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The FRENCH REVOLUTION

The winter of 1795-96 was the worst of the winters since the beginning of the revolution.

The Directory supported one of the benefits of the revolution: an advance in science and education. The old academies that had been dominated by the aristocracy were being replaced by new institutions of research and learning. New medical schools were developing, and schools for teachers and engineers, with recruitment based on merit rather than class privilege. Paris was on its way toward becoming the world center in science and medicine well into the nineteenth century.

In 1796 the Directory crushed a new communist movement led by Gracchus Babeuf. In Paris, Babeuf had started a newspaper called The Tribune of the People and had quickly acquired a following. He claimed that equality among men would not be achieved until property was abolished, and he advocated agrarian communism. Rather than the kind of popular rising against the government that had failed in 1794, he had been looking forward to an armed coup by an elite few. Instead, in 1796, he was guillotined.

Financially, the government was still bankrupt. But economically the Directory was benefiting from the country's conquests abroad. The war had been going well for France. The Austrian Netherlands had been annexed. The French had conquered the United Netherlands. Prussia had signed a peace treaty with France in April, 1795 -- Prussia having turned its interest in the direction of Poland, hoping to limit Russian expansion there. And by now France had signed a peace treaty with Spain. In the spring of 1796, French armies were pushing through the Holy Roman Empire, and Napoleon Bonaparte was given command of an army directed against the Austrians and Piedmont. Napoleon was an exceptional commander. He knew how to rally his ragged and hungry troops, telling them he would lead them to the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces and opulent towns, he told them, would be at their disposal. There, he said, "you will find honor, riches and glory." The Austrian and Piedmont armies outnumbered Napoleon's army, 52,000 to 32,000, but the Austrian and Piedmont armies were scattered, divided in purpose and slow, while Napoleon's army was concentrated and following Napoleon's singular strategy. Napoleon, moreover, was a man unusual in capacity for details, and a man unafraid of danger. By using his army economically and concentrating his attacks at critical places and critical times, within fifteen days he won six victories, captured 55 artillery pieces, and conquered what he told his troops was "the richest parts of Piedmont." Napoleon chased the Austrians out of Milan and entered that city on May 15, 1796. By January 1797 he had won more great battles, the last one at Rivoli on January 14. Napoleon's victories cheered the French people, and his name was being spoken across Europe.

Large armies were living off of the lands they occupied and reducing unemployment at home. In February, 1797, the assignat was abandoned in favor of metallic currency, and the Directory had begun balancing its financial books by the taxes and other wealth it was taking from conquered territories, including taxes that Napoleon was levying in areas he had conquered.

Politically, however, the Directory ran into trouble. The first elections for seats in parliament, held in April, 1797, did not have the requirements involved in the selection of deputies in 1795. Conservatives hostile to the war and to the Directory won a substantial number of seats. During the months that followed, deputies to the new parliament argued whether it was best to continue with a republican constitution or to return to a constitutional monarchy. Two of the five members of the Directory sided with the conservatives. The three remaining members of the Directory engineered a coup to save the republic, but the Directory crippled its political legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had conquered Venice and had been expanding against the Austrians. The Austrians had sued for peace and, in October, 1797, Napoleon, acting on his own, had signed a treaty with them, giving Austria rule over Venice. The Venetian Republic was dead. Napoleon's troops pulled out of Venice in January, 1798, and behind them arrived Austrian troops.

Meanwhile, a French army had conquered Rome, and, in December, the French took the city of Naples, 180 kilometers to the south of Rome. The French were raiding churches and palaces in Italy, confiscating art treasures and sending them back to France, helping the Directory financially.

Napoleon's campaigning in northern Italy over, in May, 1798, he set sail from France for Egypt, with a plan to strike at Britain by cutting off its trade route to India. On the way, he conquered the island of Malta -- a hundred kilometers south of the heel of the Italian boot. On July 1 he arrived in Egypt to do battle against its Mameluk rulers, and on July 21 he defeated an army of some 40,000 at the Battle of the Pyramids. Then on August 1, a British naval force, led by Admiral Horatio Nelson, smashed the French navy at anchor at Abu Qir bay, near Alexandria, Egypt -- the French losing 6,200 men as casualties and prisoners. The British were jubilant and encouraged, and in the last half of 1798, Austria, Russia and Turkey, also encouraged by the British victory at Abu Qir, joined Britain in a new coalition against France.

Beginning in March, 1799, the allies began pushing the French out of Italy. Only Napoleon in Egypt was still winning battles. The south of France appeared vulnerable to invasion, and the government in Paris was in crisis. Its Executive Directory was under a prolonged and vociferous attack from its assembly deputies. There was not the balance of powers that existed in Britain and the United States, and the new constitution of 1795 had not been working. The Directory was ruling more-or-less dictatorially and still trying to hold on to power. Leftists in the Assembly were still much weaker than were centrists, but they were loud in blaming greed and corruption of members of the Directory for insufficient supplies reaching the military and for the military defeats. Military conscription was still creating opposition to the government. On August 15, British and Russian forces landed in the United Netherlands, and the Dutch fleet joined them against France.

In France, monarchists were rising in revolt in expectation of the arrival of the liberating armies fighting revolutionary France. In August, monarchists rose around Toulouse. Around Bordeaux, fighting created perhaps as many as 4,000 casualties. In mid-September, an estimated 3,000 monarchists ransacked the town of Le Mans, looking for arms and supplies. And a monarchist army briefly occupied the town of Nantes.

In October, Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and, without permission from the Directory, returned to France. His six-day journey across the country to Paris was filled with local officials greeting him with speeches and jubilant crowds of thousands flocking to get a glimpse of him. Napoleon was the country's only undefeated general. He was a hero who had helped straighten out matters in Paris in 1795 and in 1797, and there was hope that he would now put an end to the squabbling and crisis in Paris and soon enough to save the endangered nation.

In Paris, one member of the Directory, Emmanuel Sieyès, joined with others in a conspiracy with Napoleon. In 1789, Sieyès had written a pamphlet advocating rule by the entire people. Recently his motto had become "confidence from below, authority from above." In the guise of an emergency to save France from a leftist coup, the creation of a new constitution was announced. The Directory was replaced by a three-man provisional government, one of whom was Sieyès and another Napoleon, and a committee of 50 deputies was created to change the constitution. In December a plebiscite overwhelmingly approved the new constitution. The Roman Republic of ancient times had had two consuls to avoid any one man from having too much power. France was to have three consuls, but one of them was to be the First Consul -- Napoleon's new title. According to the constitution it was the First Consul's duty to appoint ministers, generals and civil servants. There was to be little in balance of powers after Napoleon took office, on December 25 -- while the war that France's revolutionaries had started in 1792 continued.

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Copyright © 2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.