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In this compelling narrative renown- ed historian Olivier Bernier provides us with a riveting chronicle of that time, so vastly different from our own yet so pregnant with meaning for us as we embark upon a new century. From Europes bloodstained landscape to the prosperous ports and homesteads of a nascent United States, from the Spanish dominions of Central and South America to the slave trading posts of Africas Gold Coast and the lavish interiors of Chinas Forbidden City, Bernier takes us on a dizzying journey around the world, providing a finely textured portrait of civilization at the dawn of the modern era.

Bringing all of his talents as a historian and a first-rate storyteller to bear, Bernier takes us inside the courts and parliaments of the major powers to listen in on the political discourse of the day. He leads us into the boudoirs and ballrooms of the rich, the cramped homes of the middle class, and the hovels of the poor to provide an intimate glimpse of the private lives of the first modern men and women. And he explores the seminal works of such masters as Beethoven, Goethe, David, and Hokusai to shed new light on the revolutionary trends that were taking shape in the arts, architecture, science, and philosophy.

A spellbinding account of one of the most momentous chapters in the story of civilization, The World in 1800 is a singular achievement by a premier historian and an irresistible read for scholars and history buffs alike.

"Olivier Berniers richly detailed, engaging, and elegant book offers a splendid refresher course on a pivotal moment in world history-the dawn of the modern era."—Francine du Plessix Gray

"...for the first time ever, the world was becoming one, united by war and by the survival of that most ancient of evils, slavery. Already during the Seven Years War, from 1756 to 1763, fighting had ranged across the continents and across the oceans; but it had been disorganized and relatively brief, a series of spasms rather than a new sense of connection. The wars of the French Revolution, from 1792 to 1815, changed all that. Now the leading nations-France and Great Britain particularly-had worldwide strategies. What happened in Rio, Cairo, Calcutta, or Cape Town mattered to the governments in Paris and London; and each movement of the adversaries caused consequences thousands of miles away."—From the Introduction

A Very Great Change

The Center, of the World

Europe, in 1800, had just met the future. Throughout the preceding century, its people—the educated part, at least—had felt that progress was constant, rational, and gentle. Then, in one great explosion, everything changed. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, created a new, fierce, often bloody world. No king, no church, no aristocracy; these were such shocking novelties that the other European Powers—Prussia, Austria, Great Britain—banded together to restore the old order. By 1800, it was clear that they had failed. They still had their own churches and monarchies, but all their leaders, political and intellectual, understood that they were facing not just a new century but a new world. Whatever happened, Europe was leading the way.

    Because of these changes, and because they owned much of the rest of' the globe, the Europeans were convinced that they were the only people who really mattered. Those parts they did not control were either too wild or too strange to be really desirable. All of North and South America, together with their assorted islands, had long been colonized, even if the United States was now independent; Great Britain had spawned cities on the edge of India and, from them, armed expeditions were conquering an empire; as for Africa, all that was wanted was the occasional trading port to tap the resources of that continent—slaves, gold, and ivory.

    That, to be sure, left out a few major powers: Asia, the Europeans thought, consisted essentially of China, which was seen mainly as a source of porcelain, exotic silks, and lacquerwork; Japan, fiercely closed on itself; a few spice islands; and Siam, a funny kingdom where desirable tropical woods were easily found.

    Then there was Turkey. Its sultan still ruled over a vast empire that included the entire Middle East, Turkey itself, Armenia, Georgia, most of the shores of the Black Sea, almost all the Balkan peninsula (today's Rumania, Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia), as well as Greece. Only a century earlier, in 1684, Vienna had been besieged (and nearly taken) by a Turkish army; hut by the 1780s, this once mighty giant was in full decadence. Russia ate steadily at its Black Sea possessions; Egypt had become semi-independent. The question now was a simple one: what to do with the Turkish empire's many possessions when it finally collapsed.

    Indeed, the non-European world was seen mainly as a source of tropical goods—slaves, sugar, spices, coffee, tea, ivory, rare woods, gold, silver. There was a fierce rivalry between Spain, France, and England when it came to this kind of trade, with each country either defending its possessions (Spain) or trying to extend them (England). As a result, the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in a haphazard and disorganized way, had become the first of the world wars. Fighting took place not just on the traditional European battlefields, but as far away as the South Indian coast and the frozen wastes of Canada, and so it was a rehearsal of sorts for the real world war that followed, the conflict which had begun in 1792 between revolutionary France and the rest of Europe and became the Napoleonic Wars before it finally ended in 1815. In 1800, armies and navies were fighting from the Netherlands to the southern tip of Africa, from Italy to India.

    Of course, other peoples, on other continents, felt very differently about their relative importance. The emperor of China, for instance, knew very well that he ruled the only worthwhile portion of the earth, and the Koreans, next door, never forgot it; the shah of Persia, although he had to acknowledge that the sultan was a worthy rival, still considered himself a mighty potentate, as did the sultan himself. And inside Africa, local kings reigned in the full enjoyment of their own importance.

    Was Europe, then, really the center of the world? Yes, in that it was entering a second period in which its power expanded throughout the known world (the first had seen the conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century). There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was the development of the new technologies that had brought about the Industrial Revolution. Mechanical looms; faster, more destructive guns; more complex metallurgical techniques; the mass production of consumer goods; all these were new and unequaled elsewhere in the world. Just as important, these changes were financed by the development of banking and credit. As a result, Europe, economically and militarily, had become much the most powerful of all the continents.

    It also mattered that the Europeans saw themselves as the most civilized people in the history of the planet. The Greeks and the Romans, they felt, had made a good beginning; Alexander and Caesar, Aristotle and Cicero were household names among the middle and upper classes; but then the Dark Ages had come, those times of superstition and ignorance. By the end of the eighteenth century, though, reason ruled once again. This was the Enlightenment: the light of intelligence, logic, and knowledge had dispelled the darkness.

    For the first time, intellectuals, scientists, and those who read them felt sure that they could, eventually, understand the world because it was ruled by unchangeable principles, not the whim of a deity or the power of magic. Many laws of nature had yet to be discovered—science was, after all, still young—but the ultimate result was hardly in doubt. In the same way, the many species of animals and plants were being rapidly cataloged. No one believed any longer in the existence, somewhere far away, of strange, unlikely creatures. There was, in fact, nothing that could not be ascertained by rational inquiry.

    Nor could people be prevented, any longer, from exploring subjects rejected by religious dogma. The history of the world was one of these subjects; virtually no educated person, at the end of the eighteenth century. believed either that the world had been created in seven days or that Adam and Eve had ever existed. That same attitude applied to sciences like physics and chemistry. Although the Catholic Church had reluctantly admitted that the earth was round and that it circled the sun, it held firm to quite a number of other strange beliefs, which none but the very pious still respected. At the same time, religious tolerance was rapidly gaining ground, despite the opposition of the various established churches. In Prussia, Frederick the Great (1740-1786) had allowed both Catholic and Protestant cathedrals to be built in Berlin—no doubt, it helped that he cared nothing for religion. Even in France, a country from which Protestantism had been banned in 1684, toleration was appearing; finally, in 1788, the French had been allowed to worship as they pleased.

    Even more striking, great numbers of educated people felt able to reject all religious teaching—a few because they were atheists; most because, like Voltaire, George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, they were deists. They thought that there must be a Supreme Being, but were unwilling to let themselves be hemmed in by a specific theology.

