The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
and their church, their institutions somewhat modified and improved, but still their old institutions. No man less gigantic in moral stature would have dared thus to defy the petty atheistic fanaticism of the Directory. France had secured enlightened legislation which was not enforced, religious liberty which could not be practised because of ill will in the government, civil liberty which was a mere sham because of internal violence, political liberty which was a chimera before hostile foreigners. Hence it seemed to the administration that one evil must cure another. Intestine disturbances, they naïvely believed, could be kept under some measure of control only by an aggressive foreign policy which should deceive the insurgent elements as to the resources of the government. Thus far, by hook or by crook, the armies, so far as they had been clothed and paid and fed at all, had been fed and paid and clothed by the administration at Paris. If the armies should still march and fight, the nation would be impressed by the strength of the Directory.
The Directory was by no means a homogeneous body. It is doubtful whether Barras was a sincere republican, or sincere in anything except in his effort to keep himself afloat on the tide of the times. It has been believed by many that he hoped for the restoration of monarchy through disgust of the nation with such intolerable disorders as they would soon associate with the name of republic. His friendship for General Bonaparte was a mixed quantity; for while he undoubtedly wished to secure for the state in any future crisis the support of so able a man, he had at the same time used him as a sort of social scapegoat. His own strength lay in several facts: he had been Danton's follower; he had been an officer, and was appointed for that reason commanding general against the Paris sections; he had been shrewd enough to choose Bonaparte as his agent so that he enjoyed the prestige of Bonaparte's success; and in the new society of the capital he was magnificent, extravagant, and licentious, the only representative in the Directory of the newly aroused passion for life and pleasure, his colleagues being severe, unostentatious, and economical democrats.
Barras's main support in the government was Rewbell, a vigorous Alsatian and a bluff democrat, enthusiastic for the Revolution and its extension. He was no Frenchman himself, but a German at heart, and thought that the German lands—Holland, Switzerland, Germany itself—should be brought into the great movement. Like Barras, who needed disorder for his Orleanist schemes and for the supply of his lavish purse, Rewbell despised the new constitution; but for a different reason. To him it appeared a flimsy, theoretical document, so subdividing the exercise of power as to destroy it altogether. His rôle was in the world of finance, and he was always suspected, though unjustly, of unholy alliances with army contractors and stock manipulators. Larévellière was another doctrinaire, but, in comparison with Rewbell, a bigot. He had been a Girondist, a good citizen, and active in the formation of the new constitution; but he lacked practical common sense, and hated the Church with as much narrow bitterness as the most rancorous modern agnostic—seeking, however, not merely its destruction, but, like Robespierre, to substitute for it a cult of reason and humanity. The fourth member of the Directory, Letourneur, was a plain soldier, an officer in the engineers. With abundant common sense and a hard head, he, too, was a sincere republican; but he was a tolerant one, a moderate, kindly man like his friend Carnot, with whom, as time passed by and there was gradually developed an irreconcilable split in the Directory, he always voted in a minority of two against the other three.
At first the notorious Abbé Sieyès had been chosen a member of the executive. He was both deep and dark, like Bonaparte, to whom he later rendered valuable services. His ever famous pamphlet, which in 1789 triumphantly proved that the Third Estate was neither more nor less than the French nation, had made many think him a radical. As years passed on he became the oracle of his time, and as such acquired an enormous influence even in the days of the Terror, which he was helpless to avert, and which he viewed with horror and disgust. Whatever may have been his original ideas, he appears to have been for some time after the thirteenth of Vendémiaire an Orleanist, the head of a party which desired no longer a strict hereditary and absolute monarchy, but thought that in the son of Philippe Égalité they had a useful prince to preside over a constitutional kingdom. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps for the one he gave, which was that the new constitution was not yet the right one, he flatly refused the place in the Directory which was offered to him.
It was as a substitute for this dangerous visionary that Carnot was made a director. He was now in his forty-third year, and at the height of his powers. In him was embodied all that was moderate and sound, consequently all that was enduring, in the French Revolution; he was a thorough scholar, and his treatise on the metaphysics of the calculus forms an important chapter in the history of mathematical physics. As an officer in the engineers he had attained the highest distinction, while as minister of war he had shown himself an organizer and strategist of the first order. But his highest aim was to be a model French citizen. In his family relations as son, husband, and father, he was held by his neighbors to be a pattern; in his public life he strove with equal sincerity of purpose to illustrate the highest ideals of the eighteenth century. Such was the ardor of his republicanism that no man nor party in France was so repugnant but that he would use either one or both, if necessary, for his country's welfare, although he was like Chatham in his lofty scorn for parties. To him as a patriot, therefore, France, as against the outer world, was first, no matter what her government might be; but the France he yearned for was a land regenerated by the gospel of humanity, awakened to the highest activity by the equality of all before the law, refined by that self-abnegation of every man which makes all men brothers, and destroys the menace of the law.
And yet he was no dreamer. While a member of the National Assembly he had displayed such practical common sense in his chosen field of military science, that in 1793 the Committee of Safety intrusted to him the control of the war. The standard of rank and command was no longer birth nor seniority nor influence, but merit. The wild and ignorant hordes of men which the conscription law had brought into the field were something hitherto unknown in Europe. It was Carnot who organized, clothed, fed, and drilled them. It was he who devised the new tactics and evolved the new and comprehensive plans which made his national armies the power they became. It was in Carnot's administration that the young generals first came to the fore. It was by his favor that almost every man of that galaxy of modern warriors who so long dazzled Europe by their feats of arms first appeared as a candidate for advancement. Moreau, Macdonald, Jourdan, Bernadotte, Kléber, Mortier, Ney, Pichegru, Desaix, Berthier, Augereau, and Bonaparte himself—each one of these was the product of Carnot's system. He was the creator of the armies which for a time made all Europe tributary to France.
Throughout an epoch which laid bare the meanness of most natures, his character was unsmirched. He began life under the ancient régime by writing and publishing a eulogy on Vauban, who had been disgraced for his plain speaking to Louis XIV. When called to a share in the government he was the advocate of a strong nationality, of a just administration within, and of a fearless front to the world. While minister of war he on one occasion actually left his post and hastened to Maubeuge, where defeat was threatening Jourdan, devised and put into operation a new plan, led in person the victorious assault, and then returned to Paris to inspire the country and the army with news of the victory; all this he did as if it were commonplace duty, without advertising himself by parade or ceremony. Even Robespierre had trembled before his biting irony and yet dared not, as he wished, include him among his victims. After the events of Thermidor, when it was proposed to execute all those who had authorized the bloody deeds of the Terror, excepting Carnot, he prevented the sweeping measure by standing in his place to say that he too had acted with the rest, had held like them the conviction that the country could not otherwise be saved, and that therefore he must share their fate.
In the milder light of the new constitution the dark blot on his record thus frankly confessed grew less repulsive as the continued dignity and sincerity of his nature asserted themselves in a tolerance which he believed to be as needful now as ruthless severity once had been. For a year the glory of French arms had been eclipsed: his dominant idea was first to restore their splendor, then to make peace with honor and give the new life of his country an opportunity for expansion in a mild and firm administration of the new laws. If he had been dictator in the crisis, no doubt his plan, arduous as was the task, might have been realized; but, with Letourneur in a minority of two, against an unprincipled adventurer leading two bigots, it was impossible to secure the executive unity necessary for success.
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