French Directory between Extremes 563
And what was this misguided philosophy? It was man- worship, according to
Barruel, the belief that man was lord of the universe, subject to no limitations or
restraints. “For Dietrich, Condorcet, Babeuf and other recent adepts of Weishaupt,
there need be no moderator except the man- king, who has nowhere anyone but
himself for master.”^43 It was in short the repudiation of God. The same idea, in
more refined form, has been advanced in the twentieth century in condemnation
of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Barruel put the lesson bluntly: to give
any aid or sympathy to Jacobinism was an impiety, and only those who firmly re-
sisted the Jacobins would go to Heaven.^44
That the revolution was “universal,” and that good government is somehow
related to a good religion, are propositions in which one may certainly concur
without agreeing with Barruel. It was preposterous to attribute the revolutionary
agitation in Europe, not to mention America, in any significant degree to the
machinations of plotters. As for religion, much depends on what one’s religion is.
For Barruel—as for de Maistre, or Louis XVIII, or indeed Edmund Burke though
he did not use the phrase—it was the religion of the throne and the altar. A good
religion was one that upheld the established order, or rather the order that had
been established in 1789, and had seemingly been (as it seemed to them) un-
threatened at that time except by bad ideas. It was a timid religion, fearful of the
human mind, nervous at the mention of liberty or equality. It was a complacent
religion, which found justice in custom and made institutions into idols. To what
extent it was Christian would be invidious to debate, but in any case, as already
observed, a great many authorized spokesmen of the Catholic Church, during
these same years, refused to make any such equation between counter- revolution
and Christianity.
Fructidor and Floréal
These poetic words refer to two unseemly maneuvers, by which the Directory
struck out in turn against the Right and Left.^45 By the coup d’état of Fructidor of
the Year V (September 1797) it put down the royalists. By the coup d’état of Flo-
réal of the Year VI (May 1798) it did the same to the democrats. In each case it
acted from considerations which the preceding pages should help to explain, but
also because of certain developments on the international scene which are de-
scribed in the following chapters, so that no full account of the two coups d’état is
attempted here, and they are included only to round out the characterization of the
Directory.
It will be recalled that by the two- thirds rule of 1795 two- thirds of the legisla-
tive chambers, the Councils of Elders and the Five Hundred, were until the elec-
43 Mémoires, V, 112. Dietrich was the first mayor of Strasbourg during the Revolution (p. 688);
Adam Weishaupt was a founder of the German Illuminati.
44 Final conclusion, Mémoires, V, 325.
45 Among the many writings bearing on the subject may be cited A. Meynier, Les coups d ’ état du
Directoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927), and J. Suratteau, “Les élections de l’an V aux conseils du Directoire,”
in AHRF, No. 154 (1958), 21–63.