    All this made for more freedom of thought than ever before: it also convinced the Europeans that, in this area as well, they led the world. And indeed, this new openness, this thirst for scientific knowledge, resulted in new techniques that gave Europe an even bigger lead over the other continents. The Europeans themselves never doubted what they saw as their intrinsic superiority. Little was known about Asian or African gods; but everyone agreed that the rankest superstition ruled those continents. Equally, no one thought that any of those distant cultures might be as rich, as advanced as the European; there was only one right way of doing things—and many wrong ways. It was not the least shocking part of the Marquis de Sade's books that he was a cultural relativist, a man who thought that since the very same act could be praiseworthy in one place, and a dreadful sin in another, there was no superior civilization: the only thing that mattered in the end was to do precisely what one pleased.

    Those who viewed change with distaste clung firmly to the old standards and had absolute values. They believed that God (the deity was either Catholic or Protestant, depending on the location) had created a perfectly ordered hierarchy, in which the king was on top, the royal family next, the aristocracy a small step lower, and the rest of humanity below notice. These conservatives formed a sizable group all over Europe; they could be found at the various courts, and in most government ministries, and they still owned much of the land.

    The reformers also disagreed with the Marquis de Sade. Although, of course, they advocated change, they believed in the importance of virtue, usually as expounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kindness to others, a yearning for the equality of mankind, a hefty dose of sentimentality, and a need to create a morally sound world motivated them. On occasion that last need outweighed any possible kindness; it was in order to build a more equal society that the French revolutionaries sent a significant number of people to the guillotine.

    Perhaps because his fellowmen made him so uncomfortable, Rousseau had come up with a startling notion, that of the "noble savage." Civilization, Rousseau said, was corrupt by definition. Only in a state of nature did mankind live virtuously; with organized societies came greed, tyranny, inequality, and afflictions of all kinds. And so the very people who felt, with a degree of justification, that they had reached an unparalleled degree of civilization, also fantasized about life in a state of nature. This in no sense diminished their sense of superiority over the rest of the world. Since no "noble savages" were actually known, and since, in any event, no one really intended to trade gilded carriages and sumptuous mansions for a cave, the yearning for a state of nature could be understood as a sign of sophistication that simply confirmed a well-understood fact: Europe was vastly superior to the rest of the world.

    "Those who have not lived before the Revolution do not understand how sweet life can be," Talleyrand wrote. He was right. Throughout the eighteenth century, and culminating in the 1770s and 1780s, all across Europe, a new culture had been established in which pleasure was the key. Naturally, there were all sorts of pleasures. Some could be found in a witty, far-ranging conversation; and so, before 1789, people came from all over just to attend the Paris salons. Other enjoyments were more sensual, ranging from an appreciation of the nouvelle cuisine to the understanding of interior decoration: even today, the great furniture makers of that time remain unequaled. And then, there had been other, even more compelling, ways to enjoy oneself. Men and women alike had felt free to love whom they chose; fidelity to a spouse was considered stodgy; and kept women had flourished. Here, in fact, choice had been everywhere, even if not many hosts went to the same lengths as one particular Neapolitan prince. Depending on his guests' preferences, they were greeted by ravishing young women or handsome young men—or both—standing naked around a pool and ready to do whatever the guests wanted.

    That had been a time when refinement was everything. Manners, tastes, sensibilities, everything seemed to reject crudeness. As for sentimentality, it was everywhere. When, in 1782, Marie Antoinette was spotted sitting in the Garden of the Tuileries eating strawberries and cream, all the spectators burst into tears at her adorable simplicity. If your little dog had the sniffles, you announced to all your friends that your anguish was excruciating, and that, indeed, you would not sleep a wink that night.

    In this endlessly refined world, it was understood that catastrophes {other than those due to nature) were impossible. There might still be a few local wars, but they would be minor and conducted with becoming humanness. There could be no great social upheaval: change would come gradually and without tears.

    Of course, not all Europeans thought alike. The English aristocracy might love visiting Paris; it might think the French set the right standards when it came to culture, decor, and food; but the British government prided itself on its unique way of operating, and it was intent on securing trading posts around the world, an activity the French found deeply uninteresting. France had wanted no more conquests; Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, had been eager to expand her already enormous realm, and in order to do so, she had appropriated about half of Poland (the other half was split between Austria and Prussia) and a great swatch of territory in the Caucasus and along the Black Sea. Still, in the 1780s, the Europeans, for all their differences, had shared some certainties. Chief of them was that, in this most civilized, most superior continent, violent change was unthinkable.

The World Upside Down

This wholly mistaken belief had survived for an amazingly long time. When, in 1789, the Revolution began in France with the election of the Estates-General, everyone (except a few die-hard reactionaries) felt sure that this was the first step in a process of peaceful reform. When, on July 14 of that year, the Parisians stormed and took the Bastille, it was seen as a positive step, even though it had involved the odd lynching, what mattered, though, was the final end of arbitrary government. Not to worry, well-informed people said, the Revolution was now over. And they repeated that statement when, on October 4, a mob dragged the king, the queen, and the royal family from Versailles back to Paris.

    Of course, they were wrong; these events were merely the beginning of astonishingly violent and radical changes. Within three years, the monarchy had ended, the new constitution had been discarded, and massacres had taken place in the Paris prisons. In September 1792, the Republic was proclaimed. On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was guillotined and so, nine months later, was Marie Antoinette. A new revolutionary government took over, and the Terror began. France, that most refined, that most sophisticated of countries, had become unrecognizable.

    The officially proclaimed Terror was, however, no random savagery. The approximately ten thousand men and women who were killed were selected quite carefully: if the new national assembly, the Convention, demanded such bloodthirsty policies, if its all-powerful committees sent cartfuls of aristocrats, priests, and assorted opponents to the guillotine, it was, they considered, for a good reason, and no one was more coldly logical, or more blood-chillingly threatening, than Robespierre. The Republic, he explained, was the hope of mankind; if it disappeared, tyranny would prevail forever; thus, in order to preserve liberty, it was necessary to suppress it temporarily. That line of reasoning, for all its self-evident fallacy, has continued to have enormous appeal. The Soviets used it in our own century, and so do dictators all over the world.

War as a Way of Life

The threat from outside also helped to sustain the Terror. France was at war with Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain, and they had all announced that they would restore the monarchy when they won. Many excesses, therefore, were passed off as needed for the defense of the Republic. By 1800, everybody understood that this was no longer a possibility, but between 1792 and 1795, France was in real danger. It should, by all normal standards, have been defeated; briefly, it even looked as if it would be. Just how wars were won, after all, seemed very clear: the side with the most powerful allies, the best officer corps, the greater firepower, and the best drilled troops obviously could not lose. The French army, by those standards, was woefully inferior: it had no allies; it was grievously undersupplied; the men were raw recruits; and most of the officers had emigrated because they were aristocrats who hated the Republic. The Allies, therefore, expected to win quickly and easily. Then, having occupied Paris and shot a good many people, they would restore the monarchy, help themselves to some territory, and go home triumphant. In fret, to their horror, precisely the opposite happened.

    In part because so many of the French now felt the country really belonged to them, in part because the economy was ruthlessly regulated so as to produce the necessary resources, the revolutionary army went on to win battle after battle. By the beginning of 1795, it had conquered the Austrian Netherlands (today's Belgium) and Holland, much of the left bank of the Rhine, and much of northern Italy. And while it was at it, it invented modern warfare.

