The Directory
The Directory governed France from November 1795 to November 1799, and is the republic's least admired regime. It followed the fall of Robespierre and was designed by men determined that nothing like the Terror should recur. The Constitution of Year III split the legislature into two chambers — the Council of Five Hundred proposing laws and the Council of Ancients approving them — and gave the executive to five Directors, one replaced each year by lot. Every safeguard against tyranny was also a safeguard against government. Its founding act was self-serving: the Two-Thirds Decree required that two-thirds of the new legislature come from the outgoing Convention, which provoked a royalist rising in Paris in October 1795 that a young artillery officer named Bonaparte dispersed with a whiff of grapeshot. It then spent four years annulling elections it disliked. The Coup of Fructidor in 1797 voided royalist gains and deported deputies; Floréal in 1798 voided Jacobin ones; Prairial in 1799 saw the councils turn on the Directors. The currency collapsed, the assignat was abandoned, and food riots continued. Its foreign policy was war, partly because war paid — Bonaparte's Italian campaign of 1796 sent money back to Paris and made its commander independent of the government that had sent him. Sieyès, a Director himself, concluded the constitution could not survive and looked for a general. Bonaparte returned from Egypt and closed it down on 18 Brumaire, 9 November 1799. Its one durable achievement was to make a military coup look like a restoration of order. The Consulate that replaced it kept the republican forms and none of the constraints.
- Year: 1795 CE
- Category: Political
