The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  After Bonaparte’s services on the journée of 13 Vendémiaire–for which Barras and Fréron both gave him more credit than was his proper due – he was appointed first a divisional general, then commander of the Interior, and, on 2 March 1796, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Italy. This last appointment was unanimously approved by the Directors, all of whom recognized in him a man who would not scruple to replenish the country’s empty coffers with treasure looted from his defeated enemies. It was also warmly welcomed in the country as a whole. The economist, Dupont de Nemours, was almost alone in condemning it. ‘I can hardly believe you have made such a mistake,’ Dupont wrote to Reubell as soon as he heard of Bonaparte’s promotion. ‘Don’t you know he is one of those Corsicans? They are all on the make.’

  A week after his appointment to the command in Italy, Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais, a former mistress of Barras and widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais who had been guillotined in June 1794. And within three days of his marriage to this fetching, extravagant young woman from Martinique, Bonaparte was on his way to his headquarters near Genoa.

  Certain members of the Government were not at all sorry to see Bonaparte leave Paris, but they had not foreseen the consequences of what was to prove a triumphant campaign in Italy. It had been the Directory’s original intention to make an attack upon Vienna the main threat to the Austrian armies. Of secondary importance were to be advances by the Army of the Alps under Kellerman into Piedmont, by the Army of Italy into Lombardy, and a landing on the Irish coast by the Army of Ireland under Hoche. But the attack upon Vienna did not go well, while the Irish expedition was thwarted when the ships carrying Hoche’s men were dispersed in a storm. It was only from Italy that news of great victories was received. From there came reports that the King of Sardinia’s forces had been overwhelmed and that he had been obliged to cede Savoy and the area around Nice to France; that the Austrians, defeated at the bridge of Lodi on the Adda, at Arcola and at Rivoli, had been compelled to sign peace preliminaries at Leoben leading up to the Treaty of Campo-Formio at Passariano; that the Austrian Emperor had been forced to recognize the annexation by France not only of what had formerly constituted the Austrian Netherlands but also the left bank of the Rhine, and had been obliged as well to acknowledge the creation of a Cisalpine Republic out of the territories which the French had conquered in northern Italy. As a recompense the Venetian Republic, which Bonaparte had occupied, had been handed over to the Austrians after the French had stripped Venice of great quantities of her treasures including the famous bronze horses outside Saint Mark’s basilica which, made in classical times, had been looted by the Venetians from Constantinople.

  These famous horses formed part of an enormous amount of treasure which Bonaparte shipped back to France. Works of art, pictures, statuary, rare books and huge amounts of bullion reached French ports or were trundled across the frontier in loaded wagons. Delighted as they were to receive their share of these millions of livres’ worth of loot, the Directors could not but be concerned by Bonaparte’s independence. They had intended to satisfy themselves with what Danton had referred to as France’s ‘natural frontiers’, with a few modifications here and there in France’s favour, and to seize territories beyond these frontiers so that they could negotiate with their defeated enemies from a strong position. But Bonaparte had ignored their instructions. The peace negotiations, like the campaign, were largely conducted and concluded in accordance with his own ideas. Bonaparte had thus become an irresistible force in the conduct of France’s foreign affairs. He was now also to become profoundly influential in affairs at home.

  Anxious to have his Italian policies ratified by the Directors, Bonaparte had listened sympathetically to their overtures when the elections of April 1797 had resulted in hostile majorities in the Councils. He had agreed to send home the huge and vulgar, foulmouthed Pierre Augereau, one of his roughest generals. Augereau had been born into a poor family in Paris and, having enlisted in the carabiniers at the age of seventeen, had had to flee abroad after drawing his sword on an officer. He had subsequently served in the Russian, Prussian and Neapolitan armies before the Revolution had brought him back to France again. Bonaparte considered him ‘an ignoramus’ but just the man for the job in hand. Augereau thought so himself. ‘I have come here,’ he announced confidently on his arrival in Paris, ‘to kill the royalists.’ Reubell judged him ‘a splendid brigand’.