    The most important of these innovations was the adoption of universal conscription. Until then, troops had been recruited in one of two ways: by offering boons upon enlistment, or simply by force. Now, in France, it was the entire nation (or at least its young males) that came together to form the army; and those soldiers were not only numerous, they were highly patriotic, and cheered on by most of their compatriots. Thus, a relatively small professional army was replaced by the nation itself and, as a result, wars that, until then, had seemed mostly an aristocratic game had come to be supported by much of the population.

    There was still more. Until the Revolution, wars had been fought for precise, limited reasons: to defend a country's honor, or to conquer territory. Now the Allies made it clear that they intended, when victorious, to restore the ancien régime; in response, the French fought a new, ideological kind of war. Having themselves become free, they announced, they would bring liberty with them wherever they conquered. Indeed, they said, they were in conflict only with the kings, not with the peoples, who were themselves oppressed and thus the natural allies of France; and French armies came, therefore, not to gain new provinces, but to spread the benefits of freedom and a republican form of government.

    War had thus become not just unavoidable but, seemingly, the normal state of things. Years passed, and the war continued. Politics were defined by the necessities of the conflict; states were reorganized, the better to deal with it; and it spread throughout the world, linking areas as far apart as Europe, India, the Americas, and southern Africa. By 1800, it had already lasted for eight years; what no one knew was that it still had fifteen years to go.

    A corollary of this vast, apparently endless struggle was that the monarchs of Europe, from Naples to Madrid, from London to Saint Petersburg, worried that their continued rule might be in danger. Many of them, at first, had been secretly delighted by the Revolution: because it weakened one of the great powers, it meant, they thought, that the others would prosper accordingly. Now they were faced with a hideous choice: they could continue the war, and risk complete defeat and the toppling of their thrones, or negotiate a peace and recognize the legitimacy of the French republic; and then, might not a taste for freedom spread to their own subjects?

    So it was that, by 1800, France had become the most important country in Europe. It acted, everyone else reacted; and its army, with amazing speed, was changing the boundaries of states as far apart as Holland and Italy. Thai was not all, though: by reinventing itself, its system of holding property, the way it educated its children, the process through which it promulgated its laws, France was also creating a new world, one which forced change everywhere else as well.

    Of course, another country had done much of that even before the French. The United States, having gained its independence in 1783, had added a Bill of Rights to its constitution. It, too, was a republic; it was governed by an elected Congress and president. Its government guaranteed freedom of thought, of expression, of worship; it was based on the consent of the governed, not on their enforced obedience. The very Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had begun the French Revolution, was a mere adaptation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence; but the example of the United States still remained unconvincing for the Europeans. It was too far away, too primitive, too small—its population barely reached 4 million. It had never had an established church, a feudal system of land tenure, an aristocracy, a resident king. No one in Europe worried about the United States; everyone worried about France.

    And in fact, as the Revolution quieted down, the elites throughout Europe saw that the Republic was often formidably effective. The new pattern of land ownership was a case in point. Before the Revolution, the land, still by a very wide margin the most important source of wealth, had belonged mostly to the church and the nobility. Farmers were few, and the mass of the population consisted of peasants who had to pay rent, tithes to the church, feudal rights to their lord, and taxes to the king. Then, in late 1789, the lands of the church were taken over by the state, which proceeded to resell them at prices that grew progressively cheaper as the currency depreciated. To this vast ensemble—nearly one-third of all the land in France—were soon added the estates forfeited by the emigrating nobles. The result was agrarian reform on a vast scale. From a nation of peasants, France became a nation of farmers, people with a real stake in the country because they owned a small part of it.

    The end of legal privilege was just as startling. Before the Revolution, the church had been tax-exempt, and this was a major cause of its unpopularity; but so had a large part of the nobility. Certain professions were closed to commoners; you had to be noble in order to become an army officer, for instance. Finally, the court system, to a startling degree, favored the rich and powerful. This was in part because the courts of last resort, the Parlements, were composed of men who had bought their offices, usually for a very large sum. This had two consequences: not only did the judges tend to favor their social equals, they also expected to garner more from their position than merely the salary paid to them by the government. If you wanted to win your suit, you bribed the judge; it was a fully recognized part of the way the system functioned.

    Thus, for all the French to be equal before the law, and free from arbitrary arrest, was a major change in the way people lived their lives. So was the possibility of entering any profession to which you might feel suited; so was a system of courts dispensing free and fair justice; so was the principle of no taxation without representation. All these were such dearly loved conquests, in fact, that Napoléon at his most tyrannical never tried to abrogate them: he knew too well that any attempt to do so would provoke an instant, general, and violent revolt.

    There were smaller changes as well. The metric system was one. Before 1789, the French had had to cope with a confusing series of measurements: a foot in Amiens was a little longer than a foot in Arles, a pound in Paris lighter than a pound in Tours. Now, throughout the country, distances were measured in meters, liquids in liters, weights in grains and kilos—a system now practiced everywhere except England and the United States.

    This made life simpler. So did another innovation. Before the Revolution, the Catholic Church held the registries of births, marriages, and deaths. That meant all must live and die according to that church's precepts. If you died without its last rites, or if you were an actor, you could not be buried in a proper cemetery. Now the state took over these registries and the regulations of burials, and suddenly people were significantly freer. Far more startling still. divorce, for the very first time, was made legal. Of course, the church, when it was allowed back, refused to recognize people's right to divorce and remarry; but it found, in most cases, that they went ahead anyway.

    All this was very startling to most Europeans, although less, perhaps, to the English than to anyone else. But in England, too, there were many legal inequalities. Catholics, for instance, could not hold any of the offices of state or be elected to Parliament; only a minute fraction of the male population—some three hundred thousand people altogether—was allowed to vote. The result was a House of Commons composed mostly of landlords, seldom a very representative group. The other house of Parliament, the House of Lords, was composed of hereditary aristocrats who never forgot to defend their own interests. All that hardly made for a democratic system: Great Britain was a limited monarchy that allowed the aristocracy to rule. This could be seen in many ways: only the rich and well-connected could get a divorce, for instance, since it required a special (and very costly) act of Parliament. As for the land, some 60 percent of it was owned by less than 5 percent of the population. There was also another, in some ways more shocking, tradition, that of making a great deal of money from the slave trade. France, on the other hand, had abolished slavery in all its possessions by 1791.

    The abolition of slavery aside, the reforms carried out in France attracted many of the most intelligent people in Europe, from that brilliant English politician, Charles James Fox, to La Harpe, tutor to the future czar Alexander I of Russia. For them, as well as for much humbler people, France had shown the way. Unfortunately, much of that achievement was disfigured by the violence that had accompanied it; but if the killings were to stop, then the attraction might become well-nigh irresistible.

    The series of military triumphs which accompanied the Revolution also dazzled people throughout Europe. That France had been reenergized was undeniable. That it had produced a large group of brilliant, nonaristocratic generals was equally obvious: the great upheaval had actually strengthened the country that a very few years before had seemed ripe for conquest. By the middle of 1794, though, it was also becoming clear that the Terror was out of control, and that it must be stopped.

War Continued: France after Thermidor

Robespierre: to this day, in Europe, the name has kept its potency. He was either a cold monster or a selfless patriot, depending on your point of view. He either saved France by so organizing it as to defeat both the enemy outside and the royalists inside; or he was a vain, ruthless, self-infatuated dictator whose rule caused France untold sufferings. Both these summaries of his rule are true. This slender, nattily dressed man, with curled, powdered hair, a sallow complexion, and weak eyes hidden behind green glasses, brought forth immense energies; he also sent thousands of innocent people to die by beheading, shooting, or drowning. And he finally made a terrible mistake: he frightened Tallien, Barras, and his colleagues at the Convention as badly as he had frightened the rest of the French.

