Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (61 page)

supporters were basically a political group, lacking roots in society, and

consequently failing to maintain themselves in power.” Without “anything

but the most grudging support from public opinion and its leaders,” the

regime had no reason to be surprised if, in the end, businessmen and other

notables whose aspirations it had never systematically represented aban-

doned it, preferring a “leap in the dark” with a political and social outsider

like Bonaparte.100 Church’s fellow Briton Martyn Lyons has concurred

in this interpretation to the point of allowing that “it may indeed be too

simple to describe the Directory as a
bourgeois
Republic, since, in the

last resort, the
bourgeoisie
abandoned the regime.” On the other hand,

Lyons has also seen Church’s revisionism as itself simplistic: after all, some

of the Directory’s policies – preservation of a free economy, protection

of property rights, denial of universal male suffrage, and so on – were

without doubt policies favored by the “bourgeoisie,” however it is defined.

To this extent, the Directory, like all its predecessor regimes in the revo-

lutionary era, reflected the social biases of the middle strata in French

society.101

Martyn Lyons’s comments may constitute something of a “middle-of-

the-road” approach to the question of the Directory’s basis in French so-

ciety, navigating as they do between the extremes of neo-Marxist analysis

on the one hand and bureaucratic reductionism on the other. Yet they

scarcely add up to a compelling portrayal of a government courting, and

receiving strategic support from, a powerful array of interests in society.

100 Clive Church, “In Search of the Directory,” in J. F. Bosher, ed.,
French Government and
Society
,
1500–1850
, esp. pp. 274–76, 279–80, and 288–89.

101 Lyons,
France under the Directory
, pp. 236–37.

250

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

This conclusion takes on additional credibility if we return once again to the

relationship (problematic throughout the Revolution) between Paris and

outlying regions of France. We have already had ample occasion to note, in

sundry connections, the indifference (or, in some cases, outright antipathy)

displayed by many provincial Frenchmen and Frenchwomen toward

revolutionary events in their country’s capital.102 The current scholarly

interest in political culture, frequently helping to inform the research con-

ducted in provincial archives, makes it possible to continue to question

(if not altogether deny) the Revolution’s relevance to most “ordinary”

provincial folk during the tumultuous 1790s.

A number of historians working in this mode have maintained, for

instance, that there was a widespread tendency on the local level to ignore

national politics altogether during the so-called First Directory (1795–97).

Unfortunately, they have also found, the Republic’s leaders did little in

practice to “improve” provincial attitudes in this respect. What they ought

to have done, it may appear obvious today, was to try to convince locally

prominent citizens that what transpired in Paris
did
affect them directly. Yet to do so would have required demonstrating to the local citizenry that the

government was able to deal with
local
problems, perceived as such within

a local context. It made little difference what the Directors and deputies

viewed as their international and domestic goals if, in the departments and

cantons, their
commissaires
and other agents were unable (for example) to

maintain order on the highways, apply military conscription fairly, manage

urgent issues of subsistence, and find ways to accommodate arguments for

and against government intervention in local affairs. Seen in this light, the

government’s problems were daunting if not insoluble from the start. As

early as 1796, the Directory was finding it difficult to persuade the politi-

cally conscious in the departments that it could solve local problems in a

professional, nonpartisan fashion. The Directors subsequently staged the

coup of Fructidor, Year V, to overturn earlier elections that they (rightly)

perceived as rejecting their local policies of 1796. But this, in another ironic

twist, led the so-called Second Directory (of 1797–99) to adopt illegal

political and administrative measures that in turn only further discredited

the government in provincial minds.103

What deepened the government’s isolation in the departments and can-

tons of the Republic was its ostensibly neutral but really intolerant and even

persecutory stance on religious affairs. The Thermidorians and Directors

102 In this connection, refer again to the works by Richard Cobb cited specifically in the Introduction.

103 See again Lucas, “The First Directory and the Rule of Law,” pp. 231–60; and Hunt et al., “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France,” esp. pp. 736–38. Lynn Hunt also analyzes these issues in
Politics, Culture, and Class
, passim.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

251

have won some scholarly plaudits for attempting to instill a new civil

religion in the minds and hearts of the citizenry.104 Yet there is little evidence

to indicate that the new faith, with its patently political overtones, ever

caught on in a major way among the traditionally Catholic masses. What

is more, the government, even in the relatively tolerant times preceding

the leftist Fructidor coup, only grudgingly conceded Catholic liberties.

Sunday had to be a working day under the revolutionary calendar, and

the customary holidays also fell victim to the new temporal schema. In

addition, local officials played an intrusive role of surveillance over reli-

gious services: preachers were often dismayed to find police spies attending

their sermons. Moreover, priests were subjected to civic “tests” reminis-

cent of the Civil Constitution and were held answerable, under penalty of

arbitrary deportation, for any violations of the myriad rules against bells

and “exterior signs.” Again, those who opened schools could incur offi-

cial wrath if they scheduled lessons for the
décadi
or treated Sundays as

holidays.105

During 1796 and much of 1797, the Directors and their local agents

did not pursue these policies with an ironclad consistency; however, in

the wake of Fructidor (September 1797), conditions for the clergy and

communicants of the disestablished Church worsened. A tough loyalty

oath was imposed on all priests determined still to minister to their flocks;

at the same time, the government arrogated to itself the power to deport

or incarcerate “refractory” priests by simple administrative order. As the

geostrategists at Paris overextended themselves ever more perilously in

continental high politics, eventually becoming immersed in the war crisis

of late 1798 and 1799, they struck out at rumored émigrés and recalcitrant

priests in the provinces in a manner all too reminiscent of the deepening

war crisis and revolutionary situation of the early 1790s.106 And, just as

earlier, so now, harassing
curés
and
vicaires
only helped to turn the local populace against the government. “Local documents are full of examples

of strife and resistance over the religious issue,” Church has observed.

