Climax and Dénouement 787
who had worked with native democrats in the sister- republics. French democrats
found these generals ideologically sympathetic, and necessary as allies against both
the Directory and the Coalition. The French neo- Jacobins of 1799, who repre-
sented a kind of popular movement at least in opposing the Republican oligarchy,
were sensitive also to revolution and counter- revolution in other countries. They
had been aroused by the fall of the Cisalpine Republic, and the fate of Poland was
not far from their minds. In Puy- de- Dôme, for example, when the departmental
officials gave a patriotic address to the new auxiliary battalions being raised for the
war, they pointed to the contrasting precedents of Poland and the United States.
“Let this contrast awaken your courage! If victors, we shall have the good fortune of
the United Americans; if vanquished, the fate of Poland will be ours.”^18
The “foreign” or “international” revolutionaries themselves, that is those Italian,
Swiss, and Dutch who most warmly upheld the new- style republics in their own
countries, shared the dislike of French neo- Jacobins and generals for the French
Directory as it was constituted before Prairial, and had indeed become skeptical of
France itself. In Italy the Milanese La Hoz, an officer in the Cisalpine army, work-
ing through a secret society called the Raggi, or “rays” (the first secret society of the
Risorgimento), fought for republicanism and independence in north Italy, and be-
came so anti- French that for a time he aided the Austrians. In Switzerland, where
the Helvetic Republic faced the same threat of invasion and dissolution as the
French and the Cisalpine, the more militant party overcame the moderates in June
1799, when La Harpe drove Ochs out of the Helvetic Directory. La Harpe, more
“Jacobin” than Ochs, was also more hostile to the French. In Holland, where it was
known or suspected that moderates in the Batavian Directory were in touch with
Dutch émigrés, the democratic groups sought to undermine the moderates and
looked for support from the sympathetic General Brune. Here also a neo- Jacobin
movement might have occurred had not the coup d’état of Brumaire, in Paris in
November, changed the whole situation.
In France the two councils, having subordinated the Executive Directory to
themselves, began to take on the attributes of a Convention, that is of a body pos-
sessing unlimited public powers, and in particular of the Convention of 1793,
which had used drastic measures to cope with a supreme emergency.
The mood was as in 1793, yet noticeably different. Despite all appearances, a
spirit of law- abidingness and constitutional routine had developed. The cry of la
patrie en danger was again heard, but it was not officially proclaimed. There were
demands for the death of the ex- Directors, but they were not acted upon. All an-
nual classes of conscripts were called up, as in the levée en masse of 1793; but they
were called up in more methodical fashion, under the Conscription Act of 1798. A
forced loan of a hundred million francs was levied upon the rich; what came out,
in practice, was a progressive income tax developed in orderly fashion in the legis-
lation of 19 Thermidor of the Year VII. It was, to be sure, incomparably more
“progressive” than Pitt’s income tax of the same year. Where the very richest per-
18 G. Bonnefoy, ed., Histoire de l ’administration civile dans la province d ’Auvergne et le département
du Puy- de- Dôme (Paris, 1900), II, 306, as cited by my former student, Mr. Isser Woloch, who in a
study of the “Jacobin revival” of 1799 found references to Poland fairly frequent.