    By the summer of 1794, the Convention was not quite two years old; yet it had already several times turned against its own members. Starting with the more moderate Girondins, going on to the charismatic Danton, it had sent dozens of its own members to the guillotine. Now, it was largely controlled by its own permanent committees, chief among them the Committee of Public Safety; it was through them that Robespierre ruled, until July 27, 1794, the day when, in a speech to the full assembly, he announced that there were more traitors in its midst.

    Had he named those traitors, he might well have prevailed; instead, he delayed, and in an agony of fright, all the remaining deputies, each of whom dreaded being among those on Robespierre's list, finally turned against him. Led by Tallien, whose mistress, already imprisoned, was due to be executed within the next few days, and by Barras, a bold and hungry former aristocrat, the Convention outlawed the dictator. That night, under confused circumstances, Barras arrested him; and a day later, he was guillotined together with a few followers.

    The next step was to renew the membership of the key committees; and then the Convention settled down to govern France. It relied on a few basic principles: there was to be no more Terror, and the guillotine was dismantled: equally, there was to be no return to a non-Republican regime; the war must still be fought; and power must return to the bourgeoisie. In order to husband the country's resources, a system of rationing and rigidly enforced price controls was in effect; this was soon ended because it inconvenienced the middle classes, but the war continued to be fought successfully.

    "With its insane laws, the Committee of Public Safety had taken the mad decision of providing all the Parisians with bread and meat, and all the civil servants with other foodstuffs like sugar, oil, rice, etc.," wrote one of the most influential deputies, though, actually, all the committee had done was to ensure food was available at a reasonable price. Now, the Convention thought it was better to let the Parisians starve, and to allow the civil servants to survive however they might on a salary paid in highly depreciated paper money. The many non-noble rich who had passed through the Revolution unscathed, and who were now reasserting control, always had enough to eat.

    By December 1794, in a frenzy of what would today be called privatization, the state had given up its monopoly of foreign trade; it had stopped owning the weapons manufactures; it had outlawed forced seizures of goods in order to supply the armies. Trade and industry were free again; and firm police measures prevented the poor from rising again. Scarcity and inflation reinforced each other: the gold louis had gone in value from 24 paper livres in 1789 to 130 in 1794. By 1795 it reached 1,200 livres. Far more important to the poor, the standard measure of flour, which cost 2 livres in 1790, reached 225 livres in 1795, while a liter of olive oil went from 1.16 to 62 livres, and shoes from 5 to 200.

    The remaining deputies were, most of them, men of property: they wanted to enjoy their wealth without annoying restrictions, and they no longer wanted to hear from the poorer part of the population. So they decided to create a new regime. Thus began a balancing act that was to last until the end of 1799: neither the extreme left, which wanted a return to economic regulation and the Terror, nor the right, which was waiting to restore the monarchy, would be allowed to prevail. And every time either party appeared threatening, it was ruthlessly crushed: when the poorer Parisians rose on April 1, 1795, they were mowed down by the troops. When the royalists did the same on October 5, they, too, were gunned down—by a young general named Napoléon Bonaparte, who was following Barras's orders. That had, in fact, been far the more dangerous of the two risings: most of the French, by the fall of 1795, liked neither the Convention nor the Republic. As Tallien noted: "If the country were allowed to fulfill its aspirations, we would have a constitutional Counter-revolution within the next three months."

    It was in part to avoid a restoration that the Convention had settled down to write a new constitution; in part, also, because France was a state without law. The constitution of 1791 had been abrogated in 1792; the constitution of 1793, although endorsed in a nationwide vote, had been suspended until the end of the war, and thus never applied. France, in late 1794, had neither an institutional framework nor, indeed, a valid legal code. Clearly something had to be done.

    As it happened, the deputies knew just what they wanted: first came the preservation of their own power; second, the safety of all those who had voted the king's death in 1793; and third, a system that would guarantee and preserve property while ensuring that no new dictator could take over. The result was the constitution of the year III, which was adopted by the Convention on August 23, 1795, and by the electorate in September. At first glance, it met with almost universal approval: 914,853 votes for, a mere 41,892 against; but these figures were not what they seemed since, at the same time, over 4 million voters had abstained.

    Most of the French, in fact, did not care about abstract things. For them, the constitution was hardly real: what defined their lives was the war and the lack of a reliable currency. The paper money created at the beginning of the Revolution, the assignat, was depreciating faster every day; there were virtually no gold or silver coins to be seen, largely because those who had them hoarded them. As for shortages—of food, of clothes, even of nails with which to shoe horses—they were universal. It wasn't just that no one could tell what would happen next: many people did not know whether they would eat the next day.

    Still, it was in many ways a good constitution. Its authors tried to strike a balance between tyranny and anarchy, and they almost succeeded. All individual freedoms, including that of the press, were guaranteed; all the French were equal before the law. There was an attempt at separating the legislative and the executive, which had been one when the Convention ruled.

    Just as important, none of the deputies could hold an executive function. Because everyone remembered Robespierre, the Republic did not have a president. Instead, the executive consisted of a five-member Directoire elected by the legislature. The directors were forbidden to appear before either house; they could only send messages. They had no veto; they could ask the councils to take appropriate measures but not send in a bill; they controlled the civil and foreign services, and the armed forces, and they appointed (and fired) the ministers, the generals, the ambassadors, and the top administrators.

    This was, in many ways, a sound system: neither branch of government could oppress the other; on the other hand, neither had much leverage over the other, and conflicts were accordingly difficult to resolve, as the following years were to prove again and again. As for the judiciary, for the first time in French history, it was independent, and there were to be juries. Finally, the treasury was run by five commissioners, elected by the legislature, and thus wholly independent from the executive. They were to refuse all disbursements that had not been properly authorized by a law. So far, there was much to be said for the constitution: it was, on the whole, workable, moderate, and reasonably democratic; but then came two dangerous provisions. The legislature was to be renewed by a third annually, and the result was a virtually uninterrupted electoral campaign. Then there was the electorate itself.

    Only men over twenty-one who paid taxes and had been resident for a full year in the same place were considered to be citizens. Even then, not all citizens could vote equally: the electoral college elected the deputies, and its members, who were elected by the regular citizens, had to own property producing an income worth 200 days of work in the cities, 150 in the country: there were only some thirty thousand such men in France. Thus, under an appearance of democracy, the suffrage was highly restrictive and made sure that only the well-to-do could, in the end, be elected.

    This struck many of the deputies as entirely normal. "We should be governed by the best men," one of the authors of the constitution explained. "The best men are the best educated, those with the greatest interest in maintaining the laws; and, aside from a few exceptions, you will only find such men among those who, owning an estate, care about the country in which that estate is located.... If you give political rights to men without property, ... they will throw us back into the convulsions from which we have only just emerged." Now the country could be run by the bourgeoisie.

    Even so, the deputies, who knew that they were generally loathed, decided something more had to be done, and so they came up with the Decree of the Two Thirds: of the 750 new deputies to be chosen, two-thirds would have to be members of the Convention. This, obviously, was both simple and effective: it meant that as the Convention finally dissolved itself, its members would automatically pass into the new legislature.

