IX.

The Rise of Napoleon

Less than five months after the Directory took office, it launched the initial phase (March 1796 to October 1797) of the Napoleonic Wars. The three coups d'état—on September 4, 1797 (18 Fructidor), on May 11, 1798 (22 Floréal), and on June 18, 1799 (30 Prairial)—which occurred during this period, merely reflected regroupings of the bourgeois political factions. Military setbacks inflicted on the French armies in the summer of 1799, economic difficulties, and social unrest profoundly endangered bourgeois political supremacy in France. Attacks from the left culminated in a plot initiated by the radical agrarian reformer François Noël Babeuf who advocated equal distribution of land and income. This planned insurrection, called the Conspiracy of the Equals, failed to materialize however, as Babeuf was betrayed by an accomplice and executed on May 28, 1797 (8 Prairial). In the opinion of Lucien Bonaparte, president of the Council of the Five Hundred, of Fouché, minister of police, of Sieyès, then a member of the Directory, and of Talleyrand-Périgord and other political leaders, the crisis could be overcome only by drastic action. A coup d'état on November 9-10, 1799 (18-19 Brumaire), destroyed the Directory. In these and subsequent events, which culminated on December 24, 1799, in a new constitution and the Consulate, General Napoleon Bonaparte, currently the popular idol of the recent campaigns, was a central figure. Vested with dictatorial power as First Consul, he rapidly shaped the Revolutionary zeal and idealism of France to his own ends. The partial reversal of the national Revolution was compensated for, however, by its extension, during the Napoleonic conquests, to almost every corner of Europe.