Two days after this first meeting the Directors issued a statement proclaiming their intention of replacing ‘the chaos which always accompanies revolutions by a new social order’. They intended to ‘wage vigorous war on royalists, revive patriotism, sternly suppress all factions, extinguish party spirit, destroy all desire for vengeance…revive industry and commerce, stamp out speculation, revitalize the arts and sciences, re-establish public credit and restore plenty’.
These were formidable tasks. For not only were the royalists ‘reviving their intrigues’, as the Directors themselves put it, not only were the Left also endeavouring to bring the Directory down, but the financial and economic plight of the country was disastrous. The value of the assignat had fallen so low that one hundred livres’ worth could now be exchanged for no more than fifteen sous; and when 2,400,000 livres of a new paper currency, mandats territoriaux, were issued, these depreciated in value so rapidly that by the beginning of 1797, when they were withdrawn, they were worth only one per cent of their face value. Beggars pushed them away when offered them. Peasants, too, only accepted metal currency for their produce, protesting that they would only take ‘the other stuff’ if their horses would eat it. And their produce was far from plentiful. The 1795 harvest was so poor, in fact, that the already meagre bread ration had to be severely curtailed and in certain places supplemented by rice which the poor could not cook because of the exorbitant prices demanded for fuel.
The discontent of the poor was aggravated by the ever increasing flamboyance of the rich. ‘The thirst for pleasure,’ reported one newspaper, ‘the stream of fashion, a succession of dinners, the luxury of their splendid furniture and their mistresses, are the objects that chiefly employ the thoughts of the young men of Paris.’ New restaurants and dance-halls opened every week, the thirty-two theatres were crowded every night, and so were the gambling rooms in one of which the wife of a deputy ‘lost two millions on a single card’. There were firework displays at the Tivoli and the Pavilion de Hanovre, a new circus in the garden of the Capucines, lively entertainments in the gardens of Marboeuf, and daring tableaux vivants in the Jardins d’Idalie. Carriages once more bowled along to Longchamp, and at Frascati’s heads turned and men stood on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the delicious young Madame Récamier, or of Madame Tallien in a gauze dress split down the side, with jewels in her black hair, bracelets round her ankles and rings on her painted toes.
Fashions became more and more outré. There was a passion for pseudo-classical styles, for long diaphanous high-breasted robes, for ‘Athenian’ coiffeurs with triple rows of curls, for Grecian, bejewelled sandals and plumed and spangled fans, for dressing à la sauvage, ‘the arms and breasts bare, a gauze skirt with flesh coloured tights beneath it…and circlets set with diamonds round the legs and thighs’. ‘No one,’ wrote Mallet du Pan, ‘thinks of anything now but eating and drinking and pleasures.’
There were millions, though, for whom there could be no pleasure, who were saved from starvation only by the free distribution of food requisitioned from the peasants, whose plight was cited by the Jacobins as further evidence of the Directory’s appalling incompetence. Initially the Directors had been tolerant towards the Left in their anxiety to bind all parties together in a stabilized regime. They had appointed Jacobins to various administrative posts, they had been indulgent towards the appearance of various radical clubs, including the Panthéon Club, and they had allowed freedom to the left-wing press. But they had soon felt obliged to reconsider their policy of toleration when there seemed a danger that the Jacobins might combine to overthrow them. They dismissed the most troublesome or suspect of them from the posts to which they had been appointed, they prosecuted left-wing journalists, they closed the Panthéon Club, and they issued a warrant for the arrest of François-Noël Babeuf, the tactless and obtuse journalist, who declared in his Tribun du peuple that the Revolution was being betrayed, that, ‘despite all obstacles and oppositions’, it had advanced up to 9 Thermidor but had been retreating ever since.
Babeuf, who chose to call himself Gracchus, was born at Saint Quentin in November 1760, the son of a petty official and of an illiterate maidservant. He had worked as a young man for a land surveyor at Roye where his distaste for his ill-paid work and his sympathy for the unfortunate peasants living in the rural poverty of Picardy drew him to the career of political journalist. A compulsive, tedious writer, he was also resilient, indefatigable and persistent. The more often he was derided the more sure he was that his theories constituted the answer to the problems of mankind. In his earlier days as a political philosopher he had supported the idea of the loi agraire, but he had now come to the view that ‘perfect equality’ and ‘common happiness’ could only be achieved by the suppression of individual property and the private ownership of land. Men, working at their chosen occupations, should place the fruits of their labour into a common store, and there should be established ‘a simple administration for food supplies’ which would ‘take note of all individuals and all provisions and have the latter divided up according to the most scrupulous equality’. Babeuf had also come to the view that this form of communism could only be realized by violence. He and his fellow-conspirators therefore set up an insurrectionary committee and dispatched agents all over Paris to spread the word of their ‘Plebeians’ Manifesto’. But from the beginning Babeuf’s organization had been infiltrated by spies, and the Government were well informed as to his intentions, knowing the names of most of his confederates. Even so, the Directors were unsure how best to proceed against the so-called ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. Reubell feared that to take strong action might play into the hands of the royalists; La Revellière was more concerned with the activities of refractory priests; Barras, characteristically, waited until he was quite sure which way the wind was blowing. Carnot, however, insisted on firm repression. So, on 10 May 1796 Babeuf, a most incompetent conspirator, was arrested, and in August he and his fellow-conspirators were taken to trial in iron cages to Vendôme. On 26 May 1797 after an immensely long trial, he and one fellow-conspirator were condemned to death, the others being acquitted. He was guillotined the following day.
Although joined by numerous former terrorists and financed by Jacobins bent upon the Directory’s destruction, Babeuf’s conspiracy had never presented a danger to the Government as had the royalists. Supported by hundreds of émigrés and non-juring priests now returning to France and supplied with money by the English Government through an agent in Switzerland, the royalist campaign was gathering strength week by week. In April 1797 the majority of the new members returned in the elections were constitutional monarchists; and had they been a united, well-led party, able to come to terms with the émigrés, they might well have overthrown the Directory, restored the throne and made peace with France’s foreign enemies. But they were disunited, had no outstandingly capable leaders and were repeatedly rebuffed by the diehard émigrés. Moreover, there was strong feeling in France against a return of the monarchy. Those who owed their wealth and appointments to the Revolution were as anxious not to lose them as were the peasants who had acquired confiscated lands and been freed from seigneurial dues.