Mirage of the Moderates 531
questions asked on the Right. What if the regime, however decorous and constitu-
tional, violated the rights and the needs of the common people of the working
classes, harrying and insulting the very patriots who had saved the Revolution in
’92 and ’93? Such were the questions asked on the Left.
After Thermidor
It has already been remarked that for extreme conservatives the French Republic
after Thermidor was even less welcome than the Republic of the Terror, since as
long as the Terror lasted the republican government was discredited in principle
and seemed to be destroying itself in practice. At the other extreme also, among
the fiery activists, the post- Thermidorian republic was repugnant because it seemed
to betray the glorious promise of the Year II. The purs of both sides combined to
see in the post- Thermidorian republic a scene of peculiar corruption and cynicism.
Later on it became the habit of all partisans of Napoleon to throw a bad light on
the republic which he had supplanted. All who felt strongly felt a preference for
something else. No one loved the Thermidorians and the Directory.
The stereotypes of corruption and cynicism were greatly exaggerated. It has
been concluded by one scholar that, of all the men in the higher positions under
the Directory, that is, the thirteen who served as Directors and the others who
acted as ministers, only three are known to have been financially corrupt: Barras,
Talleyrand, and Fouché; and it is added (as if in defence of the French bourgeoisie)
that the two former were ex- nobles by origin, and Fouché an ex- priest.^1 A num-
ber of contractors and generals, including Bonaparte, made fortunes in the occu-
pied countries during the wars, and in Paris there was more minor graft than there
ought to have been, as when a bureaucrat accepted money to remove someone’s
name from the official lists of émigrés. As for the making of fortunes in occupied
countries, the British were doing the same by not wholly dissimilar methods in
their conquests in India during these same years, without incurring the shocked
indignation of Europeans. As for the minor graft, such commonplace misconduct
was hardly enough to meet the ideological requirements of the stereotype, since it
did not prove, especially in the eighteenth century, that the Directory was espe-
cially shameless or disgraceful. Other profits were made from the purchase and sale
of confiscated lands, or from business ventures that took on new life after the year
of the Terror. Many kinds of people thus quietly added to their fortunes, including
such diverse characters as the social philosopher Saint- Simon and the honest Yan-
kee Joel Barlow.
In the more conspicuous circles of Paris there was a debasement of moral tone.
Some of the new rich, and some who felt they had had a narrow escape in surviv-
ing the Terror, many of them persons who had never shared either in the idealism
of the Revolution or in the refinements of the Old Regime, now found it safe and
clever to make a joke about “virtue,” wear exaggerated dress, chase after absurd
luxuries, and otherwise make a show of their wealth and superiority. There was a
1 A. Meynier, Les coups d ’ état du Directoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927), II, 168–78.