Mirage of the Moderates 533
universal manhood suffrage and elements of direct democracy that had character-
ized the earlier constitution were abandoned, but the new one preserved the basic
changes brought by the Revolution.
The Directory
In its actual terms, or formal provisions, the Constitution of the Year III was about
as much or as little “democratic” as the first constitution of 1789–1791.^3 The num-
ber of citizens who might qualify to vote in primary assemblies (men of twenty-
one or older, paying an annual property tax equivalent to three days’ wages for
common labor), and the number of those who might legally qualify to sit in the
electoral assemblies of the departments (proprietors and tenants defined at exactly
the levels of 1791) must if anything have been a trifle larger in 1795 than in 1791.
It was provided that a literacy restriction should go into effect in the future (and
when operating, this provision would greatly reduce the electorate under condi-
tions then existing); but on the other hand, any young man who had fought in a
military campaign had the right to vote whether he paid a tax or not. The primary
assemblies of original voters, which in 1791 had chosen one “elector” for every
hundred citizens, in 1795 chose only one for every two hundred. Hence, though
millions were legally eligible, the number of electors actually chosen, meeting and
functioning in the departmental assemblies at any one time during the Directory,
was probably in the neighborhood of 30,000, fewer than under the constitutional
monarchy as set up in 1789–1791. The Directory was a “bourgeois republic” in the
sense that, in fact, a few hundred locally prominent persons in each department
(though subject to annual re- election as electors) kept matters pretty much in their
own hands. The accentuation of class fears during the Revolution made these
prominent persons, or bourgeoisie, the more determined to stay in power. The de-
cline of political interest and spontaneous activity since the first years of the Revo-
lution also had the effect of leaving the field more open to the upper middle class.
But the Constitution of the Year III was such that a more broadly based demo-
cratic movement could legally take place under it.
The Constitution created a legislative body in two Councils, the Elders and the
Five Hundred, whose members were elected by the electors in the departmental
assemblies. It set up the usual ministries of foreign affairs, finance, etc. As a super-
visory board above the ministers, it provided an Executive Directory of five Direc-
tors, one to be elected each year by the legislature. This collegiate executive, elected
by the legislature, was of course designed, in keeping with Republican principles of
the day, to avoid the danger of dictatorship or despotism, of which all constitution-
alists were much afraid.
By special provision, in effect until the election foreseen for the spring of 1797,
two- thirds of the first members of the two legislative chambers were required to be
3 For the text of the Constitution in English see John H. Stewart, Documentary Survey of the
French Revolution (New York, 1951), 572–612; see also Appendix V, “ ‘Democratic’ and ‘Bourgeois’
Characteristics in the French Constitution of 1791.”