Mirage of the Moderates 535
five incumbents ever agreed even within itself, and the Directors were often also at
odds with the two legislative chambers. Far from being a disciplined committee
intent on world revolution or anything else, the French executive presented itself
to the world as irresolute, vacillating, and unpredictable, at the mercy of events,
improvising its policies to keep abreast of accomplished facts. It shifted with de-
velopments that it could not control: conspiracies, intrigues, and elections at home;
the victories and the independent actions of its generals in the field; the demands
and disturbances of revolutionaries in other countries.
If not always moderate in its actions, the Directory remained essentially moder-
ate in its preferred position, and in any case lived in nervous apprehension of the
extremes. The “first” Directory, until the coup d’état of Fructidor (1797), was a
predominantly liberal government, allowing much latitude to the press and to the
embryonic manifestation of political parties. The “second” Directory, from Fructi-
dor to Brumaire, was more arbitrary and dictatorial. Throughout, as Marcel Rein-
hard has said, the Directory “was falsified by its own principle.”^4 Claiming to
represent the sovereignty of the people it could not let the people alone, since the
“people,” when not hostile, were largely indifferent to the men now trying to gov-
ern the country. Claiming to be a constitutional government, it could not protect
the constitution except by use of unconstitutional methods. It was an awkward
fact, for a government that would have preferred to be moderate, that the majority
of the population, especially the rural people, had relapsed into a non- political
apathy, content to enjoy the gains derived from the Revolution but no longer ex-
cited by them, while the minorities that remained most politically sensitive and
alert, both the Right and the Left, made no virtue of moderation and were un-
troubled by constitutional scruples.
The Directory therefore followed a zig- zag or see- saw policy, la politique de la
bascule. It was buffeted repeatedly between Right and Left, between “royalism” and
“democracy.” Alarmed by signs of activity on one of these sides, the moderates of
the Directory would try to make common cause with moderates inclining to the
opposite side, until, given such encouragement, the second side became active to
the point of threatening to dominate, setting up another alarm in which the trend
started in the other direction.
Of the real condition of the French people during these constitutional and po-
litical vicissitudes it is hard to speak. Marcel Reinhard concludes that the country
was better off at the end of the Directory than at its beginning: the scarcities of
1795 had been overcome, a more stable currency had been introduced, schools and
law- courts and regular procedures of administration and taxation had been put
into operation, people were normally at work in the shops and on the farms. The
“anarchy” under the Directory, according to Reinhard, came more at its beginning
than at its end.
Contemporaries were very much interested in the true state of a country that
had passed through so tremendous a revolution. Their judgments were widely dif-
ferent, but the difference was not due to impediments in the way of observation.
No curtain screened France from the outside world. Travelers of all nationalities,
4 M. Reinhard, Le Departement de la Sarthe sous le régime Directorial (Saint Brieuc, s.d.), 629–31.