Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (60 page)

for example, has seen the Constitution of the Year III as a “creation of

abstract theorists, who imagined that the most ‘rational’ plan would nec-

essarily work best.” The government’s “executive arm,” he has contended,

“was fatally and deliberately weakened.” For one thing, a five-man exec-

utive might easily fall prey to internal squabbling, and blind chance could

influence the quality of its personnel, in that lots were ostensibly to be

drawn annually to determine which Director would “retire.” More crucial,

arguably, was the “rigid separation of powers” mandated by the Constitu-

tion. The ministers did not sit in the legislature, and the Directors had to

communicate with the deputies by official “messages.” Moreover, because

the Five Hundred controlled the purse strings, it could, if dominated by

a hostile majority, paralyze the Directors. “The Directory, which had no

power of dissolution, and no veto, could only reply by unconstitutional

methods.” The way was open, in other words, for the coups, the executive

purges of the legislature and (belike) of local government, for which the

Directors indeed became notorious. More generally, a certain inflexibility

plagued the government’s internal workings. Not only were executive and

legislative powers rigidly separated; the inability of the Elders to amend the

edicts proposed by the Five Hundred made for tensions
within
this bicam-

eral legislature. And the procedure for amending the Constitution itself,

Lyons has pertinently noted, “was almost Byzantine in its complexity.”91

It would be difficult to disagree with the inference Lyons has drawn from

all of this: namely, that the frequent Directorial coups and “exceptional

laws” of this period reflect unfavorably on the Thermidorians’ constitu-

tional handiwork. Yet it is just as certain that a satisfactory explanation of

89 These constitutional arrangements are summarized lucidly in Woronoff,
The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory
, pp. 29–42. The electoral system is discussed in detail in Crook,
Elections in the French Revolution
, pp. 131–57.

90 Refer again to Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory,” pp. 201–18.

91 Lyons,
France under the Directory
, pp. 18–20.

246

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

the Directory’s shortcomings must take us beyond a critical reading of the

Constitution of the Year III. It must take us into complex issues of polit-

ical culture and (polarized) social relations, and it requires as well that we

reassess the relationship between Paris and the provinces and – ultimately –

that obtaining between France’s domestic and foreign policies.

On the matter of political culture, we need to recall one of the central

legacies of the ancien régime to the Revolution: the preference for political

consensus in society, which is to say the distrust of any notion of a plural-

istic politics, of a free competition of political factions or parties. We have

already seen how this legacy was reflected in the increasingly acrimonious

factionalism of earlier phases of the Revolution and in the Jacobin dicta-

torship of the Year II. But the tendency hardly expired with Robespierre.

When Boissy d’Anglas, one of the most prominent survivors of the Terror,

insisted that 9 Thermidor, Year II, “was not a party victory, but a national

movement which gave back to the people the exercise of its rights and to the

Republic its independence,” he was giving voice to the persistent resistance

in France to the notion of a multiparty, competitive politics.92

And indeed, this became one of the hallmarks of the Directory. In theory,

it offered representative governance based – at least in part – on electoral

politics, but it never fully accepted the need for a contestatory system

of organized political parties. “It was better to die with honor defend-

ing the republic and its established government,” revealingly claimed one

of the Directors, La Révellière-Lépeaux, “than to perish or even to live

in the muck of parties and the play-things of the factions.”93 There can

be little doubt that this deeply rooted consensual political philosophy, this

predilection for a “fraternity of citizens” over the divisiveness of “factions,”

powerfully motivated the Directory to play its
jeu de bascule
, its balancing game of purges and counterpurges during the four years of its existence.

Thus its inauguration in late 1795 upon the basis of a legislature two-thirds

of whose members were to come from the departing Convention – this,

to fend off resurgent royalism. Thus its decision in September 1797

(the famous Fructidor coup d’état) to purge declared or suspected royalists

from the legislative assemblies and from the councils of local government

as part of an effort to combat a renewed threat from the Right. Thus its

decision less than a year later (in the coup of Floréal, Year VI) to round

upon the very Jacobins holding national and local office who had been so

recently enlisted in its antiroyalist campaign, but who were now viewed

as personifying a resurgent threat from the Left. And thus the Directors’

entreaties to their
commissaires auxdépartements
the following spring to

92 Boissy d’Anglas cited in Lynn Hunt, David Lansky, and Paul Hanson, “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795–1799: The Road to Brumaire,”
Journal of Modern
History
51 (1979): 738.

93 Cited in ibid., pp. 737–38.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

247

find candidates for office who would pledge strict adherence to the govern-

ment’s line in all matters.94 “In essence,” a trio of American historians have

concluded, “the republicans of 1795 wanted to establish a liberal republic

without accepting the imperatives of liberal politics.”95

But the republicans’ political concerns were powerfully reinforced by

their
social
anxieties. Throughout the 1790s, political polarization had invariably betokened the presence of social polarization. Hence, when the

Directors in 1796 and 1797 lashed out at the “Philanthropic Institutes”

that were enlisting candidates and mobilizing voters on the right, and at

the “Constitutional Circles” and other Jacobin groups on the left, they

were trying as much to defend a social
via media
against social extremes as to champion a “middle way” (supporting the government) in politics.

