Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (62 page)

itary contractors – Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard and others – who knew how to

profit from the situation, nevertheless the Directory’s expansionist foreign

policy (or, rather, the bill for that policy) must have antagonized a verita-

ble army of “bourgeois” citizens: entrepreneurs of all stripes,
rentiers
and pensioners, and many of the government’s own functionaries.109

The impact the Directory’s war had on the masses is naturally more

difficult to gauge; still, there are indications aplenty of widespread apa-

thy if not universal resentment in plebeian ranks over the French “descent

upon Europe.” In the southern department of the Gard, Gwynne Lewis

has found, the endless war, “although reviving the revolutionary ardor of

some, particularly the urban workers, offered little to the rural Catholic

population.” The Catholics were, in any case, likelier to be aroused by

drastic religious and economic changes than by foreign policy.110 From the

central department of the Seine-et-Oise came this realistic appraisal of the

local peasantry by the government’s
commissaire
: “The French victories

109 On these economic points, see again Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory,”

pp. 201–18; and Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe,” pp. 567–88.

110 Gwynne Lewis,
The Second Vendée: The Continuity of Counter-Revolution in the
Department of the Gard, 1789–1815
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 134–35.

254

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

appeal to a section of them, but do not touch them greatly, because they

are purchased at the cost of their sons’ blood, and the peasantry are not

sufficiently committed to accept such sacrifices. They neglect the exercise

of civic rights because exercising these rights has exhausted them.” It would

only require “peace, tranquility and a certain period of calm,” offered this

observer wistfully, “to make them feel the advantages of the Revolution

and to make them like the Revolution again.”111 If only “peace, tranquility

and a certain period of calm” could have been France’s lot! But there was,

as always, the war . . . and as of 1798, that meant a military draft of unprece-

dented onerousness. And, whatever republican historiography may tell us,

nothing was so ideally designed to sow widespread fear and hatred of the

Revolution’s war making among the French as the conscription that was

institutionalized in the
loi Jourdan
.112

Hence, the war probably undercut the Directory’s legitimacy as much

as did any flaws in its constitutional arrangements or in the political culture

and social relations of the day. But the war also contributed most decisively

to the regime’s downfall by militarizing its politics in such a fashion as

to make its subversion and eventual overthrow by the generals virtually

unavoidable.

To begin with, there was militarization on the radicalized right. On the

eve of Fructidor (September 1797), most of the conservative deputies in

the legislature found themselves confronting a devil’s choice between sanc-

tioning military action by reactionaries – action which, if successful, would

likely benefit irreconcilable royalists – and accepting their own (militarily

compassed?) defeat by the Directory. In the end, despite last-minute mili-

tary precautions on the royalist right, the majority of conservatives allowed

themselves to be defeated (and, in some cases, purged) by a progovernment

coup put through, significantly, by Bonaparte’s stand-in general Augereau

and troops loyal to the regime. The conservative “Clichyites” were

painfully aware of, and for the most part wished to dissociate themselves

from, those implacable foes of the Revolution who tended to discredit all of

its critics by taking up arms against France. When the comte de Provence

issued his inflammatory and reactionary Declaration of Verona in 1795,

when irreconcilable émigrés sought to prolong the civil war in the Vendée

or to foment military uprisings in the eastern and southern provinces, and

when extremists on the right lobbied the other European powers to form

a new coalition against Paris, they were contributing to the militarization

of conservative (and, by extension, all) politics in the Republic.113

111 Cited in Church, “In Search of the Directory,” p. 286.

112 On this point, refer once again to Forrest,
Conscripts and Deserters
, passim, and
The Soldiers of the French Revolution
, passim.

113 Harvey Mitchell,
The Underground War against Revolutionary France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. pp. 249 and 252.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

255

Indeed, if a militarization of politics manifested itself on the right, it

was just as evident on the left. The recrudescence of Jacobinism around

the time of Fructidor, and over a subsequent two-year period dominated

increasingly by military and security issues, indicates this clearly.

Tellingly, in the preamble to the coup of Fructidor, Year V, a certain

sympathetic resonance developed between the armies abroad and progres-

sive activists at home.114 In the troubling wake of elections in the spring

of 1797 energizing the Right, apprehensive “patriots” found themselves

looking for political salvation to the victorious republican armies stationed

in Italy and Germany. The generals and their men, in fact, had a variety

of ways to express their displeasure with the conservative trend of politics

at home and to hearten activists on the Left. General Bonaparte used his

divisional newspaper to sound the charge against the Right. Petitions and

proclamations swearing fealty to the Directory flooded into Paris from the

battalions. And toasts ostentatiously drunk by officers and their troops

(and publicized back home) trumpeted such messages as: “To the unity

of French republicans; may they follow the Army of Italy’s example and,

supported by it, regain that energy which is fitting for the leading nation

on Earth!” For their part, Jacobins and other activists responded eagerly to

such expressions of support. Literally thousands of citizens in departments

all over the Republic (Puy-de-D ôme, Mont Blanc, Nord, Ille-et-Vilaine,

C ôte d’Or, Vienne, Sa ône-et-Loire, and so on) sent petitions back to the

militaires
, declaring that they were inspired by the attestations of support in the camps, were alert to the dangers of political “reaction,” and were

ready to defend the Republic with their lives. Reporting rapturously on all

of this, a leading leftist journalist voiced the hope that “this general explo-

sion of patriotism will inform our brave brothers-in-law that the nation

still has in its midst numerous battalions of
enfans fidèles
.”

