The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  The rout of the Jacobins could not fail to encourage monarchists of every stripe. They certainly had little enough to cheer them on other fronts. Their foreign friends were either deserting them—like the British, who were putting out peace feelers—or being defeated in the field, like the Austrians in Italy. The royalist rebellions in the Vendée and Brittany were now in the final stages of being stifled by Hoche. It was true that White Terror continued to make life unsafe for those with Jacobin pasts throughout the south-east, and that the British spymaster Wickham in Switzerland, and d’Antraigues in Italy, entertained high hopes that some movement might come together out of the random vengeance killings that went on all the time in a region where vendetta had long been a way of life. Mallet du Pan, characteristically, saw more clearly. ‘The south’, he wrote,8 ‘is in ferment, but its agitation is vague, without ends or means.’ The people of Arles, noted a local observer in January 1796, ‘taken up entirely with themselves and little indeed with the public interest have contracted the habit of concentrating great national concerns in their personal passions and feelings. For them, revolutionary crises have not been this or that event favourable or disastrous to liberty, but ways of letting one party prevail over another.’9

  In such circumstances, monarchists hoping to recapture the State increasingly pinned their hopes on winning elections. The next ones were scheduled for the spring of 1797, and already a number of deputies who were not ex-members of the Convention were discussing how the reduction of the latter to a minority could be turned to monarchist advantage. They met regularly in the prosperous suburb of Clichy. First emerging in Thermidorian times, this ‘Clichy Club’ was understandably quiescent in the aftermath of Vendémiaire, but now it took on new life. A well-funded and outspoken right-wing press, several of whose editors were regular attenders at Clichy, used renewed government complaisance to emphasize the coming opportunity. It was true that there was no real unity on the right, or even within the Clichy Club. Monarchical absolutists hated constitutionalists, and only co-operated with them in order to use them. Constitutionalists in turn could be subdivided into those hoping for concessions from Louis XVIII, and Orleanists, who placed more hope in the junior branch of the royal house represented by Louis-Philippe, the émigré son of Philippe-Égalité. A king who was himself the son of a regicide might, legitimists feared, be an attractive prospect to the regicides who still dominated politics, if their republic should fail. Even so, all royalists believed by the autumn of 1796 that events were moving their way, and most were content to co-operate in winning the elections, leaving decisions about subsequent policy until later. While newspapers and pamphleteers hammered home the inadequacies of the Republic—its contempt for the law and above all its economic and financial incompetence—something like a party organization grew up with the establishment of semi-secret royalist clubs calling themselves the ‘Philanthropic Institute’. Beginning in Bordeaux, they soon spread throughout the south, and at their height were active in perhaps 70 departments, some of them receiving secret British funds. The self-styled ‘friends of order’ who made up their membership played assiduously upon the fears of the men of substance who would be casting their votes in April 1797; but their efforts were undermined by the activities of an inner circle of ‘legitimate sons’ who still toyed with more violent means. The futility of that was, however, demonstrated as the year began when a royalist version of the Grenelle plot to subvert troops stationed near Paris was revealed by informers. Brottier, the chief agent of d’Antraigues’s network in the capital, was arrested, along with several key members of his organization, at the end of January. They were at once subjected to a show trial, running concurrently with that of Babeuf which finally began in Vendôme on 20 February.

  The twin dangers facing the Republic were thus graphically displayed side by side; and in addition for the first time during the revolution the government resorted to systematic electioneering on its own behalf. Under the constitution, each department was administered by a five-man elected administration, subject in turn to the surveillance of a centrally appointed ‘directorial commissioner’ modelled on the national agent employed under the Revolutionary Government of the Year II. In disturbed departments of the west, or along the Rhône valley, departmental administrations had never been elected from the start, and were regularly remodelled according to each swing of the pendulum in Paris. In the first three months of 1796 eleven departments had their personnel totally or partially renewed to remove Jacobinical influences. During the spring of the subsequent year this network of officials was directed to use all its influence to see that the electoral assemblies returned solid, middle-of-the-road republicans. On 25 February it was decreed that voting would not be allowed to émigrés unless their names had been removed from the official list, scotching plans for a mass return to participate in the elections: while in March an oath to defend the constitution against both monarchists and anarchists was imposed on all members of electoral assemblies. The right was alarmed at these confident directorial ploys. As well as denouncing them furiously in the press, its leaders begged Louis XVIII to make some gesture to reassure propertied waverers before the assemblies met. Eventually, on 10 March, he issued a grudging declaration from Blankenburg, full of ambiguity, urging Frenchmen to vote decisively against Jacobinism, and holding out the vaguest hope that the Declaration of Verona had not after all been his last word.

