resources of Berne and the wealth of Rome fortunately tided
over the financial difficulty and provided for the expedition
to Egypt, which permitted Bonaparte to wait
“for the fruit to ripen”—i.e. till the Directory
should be ruined in the eyes of France and of all
Bonaparte in Egypt.
The second coalition.Europe. The disaster of Aboukir (August 1, 1798) speedily
decided the coalition pending between England, Austria, the
Empire, Portugal, Naples, Russia and Turkey. The Directory
had to make a stand or perish, and with it the Republic. The
directors had thought France might retain a monopoly
in numbers and in initiative. They soon perceived
that enthusiasm is not as great for a war of policy
and conquest as for a war of national defence; and
the army dwindled, since a country cannot bleed itself to death.
The law of conscription was voted on the 5th of September 1798;
and the tragedy of Rastadt, where the French commissioners
were assassinated, was the opening of a war, desired but ill-prepared
for, in which the Directory showed hesitation in
strategy and incoherence in tactics, over a disproportionate
area in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Military reverses
were inevitable, and responsibility for them could not be shirked.
As though shattered by a reverberant echo from the cannon of
the Trebbia, the Directory crumbled to pieces, succumbing
on the 18th of June 1799 beneath the reprobation showered on
Treilhard, Merlin de Douai, and La Révellière-Lépeaux. A
few more military disasters, royalist insurrections in the south,
Chouan disturbances in Normandy, Orleanist intrigues and the
end came. To soothe the populace and protect the frontier
more was required than the resumption, as in all grave crises of
the Revolution, of terrorist measures such as forced taxation
or the law of hostages; the new Directory, Sieyès presiding,
saw that for the indispensable revision of the constitution
“a head and a sword” were needed. Moreau being unattainable,
Joubert was to be the sword of Sieyès; but, when he was
killed at the battle of Novi, the sword of the Revolution fell
into the hands of Bonaparte.
Although Brune and Masséna retrieved the fight at Bergen and Zürich, and although the Allies lingered on the frontier as they had done after Valmy, still the fortunes of the Directory were not restored. Success was reserved for Bonaparte, suddenly landing at Fréjus with the Coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. prestige of his victories in the East, and now, after Hoche’s death, appearing as sole master of the armies. He manœuvred among the parties as on the 13th Vendémiaire. On the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. France and the army fell together at his feet. By a twofold coup d’état, parliamentary and military, he culled the fruits of the Directory’s systematic aggression and unpopularity, and realized the universal desires of the rich bourgeoisie, tired of warfare; of the wretched populace; of landholders, afraid of a return to the old order of things; of royalists, who looked upon Bonaparte as a future Monk; of priests and their people, who hoped for an indulgent treatment of Catholicism; and finally of the immense majority of the French, who love to be ruled and for long had had no efficient government. There was hardly any one to defend a liberty which they had never known. France had, indeed, remained monarchist at heart for all her revolutionary appearance; and Bonaparte added but a name, though an illustrious one, to the series of national or local dictatorships, which, after the departure of the weak Louis XVI., had maintained a sort of informal republican royalty.
On the night of the 19th Brumaire a mere ghost of an Assembly abolished the constitution of the year III., ordained the provisionary Consulate, and legalized the coup d’état in favour of Bonaparte. A striking and singular event; for the history of France and a great part The Consulate, Sept. 11, 1799–May 18, 1804. of Europe was now for fifteen years to be summed up in the person of a single man (see Napoleon).
This night of Brumaire, however, seemed to be a victory for Sieyès rather than for Bonaparte. He it was who originated the project which the legislative commissions, charged with elaborating the new constitution, had to discuss. Bonaparte’s cleverness lay in opposing Daunou’s plan to that of Sieyès, and The constitution of the year VIII. in retaining only those portions of both which could serve his ambition. Parliamentary institutions annulled by the complication of three assemblies—the Council of State which drafted bills, the Tribunate which discussed them without voting them, and the Legislative Assembly which voted them without discussing them; popular suffrage, mutilated by the lists of notables (on which the members of the Assemblies were to be chosen by the conservative senate); and the triple executive authority of the consuls, elected for ten years: all these semblances of constitutional authority were adopted by Bonaparte. But he abolished the post of Grand Elector, which Sieyès had reserved for himself, in order to reinforce the real authority of the First Consul himself—by leaving the two other consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun, as well as the Assemblies, equally weak. Thus the aristocratic constitution of Sieyès was transformed into an unavowed dictatorship, a public ratification of which the First Consul obtained by a third coup d’état from the intimidated and yet reassured electors-reassured by his dazzling but unconvincing offers of peace to the victorious Coalition (which repulsed them), by the rapid disarmament of La Vendée, and by the proclamations in which he filled the ears of the infatuated people with the new talk of stability of government, order, justice and moderation. He gave every one a feeling that France was governed once more by a real statesman, that a pilot was at the helm.
Bonaparte had now to rid himself of Sieyès and those republicans who had no desire to hand over the republic to one man, particularly of Moreau and Masséna, his military rivals. The victory of Marengo (June 14, 1800) momentarily in the balance, but secured by Desaix and Kellermann, offered a further opportunity to his jealous ambition by increasing his popularity. The royalist plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise (December 24, 1800) allowed him to make a clean sweep of the democratic republicans, who despite their innocence were deported to Guiana, and to annul Assemblies that were a mere show by making the senate omnipotent in constitutional matters; but it was necessary for him to transform this deceptive truce into the general pacification so ardently desired for the last eight years. The treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801 with Austria who had been disarmed by Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden, restored peace to the continent, gave nearly the whole of Italy to France, and permitted Bonaparte to eliminate from the Assemblies all the leaders of the opposition in the discussion of the Civil Code. The Concordat (July 1801), drawn up not in the Church’s interest but in that of his own policy, by giving satisfaction to the religious feeling of the country, allowed him to put down the constitutional democratic Church, to rally round him the consciences of the peasants, and above all to deprive the royalists of their best weapon. The “Articles Organiques” hid from the eyes of his companions in arms and councillors a reaction which, in fact if not in law, restored to a submissive Church, despoiled of her revenues, her position as the religion of the state. The Consulate. The peace of Amiens with England (March 1802), of which France’s allies, Spain and Holland, paid all the costs, finally gave the peacemaker a pretext for endowing himself with a Consulate, not for ten years but for life, as a recompense from the nation. The Rubicon was crossed on that day: Bonaparte’s march to empire began with the constitution of the year X. (August 1802).
Before all things it was now necessary to reorganize France, ravaged as she was by the Revolution, and with her institutions in a state of utter corruption. The touch of the master was at once revealed to all the foreigners who rushed to gaze at the man about whom, after so many catastrophes Internal reorganization. and strange adventures, Paris, “la ville lumière,” and all Europe were talking. First of all, Louis XV.’s system of roads was improved and that of Louis XVI.’s canals developed; then industry put its shoulder to the wheel; order and discipline were re-established everywhere, from the frontiers to the capital, and brigandage suppressed; and finally there was Paris, the city of cities! Everything was in process of transformation:
