre who drained the blood of France, and ravaged Europe, to feed an insatiable will to power and war? “The French Revolution,” said Nietzsche, “made Napoleon possible; that is its justification.”7 Napoleon, musing before the tomb of Rousseau, murmured, “Perhaps it would have been better if neither of us had ever been born.”8
He was born at Ajaccio August 15, 1769. Fifteen months earlier Genoa had sold Corsica to France; only two months earlier a French army had validated the sale by suppressing Paoli’s revolt; on such trivia history has turned. Twenty years later Napoleon wrote to Paoli: “I was born when my country was dying. Thirty thousand Frenchmen disgorged upon our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in a sea of blood; such was the hateful spectacle that offended my infant eyes.”9
Corsica, said Livy, “is a rugged, mountainous, almost uninhabitable island. The people resemble their country, being as ungovernable as wild beasts.”10 Contact with Italy had softened some part of this wildness, but the rough terrain, the hard and almost primitive life, the mortal family feuds, the fierce defense against invaders, had left the Corsicans of Paoli’s time fit for guerrilla warfare or a condottiere’s enterprise rather than for the concessions that violent instincts must make to prosaic order if civilization is to form. Civility was growing in the capital, but during most of the time that Letizia Ramolino Buonaparte was carrying Napoleon she followed her husband from camp to camp with Paoli, lived in tents or mountain shacks, and breathed the air of battle. Her child seemed to remember all this with his blood, for he was never so happy as in war. He remained to the end a Corsican, and, in everything but date and education, an Italian, bequeathed to Corsica by the Renaissance. When he conquered Italy for France the Italians received him readily; he was the Italian who was conquering France.
His father, Carlo Buonaparte, could trace his lineage far back in the history of Italy, through a lusty breed living mostly in Tuscany, then in Genoa, then, in the sixteenth century, migrating to Corsica. The family treasured a noble pedigree, which was recognized by the French government; the de, however, was shed when, in the Revolution, a title to nobility was a step toward the guillotine. Carlo was a man of adaptable talent; he fought under Paoli for Corsican freedom; when that movement failed he made his peace with the French, served in the Franco-Corsican administration, secured the admission of two of his sons to academies in France, and was among the deputies sent to the States-General by the Corsican nobility. Napoleon took from his father his gray eyes, and perhaps his fatal gastric cancer.11
He took more from his mother. “It is to my mother and her excellent principles that I owe all my success, and any good that I have done. I do not hesitate to affirm that the future of the child depends upon its mother.”12 He resembled her in energy, courage, and mad resolution, even in fidelity to the proliferating Bonapartes. Born in 1750, Letizia Ramolino was fourteen when she married, thirty-five when widowed; she bore thirteen children between 1764 and 1784, saw five of them die in childhood, raised the rest with stern authority, glowed with their pride, and suffered with their fall.
Napoleon was her fourth, the second to survive infancy. Oldest was Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844), amiable and cultured epicurean; made king of Naples and then of Spain, he hoped to be the second emperor of France. After Napoleon came Lucien (1775–1840), who helped him seize the French government in 1799, became his passionate enemy, and stood by his side in the heroic futility of the “Hundred Days.” Then Maria Anna Elisa (1777–1820), proud and able grand duchess of Tuscany, who opposed her brother in 1813, and preceded him to death. Then Louis (1778–1846), who married the kindly Hortense de Beauharnais, became king of Holland, and begat Napoleon III. Then Pauline (1780–1825), beautiful and scandalously gay, who married Prince Camillo Borghese, and still holds court, in Canova’s softly contoured marble in the Galleria Borghese, as one of the lasting delights of Rome. “Pauline and I,” Napoleon recalled, “were Mother’s favorites: Pauline because she was the prettiest and daintiest of my sisters, and I because a natural instinct told her that I would be the founder of the family’s greatness.”13 Then Maria Carolina (1782–1839), who married Joachim Murat and became queen of Naples. Lastly, Jérôme (1784–1860), who founded the Bonapartes of Baltimore, and rose to be king of Westphalia.
In 1779 Carlo Buonaparte secured from the French government the privilege of sending Napoleon to a military academy at Brienne, some ninety miles southeast of Paris. It was a cardinal event in the boy’s life, for it destined him to a martial career, and—almost to the end—to think of life and destiny in terms of war. Brienne became a formative ordeal for a lad of ten, so far from home in a strange and strict environment. The other students could not forgive his pride and temper, which seemed so disproportionate to his obscure nobility. “I suffered infinitely from the ridicule of my schoolmates, who jeered at me as a foreigner.” The young maverick withdrew into himself, into studies, books, and dreams. His inclination to taciturnity was deepened; he spoke little, trusted no one, and kept himself from a world that seemed organized to torment him. There was one exception: he made friends with Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, also a product of 1769; they defended each other, fought each other; after long separations Bourrienne became his secretary (1797), and remained close to him until 1805.
Isolation enabled the young Corsican to excel in studies that fed his hunger for eminence. He fled from Latin as from something dead; he had no uses for its Virgilian graces or its Taciturnian terseness. He received little instruction in literature or art, for the teachers were mostly innocent of these lures. But he took eagerly to mathematics; here was a discipline congenial to his demand for exactitude and clarity, something beyond prejudice and argument, and of constant use to a military engineer; in this field he led his class. Also he relished geography; those varied lands were terrain to be studied, people to be ruled; and they were food for dreams. History was for him, as for Carlyle, a worship and rosary of heroes, especially those who guided nations or molded empires. He loved Plutarch even more than Euclid; he breathed the passion of those ancient patriots, he drank the blood of those historic battles; “There is nothing modern in you,” Paoli told him; “you belong wholly to Plutarch.”14 He would have understood Heine, who said that when he read Plutarch he longed to mount a horse and ride forth to conquer Paris. Napoleon reached that goal through Italy and Egypt, but flank attacks were his forte.
After five years at Brienne, Bonaparte, now fifteen, was among the students selected from the twelve military schools of France to receive advanced instruction at the École Militaire in Paris. In October, 1785, he was assigned as second lieutenant of artillery to the La Fère Regiment stationed at Valence on the Rhone. His total pay there was 1,120 livres per year;15 out of this, apparently, he sent something to help his mother care for her growing brood. As his father had died in February, and Joseph was as yet without means, Napoleon had become acting head of the clan. On his furloughs he made several visits to Corsica, lonesome, he said, for “the smell of its earth,” for its “precipices, high mountains, and deep ravines.”16
At Valence, and in 1788 at Auxonne, he earned the respect of his fellow officers by his rapid progress in military sciences and arts, his quickness to learn, his fertility in practical suggestions, and his readiness to share in the hard physical work of managing artillery. He carefully studied the Essai de tactique générale (1772) and other martial texts by Julie de Lespinasse’s negligent lover, Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de Guibert. Napoleon was no longer an outcast; he made friends, attended theaters, heard concerts, took lessons in dancing, and discovered the charms of women. On a furlough in Paris (January 22, 1787) he laboriously talked himself i
nto an unpremeditated adventure with a streetwalker; “that night,” he assures us, “I knew a woman for the first time.”17 Nevertheless some somber moods remained. At times, alone in his simple room, he asked himself why, in pure logic, he should continue to live. “As I must die sometime, it would perhaps be better if I killed myself.”18 But he could not think of any pleasant way.
He found time, in his free hours, to extend his self-education in literature and history. Mme. de Rémusat, later lady-in-waiting to Josephine, thought that he was “ignorant, reading but little, and that hurriedly”;19 and yet we find that at Valence and Auxonne he read dramas by Corneille, Molière, Racine, and Voltaire,20 memorized some passages, reread Amyot’s translation of Plutarch, and studied Machiavelli’s Prince, Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, Marigny’s Histoire des arabes, Houssaye’s Histoire du gouvernement de V énise, Barrow’s Histoire d’Angleterre, and many more. He took notes as he read, and made summaries of the major works; 368 pages of these notes survive from his youth.21 He was of the Italian Renaissance in character, and of the French Enlightenment in mind. But also the romantic streak in him responded to the passionate prose of Rousseau and the poems ascribed to “Ossian,” which he relished “for the same reason that made me delight in the murmur of the winds and waves.”22