French Directory between Extremes 555
men of prominence in the regime of the Directory itself, men who did not make
republicanism a matter of first principle, who might accept constitutional monar-
chy if given adequate guarantees, or who would be inclined to listen to the argu-
ments of émigrés like Lally- Tollendal, when he urged that a combination of old
and new property- owners should attempt to decide the future of France. Of the
same general complexion were Lally- Tollendal’s friends among the French émi-
grés, the Dutch émigrés who agreed more with the Hereditary Prince than with
his father, the churchmen who sought to prevent the capture of Christianity by the
royalists, and persons in various governments, including William Pitt in 1797, who
could entertain the thought of a peace with France that would leave the Directory
in being.
Beyond them lay the extreme Right. Here the characteristic doctrines, in the
middle years of the 1790’s, were that everything about the French Revolution
since June 1789 had been bad, that France before 1789 had had an excellent
constitution, or at least one that was capable of satisfactory development and
should be restored; and that the war should be fought until the republic in France
was overthrown.
It was increasingly believed also that the assault on older political institutions
had gone hand in hand with an attack on religion, that the real source of trouble
was a false philosophy and false conception of man and his place in the universe,
and that the good society of the future must therefore rest on a mutuality of inter-
est between government and religion, or between “the throne and the altar.” The
extreme Right, even more than the extreme Left, also saw the Revolution as a
universal disturbance overrunning all boundaries in which all established rights
and authorities were threatened by the same destructive force.^22
This intransigent or anti- conciliatory conservatism was not new. It did not arise
simply as a reaction against the French Revolution, still less against its violence
and extremism. The enthusiasm for the fall of the Bastille expressed throughout
Europe was momentary and deceptive. It was briefly shared both by potential rev-
olutionary sympathizers and by others, deeply conservative, who had long resisted
the reforming efforts of monarchs and now rejoiced in the embarrassment of
kings. In a word, the advocates both of an aristocratic revolution and a democratic
revolution welcomed “liberty” in July 1789. Their agreement was soon over. The
Italian economist Pietro Verri, who was a moderate until his death in 1797, noted
the change at Milan a few weeks after the fall of the Bastille.
“The nobles and ecclesiastics,” said Verri, “seeing the French people intent on
abolishing all the distinctions of these orders, prefer a decorative slavery to a lib-
erty that admits no distinction except merit, and hence they foment opinion
against France and make themselves prophets of that vast kingdom’s total ruin. The
most essential and palpable principles of government, of human rights and the
22 J. Godechot, La contre- revolution (Paris, 1961); Paul H. Beik, The French Revolution Seen from
the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789–99, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s.
vol. XLVI, Feb. 1956. The Right, as treated by Beik, is defined to include only those “whose opinions
would not stretch beyond the point of incorporating the Estates General on a regular basis into the
political life of the nation” (p. 3).