    Indeed, no one was taking any chances. When the new councils met, their first task was to elect the five directors. To no one's surprise, they all turned out to be men who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI, all men of the center, and all backers of the new economic dispensation. On October 27, 1795, at the Palace of the Luxembourg, they met and assumed their new office. And just in case anyone still failed to understand why they were there, Barras made it plain: their task, he said, was "to save the men of the Revolution."

The Beginnings of the Directoire

Still, none of the politicians could expect to be saved if the country itself perished; and there was a chance it might do so. The very installation of the directors was symptomatic. Their palace had been the residence of Louis XVI's brother until 1791. Now, when the Kings of the Republic, as they were soon called, moved in, they found cavernous, empty rooms—not a table, not a chair not a log for the fireplace; and in order to certify that they had just taken office, they were forced to borrow five chairs, a kitchen table, paper, and ink from the concierge.

    Eventually, they furnished the palace; but finding money to run the government and pay the armies was more difficult still. "The Treasury was completely empty, the assignats [the paper currency] valueless, the little they were worth vanished from day to day as their value fell to nothing ... There were no revenues, ... no financial plan ... The credit of the State was dead," noted Louis-Marie de la Révellière-Lépeaux, one of the new directors. He knew what he was talking about.

    Because the government had no metallic currency, it paid salaries and supplies in paper money; and since that was depreciating rapidly, it printed more and more of it. In August 1794, assignats of a nominal value of 7.5 billion livres were in circulation; by November 1795, that amount had risen to 20 billion, and to 39 billion by January 1796. In 1795, 1 gold franc was worth 50 paper francs. A year later, it was worth 1,000 francs, and all the prices continued to rise. Before the Revolution, a Parisian worker could live modestly on 2,000 livres a year. Now, coffee cost 210 livres a pound, a turkey 250 livres, meat 120 livres, bread 60 livres, a dress 2,500 livres—and the salaries for those who were still employed signally failed to keep up. At the same time, because the rich had either fled or gone into hiding, many Parisians found themselves unemployed: hairdressers and furniture makers, servants and jewelers, all were out of a job.

    As, in late October 1795, the Directoire was installed, impoverishment was general. The aristocracy had fled or died, the rich bourgeoisie was in hiding. The small, mercantile bourgeoisie was ruined by the cessation of trade; and the urban proletariat was both unemployed and destitute. Paris itself, once the capital of all the pleasures, all the refinements, looked like a city half-dead. "Posters everywhere ... tricolor rags fluttering from the windows—rivers of mud, urine and soap scum [running down the streets]—dried-up fountains—cheap restaurants by the hundred, wine and liquor vendors by the thousands ... —the grandest private houses become shops for candy-makers, cooks, food-sellers, or dirty hotels ... nameless streets, and everywhere, on the palaces, on the walls of the once-private gardens, these words: National Property For Sale ... What a spectacle! Half of Paris was selling the other half!"

    Sometimes it seemed as if a good part of Paris was selling itself as well: prostitutes were everywhere, boldly soliciting. Some walked the streets, offering themselves to the passersby; others, the more successful ones, hid their activities in the back rooms of shops selling anything from a cold supper to perfume, dresses, even sealing wax. Yet others rented rooms in the Palais-Royal, the former residence of the duc d'Orléans, and hung erotic images on their doors to offer a preview of what they were willing to do.

    Still, the killing had stopped, and the capital, impoverished, unkempt, gave itself to a whirl of pleasure. Suddenly, there were public balls everywhere: in a former Jesuit school, in a former convent of Carmelites, in the cemetery of Saint Sulpice, in the Élysée Palace. There were Victim's Balls, which the surviving relatives of the guillotined attended, wearing a red ribbon around their necks as a reminder of these executions. Everywhere, every day, Paris danced, and the fashions worn by the dancers seemed as astonishing as the fact that it was possible to have fun.

    Abandon was the fashion and the women embraced it: tall, powdered coiffures, corsets, hooped skirts, silks, and velvets were all gone. Now a "Roman" look was in vogue: there were Vestal dresses, Ceres, Minerva, and Galatea tunics. High waists, or no waist at all, short sleeves, freely floating tunics prevailed; and they were made of the lightest, most transparent fabrics, worn sometimes over a flesh-colored body stocking, sometimes over nothing at all. The Citizeness Hamelin, one of the queens of the new regime, was seen on the Champs Élysées clad solely in a shift of pink transparent gauze. Mme Tallien, one of her rivals, could be observed, at the Ranelagh Gardens. dressed in a tunic split high on the side, flesh-colored panties, her bare feet shining with toe rings, her breasts uncovered, and her arms laden with diamond bracelets. And every day, she wore a different wig, blonde, brunette, red, blue, green.

    There were other extravagantly dressed people—some of them officials. Louis David, the great painter, had been asked to design costumes for the new regime. He came up with toga-like cloaks for the deputies, and an ensemble for the directors that made them look dazzling, certainly, but also a little comical: it consisted of a purple cloak, draped in ancient Roman style; a blue jacket, lavishly embroidered in gold and closed in front; tight breeches: a tricolor sash set diagonally across the chest; an abundant lace cravat; an azure blue belt supporting a straight saber; shoes with silk puffs on top; and crowning it all, a hat lavishly adorned with blue, white, and red plumes.

    Soon after the new regime's installation it became clear that in essence the Revolution was over. Once again, there was an upper class eager to spend its money. Houses were redone; brand-new, gilded carriages reappeared in the streets; dress designers, hairdressers, embroiderers, silversmiths, and furniture makers prospered again. The main difference was that Paris remained shabby, and that the new rich had earned their money by taking advantage of the government: they were bankers who lent money at incredibly high rates, purveyors who sent half-rotten food to the armies and charged enormous prices for it, speculators of all kinds, and, soon, generals who helped themselves from the treasuries of the countries they conquered.

    The war, in fact, had served many people well, and it continued to do so. Holland, now controlled by France, gave itself a government modeled on the French, lost its South African colony—and sent money to Paris. Prussia signed a peace treaty on April 5, 1795; Spain followed suit on July 4. That left two enemies: Austria on the Continent; Great Britain on the seas. As a result, there was no longer any danger of a real disaster; instead, the government, the generals, and many businessmen lived off the contributions imposed on the conquered lands and the seizures and sales of church lands, especially in Belgium. And there was yet another highly convenient aspect of the war: troops were always ready for use (so were generals) when civil disorders threatened.

    From the very beginning of the Directoire, in fact, the army was given tasks that would have belonged to a properly constituted police force, had there been one. When, for instance, the directors feared that the left was preparing a new rising, Bonaparte was sent to close its main center, the Pantheon Club. It was no coincidence that the young, still unknown officer was made general in chief of the French army in Italy just ten days later: he had proved his reliability. Once in Italy, he continued to prove it by sending back gold and paintings. Of course, there was a serious danger in using the army in this way: neither generals nor soldiers were worried about violating the constitution; and they showed it within a year.

    Still, laws could also be passed. In the first half of 1796, the directors were worried about the stability of the regime, and Barras, the cleverest, most energetic of them, decided to take action. The danger still came from the left, so on April 16, 1796, at the request of the directors, the councils voted a law punishing with death all those who advocated either the restoration of the monarchy or a return to the constitution of 1793, which had given all power to the Convention. Since at this point no one was foolish enough to be openly royalist, this, in spite of its appearance of evenhandedness, was directed against those who wanted to bring back the days of the Terror. It had, in any event, been balanced by another law requiring all government employees to swear they hated all monarchies; and as a corollary, the directors were given the power to remove names from the list of émigrés.