On the right, the authorities could always see (and genuinely feared)

émigrés and domestic ex-nobles “dug in” upon their rustic estates who were

probably of one mind in desiring a return to the good old days of social

privilege, deference, and all the services associated with seigneurialism.

They were keenly aware as well of the Declaration of Verona issued in

1795 by the comte de Provence (“Louis XVIII”) and promising an eventual

restoration of the old regime’s social structure and prerogatives.96 But if

the French leaders could see the Revolution’s social gains being menaced

from the right, they were just as quick to perceive a social threat posed to

middle-class “respectability” on the left.

Colin Lucas has noted on this last point that the Revolution “was by

and large the business of only part of the population,” a “political nation”

whose members “continued to form the
pays légal
of property owners

who voted in national elections and provided the personnel of local

government.”97 These were, for the most part, the “solid” Frenchmen to

whom the Directory wished to confine the full rights of active citizen-

ship. Hence, the consternation aroused in governing circles by the increas-

ingly aggressive Jacobin campaign – especially in the days after Fructidor,

Year V – to broaden the social basis of French politics. As one historian

of Jacobin activism in these late days of the Revolution has remarked,

the politicians and clubbists on the left did not define their sociopolitical

goals with any great precision. Still, they did share “a minimal preference

94 A lucid synopsis of these purges and counterpurges staged by the Directors during 1795–99

can be found in Woronoff,
The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory
, esp. pp. 30–36, 55–58, 60–61, and 176–82.

95 Hunt et al., “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France,” p. 736.

96 On the social views of those on the Far Right, see Jacques Godechot,
La Contre-Révolution: Doctrine et Action
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); and D. M. G.

Sutherland,
France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), passim.

97 Colin Lucas, “The First Directory and the Rule of Law,”
French Historical Studies
10 (1977): 258.

248

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

for a republic where political oligarchy and social pretension would be

attacked, and where the ‘workingman’ had a rightful place in civil and

political life.” The membership of the Jacobin societies during 1795–99

seems to have consisted for the most part of “a conglomerate of intellec-

tuals, white-collar employees, and ‘workingmen’ or artisans of all varieties

with fairly low status and poor education.”98 These last – workingmen or

artisans – were precisely the citizens whom officials under the Directory

associated most closely with the Terror. It is not at all astonishing, con-

sequently, that Jacobin efforts to involve such laboring Frenchmen in

post-Terrorist politics should have raised Directorial hackles and helped to

convince the government to strike out at the Left in 1798 and 1799.

It is clear in retrospect that French governance in the late 1790s was

caught in a difficult if not necessarily fatal domestic bind. Government at

the center was itself internally divided and at times well-nigh paralyzed by

an overly strict separation of constitutional powers. Beyond that problem,

however, officials in both the executive and the legislative branches found

it difficult to observe the letter and the spirit of the competitive system of

politics through which they were sworn to govern the country. This was

so in part because, Frenchmen that they were, they tended to regard such a

system as favoring factionalism and divisiveness in public affairs. But it was

also true that those who were ruling France genuinely feared – and had some

reason to fear – the impact upon politics of the deep polarization induced

in society by the years of revolution. Hence, the Directory’s notorious

politique de bascule
, its attempt to strike a sociopolitical “balance” with

alternating blows against the Right and the Left. Such a policy, however,

guaranteed as it was to alienate those at both ends of the political spec-

trum, made it absolutely essential for the government to develop a centrist

political party and local patronage connections upon which it could, in

these agitated times, rely.

Yet this was precisely what did
not
come to pass. As one member of the

Council of Five Hundred lamented in Fructidor, Year VII:

I know that people have talked a lot about a neutral and centrist party, equally

opposed to all extremists and destined, by its wisdom, ever to hold the balance of

affairs in its hand; but this party is without life, without color, without movement; it consists, throughout France, of some disguised Royalists, and many weak individuals ready to compromise themselves; in all times of troubles, the balance falls

from their timid hands.”99

Delivered a few months later, this commentary could have served as an

epitaph for a political regime that, for lack of a viable sociopolitical center,

98 Isser Woloch,
Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 92–93, 95–96, and 112.

99 Cited in Lyons,
France under the Directory
, pp. 230–31. My translation from the French.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

249

had to place its powers and responsibilities in the hands of a talented

(and lucky) general.

Why, then, did the Directory fail to develop a strong political con-

stituency in revolutionary France? In part, no doubt, this was a matter

of inherited political culture, an inflexibility of political outlook already

discussed. Just as the Directors could not really brook the existence of

competitive parties on the right and the left, viewing contestatory politics

as “factionalism” destructive of society’s common weal, so they could not

conceive of a government “party” in positive terms. But, clearly, we have to

deal here with more than a matter of political culture. Socioeconomic inter-

ests were (or should have been?) deeply engaged as well. However, recent

scholarly commentary does very little to validate the Marxist paradigm of a

“bourgeois” Directory solidly anchored in the bedrock of entrepreneurial

and other middle-class interests. Indeed, British “bureaucratic” historian

Clive Church has gone so far as to declare that “the Directory failed

precisely because it was not a bourgeois regime. . . . The Directors and their