  Under his command the Directory’s forces occupied the city for the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor. General Pichegru, the royalist general who, having been elected for the Jura, was now President of the Five Hundred, was arrested. So was François Barthélemy, Letourneur’s successor, the one Director, other than Carnot, who was in sympathy with the Councils. Carnot himself escaped and fled abroad. The Councils were then purged, the elections in forty-nine departments being annulled and 177 deputies displaced. Journals antagonistic to the Directory were suppressed, various opponents of the three Directors who had organized the coup were transported to Guiana where a large number of them perished, and others were arraigned before military tribunals, condemned to death and shot. Émigrés were given a fortnight to leave France on pain of death. Deported priests who had returned to France were also ordered to leave the country or risk sentence to the ‘dry guillotine’ of Guiana. All other priests were required to swear an oath of hatred of both the monarchy and the Constitution of 1793.

  The victory of the Directory was for the moment complete. But only for the moment, for it had been achieved by a fatal reliance upon the army; while the Councils, provoked by the methods of the Government which became more and more authoritarian and anti-clerical as time went by, awaited an opportunity for revenge.

  The Jacobins also were mustering their forces for an onslaught against the Directory, which was given little credit for the undoubtedly beneficial administrative reforms carried out by the Ministries of Finance and of the Interior. Unfortunately, it was unable to profit from England’s remaining the only country still at war with France after the signing of the Treaty of Campo-Formio. The appearance of a large French army at Brest had provoked such forceful reaction from the British Government that Bonaparte advised against the projected invasion of England and pressed instead for an Egyptian expedition, the beginning of the realization of his ‘Eastern dream’.

  The Directory approved Bonaparte’s plan, thankful to be at least temporarily rid of a man whose ambitions were as alarming as his intentions mystifying, and seeing in his schemes a possible means of damaging English commerce and of establishing a base for the creation of a French Empire in the East. So, on 19 May 1798, the four hundred ships of the Egyptian expedition set sail from Toulon, carrying 38,000 troops and nearly 200 scholars, writers and artists. It was a romantic adventure and, initially, successful. Malta was captured on the way, Alexandria taken by assault, the Mameluke cavalry were overwhelmed in the shadow of the pyramids, and on 23 July Bonaparte marched into Cairo. A week later, however, he was trapped; the French fleet, riding at anchor near Aboukir, was surprised by Nelson who put out of action all but two of its ships. Nor was this all. The Egyptian expedition had alarmed Turkey as well as Russia which, with its Eastern interests evidently threatened, resolved henceforth to play a more determined part in the war. France’s enemies rapidly multiplied again. Naples turned against her, so did Austria; so, eventually, did Sweden. The Directory responded by a new levée en masse. Even so, it could not call upon as many men as could the combined forces of her enemies, nor could it produce the necessary equipment. Both in Italy and in Germany the French armies suffered a series of setbacks and defeats, and, had it not been for the mutual jealousies and mistrust of the ill-assorted allies opposing them, they might well have been overwhelmed.

  At home the discontent which conscription had aroused grew more bitter as taxes were increased and the economy stagnated. And the Councils now seized their opportunity to revenge themselves for the treatment they had received at the hands of the Dir
ectory in the purges that had followed the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor. ‘You have destroyed public feeling,’ declared a deputy in one of many attacks upon the Directors. ‘You have muzzled liberty, persecuted republicans, destroyed a free press, suffocated truth…The French people in Year VI [1797] appointed to public office men worthy of their confidence and you had the effrontery to say that the elections were the result of a conspiracy and, making that your excuse, you meddled disgracefully with the representatives of the nation.’

  Harried by such vituperation two of the most disliked Directors were prevailed upon to resign. The place of one of them was taken by Roger Ducos, a compliant protégé of Barras, who had voted for the death of the King in the Convention. Other figures familiar in the earlier days of the Revolution were once more seen at the Ministries: Fouché became Minister of Police, and Robert Lindet, Minister of Finance. General Bernadotte, who had distinguished himself in Italy, was appointed Minister of War.