    This was a key measure. Any person who had emigrated had their name placed on the list. The consequences were dire: their property was forfeited to the state, and they could be executed on sight if they ever returned to France. With the Revolution ended, however, many of the nearly quarter million émigrés wanted to return and, if possible, reclaim their property. Most of them had been royalist: by giving the directors the power to take names off the list, therefore, the councils also put them in a position to pressure the fight.

A Delicate Balance

It was the left that now seemed about to end the directors' balancing act. Happily for them, they had just the right enemy. His name was Gracchus Babeuf, and he was the first communist. He wanted all property to be held in common and shared out equally: no one was to own anything. To achieve this, he favored a return of the Terror. "All the evils are at their apogee ... They can be remedied only by a complete upheaval ... Let chaos therefore rule and from chaos, let there emerge a new and better world," he wrote in the newspaper he published.

    Extremism is always easy to attack because it upsets so many people; so, naturally, Babeuf was the ideal ogre, no matter how small his actual following. The Terror, after all, was still fresh in people's minds. There were very few Parisians who did not feel that they would have something to lose if all private property were shared out; as for the new farmers, who now actually owned their land, they would have died rather than give it up. Finally, Barras himself was firmly committed to the Republic, and everyone knew it. He could therefore dispose of Babeuf without making people worry that it might be the preliminary to a restoration.

    On May 10, 1796, Babeuf and 245 of his followers were arrested; a year later, Babeuf was executed. The Directoire was now firmly established as the defender of those of the French who were in a position to speak out. By beheading that fearsome (if largely imaginary) monster, Barras had shown that to a significant extent, he was the only director who mattered.

    What was quickly happening, in fact, was a change in the regime itself. Far from being equal with the councils, the directors were seizing powers which made them almost supreme. The use of the police, to which they were entitled, proved far more potent than expected because no magistrate was willing to obey the law barring arbitrary arrests. There is nothing like the prospect of detention or deportation to encourage cooperation with the government.

    The government badly needed this weapon: the financial situation, disastrous in 1795, was even worse in 1796. At the end of January, it was decided to do away with the now worthless assignats. This was fine except for one little fact: there was no alternative currency available, and specie failed to reappear; so, in March, a new paper money, the mandat territorial, was created. Its rate was fixed by law at 1 mandat territorial for 100 assignats, and it could be used to buy the many nationalized properties still held by the state.

    No more than 2.4 billion's worth of mandats was printed. Within two weeks, though, it took only 35.5 gold francs to buy 100 francs in the new paper. By mid April, the rate was down to 20 gold francs, to 13.5 by May. And in February 1797, less than a year after their creation, the mandats were withdrawn. As for the assignats, which were in fact still circulating, they were not much better: France, in essence, was a country without a currency.

    That, however, did not force the Directoire to sue for peace. Most governments raise money to pay their troops; this government kept the war going to raise money, because it expected repeated infusions of cash seized from those it conquered. Victorious generals were thus even more necessary than usual, and away in northern Italy, one such general was beginning to reach celebrity: Napoléon Bonaparte.

Love and War

The Austrian armies, in Italy, had been doing quite well, but Bonaparte's arrival changed everything. This was partly because the new general in chief knew how to concentrate his army and strike a series of devastating blows, partly because he had invented a new way of massing his men in deep columns that punctured the line disposition of the Austrians. No one had realized yet, except for Bonaparte himself, that he was also one of the greatest generals in recorded history. He won again and again—at Arcole in mid-November 1796, at Rivoli the months later; then, early in February, having already conquered Bologna and Ferrara, he took Mantua and forced a peace upon the pope that gave France 15 million francs in gold and many works of art.

    All these victories pleased the government, of course, but what made the real difference were those hefty war damages that the vanquished kept having to pay. The French, in 1796, had almost given up paying taxes: it was a good thing somebody else was doing it for them, and, not unnaturally, Bonaparte's popularity began to soar. Before leaving Paris, however, he had taken precautions --not even he, after all, could know that things would go so well. He had tried, therefore, to make very sure Barras would back him, partly by courting him assiduously, partly by marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais, Barras's discarded mistress and a woman of considerable charm.

    It was a wise political move—Barras was often generous to his former mistresses—but there was more to it: Napoléon had also fallen passionately in love with Joséphine, not least, possibly, because she had had a great deal of experience in pleasing men. As for Joséphine, although she was much less enthusiastic, she was in need of a new husband (the last had been guillotined), was penniless, and had just been left by the notoriously fickle Barras. A general who could make his fortune by looting seemed as good a bet as any. At any rate. Joséphine did not bother to remain faithful; no sooner had Bonaparte left Paris than she started all affair with a charming young man; and she took the charming young man, one Hyppolite Charles, with her when she joined her new husband in Italy.

    This was not as obvious a complication as it might seem. Bonaparte was quite busy pursuing and beating the Austrians; so, while never very far away, he was also seldom actually present; and when he was away from Joséphine, he wrote her. The result was a series of burning love letters in which the General revealed himself as unexpectedly human.

    "I have felt sad ever since leaving you," he wrote her on July 17, 1796. "All my happiness is in being near you. I keep remembering, over and over, your kisses, your tears, your charming jealousy; and the beauties of the incomparable Joséphine constantly light a bright and burning flame in my heart and in my desire.... A few days ago, I thought that I loved you: but, since seeing you, I have felt that I love you a thousand times more still!.... Ah! I beg you, let me see a few of your faults; be less beautiful, less graceful, less kind above all."

    It is a touching letter—but also a comical one. Joséphine, clearly, had decided to play her role to the hilt: for her to have pretended jealousy when she was in the middle of an affair with another man was, to say the least, management of a high order. As for Napoléon, just two days later he was writing: "I have not had a letter from you for two days.... Why, you wicked, ugly, tyrannical, pretty little monster! You laugh at my menaces, at my silliness. Ah! if only I could lock you up in my heart ... I would keep you imprisoned there." The happily free Joséphine, meanwhile, was enjoying herself in Milan, and Barras was congratulating himself on having, at one stroke, disposed of an unwanted mistress and earned the gratitude of that stiff, awkward, but very useful little general.

    Eventually, Joséphine sent young M. Charles home—he had really been making himself too conspicuous—and Napoléon went on writing her almost every day. "Your letters are as cold as if you were fifty," he told her on October 17, "they look like a fifteen year old marriage. One sees there friendship and the other feelings of that winter of life. What, Joséphine! That is very cruel, very wicked, very treacherous of you! What more can you do to make me thoroughly miserable? Stop loving me? But you've already done that. Start hating me? Well, I wish you would, everything is humiliating except hatred; but Indifference, with its steady pulse, its unwavering eye, its monotonous pace! ... A thousand, thousand kisses as loving as my heart."

    And since, as usual, Joséphine had not bothered to write him, he went on, a few days later: "I don't love you at all any more; on the contrary, I hate you. You are wicked, clumsy, stupid and plain. You never write me, you don't love your husband." Happily for Napoléon, he did occasionally come together with the lazy Joséphine; and when he did, she taught him just how enjoyable sex could be—something he remembered to the end of his life.

