Coup of 18 Fructidor — Directors Purge Royalists
The Directory annulled an election with troops on 4 September 1797, and the French Republic stopped pretending to be constitutional. The elections of April that year had gone badly for it. Around two-thirds of the seats were up, and royalists and constitutional monarchists won most of them, taking control of both councils and electing Barthélemy — a moderate — to the Directory itself. The Directors could not be removed by the legislature, and the legislature could not be dissolved by the Directors, which is exactly the deadlock the constitution of Year III had been designed to produce. Three of the five Directors resolved it by calling in the army. Bonaparte, in Italy, sent General Augereau and a quantity of documents seized from a royalist agent that implicated the general Pichegru, one of the council presidents, in correspondence with the exiled Bourbons. Augereau's troops surrounded the Tuileries at dawn. Two Directors and 53 deputies were arrested; the elections in 49 departments were annulled outright; and 65 people were sentenced to deportation to Guiana, which the sentence itself called the dry guillotine. Emigré and refractory priest laws were reimposed, and dozens of newspapers were closed. The republic had been saved by the army from the voters, which is a formula with limited durability. The Directory repeated the manoeuvre against the Jacobins in 1798 and against itself in 1799. Bonaparte, who had provided the troops without leaving Italy, closed the whole arrangement down on 18 Brumaire two years later. The regime that used the army against the electorate was closed down by the army it had used.
- Year: 1797 CE
- Category: Political