  Despite all these unprecedented manoeuvres, the elections of the Year V, between 21 March and 9 April, took place amid the same public indifference that had characterized every election since 1791. Most of those qualified to vote in replacing the 234 or so former members of the Convention now to retire by lot did not bother to do so. But the verdict of the electoral assemblies was nevertheless clear. They voted heavily against the Convention and its legacy: only 11 of the retiring deputies were re-elected. They voted, too, against Jacobinism. No clearly identifiable left-wing candidates were returned. Above all they voted against the Directory. Of those elected, 228 were without any previous political experience, but were still preferred to the trusted hacks the authorities had tried to favour. And 182 of them were royalists. That did not mean that they constituted a united party. They ranged from the most gradualist believers in a constitutional restoration, to General Pichegru, who had been in sporadic contact with Louis XVIII’s agents for almost two years over the prospects of a restoration by military coup. But their arrival destroyed the more-or-less stable majority on which the Directors had been able to rely since the inauguration of the constitution. For this reason alone Reubell at once proposed the annulment of the elections. His colleagues felt, however, that the complexion of the new majority was by no means clear; and the first test of opinion confirmed the uncertainty. When it fell to Letourneur’s lot to retire, the new Councils elected Barthélemy, a career diplomat best known for negotiating the Peace of Basle in 1795. His constitutional convictions were unclear. He seems to have been chosen on the presumption that he would help to bring an end to the war.

  All these domestic convolutions took place, of course, against the background of Bonaparte’s victories in Italy and even (at last) progress on the German front. The preliminaries of Leoben were signed on 18 April. The new Councils convened on 20 May under their shadow, and the nature of the peace they were to produce became at once one of the central issues in politics. The desire for peace was general after five years of battling against the whole of Europe. When in July the British offered to negotiate, the prospects for a general settlement seemed bright. Royalists believed that it would smooth the way towards a restoration, and to hasten the moment, they favoured a conciliatory approach to both Austria and Great Britain. Pragmatists like Carnot and Barthélemy also realized that a peace without significant concessions was bound to be unstable. In any case they believed that a working relationship must be developed with the new majority. But the other three Directors, after characteristic initial wavering by Barras, feared that co-operation coul
d only lead to a monarchist triumph. Pichegru had been elected president of the Five Hundred, and by this time the Directors, though not the deputies, had received damning evidence from Bonaparte of his treasons. Nor did the Republic’s more successful generals wish to see their conquests bartered away to bring in a king. That meant not only Bonaparte, but Hoche, who as commander in the Netherlands hoped to restore a prestige dented by the Irish débâcle of the previous winter. Encouraged by Barras, Hoche moved troops within the constitutional belt around the capital in July, and under their eye on the fourteenth the Directory, outvoting Carnot and Barthélemy, carried out a ministerial reshuffle which deliberately challenged the Councils by removing the most prominent right-wingers. The ‘triumvirs’, as the right-wing press now dubbed Barras, Reubell, and La Revellière, also began to make overtures towards Jacobinism. Babeuf had been finally convicted at Vendôme, and he and one other conspirator had gone to the guillotine on 27 May. They would be remembered as Jacobin martyrs (having, like those of Prairial, tried to kill themselves as soon as the verdict was pronounced), but most of the other accused had been acquitted, so it was possible now to close the episode and quietly rehabilitate less extreme forms of Jacobinism. But any such gestures naturally alarmed the Councils, who were busy discussing ways to circumscribe the Directory’s financial powers, and measures favourable to nonjuror priests. Thus tension between executive and legislature mounted over the summer, while the majority of a clearly divided Directory steadily drafted more and more troops into the Paris region. Late July, in fact, was marked by a surge of patriotic addresses from the armies professing loyalty to the Republic, and neither the Directory nor the generals did anything to discourage such overt partisanship. Bonaparte even told his men they would cross the Alps ‘with an eagle’s swiftness’ if the Republic should be threatened. Meanwhile he dispatched one of his deputies, Augereau, to command the forces being assembled by the triumvirs. Desperately, royalist leaders spent August trying to put together a counter-force. While the Councils debated measures to revitalize the National Guard, irregular bands of street fighters were recruited, and there were clashes with Augereau’s troops. But in the face of so much accumulating force, the Councils could do little but bluster. Thus, at the end of August, they finally approved the abrogation of all laws against refractory priests.

