The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
in the flight of the ruling class, in the distemper of the radical democracy, a constitutional monarchy was unthinkable. A presidential government on the model of that devised and used by the United States was equally impossible, because the French appear already to have had a premonition or an instinct that a ripe experience of liberty was essential to the working of such an institution. The student of the revolutionary times will become aware how powerful the feeling already was among the French that a single strong executive, elected by the masses, would speedily turn into a tyrant. They have now a nominal president; but his election is indirect, his office is representative, not political, and his duties are like an impersonal, colorless reflection of those performed by the English crown. The constitution-makers simply could not fall back on an experience of successful free government which did not exist. Absolute monarchy had made gradual change impossible, for oppression dies only in convulsions. Experience was in front, not behind, and must be gained through suffering.
It was therefore a grim necessity which led the Thermidorians of the Convention to try another political nostrum. What should it be? There had always been a profound sense in France of her historic continuity with Rome. Her system of jurisprudence, her speech, her church, her very land, were Roman. Recalling this, the constitution-framers also recollected that these had been the gifts of imperial and Christian Rome. It was a curious but characteristic whim which consequently suggested to the enemies of ecclesiasticism the revival of Roman forms dating from the heathen commonwealth. This it was which led them to commit the administration of government in both external and internal relations to a divided executive. There, however, the resemblance to Rome ended, for instead of two consuls there were to be five directors. These were to sit as a committee, to appoint their own ministerial agents, together with all officers and officials of the army, and to fill the few positions in the administrative departments which were not elective, except those in the treasury, which was a separate, independent administration. All executive powers except those of the treasury were likewise to be in their hands. They were to have no veto, and their treaties of peace must be ratified by the legislature; but they could declare war without consulting any one. The judiciary was to be elected directly by the people, and the judges were to hold office for about a year. The legislature was to be separated into a senate with two hundred and fifty members, called the Council of Ancients, which had the veto power, and an assembly called the Council of Juniors, or, more popularly, from its number, the Five Hundred, which had the initiative in legislation. The members of the former must be at least forty years old and married; every aspirant for a seat in the latter must be twenty-five and of good character. Both these bodies were alike to be elected by universal suffrage working indirectly through secondary electors, and limited by educational and property qualifications. There were many wholesome checks and balances. This constitution is known as that of I Vendémiaire, An IV, or September twenty-second, 1795. It became operative on October twenty-sixth.
The scheme was formed, as was intended, under Girondist influence, and was acceptable to the nation as a whole. In spite of many defects, it might after a little experience have been amended so as to work, if the people had been united and hearty in its support. But they were not. The Thermidorians, who were still Jacobins at heart, ordered that at least two-thirds of the men elected to sit in the new houses should have been members of the Convention, on the plea that they alone had sufficient experience of affairs to carry on the public business, at least for the present. Perhaps this was intended as some offset to the enforced closing of the Jacobin Club on November twelfth, 1794, due to menaces by the higher classes of Parisian society, known to history as "the gilded youth." On the other hand, the royalists saw in the new constitution an instrument ready to their hand, should public opinion, in its search for means to restore quiet and order, be carried still further away from the Revolution than the movement of Thermidor had swept it. Their conduct justified the measures of the Jacobins.
CHAPTER XXI.
The Antechamber to Success.
Punishment of the Terrorists—Dangers of the Thermidorians—Successes of Republican Arms—Some Republican Generals—Military Prodigies—The Treaty of Basel—Vendean Disorders Repressed—A "White Terror"—Royalist Activity—Friction Under the New Constitution—Arrival of Buonaparte in Paris—Paris Society—Its Power—The People Angry—Resurgence of Jacobinism—Buonaparte's Dejection—His Relations with Mme. Permon—His Magnanimity.
1795.
From time to time after the events of Thermidor the more active agents of the Terror were sentenced to transportation, and the less guilty were imprisoned. On May seventh, 1795, three days before Buonaparte's arrival in Paris, Fouquier-Tinville, and fifteen other wretches who had been but tools, the executioners of the revolutionary tribunal, were put to death. The National Guard had been reorganized, and Pichegru was recalled from the north to take command of the united forces in Paris under a committee of the Convention with Barras at its head.
This was intended to overawe those citizens of Paris who were hostile to the Jacobins. They saw the trap set for them, and were angry. During the years of internal disorder and foreign warfare just passed the economic conditions of the land had grown worse and worse, until, in the winter of 1794–95, the laboring classes of Paris were again on the verge of starvation. As usual, they attributed their sufferings to the government, and there were bread riots. Twice in the spring of 1795—on April first and May twentieth—the unemployed and hungry rose to overthrow the Convention, but they were easily put down by the soldiers on both occasions. The whole populace, as represented by the sections or wards of Paris, resented this use of armed force, and grew uneasy. The Thermidorians further angered it by introducing a new metropolitan administration, which greatly diminished the powers and influence of the sections, without, however, destroying their organization. The people of the capital, therefore, were ready for mischief. The storming of the Tuileries on August tenth, 1792, had been the work of the Paris mob. Why could they not in turn, another mob, reactionary and to a degree even royalist, overthrow the tyranny of the Jacobins as they themselves had overthrown the double-faced administration of the King?
A crisis might easily have been precipitated before Buonaparte's arrival in Paris, but it was delayed by events outside the city. The year 1794 had been a brilliant season for the republican arms and for republican diplomacy. We have seen how the Piedmontese were forced beyond the maritime Alps; the languid and worthless troops of Spain were expelled from the Pyrenean strongholds and forced southward; in some places, beyond the Ebro. Pichegru, with the Army of the North, had driven the invaders from French soil and had conquered the Austrian Netherlands. Jourdan, with the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, had defeated the Austrians at Fleurus in a battle decided by the bravery of Marceau, thus confirming the conquest. Other generals were likewise rising to eminence. Hoche had in 1793 beaten the Austrians under Wurmser at Weissenburg, and driven them from Alsace. He had now further heightened his fame by his successes against the insurgents of the west. Saint-Cyr, Bernadotte, and Kléber, with many others of Buonaparte's contemporaries, had also risen to distinction in minor engagements.
Of peasant birth, Pichegru was nevertheless appointed by ecclesiastical influence as a scholar at Brienne. In the dearth of generals he was selected for promotion by Saint-Just as was Hoche at the time when Carnot discovered Jourdan. Having assisted Hoche in the conquest of Alsace when a division general and only thirty-two years old, he began the next year, in 1794, to deploy his extraordinary powers, and with Moreau as second in command he swept the English and Austrians out of the Netherlands. Both these generals were sensitive and jealous men; after brilliant careers under the republic they turned royalists and came to unhappy ends. Moreau was two years the junior. He was the son of a Breton lawyer and rose to notice both as a local politician, and as a volunteer captain in the Breton struggles for independence with which he had no sympathy. As a great soldier he ranks with Hoche after Napoleon in the revolutionary time. Hoche was younger still, having been born in 1768. In 1784 he enlisted as a common soldier and rose from the ranks by sheer ability. He died at the age of thirty, but as a politician and strategist he was already famous. Kléber was an Alsatian who had been educated in the military school at Munich and was already forty-one