  Under the influence of these men the Government once again lurched to the Left. Old clubs were allowed to reopen their doors and new ones proliferated, Jacobin newspapers reappeared in cafés and on the streets, and a forced loan was imposed upon the well-to-do. Sieyès, who had at first encouraged the Councils in their assault upon the Directory, did not much care for the way events were now turning. In May 1799 he replaced Reubell, the Director most closely associated with the war policy of the Government, and, with the authority of a Director himself, he warned against a return to those ‘disastrous times’ when those who were ‘not officially in charge of anything were obstinately determined to take everything in hand’. In denouncing ‘those who by their frantic provocations’ proved themselves to be ‘not republicans at all’, he called upon his audience to remember with horror the ‘Terror so justly abominated by Frenchmen’.

  Such sentiments were widely shared. Proposals put forward in one of the most celebrated of the clubs, the Club du Manège, that the time had come to ‘resurrect the pikes’ and reconstitute the Committee of Public Safety met with furious shouts of ‘Down with the Jacobins!’ and with hails of stones hurled through the windows of the hall. And when the club was closed by the police, the acclamations were far louder than the protests. The continuing military disasters kept Jacobinism alive for a time. But General Jourdan’s call for a reissue of the 1793 decree of ‘la patrie en danger’ was hotly resisted. Bonaparte’s brother, Lucien, who had entered the Council of Five Hundred the year before, insisted that it was better ‘to extend the constitutional powers of the Directory than to be exposed to the danger of being carried off by a revolutionary wave’, while another deputy warned of ‘a return to the 1793 régime’. Jourdan’s motion was easily defeated in the Council of Five Hundred, and by the middle of October 1799 there was no longer any need for such a motion as the foreign threat had passed: the English had been defeated at Bergen and Castricum, Switzerland had been conquered again, and the Tsar had withdrawn his troops to Russia. The Jacobin cause was lost.

  Only in Egypt did French prospects still appear gloomy. Bonaparte had triumphed over the Turkish army at Aboukir but was still confined in the country by the English blockade. Well aware that for the moment there was no further glory to be won in the East, he gave up his command to a subordinate and, slipping past the English ships, sailed home to France. ‘I am going home,’ he said, ‘to drive out the lawyers.’

  He landed at Fréjus on 9 October and entered Paris less than a week later. He was greeted as a hero, the victorious conqueror, the peacemaker of Campo-Formio and, although France had already been saved, the saviour of France. ‘Everyone is intoxicated,’ the Moniteur reported. ‘Victory which is Bonaparte’s constant companion, has anticipated him for once. He arrives in time, however, to strike the final blows against the dying Coalition.’ Yet there were no more blows to be struck that year, and Bonaparte had already determined that his services were to be of a different kind.

  He knew that a coup was imminent and that the country, tired of war and tired of revolution, was ready to accept it. The brief resurgence of Jacobinism had alarmed those classes which were now predominant in France, and they were looking for a man who would stamp it out for good. The landowning peasants dreaded a change in the political climate which might lead to the loi agraire as much as they feared the consequences of a royalist restoration. The commercial and business interests of the bourgeoisie demanded political stability, an end to forced loans, a régime that would establish property owners as the rightful beneficiaries of the Revolution.

  Sieyès was ready to help them. Convinced now that the authority of the executive must be expanded at the expense of the Councils and that this could only be achieved by a coup d’état organized by a popular general, he had first approached General Joubert. But within a few days Joubert had been killed in action. He had then sounded out General Moreau, but Moreau had expressed doubts and raised objections. Then Bonaparte had appeared on the scene and Bonaparte was almost ideal: he had a Jacobin past, so the suspicions of the Jacobins would be allayed; he was unscrupulous; he had placed himself in a potentially dangerous position by deserting his post and coming home without authority. He was also ambitious – more ambitious than perhaps Sieyès suspected: he was unlikely to stand aside when the coup had been effected, particularly for Sieyès, a man whom he despised, ‘the mole of the Revolution’. He was moreover in the turmoil of an emotional crisis. While in Egypt he had learned that Josephine was having an affaire with a handsome young hussar and that they were both involved in financial dealings with corrupt army contractors. He had come home determined to divorce her; yet, once he was with her again, her contrite tears, her beguiling charm, and the entreaties of her children overcame his resolve. They were reconciled. He undertook to give up the lively young woman with whom he had been consoling himself in Egypt while Josephine, in turn, promised to be faithful to him thereafter. His marriage mended, Bonaparte began to plan the coup d’état with his fellow-conspirators.