Small wonder that, in these circumstances, the Directors and several key

generals were able in concert to engineer the coup and extensive purges of

Fructidor. Small wonder, as well, that in the months to come Jacobin ben-

eficiaries of Fructidor from one end of the Republic to the other would

seize every occasion to proclaim solidarity with France’s brave
militaires
.

Some clubs fraternized ceremoniously with passing detachments of troops.

Some even tried to involve army units in local political controversies, pitting

the “honest” patriots against citizens suspected of sinister designs against

the Republic.115 But perhaps the issue most calculated to strengthen ties be-

tween soldiers and activists on the Left, if it could be adequately exploited,

was that involving the veterans’ bonus. The Convention had promised such

a special compensation to the
défenseurs de la patrie
back in the Year II, but 114 Woloch,
Jacobin Legacy
, pp. 70–76, for this discussion.

115 Ibid., pp. 134–35.

256

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

for financial and political reasons nothing had come of this grand gesture.

The lawmakers under the Directory, acutely aware of their dependence on

the goodwill of the armies, had kept the notion of a veterans’ bonus on their

agenda but as of 1797–98 had still failed to pass it into law. Yet this was an

issue ideally calculated to attract the support of the two most reliably patri-

otic interests in French society: namely, the Jacobins and the soldiery. Why

not mobilize some of the nation’s resources in the form of the veterans’

bonus so as to succor courageous citizens to whom the Revolution owed so

much and yet had hitherto accorded so little?116 Predictably, therefore, local

clubbists bombarded the government with petitions demanding swift es-

tablishment of this compensation for the tried and true heroes of the nation.

In these and other ways, Jacobins betrayed a continuing – if problem-

atic – reliance on armed force that paralleled developments at the other

end of the political spectrum. But the Directors – at least in 1798, a year

of relatively favorable geopolitics – would have none of it. As we know,

they struck out at the Left in the spring of 1798, severely curtailing left-

ist activism in all its forms. Yet, in the following year, with the crisis of

the War of the Second Coalition, Jacobinism’s identification with French

geostrategic security produced – for the last time – an efflorescence of

leftist political influence and activism. In the wake of the coup of 30 prairial,

Year VII (18 June 1799), power shifted somewhat from the executive to the

legislature, and a number of measures bearing a Jacobin imprint and recall-

ing the perilous times of the Year II were enacted. They included a call-up of

all classes of conscripts, a forced loan to be assessed on the rich, and a “law

of hostages” aimed at relatives of émigrés and ex-nobles in the provinces.

Jacobin deputies galvanized by the national crisis hurled accusations of

corruption at a number of the Directors, ministers, and
commissaires
to

the armies, and coordinated activities with a revitalized Jacobin Club

in Paris. Throughout the country, clubs were founded or reinstated;

newspapers were established or revived; and an outpouring of petitions

calling for a return to the military-patriotic heroics of the Year II reinforced

this “classic pattern of resurgent Jacobinism in Directorial France.”117

Unhappily for the Left, it was too good to last. After all, the Year VII

was not the Year II: precisely because the Revolution had succeeded so

well at its chief task of rebuilding civilian and military institutions, nothing

like the Jacobin idealism (and terrorism) of 1793–94 was now required to

safeguard France’s place in the world. This was, significantly, the message

given by Director Paul Barras to General Jourdan in a confidential inter-

view granted at the time. “We have today an organization, great civil and

military organizations,” Barras insisted. The way to master the current

116 Ibid., pp. 165–69.

117 See, on these developments: ibid., pp. 367–70; and Lyons,
France under the Directory
, pp. 224–29.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

257

crisis was simply to turn existing resources to account and mobilize all

citizens “in a regular way and without any shock.” A Jacobin motion to

declare
la patrie
once again
en danger
was voted down in the Five Hundred on 14 September; the most prominent pro-Jacobin in the government,

War Minister Bernadotte, was cashiered; and leftist deputies, clubbists, and

propagandists were once again badgered into silence.118

So there would be no repetition of the Terror in France. Yet this in

no way signaled the notables’ approval of the constitutional status quo.

Changes in the personnel of the Directory – above all, the accession to

executive power of Siéyès, the Revolution’s most celebrated constitutional

theorist – pointed toward an important revision of French governance. As

Lyons has truthfully remarked, “there were many former supporters of

the Directory who now sensed the inadequacy of the Constitution of the

Year 3. . . . A strong government had to be found to defeat the Coalition,

eliminate the deficit, and control political extremism.” But, given the pro-

found militarization of revolutionary France – of its foreign policy, its

leftist, rightist, and even “centrist” politics, its public institutions and its

populace – what were the chances that yet another civilian politician or

coterie of politicians could furnish that strong, unified leadership in Paris?

Siéyès and his co-conspirators may have thought that they could fill the

bill – once they had “used” yet another general to overthrow the Directory.

But a more permanent solution was likely to lie in another direction.

“On 17 vendémiaire VIII, Bonaparte landed at Fréjus. The Directory’s

nemesis was at hand. . . .”119

“Though it was chance that gave power to Bonaparte,” Jacques Godechot

has written, “the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire was a logical outcome of

the revolution.” After all, others in their turn – Patriots in the Constituent

Assembly, Girondists in the Legislative Assembly, Jacobins in the Conven-