Climax and Dénouement 777
Douai, and Treilhard, along with their foreign minister Talleyrand—would greatly
prefer to remain at peace on the Continent. Peace was made impossible, however,
as explained in Chapter XXVII, by the very existence of the sister- republics,
among which the Batavian was intolerable to Great Britain, and the Cisalpine to
Austria. The astounding decision to send an army to Egypt, made at the instiga-
tion of Bonaparte and Talleyrand against the judgment of Reubell, was designed to
finish off the maritime war with England, but resulted instead in the renewal of
hostilities on the Continent. The French invasion of Egypt brought Turkey and
Russia into the war, while the French reverses in the East, and the consequent ap-
pearance of Nelson at Naples, tempted the King of Naples into attacking the
Roman Republic, in what proved to be the opening move in the War of the Sec-
ond Coalition. To this extent, the foreign policy of the Directory had proved a
failure.
Domestically, the Directory sought to hold a middle position between restora-
tion of the monarchy with features of the old regime on the one hand, and a revival
of the popular revolutionism and aggressive equalitarianism of the Year II on the
other. The course pursued had been zig- zag rather than middling. It had also been
unconstitutional and immoderate in its methods. Twice the Directory had an-
nulled the results of lawful elections. In 1797, by the Fructidor coup, it had prob-
ably prevented a restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVIII. In 1798, by the
Floréal coup, it prevented the “Jacobins” from enjoying the majority in the two
Councils to which the election of the Year VI entitled them.
This floréalisation of the democrats preceded by only a few days Bonaparte’s
departure for Egypt, and, like it, marked a point of no return for the First French
Republic. That the Directory should have used violence against royalists and cleri-
cals was at least understandable; most of them were irreconcilable to the Republic
on any terms. To do the same for the most eager republicans was more clearly fatal
to republican institutions. The truth seems to be that the “official” republicans,
those enjoying office or influence, from the Directory itself down through the sev-
eral branches of government and locally into the departments—mostly men of
some means, standing or prominence, born in the upper strata of the former Third
Estate—seem already to have come to see themselves as a natural ruling class, and
to regard any criticism of government, or avowed opposition, as improper. Jacobins
themselves in the eyes of William Pitt and Alexander Hamilton, these official
French Republicans, like English gentlefolk and American Federalists, denounced
other republicans as Jacobins, anarchists, énergumènes, and désorganisateurs. The “Ja-
cobins” of 1798 were not, however, the militant Jacobins of 1793. Still less were
they the old sans- culottes, who had been crushed since 1795. Their very numbers,
sufficient to win elections in many parts of the country by constitutional and open
methods, suggest that they were more than a small minority of extremists. They
were, in a sense, the predecessors of the Radical party of a century later, predomi-
nantly middle- class persons of various levels of income and occupation, men who
had developed a strong political consciousness, were committed to the Revolution
and the Enlightenment, detested priests, émigrés, aristocrats, and “the rich,”
wanted a more general participation in public affairs, and claimed a right to be
elected to office without being selected by those already in power. Probably in