    Passion, whether unrequited or not, was not, however, the general's main occupation. Greatly to the directors' satisfaction, he was busy conquering northern Italy; and as he got closer to Rome a hitherto unexpected opportunity opened up. When, in 1790, the National Assembly had decided to have bishops elected by the faithful, Pope Pius VI had denounced the new laws, and many priests had followed him. The result was an immediate break between the Revolution and the church. When the monarchy fell, virtually all bishops and most priests remained attached to the ancien régime. All was now clear, and the Convention had proceeded to outlaw church and clergy.

    The new constitution was more tolerant: it merely stated that the state neither supported nor endorsed any church, and that all ceremonies must remain private; but, in fact, the government continued to think of the Catholic Church as the enemy, and it was not wrong. Now, with the French army at the gates of Rome, it might be possible to destroy the church by seizing the pope and preventing the holding of a conclave when he died. "Romanism will always be the irreconcilable enemy of the Revolution," Barras wrote Bonaparte. "The Directoire thus requests that you do whatever you can to destroy the pontifical government."

    Had that order been followed, Barras would have reaped two major benefits from it: the church would, presumably, have presented less of a problem, and, far more important, the director would have earned the undying gratitude of the left just at a moment when the right was beginning to worry him. Unfortunately for him, however, Bonaparte was a general who never hesitated to disregard inconvenient orders. He was already looking forward to a future in politics: it would not look well if he were the man who seized the pope. Besides, hard cast was needed; so, instead, he signed the Peace of Tolentino, which included a large financial indemnity from Pius. Part of the money was then sent to Paris, a major sop to the directors; and, as was becoming usual, a very substantial sum was retained by the general for his own use. Indeed, the money was flowing in: 20 million livres from Milan, 15 from the Pope, 7.5 from Modena, 2 from Parma, without counting the odd bits of loot. Bonaparte, who had started the campaign as a poor man, was now wealthy.

    There was another good reason to leave Rome alone: having settled his conquests in northern Italy, and created local republics, Bonaparte meant to use them as a staging ground for his next campaign, across the Alps and directly into Austria, thus winning the war in the enemy's heartland. An expedition to the south, therefore, would have been seriously counterproductive.

    The fact that things were going so well in Italy did certainly ease the Directoire's financial position: by the middle of the year, for the first time, the army in Italy was being paid half in metallic currency, instead of merely receiving worthless assignats. The political situation in Paris was far more worrisome: because the constitution enfranchised the prosperous and only them, it looked as if the coming legislative elections might produce a right-wing, monarchist majority.

    The directors did what they could. On January 27, 1797, they issued an executive order disenfranchising all those who, although back in France, were still on the list of émigrés—altogether a significant number of potential voters, men who were expecting shortly to have their names crossed off the list and so had already returned. Even so, most of the newly elected deputies were intent on restoring the monarchy.

    This naturally alarmed the directors, and it affected their plans in two ways: Barras began scheming toward a coup to undo the elections; and Bonaparte was free to make peace. This last may seem an odd consequence of the election, but it worked out in this way: Barras began to think he would soon need a willing general right there in Paris to force the issue; he also thought that Bonaparte would be that general. It would have been impolitic, therefore, to annoy Bonaparte, and although the general had just signed a preliminary treaty with Austria at Leoben against the government's explicit orders. Barras did not feel he could disavow him.

    As for Bonaparte, his reasons for wanting to make peace were simple: his troops were exhausted and too far from their base; he therefore needed a pause. Conveniently, the Austrians were in no position to argue; after taking Venice, which had been an independent state for over a thousand years. Bonaparte had moved through the Alps as far as Klagenfurt in the Tyrol. The Austrian government rightly felt that this was too close for comfort; and so the Preliminaries of Leoben were signed. They gave France Lombardy, much of northern Italy, Belgium, and the left bank of the Rhine subject to a later congress; Austria, in compensation, received Istria and Dalmatia, on the coast of the Adriatic. Bonaparte was pleased; and the French government acquiesced.

    There still remained the threat from the right. Happily for the Directoire, though, its members were as flamboyant as they were lacking in seriousness. Encouraged by the election, the royalists were everywhere, recognizable by the fashions they sported. A contemporary, pamphlet made fun of it all: "Come, fair youth; with your black velvet lapels, your victim-style collars [cut especially low to simulate those of people about to be guillotined], your tied and perfumed hair, your huge cravats, your pointy shoes and your square-cut coats."

    True enough, the fashionable places in Paris were full of these young men, many of them holding a cudgel as a symbol of their eagerness to put down the populace. Of far greater consequence, the new majority in the councils began to act. The laws directed against the émigrés' relatives were abrogated, as were those directed against the left (this was just a way of taking power away from the government). Even more inconvenient, the councils now set about refusing to vote the necessary appropriations, thus dealing the executive an almost crippling blow. That also threatened government employees, purveyors, and bond holders, however, and they rallied to the support of the Directoire.

    Adding to the problem was the fact that by now the directors thoroughly loathed one another. Talleyrand, who had just been appointed foreign minister, was the witness of a typical scene. "Carnot and Barras had begun to quarrel, the latter accusing rile former of having taken a letter which should have been seen by his fellow directors. Both were standing. Carnot, raising his hand, said: `I swear on my word of honor that this is not true.'

    "`Don't raise your hand,' Barras answered [referring to Carnot's part in the Terror], `blood would start to drip from it.'"

    Finally, with the election of a new director, in late May-early June 1797, the Directoire was able to act. Now it was the conservatives who were in a minority of two.

Directors and Generals

A good deal of planning was needed before the proposed coup to undo the elections could be carried out. The directors were, after all, preparing to violate the constitution; and to do that, they needed a compliant general. Bonaparte, always cautious, sent 3 million in gold and Augereau, his main aide, to Paris, but he remained in Italy. Then, on July 16, the directors dismissed two conservative ministers—the ministers were responsible to them alone—thus causing great alarm among the newly elected deputies. On August 26, things became clearer still. In a well-publicized speech, the director La Révellière-Lépeaux told the Parisians: "The Directoire will face any danger in order to assure the French their liberty, their constitution, their possessions, their peace and their glory." Given the fact that the government was about to violate the very constitution it was claiming to defend, this had a certain involuntary humor about it; but it was, at any rate, clear.

    Indeed, at 11:30 P.M. on September 3, troops were posted about the city and moved to occupy the bridges and the buildings where the councils met. At the same time, posters were put up everywhere denouncing the royalist plot—though, in fact, the royalists had not yet begun to plan their own coup. Immediately after these moves, Barras announced that anyone trying to restore the monarchy would be shot on sight. In the meantime, many conservatives were arrested, so that, not surprisingly, very few of them were present when the councils met the next day. The remaining deputies promptly did just what they were told.

    They began by annulling nearly half of the elections; altogether, 177 deputies were dismissed, while 53 of them were sent to the French colony of Guiana, a hellhole that had been nicknamed "the dry guillotine" because tropical fevers usually dispatched its residents. There followed, still on September 4, a law ordering all the émigrés to leave the country within fourteen days or be shot on sight, another canceling all local elections and giving the Directoire the power to appoint mayors and judges, and still another giving the police the power to suspend publications for a year. Two innocuous but safe men were elected director; and everyone understood that Barras was now firmly in control.