“In the quiet department of the Haute Marne this was practically the only

cause of public disorder, leading on one occasion to a whole village rioting

when two luckless gendarmes tried to arrest a refractory priest.” While we

may assume that most rural communities in this period that were roused

at times from political quiescence were not exercised solely about religious

104 For some reflections on this fascinating subject, consult Mona Ozouf,
Festivals and the
French Revolution
, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Ozouf’s articles “Revolutionary Calendar” and “Revolutionary Religion” in Furet and Ozouf, eds.,
A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
, pp. 538–70.

105 McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, pp. 120–21.

106 Ibid., pp. 121–27.

252

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

questions, we can agree with Church that the government’s brutal treatment

of priests and their flocks “was a major cause of the alienation of public

opinion during the later stages of the Directory’s existence.”107

In summing up this situation, one historian has criticized the Directory

for preferring “anticlerical growling and bristling to the genuine neutral-

ity in religious affairs which might have brought about a pacification.”108

In the final analysis, this may be a valid judgment, all the more in that now

the Directory’s mismanagement of religious affairs can be readily con-

trasted to Bonaparte’s statesmanlike approach to the problem just a few

years later. But the Directory’s behavior, however counterproductive it

may have been, is explicable on several counts. For one thing, the political

culture within which the policymakers of the late 1790s were operating

tended to blinker their religious perceptions much as it did their political

perceptions. Just as the Directors had a difficult time accepting the notion

of organized and freely competing political parties, so they could not in the

end resist the temptation to police and even persecute a Catholic Church

that was supposed to be free to compete with other faiths for the pop-

ular favor. More important, however, was the “force of circumstances.”

The Directory, eventually besieged on the international front by the

Second Coalition, and challenged at home by political extremists on both

the right and the left, was tempted to confuse apolitical Catholicism with

the royalist-counterrevolutionary cause, and to enlist Jacobin anticlerical-

ism in a patriotic if sporadic campaign against these ecclesiastical and secular

threats to the Revolution. Hence the continuation under the Directory

of revolutionary anticlericalism – and a further means by which the post-

Thermidorian regime undercut its own position in France.

What emerges from this analysis of conditions in France in the late 1790s

is the fact that the Directory, even if it had not been so hopelessly mired in

warfare of ever-expanding scope, would have found the task of establishing

its legitimacy to be daunting. But of course there was in reality no way

of “getting away” from the war – a war that, as Mirabeau and others had

earlier prophesied, was fated to become an integral part of the revolutionary

process. Warfare undermined the Directory both directly and indirectly:

directly, by crippling its finances and sapping its base of support in society;

and indirectly, by militarizing domestic politics to such an extent that only

generals and their armies could rescue the civilian government from the

consequences of its weaknesses.

To weigh the direct impact of the war upon the Directory is, in large

part, to range over points we have already made in other contexts. To begin

107 Church, “In Search of the Directory,” pp. 286–87.

108 McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, p. 129.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

253

with, finances are the “sinews of government,” and it was overwhelmingly

French foreign policy which prevented the Directory from ending the

protracted fiscal crisis that had dogged the revolutionaries since 1789.

Moreover, official efforts to deal with that crisis only cost the government

support in what should have been its key “middle-class” constituencies.

The final agonies of the
assignats
, and their replacement by
mandats territoriaux
that themselves depreciated almost as quickly, may have fattened

the purses of certain speculators in currency and allowed some debtors a

windfall in paying off their debts, but such a turn of events could only

have diminished the Directory in the eyes of creditors, military and civil-

ian pensioners, government employees, and others dependent upon the

Revolution’s paper currency. Even more damaging was the “bankruptcy

of the two-thirds,” which, however necessary it may have seemed from a

strictly financial point of view, effectively wiped out two-thirds of many

rentiers
’ most crucial form of income. Finance ministers of the Bourbon

kings in prerevolutionary times had – with good reason – vetoed such

wholesale state bankruptcies for fear of antagonizing the influential
rentiers

of Paris and provincial capitals; here, now, was a “revolutionary” govern-

ment forced into just such a course of action by the monstrous expenses of

war. Then, again, there were the shipbuilders, insurance agents, merchants,

and refiners of port cities like Le Havre and Nantes, La Rochelle and

Bordeaux and Marseilles, whose lucrative earnings from overseas colonies

and trade were in the late 1790s stifled by the British blockade. Although,

obviously, there existed the counterpoise of currency speculators and mil-