he hoped that Sieyès had the theoretical nous to be able to ensure the country’s future as a
republic by formulating one of the constitutions of which he was a noted inventor. Sieyès,
whose hatred of the nobility was undiminished since the time of his What is the Third
Estate?, written at the outbreak of the Revolution, replaced Rewbell in the Directory in
May 1799. Constant wrote to this man whom history now judges as a vain, narrow and
sometimes cynical schemer on 18 May 1799 using the terms of hero worship and telling
him that he saw in him the guarantor of the Republic’s future:
I give you now the expression of my unchanging feelings for you:
friendship, devotion, admiration, hope, the conviction that you
alone can finish the work you began, and a deep resolve to
devote...all the means at my disposal, all my intellectual resources
and all my strength to your service.^82As with his earlier defence of Barras and 18 Fructidor, it is difficult to
judge whether what looks like repellent sycophancy is motivated by
Constant’s desire for personal advancement or by a genuine love of the
Republic: in Constant’s rather desperate circumstances in 1799 the honest
answer is probably both. In Mémoires de Madame Récamier (1815)^83
Constant was to write a scathing account of Sieyès’s character and career
that shows he had by then come to judge the Director in a similar way to
posterity. Possibly in order to support the Director Sieyès’s views and
certainly to consolidate a Republic which was constantly threatened by
both royalist and Jacobin (as well as by recent Austrian and Russian
successes in the continuing war), Constant published Des suites de la
contre-révolution de 1660 en Angleterre (On the consequences of the
Counter-revolution of 1660 in England) in July 1799, one of his most
effective and, in the circumstances, courageous works.
84
It was a reply to a
royalist pamphlet by Boulay de la Meurthe which had praised the
restoration of the English monarchy after Cromwell in 1660 for having
brought general well-being to the nation. Constant’s rejoinder pointed to
vindictive confiscations and reprisals against supporters of the previous
régime in England. The message was clear: if the Bourbons were ever to
return, their revenge would be still more terrible than this.
War was now raging in Switzerland where the French Republic was fighting against
the Austrians of the anti-French coalition and where the French gained a victory at Zurich
on 26 September 1799. Across the Mediterranean the Egyptian campaign was in
progress. Constant’s friends Talleyrand of the Foreign Ministry and the devious Sieyès
were in secret contact with General Bonaparte with a view to using the army to
overthrow the Directory, on the spurious grounds of an alleged Jacobin plot. On 9
October 1799 the young general landed at Fréjus, travelled to Paris and over the next five
weeks worked on his future strategy. Constant maintains in his Souvenirs historiques that
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