    This was a major turning point: the regime, in its first period, had been mostly liberal and democratic; it had expressed the will, at any rate, of its limited electorate. Henceforth, it canceled any election whose result was inconvenient and arrested people whose only crime was to have the wrong political views. In doing that, it lost whatever popular support it had had, and came to depend on compliant generals and the use of force. Its very strength, however, was its fragility: what one general had done, another could undo. As for the lack of popular reaction, it simply showed how cynical people had become. Too much had happened in just eight years: all they cared about now was being allowed to go about their business. It was a lesson of which Bonaparte took due notice. So, for that matter, did the Austrians. Having given up the hope that a royalist takeover would improve their negotiating position, they signed, on October 18, the peace of Campo Formio, which confirmed the Preliminaries of Leoben and gave France northern Italy, Belgium, and the left bank of the Rhine subject to further compensation, while Austria received Venice and its mainland possessions.

    State-organized coups being now an accepted method of government, they began to multiply in the French-controlled territories. They also underlined the instability that had become one of the Directoire's essential weaknesses. Talleyrand saw it well: "The words: Republic, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity were written on every wall, but these concepts were nowhere a reality. From the highest of authorities to the lowest, there was hardly one which was not arbitrary, either in the way it had been installed or composed, or by its actions. All was violent; nothing, in consequence, was lasting."

Money, the Government, and the People

The economy was another problem. At the end of September 1797, the government forcibly converted two-thirds of the national debt into coupons that could be used to purchase nationalized properties, thus impoverishing a great many people. Then, in 1798-1799, a shortage of currency provoked yet another crisis. The mandats had been withdrawn; the assignats were worthless; and specie was extremely scarce. In spite of this shortage of currency, however, the abundant crops harvested in 1796, 1797, and 1798 forced a dramatic drop in prices. Because of the war, France could not export its surplus production, and there was a glut at the very time when in England shortages resulted in dramatically higher prices. Once again, the war defined the world: because commerce was impeded, almost everyone suffered.

    For the poorer French, peasants and workers alike, life had become almost impossible. There were shortages of every kind of manufactured products. Unemployment in urban areas continued to be high, so that, in the cities, the lower price of bread hardly helped the many who were utterly destitute. And in the country, the farmers, who still made up most of the French population, found themselves just as badly off. Rapidly, the price of a standard measure of wheat fell to twenty livres, then to fifteen. As the break-even price was between twenty-two and twenty-six livres, this was nothing short of a catastrophe. By 1799, the great majority of the French were desperate. After all the turmoil of the Revolution, after many years of war and the great effort all that entailed, many people were significantly worse off than they had been in 1789. More farmers, it is true, owned their land; but because the government had so mismanaged the economy, that was not yet doing them any good. The consequences of all this were clear: the Directoire was universally detested.

    Still, the situation, in 1798, was not entirely bleak. There were a few fruitful conquests. In February and March, Switzerland was taken over. Geneva was annexed to France, the rest of the country was given a French-style constitution, and all public moneys were sent to Paris; the Swiss being what they are, it turned out to be quite a significant sum. Rome, too, and the Pontifical States were soon taken over; the pope was deported, first to Siena, then to France; Rome was proclaimed a republic; and the new government was promptly made to pay France 35 million in gold. Then, in January 1799, as the result of a foolish provocation by King Ferdinand of Naples, a man of quite extraordinary stupidity, the French army invaded and occupied the Kingdom of Naples, which became the Parthenopean Republic.

    In France itself, however, these conquests changed nothing. The Directoire, lurching desperately from left to right, arrested those on whom it had recently relied. Indeed, violating the constitution, and using violence to oppose the will of the people, had become such a standard method that it began to be praised as the right way to govern. "The Revolution," a deputy explained, "has not ended; it will only do so when a general and sincere peace takes away from our neighbors any reason to create troubles within our country, when all the parties are finally convinced that the Republic will never perish." And since revolutionary law always superseded regular laws, then, by definition, nothing the government ever did could be illegal. A newspaper article made things clearer still. "The unconstitutional acts committed by the government," Le Conservateur explained, "are in response to the will or the consent, expressed or tacit, of the best Republicans. Today, the directorial power is also a dictatorial power; that is what the circumstances demand." It could not be clearer: since the will or the consent of the people was tacit, that is, unexpressed, anything the directors did was, by definition, praiseworthy.

    Then, in June 1799, came a major change. As a result of that year's elections, it was the councils who prevailed: they forced the resignation of two of the directors, thus taking away Barras's majority within the Directoire. It hardly mattered, though, except as a sign that the end of the regime was in sight. No one, in the summer of 1799, believed the situation could last—least of all Barras, who was busy negotiating with royalist agents. How the regime would end was obvious: a general would stage a coup and, instead of leaving power in the directors' hands, take it over for himself. The question thus was: which general? And the answer was anything but obvious.

    That was because one key general was away, so far away that he might well never come back: in May 1798, Bonaparte had left for Egypt, taking an army with him. On August 1 of that year, the British admiral Lord Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir. No one knew, therefore, whether Bonaparte would ever be able to sail back; and he was counted out—until, that is, October 1799, when the startling news that he had landed at Marseilles on the ninth spread rapidly through Paris. It was soon known that he had left his army behind; but far from blaming him, almost everyone turned to him as a savior.

As Unlikely Recourse

It is not easy, at first, to understand just what it was about Bonaparte that so fascinated people. A brusque and often rude Corsican, he had had a checkered career, veering from the extreme left during the Terror to faithful support of Barras to muted opposition to the Directoire. Certainly, no one had any particular reason to trust him or to think he could govern France. And yet, in spite of all that, his genius was manifest. There was something convincing, even fascinating, about him. To see him was to believe he could do anything.

    This was true even of the man least likely to be fascinated by an uneducated, unpolished general. Talleyrand, the foreign minister, was the most civilized of men. The scion of one of France's great aristocratic families, he had been a fashionable young man before the Revolution—as well as a bishop. Then he had sat in the National Assembly among the liberal monarchists, left the church, emigrated just in time, and returned to become, after a short interval, an outstandingly successful foreign minister. He was enormously intelligent, completely amoral, a man for whom manners counted greatly. He should have loathed Bonaparte. Instead, he was dazzled.

    Talleyrand and Bonaparte first met just before the general's departure for Egypt. "At first glance," Talleyrand noted, "I thought him full of charm: twenty victorious battles add greatly to youth [Bonaparte was twenty-nine], beautiful eyes, pallor and a kind of exhaustion." In no time, Bonaparte showed just how quickly he could judge someone. Talleyrand was not only a great foreign minister, he could be of immense political help; and so the general proceeded to make him a friend: "He spoke with much good grace of my appointment to the Foreign ministry, and insisted on the pleasure it had been to correspond with a person of a very different sort from the Directors."

    This was typical of Bonaparte: perhaps because he was so sure of his own genius, he quickly recognized other men of merit, and made clear that he appreciated their true worth. In a world where mediocrity and envy ruled, it was a great attraction; so was the general's ability to go straight to the crux of the matter.

    Having such a man back in Paris was thus a major event. The Directoire was tottering; the question was not whether it would survive, but when it would be replaced. A coup was expected every day; and, suddenly, the perfect man to lead it had appeared. The revolution had started as a claim for liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Directoire had suppressed most of the people's liberties; fraternity had never been even a remote possibility. Equality before the law applied to everyone, except for the government, which had been violating it with impunity. There remained one great success: the conduct of the war. And just as the conflict changed the other European regimes, so it determined what was to come next in France.

    It was no wonder Barras had begun to worry. Still, it is easier to carry out a coup than to organize a government, a fact of which Bonaparte was fully aware. Thus the question as he reached Paris on October 16, 1799, was whether enough talented men were ready to follow him in changing, yet again, the way France was ruled.

Copyright © 2000 Olivier Bernier. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-471-30371-2