French Directory between Extremes 545
selves might sooner or later be engulfed. Of similar views were many shopkeepers,
recently prospering farmers, ex- soldiers, young men just beginning to imagine
their futures, Julien Sorels of one kind and another who disliked the notables of
the newly emerging social establishment, and for whom, therefore, equality repre-
sented a value still to be achieved. Disapproving and aloof, the “pures” of the Re-
public, fearful of being tainted by compromise, never ready to admit that the Rev-
olution had quite achieved its aim, they were often called exclusifs by the more
complacent official republicans.
It is impossible to estimate the number of persons of this kind in France in
- Probably it was large, perhaps as large as any group that had a definite politi-
cal consciousness. Their relative strength varied greatly from place to place. A good
deal is known about the city of Toulouse, one of the most “Jacobin” cities of France,
where the “Jacobins” controlled the municipality and won all the elections under
the Directory. In this city of 60,000 (or some 15,000 grown men) there were about
1,500 persons sufficiently animated in their politics to be called Jacobins. They
were recruited from the same social levels as the true Jacobins before 1794: that is,
from all levels except the former nobility and the most depressed segments of the
working class. They included well- to- do merchants, lawyers, doctors, teachers,
members of learned academies, manufacturers, artisans, shopkeepers, and propri-
etors of small businesses. They kept their own firebrands under control, so as to
give no excuse for counter- revolutionary reprisals, and if they were conscious of
having allied with lower- class sans- culottes in the Year II they were now willing to
forget any such troublesome connections. They were political or middle- class dem-
ocrats. Tenacious of their own property, they were hostile to the rich. Civilized
themselves, they were scornful of high society. They were out of sympathy with the
reigning republicans, those who dominated in the departmental electoral assem-
blies and in Paris, because the reigning republicans had a low opinion of them.
One has the impression that here if anywhere, among democrats of this kind, were
the materials from which a law- abiding opposition to government, and a regime of
competing political parties, might have been made, if only the Directory itself had
been more tolerant of such opposition, and other circumstances had been more
propitious.^1
There was, however, no visible boundary, at any fixed point, between these po-
litical democrats and other democrats further to the Left, though in the end the
differences were clear enough. Political democrats, critical of the Directory but
loyal to it, continued to use the language of the Revolution and enjoyed reading
radical newspapers. Sober citizens, with no intention of acting upon or even agree-
ing with their contents, subscribed to journals that ferociously denounced kings,
aristocrats, leagues of tyrants, the clergy, the English, and the rich. Among the
numerous radical papers that sprouted up at the end of 1795 was the Tribun du
peuple, by a then obscure journalist who called himself “Gracchus” Babeuf.
1 J. Beyssi, “Le parti jacobin à Toulouse sous le Directoire,” in Annales historiques de la Révolution
française, Nos. 117, 118 (1950), 28–54, 109–33. For^ enlightening accounts of democrats of this kind see
also the second volume of A. Meynier, Les coups d ’ état du Directoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927), and relevant
parts of M. Reinhard, Le Departement de la Sarthe sous le régime Directorial (Saint- Brieuc, no date).