In introducing this Constitution of the Year Three, Boissy d’Anglas, in a speech which might almost have been written by Vergniaud, declared:
Absolute equality is a chimera. If it existed one would have to assume complete equality in intelligence, virtue, physical strength, education and fortune in all men…We must be ruled by the best citizens. And the best are the most learned and the most concerned in the maintenance of law and order. Now, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who own some property, and are thus attached to the land in which it lies, to the laws which protect it and to the public order which maintains it…You must, therefore, guarantee the political rights of the well-to-do…and [deny] unreserved political rights to men without property, for if such men ever find themselves seated among the legislators, then they will provoke agitations…without fearing their consequences…and in the end precipitate us into those violent convulsions from which we have scarcely yet emerged.
After two months’ debate the Constitution, which in effect returned the country’s political and economic leadership to men who were reasonably well off, was approved by the Convention. Legislative power was to be entrusted to two Councils, a Council of Five Hundred composed of men over thirty years of age who were to have the right to initiate laws, and a Council of Ancients of two hundred and fifty members, married men or widowers at least forty years old, who were to approve or veto the laws proposed. A third of the members of each Council were to be required to retire each year. Executive power was to be entrusted to a Directory of five members who were to be appointed by the Council of Five Hundred and who were to be given a magnificent uniform ‘as a protest’, so Boissy d’Anglas said, ‘against sans-culottism’.
Conscious that they commanded limited support in the country as a whole, the Thermidorians – as Boissy d’Anglas and his colleagues were called in allusion to the season in which the Robespierrists had been overthrown – decreed that two thirds of the new deputies should be chosen from amongst the members of the Convention. Both this Law of the Two-Thirds as it was known and the Constitution itself were submitted to a plebiscite; and, despite enormous numbers of abstentions, both were approved, the Constitution by a majority of over a million votes to less than 50,000, the Two-Thirds Law by about two to one.
The comparatively widespread opposition to this law, particularly in Paris, the South and the West, gave the royalists an opportunity to organize the last journée of the Revolution. Protesting that there had been fraud in the counting of votes, that the troops which had been brought into the capital had been called in for some sinister purpose, and that the Convention’s attempt to perpetuate itself was an affront to freedom, the royalist plotters were able to play on the people’s distress to win their support. For there was, indeed, much distress in France that summer and autumn of 1795. The bread ration fell as the price of meat rose, and wages could not keep up with the rising cost of everything else. Sugar soared from eleven to sixty-two livres a pound, firewood from 160 livres a wagon-load in May to 500 in September. The cost of living had by then risen almost thirty times higher than it had been in 1790. The police were accordingly not surprised when the annual celebrations commemorating the fall of the monarchy passed off in what they termed ‘a state of apathy’.
To the royalists and their fellow-conspirators the time, then, seemed ideal for an attack upon the Convention. They induced a number of Chouan leaders and émigrés to come to Paris, and went about the sections fostering the people’s inclination to blame their sufferings and misfortunes upon the Government, persuading them that they were threatened with a renewal of the Terror, inciting young men to march about the streets shouting ‘Down with the Two-Thirds’. In several sections there were serious riots in which musket shots were exchanged with the soldiers of the Convention.
The Convention responded to the danger from the royalists by turning to the staunchly republican sans-culottes, issuing arms to all citizens ‘faithful to the Revolution’ who applied for them, and by forming three battalions of ‘Patriots of ’89’. At least seven of the disaffected sections thereupon declared themselves in rebellion, beat the générale in defiance of the law and seized arms for the fight that now appeared inevitable. By the beginning of October, after news had reached Paris of the eruption and repression of royalist uprisings at Châteauneuf-en-Thimerais and Dreux, as many as 25,000 sectionnaires were under arms. The section of Lepeletier became the centre of the insurrectionary movement, and it was here that the Government’s first attempt to suppress it took place. General J. F. de Menou, commander of the Army of the Interior, was ordered to march into it with a strong force of infantry, cavalry and artillery to overawe the rebel sectionnaires and to insist that they deliver up their arms. Menou, a kind officer of a somewhat hesitant nature and moderate political opinions, accepted his orders with reluctance and carried them out both late and indecisively. He advanced towards the convent of the Filles St Thomas, where the leaders of the Lepeletier section were in session, with his troops in so close a formation that, had they been called upon to do so, they would have had little chance of conducting a successful engagement against the massed ranks of their armed opponents who filled the streets and looked down upon them from the roof tops. General Menou entered the convent, his cannon drawn up behind him and levelled at the door. He found the section’s committee armed and defiant. To his almost apologetic request that they hand over their weapons, they replied that they would do nothing of the sort, defying him to use force. So, having obtained an undertaking that the section would disperse its forces if he withdrew his, he led his columns out of the area while the men he had been sent to subdue fulfilled their promise, only to reassemble again immediately in more challenging mood than ever.
Well aware now that Menou was far from the kind of general they needed in such a crisis, and suspecting that he might well be in complicity with the rebels, the Convention dismissed him and appointed in his place Paul Barras, who had proved so energetic a leader during the journée of Thermidor. But Barras had never been a particularly successful commander of regular troops – his years in the army, spent mostly in India, had not been in the least distinguished – and it was considered essential that he should be given some more experienced assistants. One of these, introduced to him by Fréron, was the Corsican Brigadier Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonaparte, then aged twenty-six, had come to the notice of the Convention through his exceptional skill as an artillery officer during the siege of Toulon and had risen from the rank of captain to that of brigadier-general within the space of four months. Unlike several of his friends, including his closest, Alexandre des Mazis, who had chosen to emigrate, he had demonstrated his support of the Revolution from the beginning. While stationed at Valence as a subaltern he had been appointed secretary of the Society of Friends of the Constitution. He had publicly condemned the King’s flight to Varennes, and had made it known that he approved both of the sale of land confiscated from the Church and the nobility, and of the decree by which the clergy were to be elected by their congregations. Since the capture of Toulon, however, Bonaparte’s career had not prospered. He had become friendly with the sociable, gregarious Augustin Robespierre and, after the fall of the Robespierrists, had thus become suspect to the Thermidorians. For a time he was placed under house arrest. Then, after his release, he was transferred from the artillery to the infantry for having tried to rescind an order posting him to the Army of the West which was engaged in the unpleasant duty of fighting the Chouans. He applied for sick leave which he spent in Paris in a dreary hotel on the Left Bank, complaining of the shabby way he had been treated and even on occasion threatening suicide. He walked disconsolately about the city in his now frayed uniform, or in what Mme Junot described as ‘a grey greatcoat, very plainly made, buttoned up to his chin…and a black cravat very clumsily tied’, his long ill-combed hair falling over his collar. When his leave was over, he asked for a command in the field, but was given instead a staff appointment which he found so irksome that he decided to go to Constantinople to help reorganize the Turkish artillery. He had obtained his passport and was ready to leave when Fréron, whom he had met in the South while they were on duty together there, took him to Barras.