  Much work had been done already. General Bernadotte, who had proposed that Bonaparte should be arrested for desertion and evasion of the quarantine regulations, was dismissed from the Ministry of War. Fouché, as Minister of Police, indicated that he would not interfere. Barras, as usual, was equivocal, ready to jump to the winning side, agreeing for the moment to raise no objections. The election of Lucien Bonaparte as President of the Five Hundred was contrived. The President of the Ancients gave satisfactory assurances. Talleyrand undertook to negotiate between Sieyès and Bonaparte who finally met on 1 November. The meeting disturbed Sieyès, for Bonaparte immediately made it clear to him that he was not going to be the mere ‘sword’ of the operation. He was after political power, and Sieyès had no alternative but to give way to him.

  The next step was to persuade the Ancients to vote for the transfer of both Councils to Saint-Cloud in accordance with a provision of the Constitution of Year III which provided for such a move when the deputies were deemed to require the protection of troops against popular disturbances. A rumour was, therefore, spread abroad that a Jacobin plot was afoot to ‘convert the two Councils into a national convention’, in the words of the Moniteur, ‘to remove from the Convention all deputies not in sympathy with its aims and to entrust the government to a committee of public safety’. Referring to this plot, a deputy warned the Ancients on 9 November (18 Brumaire) that the conspirators were waiting only for a signal to ‘raise their daggers against the representatives of the nation’. The required vote was, therefore, given; and General Bonaparte was invested with the command of the Paris garrison ‘to ensure the safety of the national representation’ when the Councils moved to Saint-Cloud. Barras now decided that the conspirators were playing too dangerous a game. Followed shortly by two of the other five Directors, he resigned ‘in protest’, leaving Sieyès and Ducos, the only survivors of the Second Directory.

  As their meeting places, the Orangery and the Galerie d’Apollon, were not ready for them, the Councils were unable to
meet at Saint-Cloud until about one o’clock on 19 Brumaire. And when they did at last assemble, the sessions of both were stormy, some deputies protesting that the Jacobin plot was an invention to secure their removal to the château which was now surrounded by troops, and others insisting that every representative should take an oath swearing to maintain the Constitution. As President of the Five Hundred, Lucien Bonaparte felt compelled to give way to this request though the swearing would take at least an hour. By half-past three, however, his brother had lost all patience and, accompanied by his aides-de-camp and secretary, Fauvelet de Bourrienne, he entered the hall of the Ancients to make a speech himself. Though confident with his troops, Napoleon Bonaparte was never at ease in civilian assemblies. His speech turned into a long and badly delivered harangue in which he maintained, fumbling for words, that there was no longer a Directory and that there were men sitting in the hall of the Five Hundred ‘who would be willing to restore the revolutionary committees and the scaffold’. ‘If there is talk of declaring me hors la loi,’ he declared, turning towards his aides, ‘I shall appeal to you, my brave companions in arms. Remember that I march accompanied by the god of victory and the god of fortune.’ Outside, he added, there were more of his men whose bayonets he could see. ‘General,’ whispered Bourienne, tugging at his arm, appalled by the impression he was creating, ‘General, you don’t know what you are saying.’

  He allowed himself to be led away; but in the courtyard he was given a message from Fouché and Talleyrand in Paris who wrote to say that there was not a moment to lose, that the time for decisive action had come. Surrounded by soldiers, he thereupon marched into the Orangery where the deputies of the Five Hundred rose to their feet in horror at this illegal intrusion. Some of them left their seats, shaking their fists in his face, punching him in the chest, seizing hold of his collar. ‘Outlaw him!’ they shouted. ‘Down with the military dictator!’ Looking shocked and pale and as though about to faint – he afterwards admitted that he lost his nerve that day – he was dragged from the hall by four of his grenadiers.