VIII.

Struggle For Power

The factional struggle between the Committee of Public Safety and the extreme group surrounding Hébert was resolved with the execution, on March 24, 1794, of Hébert and his principal associates. Within two weeks, Robespierre moved against the Dantonists, who had begun to demand peace and an end of the terror. Danton and his principal colleagues were beheaded on April 6. As a result of these purges and wholesale reprisals against supporters of the two factions, Robespierre lost the backing of many leading Jacobins, especially those who feared for their own safety. A number of military successes, notably that at Fleurus, Belgium, on June 26, which prepared the way for the second French conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, increased popular confidence in eventual triumph. As a consequence, distaste for Robespierre's paranoid security measures became widespread. The general dissatisfaction with the leader of the Committee of Public Safety soon developed into full-fledged conspiracy. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, and 98 of their followers were seized on July 27, the Ninth Thermidor according to the Republican calendar, and beheaded the next day. The Ninth Thermidor is generally regarded as marking the end of the “Republic of Virtue”.

Until the end of 1794, the National Convention was dominated by the group, called Thermidoreans, that overthrew Robespierre and ended the Reign of Terror. The Jacobin Clubs were closed throughout France, the Revolutionary tribunals were abolished, and various extremist decrees, including one that had fixed wages and commodity prices, were repealed. After the recall to the convention of expelled Girondins and other right-wing delegates, Thermidorean conservatism was transformed into sharp reaction. During the spring of 1795, bread riots and protest demonstrations spread from Paris to many sections of France. The outbreaks were suppressed, and severe reprisals were exacted against the Montagnards.

The morale of the French armies was undamaged by these events on the home front. During the winter of 1794-1795, French forces commanded by General Charles Pichegru overran the Austrian Netherlands, occupied the United Netherlands (which the victors reorganized as the Batavian Republic), and routed the allied armies of the Rhine. This sequence of reversals resulted in the disintegration of the anti-French coalition. On April 5, 1795, by the Treaty of Basel, Prussia and a number of allied Germanic states concluded peace with the French government. On July 22 Spain also withdrew from the war, leaving Britain, Sardinia, and Austria as the sole remaining belligerents. For nearly a year, however, a stalemate prevailed between France and these powers. The next phase of the struggle opened the Napoleonic Wars.

Peace was restored to the frontiers, and in July an invading army of émigrés was defeated in Brittany. The National Convention then quickly completed the draft of a new constitution. Formally approved on August 22, 1795, the new basic law of France vested executive authority in a Directory, composed of five members. Legislative power was delegated to a two-chambered legislature, consisting of the Council of Ancients, with 250 members, and the Council of the Five Hundred. The terms of one member of the Directory and a third of the legislature were renewable annually, beginning in May 1797, and the franchise was limited to taxpayers who could establish proof of one-year residence in their voting district. The new constitution contained additional evidence of retreat from Jacobin democracy. In its failure to provide a means of breaking deadlocks between the executive and legislative bodies, it laid the basis for constant intragovernmental rivalry for power, successive coups d'état, and ineffectual administration of national affairs. The National Convention, however, still anticlerical and anti-Royalist despite its opposition to Jacobinism, created safeguards against the restoration of the monarchy. By a special decree, the first directors and two-thirds of the legislature were to be chosen from among the convention's membership. Parisian Royalists, reacting violently against this decree, organized, on October 5, 1795, an insurrection against the convention. The uprising was promptly quelled by troops under the command of General Napoleon Bonaparte, a little-known leader of the Revolutionary armies who later became Napoleon I, emperor of France. On October 26 the powers of the National Convention were terminated; on November 2 it was replaced by the government provided for under the new constitution.

Although a number of capable statesmen including Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and Joseph Fouché gave distinguished service to the Directory, from the outset the government encountered a variety of difficulties. Many of these problems arose from the inherent structural faults of the governmental apparatus; others grew out of the economic and political dislocations brought on by the triumph of conservatism. The Directory inherited an acute financial crisis, which was aggravated by disastrous depreciation (about 99 per cent) of the Assignats. Although most of the Jacobin leaders were dead, abroad, or in hiding, the spirit of Jacobinism still flourished among the lower classes. In the higher circles of society, Royalist agitators boldly campaigned for restoration. The bourgeois political groupings, determined to preserve their hard-won status as masters of France, soon found it materially and politically profitable to direct the mass energies unleashed by the Revolution into militaristic channels. Old scores remained to be settled with the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, absolutism, by its nature a threat to the Revolution, still held sway over most of Europe.