Climax and Dénouement 791
that was evident in the social origins of the leading antagonists. Brune, a provincial
lawyer’s son who had once been a printer’s apprentice, had forced the brother of
the King of England to sign a humiliating agreement and beat an ignominious
retreat. Masséna, who had begun life as a cabin boy at sea, and then been an army
sergeant, with further promotion impossible under the conditions of aristocratic
resurgence in the 1780’s, had discomfited a Russian nobleman, the “Prince of
Italy,” Marshal Suvorov, who himself was the son of a general and senator of the
Tsarist Empire. The facts did not escape contemporaries. Mallet du Pan com-
mented on the failure of “oppressed nations” to show sympathy for the Allies.
Country people, he thought, had not behaved too badly. But people in the towns
“have everywhere but too plainly discovered the degeneracy to which they were
sunk by luxury, selfishness and the love of pleasure.”^23 Those who could not defeat
the bourgeoisie could at least insult it.
With the battle of Zurich in September, and the Convention of Alkmaar in
October, the threat of an invasion of France was alleviated, and the neo- Jacobin
agitation began to subside. Brune and Masséna, the real victors of the moment,
had no political following, at least outside the ranks of militant democrats, and no
political ambitions. On October 9 Bonaparte stepped ashore at Fréjus. A Republic
which had in any case become dependent on generals, and in which the democrats
most especially wished to have army commanders in office, now succumbed to the
fascination of the youthful general who since the bridge of Lodi had outshone
them all. A month of rapid and secret machinations, involving Sieyès, Bonaparte,
and his brother Lucien and others, and with strong resistance from a good many
democrats, who had never forgotten the betrayal of Venice, and preferred a general
with a more unswervingly republican record, eventuated in the final coup d’état
under the Directory, that of 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII—or November 9,
1799—by which the Republic underwent its expected mutation, and emerged as
the Consulate. Its disillusioned philosophy was expressed by the new First Consul:
“The French can no longer be governed except by me.”
Two Men on Horseback
In the end we retreat into symbolism. Revolutions, agitations, social movements,
and glacially slow readjustments in a democratic direction were to go on for a long
time, but a historical period came to a close with the century itself, and the Age of
the Democratic Revolution may be thought of as ending in a final scene of two
men on horseback.
On the first day of the new century, January 1, 1801, the vice- president of the
United States, Thomas Jefferson, soon to be president, left the boarding- house in
which he resided with a few colleagues among vacant lots and half- finished build-
ings, on an unpaved and untidy thoroughfare known as C Street, in the new Fed-
eral City. The vice- president was hardly an inexperienced provincial, for he had
known the court of Versailles well enough in former days, and been present in
23 British Mercury, III, 332; see also 341–43.