  The triumvirs took up the challenge. On the night of 3–4 September (17–18 Fructidor, Year V) they ordered the troops they had assembled to seize all strong points in Paris and surround the legislative chambers. They then issued orders for the arrest of Carnot, Barthélemy, 53 deputies (including Pichegru), and several other prominent members of the right. They also closed down some 30 newspapers. These measures were confirmed by a handpicked quorum of deputies from both Councils meeting under military surveillance. Meanwhile the city was plastered with a proclamation denouncing royalist machinations and publicizing for the first time the treason of Pichegru. There was no resistance. The coup was practically bloodless. As soon as it was over the purged Councils annulled the results of the spring elections in 49 departments, leaving 177 vacant seats. The vacant posts on the Directory were filled by François de Neufchâteau, a noted anti-clerical, and Merlin de Douai, one of the chief architects of the constitution which this coup of Fructidor had in effect destroyed.

  Whether it saved France from a restoration seems improbable. Although it undoubtedly thwarted the ‘grand design’ of certain British-backed royalist agents like the ex-magistrate and deputy d’André, who hoped to achieve a peaceful recall of the pretender by a legislative majority built up over several elections and tireless cultivation of moderate opinion, the limited number of its victims shows that no sort of royalist majority yet existed. It is quite likely, as Carnot had hoped, that a working relationship could have been established between the Directory and a moderate, republican majority. But the triumvirs dreaded a conspiracy, and the generals feared and despised all moderates. They combined, therefore, to destroy the constitution before it had weathered its first real test. From now on, although legal forms would continue to be observed, the ‘Second Directory’ would not hesitate to rig or set aside any results that proved inconvenient. They thereby proclaimed that they had no confidence in the system by which they ruled. They could scarcely, then, expect their fellow citizens to trust it either, or to come to its defence when it was under threat from forces outside the Directory two years later.

  Meanwhile, however, Fructidor ushered in a period of decisive government. The whole of the Year V (October 1796–September 1797) had been a time of paralysis and suspended action. During its first half the coming election had dominated all preoccupations; its second was stalemated by the results. But now, with a united Directory and a subservient legislature, the government could turn to the problems shelved over the previous twelve months.

  First the international situation was clarified. Both the Austrians and the British had been happy to spin out peace negotiations in the hope of wringing concessions from a divided France. They now saw no further prospect of that. Within six weeks the Austrians had signed the peace of Campo Formio, accepting conditions much like those agreed at Leoben the previous spring. The British, meanwhile, were offered terms amounting to little more than complete surrender, and broke off their negotiations within a week of the Fructidor coup. The whole French war effort was now to be marshalled against the island state, and Bonaparte was summoned back from Italy to command an army of invasion being encamped along the Channel coasts. Hoche, who had always regarded the British Isles as his destined prey, died suddenly late in September, removing the Corsican’s last credible rival. Yet failure on the northern seas had almost destroyed Hoche in 1796, and the victor of Italy did not want to risk his own reputation. The Dutch fleet, an indispensable auxiliary, had been destroyed at Camperdown in October; and inspection of the northern ports quickly convinced him that no adequate expedition could be launched against England before the end of 1798, if at all. But did Great Britain need to be attacked frontally? As early as the summer of 1797, when he was still in Italy, Bonaparte had begun to dream of striking at a major source of British wealth, India, through Egypt. In September, while still in Italy, he had formally suggested the idea, and it appealed to Talleyrand, who, after a period of emigration, had re-emerged in July to become foreign minister. The wily former bishop had already been thinking along the same lines. It appealed to the Directors, too, when the general and the minister formally proposed the idea of an Egyptian expedition on 5 March 1798. Bonaparte had behaved modestly since his return and refused to put on military airs except when inspecting the troops in Normandy; but the presence at home of so successful a general, who had more than once forced the pace of the Republic’s policies against the instructions of its Directors, unnerved them. They would feel happier with him far away in Egypt, and the expedition he proposed was smaller and less expensive than a full-scale descent on England would have been. If he succeeded, the British would surely be knocked out of the war: they seemed too dependent on the wealth of India, and French control of the Suez isthmus would turn their control of the route round the Cape from an asset into a burden. If he failed, they would be rid of him. Accordingly, the Directory welcomed the Egyptian project warmly. A fleet was equipped at Toulon over the spring of 1798, and on 19 May it sailed, carrying an army of 35,000 men.

