ended merely in the arrest and guillotining of Babeuf (September 9, 1796–May 25, 1797).
The liquidation of the financial inheritance of the Convention
was no less difficult. The successive issues of assignats, and the
multiplication of counterfeits made abroad, had so
depreciated this paper money that an assignat of 100
francs was in February 1796 worth only 30 centimes;
Financial policy
of the Directory.
while the government, obliged to accept them at their
nominal value, no longer collected any taxes and could not pay
salaries. The destruction of the plate for printing assignats,
on the 18th of February 1796, did not prevent the drop in the
forty milliards still in circulation. Territorial mandates were
now tried, which inspired no greater confidence, but served to
liquidate two-thirds of the debt, the remaining third being consolidated
by its dependence on the Grand Livre (September 30,
1797). This widespread bankruptcy, falling chiefly on the
bourgeoisie, inaugurated a reaction which lasted until 1830
against the chief principle of the Constituent Assembly, which
had favoured indirect taxation as producing a large sum without
imposing any very obvious burden. The bureaucrats of the old
system—having returned to their offices and being used to these
indirect taxes—lent their assistance, and thus the Directory was
enabled to maintain its struggle against the Coalition.
All system in finance having disappeared, war provided the Directory, now in extremis, with a treasury, and was its only source for supplying constitutional needs; while it opened a path to the military commanders who were to be the support and the glory of the state. England External policy. remaining invulnerable in her insular position despite Hoche’s attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, the Directory resumed the traditional policy against Austria of conquering the natural frontiers, Carnot furnishing the plans; hence the war in southern Germany, in which Jourdan and Moreau were repulsed by an inferior force under the archduke Charles, and Bonaparte’s triumphant Italian campaign. Chief of an army that he had made irresistible, not by honour but by glory, and master of wealth by rapine, Bonaparte imposed his will upon the Directory, which he provided with funds. After having separated the Piedmontese from the Austrians, whom he drove back into Tyrol, and repulsed offensive reprisals of Wurmser and Alvinzi on four occasions, he stopped short at the preliminary negotiations of Léoben just at the moment when the Directory, discouraged by the problem of Italian reconstitution, was preparing the army of the Rhine to re-enter the field under the command of Hoche. Bonaparte thus gained the good opinion of peace-loving Frenchmen; he partitioned Venetian territory with Austria, contrary to French interests but conformably with his own in Italy, and henceforward was the decisive factor in French and European policy, like Caesar or Pompey of old. England, in consternation, offered in her turn to negotiate at Lille.
These military successes did not prevent the Directory, like
the Thermidorians, from losing ground in the country. Every
strategic truce since 1795 had been marked by a political
crisis; peace reawakened opposition. The constitutional
party, royalist in reality, had made alarming
Struggle against
the royalists.
progress, chiefly owing to the Babouvist conspiracy;
they now tried to corrupt the republican generals, and Condé
procured the treachery of Pichegru, Kellermann and General
Ferrand at Besançon. Moreover, their Clichy club, directed
by the abbé Brottier, manipulated Parisian opinion; while
many of the refractory priests, having returned after the liberal
Public Worship Act of September 1795, made active propaganda
against the principles of the Revolution, and plotted the fall
of the Directory as maintaining the State’s independence of the
Church. Thus the partial elections of the year V. (May 20,
1797) had brought back into the two councils a counter-revolutionary
majority of royalists, constitutionalists of 1791, Catholics
and moderates. The Director Letourneur had been replaced
by Barthélemy, who had negotiated the treaty of Basel and was
a constitutional monarchist. So that the executive not only
found it impossible to govern, owing to the opposition of the
councils and a vehement press-campaign, but was distracted
by ceaseless internal conflict. Carnot and Barthélemy wished
to meet ecclesiastical opposition by legal measures only, and
demanded peace; while Barras, La Révellière and Reubell
saw no other remedy save military force. The attempt of the
counter-revolutionaries to make an army for themselves out of
the guard of the Legislative Assembly, and the success of the
Catholics, who had managed at the end of August 1797 to repeal
the laws against refractory priests, determined the Directory
to appeal from the rebellious parliament to the ready swords of
Augereau and Bernadotte. On the 18th Fructidor (September
18th Fructidor.
4, 1797) Bonaparte’s lieutenants, backed up by the
whole army, stopped the elections in forty-nine
departments, and deported to Guiana many deputies
of both councils, journalists and non-juring priests, as
well as the director Barthélemy, though Carnot escaped into
Switzerland. The royalist party was once more overthrown,
but with it the republican constitution itself. Thus every act
of violence still further confirmed the new empire of the army
and the defeat of principles, preparing the way for military
despotism.
Political and financial coups d’état were not enough for the
directors. In order to win back public opinion, tired of internecine
quarrels and sickened by the scandalous
immorality of the generals and of those in power,
and to remove from Paris an army which after having
Aggressive policy
of the Directory.
given them a fresh lease of life was now a menace to
them, war appeared their only hopeful course. They attempted
to renew the designs of Louis XIV. and anticipate those of
Napoleon. But Bonaparte saw what they were planning; and
to the rupture of the negotiations at Lille and an order for the
resumption of hostilities he responded by a fresh act of disobedience
and the infliction on the Directory of the peace of
Campo-Formio, on October 17, 1797. The directors were consoled
for this enforced peace by acquiring the left bank of the
Rhine and Belgium, and for the forfeiture of republican principles
by attaining what had for so long been the ambition of the
monarchy. But the army continued a menace. To avoid
disbanding it, which might, as after the peace of Basel, have
given the counter-revolution further auxiliaries, the Directory
appointed Bonaparte chief of the Army of England, and employed
Jourdan to revise the conscription laws so as to make military
service a permanent duty of the citizen, since war was now to be
the permanent object of policy. The Directory finally conceived
the gigantic project of bolstering up the French Republic—the
triumph of which was celebrated by the peace of Campo-Formio—by
forming the neighbouring weak states into tributary
vassal republics. This system had already been applied to the
Batavian republic in 1795, to the Ligurian and Cisalpine republics
in June 1797; it was extended to that of Mülhausen on the 28th
of January 1798, to the Roman republic in February, to the
Helvetian in April, while the Parthenopaean republic (Naples)
was to be established in 1799. This was an international coup de
force, which presupposed that all these nations in whose eyes
independence was flaunted would make no claim to enjoy it;
that though they had been beaten and pillaged they would not
learn to conquer in their turn; and that the king of Sardinia,
dispossessed of Milan, the grand-duke of Tuscany who had
given refuge to the pope when driven from Rome, and the
king of Naples, who had opened his ports to Nelson’s fleet,
would not find allies to make a stand against this hypocritical
system.
What happened was exactly the contrary. Meanwhile, the armies were kept in perpetual motion, procuring money for the impecunious Directory, making a diversion for internal discontent, and also permitting of a “reversed Fructidor,” against the anarchists, who had got the Coup d’état of the 22nd Floréal. upper hand in the partial elections of May 1798. The social danger was averted in its turn after the clerical danger had been dissipated. The next task was to relieve Paris of Bonaparte, who had already refused to repeat Hoche’s unhappy expedition to Ireland and to attack England at home without either money or a navy. The pecuniary
