CHAPTER XXII
THE FRENCH DIRECTORY:
MIRAGE OF THE MODERATESThe French government is now concerned with a problem of interest to all nations.
How does one come out of a regime of violence after having once been in it? How
get back on the road of justice and moderation once it has been left?
—THE COUNT DE MONTLOSIER, LONDON, 1796
After Robespierre’s death, as the Terror came to an end, and the political and emo-
tional crisis of the Year II receded, the question that a great many Frenchmen put
to themselves both in France and in the emigration, and a question to which ob-
servers throughout Europe and America awaited the answer, was whether some
kind of moderate or constitutional regime would be durably established. The next
four years, punctuated toward their end by the coups d’état of Fructidor and Flo-
réal, were to show that constitutional quietude was still far away.
The difficulty was that not everyone agreed on what either moderation or justice
should consist in. Justice, for some, required the punishment of all revolutionaries
and their sympathizers. For others, it meant a continuing battle against kings,
priests, aristocrats, and the comfortable middle classes. Both groups saw in “mod-
eration” a mere tactic of the opposition, and moderates as the dupes of the opposite
extreme. Compromise for them meant the surrender of principle. It meant truck-
ling with an enemy that could never be trusted, and had no real intention of
compromise.
In any case, what was “moderation”? Did it mean merely the absence of spec-
tacular violence, with no more busy public guillotines and forced liquidations and
purges? Was a regime moderate because it managed to exist without such exhibi-
tions of ruthlessness? What if it persisted in an obstinate violation of the Christian
religion, of the rights of the French king, nobility, and former property- owners, or
of the authority of foreign governments over their own peoples? Such were the