406 Chapter 21During 1794–95, the Convention labored to re-
move the more extreme aspects of the Jacobin dictator-
ship, starting with the abolition of the Jacobin clubs.
The tribunals were closed and prisoners were released.
The Law of Suspects was repealed and new judicial
guarantees instituted. The Convention recalled
deputies who had been purged. To placate federalists,
the powers of the central government were reduced. An
amnesty was offered to all rebels who laid down their
arms. Freedom of religion was gradually restored, with
churches separated from state control. Following these
efforts to restore order, the Convention wrote a new
constitution to keep it. The Constitution of the Year III
(1795) was the third in the short history of the revolu-
tion. It, too, began with a declaration of rights, which
was significantly renamed the Declaration of the Rights
and Duties. Article One stated a right of security along-
side liberty and equality.
France remained a republic with a broad suffrage
including most (male) citizens, but it was constituted
with safeguards, such as the separation of powers. A bi-
cameral legislature, for example, included a lower house
that introduced all legislation and an upper house with
the power to block it. As a further safeguard, the upper
house was a Council of Ancients, whose 250 members
had to be at least forty years old—a reaction to the fact
that in 1793 Robespierre had been thirty-five years old,
Danton thirty-four, and Saint-Just twenty-six. The new
government was called the Directory because the con-
stitution also created an executive branch with that
name. The Directory had five members, chosen by the
legislature from among its own members and prohib-
ited from succeeding themselves.
The Convention bequeathed great difficulties to
the Directory. Economic problems were so severe that
government ministers were given salaries measured in
wheat because the currency was so unstable. Royalism
was resurgent, and in some regions this had produced a
“white (the symbol of royalism) terror” against former
Jacobins. Simultaneously, however, new militants de-
manded further revolution. Gracchus Babeuf, a radical
journalist, founded the Conspiracy of Equals in 1795,
to restore the Constitution of the Year I and to create
greater egalitarianism. Babeuf’s manifesto bluntly pro-
claimed, “In a true society, there should be neither rich
nor poor.”
The Directory preserved the moderate republic by
using the army against royalists, executing extremists
such as Babeuf, and repudiating much of the national
debt. It won a final victory in the Vendée in 1796 but
became increasingly conservative when elections in
1797 returned only thirteen of the surviving 216 mem-
bers of the Convention. The Directory was soon char-
acterized by the return of individuals who had gone
into hiding or fled the country. Talleyrand became for-
eign minister in July 1797; Sieyès became a director in- The Directory thus attempted to stand in the po-
litical center, dreading both Jacobinism and royalism. It
was a republic that distrusted republicanism, reflecting
French exhaustion and apathy. This made it vulnerable
to conspiracies, as Talleyrand realized when he at-
tended a meeting of the directors, and guards confis-
cated his cane as a potential weapon. “It appears to me,”
he said, “that your government is terribly afraid of be-
ing poked with a stick.” He was not surprised when the
Directory fell in a military coup d’état in 1799.
The Revolutionary Wars and
the Rise of Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte was born the second son of a mi-
nor Italian noble on the island of Corsica. The family
became French when Louis XV bought Corsica from
the republic of Genoa, whose government had become
exasperated with Corsican rebellion. Napoleon’s father
had accepted the French occupation, a French patent of
nobility, and a position in the government of Corsica.
This enabled him to send the nine-year-old Napoleon
to the Royal Military Academy for sons of the aristoc-
racy in 1778. The poor, skinny, provincial Bonaparte
was unpopular, but he was a good student. His mathe-
matic skills determined his future: The artillery needed
officers who could calculate trajectories. He graduated
two years early, in 1785, and became a lieutenant in the
royal artillery.
Napoleon harnessed his high intelligence to hard
work. “Work is my element,” he later wrote in a diary.
He proved this as a young officer by working eighteen
hours per day, typically eating only one meal and sleep-
ing four or five hours. He kept these habits as emperor;
on the two nights before his victory at Austerlitz
(1805), Bonaparte slept a total of three hours. This trait
enabled him to issue more than eighty thousand written
orders in his fifteen-year reign, an average of fifteen
documents per day. Even “the love of a woman,” he
noted at age twenty-two, “is incompatible with one’s
life work.”
Lieutenant Bonaparte was a political radical. He
had read the philosophes and admired Rousseau. He
had contempt for the church and hatred for kings:
“There are few of them who have not merited de-
thronement,” he wrote. When the revolution began, he