The Final Stages of the Revolution 471the Committee of Public Safety, survived because he had opposed Robe
spierre. Moreover, the continuing war effort desperately required his admin
istrative talent.
After dismantling the Paris Commune, the victors of Thermidor—the
name taken from the period in the revolutionary calendar in which Robe
spierre fell—set about establishing a new national government. Order was
only slowly and incompletely restored in the countryside. The Thermidorians
greatly reduced the powers of the Committee of Public Safety on July 31,
1794, and then abolished it completely. In November 1794, Jacobin Clubs
were banned.
The Directory: Politics and Society
In 1795 the Thermidorians produced a constitution that created a bicam
eral (two-house) legislative assembly and a collective executive of five
directors. The latter provided the name “the Directory” for this period of
the Revolution. The two assemblies included the Council of the Ancients
(250 members), which discussed and voted on legislation proposed by the
second assembly, the Council of Five Hundred. Two-thirds of the members
of the new councils were elected from among the members of the existing
Convention. The two councils elected the five directors who formed the
collective executive authority, or Directorate. Beginning in 1797, one-third
of the members of each council and one of the five directors were to be
replaced each year.
People with property benefited from the Thermidorian reaction. By the
Constitution of 1795, all male taxpayers could vote, but they selected elec
toral assemblies for which only about 30,000 men were eligible, a smaller
group than in the indirect elections of 1789-1791. But although about 2
million men could vote (out of some 7 million men of voting age), the system
of indirect election favored the selection of the wealthiest citizens to serve in
the assemblies.
The period of the Directory was marked by a decided turn against the
asceticism associated with Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue. The jeunesse
doreey or gilded youth, drawn from the bourgeoisie and old nobility, set the
social and cultural tone of the day. Wearing square collars and fancy clothes,
wealthy young men smashed busts of Marat. The red-colored symbols of the
sans-culottes—such as the Phrygian cap—quickly disappeared. Women who
could afford to do so wore long flowing white robes of opulence and sensual
ity, with plunging necklines that would have horrified Robespierre. The
familiar (tu) form of address, identified with section and club meetings, gave
way to the formal vous more characteristic of the Old Regime. Crowds in
which women played a prominent part demanded that churches be reopened.
Boisterous social events amused the middle class; among them the macabre
“Dance of the Victims,” a ball to which only those with a relative who had
perished in the Terror could be admitted. Some revelers turned up with their