  Fructidor also cleared the way for resolving the Republic’s financial difficulties. Ramel, the finance minister, had survived in office throughout all the Year V’s political upheavals, but the collapse of paper money confronted him with problems scarcely less difficult than those it had caused. The disappearance of inflated paper provoked a massive deflation as still scarce coinage became once more the only legal tender. Debtors who had not already cleared their obligations in paper now found themselves overwhelmed as prices plummeted and interest rates soared. In many districts a natural economy of barter proved the only viable means of exchange. Taxes, now payable in coin, practically dried up for a t
ime, just at the moment when the government was brought face to face with the true scale of the debt it had run up to finance the war. The early months of 1797 witnessed desperate attempts to raise coinage from any source. Future revenues were mortgaged against advances at usurious rates, and the State’s assets were recklessly sold off, from former church lands in now annexed Belgium, right down to the crown jewels of the former kings. Directorial hopes that the plunder of conquered territories would yield rich rewards were largely disappointed. War indemnity payments imposed on the Batavian Republic were useful, but sums raised in Germany and Italy were mostly spent there, on keeping armies in the field supplied. In the build-up to the Fructidor coup Ramel’s administration and the speculators on whom he relied to put together some of his more bizarre financial expedients were ferociously denounced in the Councils. The main critics were among those purged. Within a week of their elimination Ramel had radical and decisive remedies to propose, and the Directory adopted them. On 30 September two-thirds of the State’s debts were renounced by a one-off payment in paper valid for the purchase in national lands. The other third was ‘consolidated’. Not since 1770 (except momentarily in August 1788) had the French government declared bankruptcy; and throughout the Revolution a rare consensus had survived that the national debt should be sacrosanct. Without it, the Revolution itself might not have come about, and it was a symbol of confidence in the new order. After Fructidor, the abandonment of the Revolution’s longest-held principle looked like one more admission of failure. Bitter debt-holders found in subsequent months that the bonds in which they had been paid off lost 60 per cent of their face value within a year, and soon afterwards a decision no longer to accept them in payment for national lands completely destroyed them. But the ‘Two Thirds Bankruptcy’ relieved the State of debts which cost it 160 millions a year, and paved the way for durable financial reconstruction. The process began only a few weeks later (12 November) with the establishment of an ‘Agency for Direct Contributions’, to orchestrate the recovery of direct taxes at local level via the directorial commissioners—the first centralized fiscal apparatus since the old regime, largely staffed too with officials who had learned their trade then. And their methods: taxpayers in arrears would find troops billeted on them. In 1798 another principle of 1789 was abandoned with the reintroduction of the indirect taxes so universally execrated in the cahiers. It had been their very effectiveness that had made them unpopular, and which now constituted their appeal. They were now imposed on tobacco, on road traffic, on legal documents, and on doors and windows—although the Councils balked at a proposal to tax salt, with its echoes of the most hated of all the pre-revolutionary levies, the gabelle. None of these measures gave spectacularly rapid results. It took years to draw as much coinage back into circulation as had been available in 1789, and although the last years of the century were marked by good harvests, business confidence was slow to revive. The most immediate effect of the bankruptcy and the State’s reviving capacity for taxing its citizens was to increase its unpopularity among the very propertied groups on which it claimed to base its support.