Yet the Directors, discredited and financially inept, knew that they must take action against the royalists if they were to survive. The two convinced republicans, Reubell and La Revellière, even proposed annulling the elections. This, Carnot strongly resisted. But, after his usual hesitations, Barras threw in his lot with the republicans, and a coup d’état was decided upon. There could be no question, though, of a popular uprising. As on the journées of Vendémiaire, the army would have to be called in.
The mood of the army was not as it had been at the time of Valmy. The tradition of antagonism towards King, priests and nobles was still strong, but spirits in the ranks were no longer kept up by enthusiastic support for the republican cause. Soldiers felt cut off from the Government at home; they took pride in their regiments and in French might rather than in the Revolution. It was their generals they looked to for leadership now, not the civilians at home, certainly not to the ‘army commissioners’ whom the Directors had appointed to succeed the Convention’s représentants en mission. Above all, they looked to Bonaparte who had promised them ‘rich provinces, great cities…honour, glory and wealth’.
After Bonaparte’s services on the journée of 13 Vendémiaire–for which Barras and Fréron both gave him more credit than was his proper due – he was appointed first a divisional general, then commander of the Interior, and, on 2 March 1796, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Italy. This last appointment was unanimously approved by the Directors, all of whom recognized in him a man who would not scruple to replenish the country’s empty coffers with treasure looted from his defeated enemies. It was also warmly welcomed in the country as a whole. The economist, Dupont de Nemours, was almost alone in condemning it. ‘I can hardly believe you have made such a mistake,’ Dupont wrote to Reubell as soon as he heard of Bonaparte’s promotion. ‘Don’t you know he is one of those Corsicans? They are all on the make.’
A week after his appointment to the command in Italy, Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais, a former mistress of Barras and widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais who had been guillotined in June 1794. And within three days of his marriage to this fetching, extravagant young woman from Martinique, Bonaparte was on his way to his headquarters near Genoa.
Certain members of the Government were not at all sorry to see Bonaparte leave Paris, but they had not foreseen the consequences of what was to prove a triumphant campaign in Italy. It had been the Directory’s original intention to make an attack upon Vienna the main threat to the Austrian armies. Of secondary importance were to be advances by the Army of the Alps under Kellerman into Piedmont, by the Army of Italy into Lombardy, and a landing on the Irish coast by the Army of Ireland under Hoche. But the attack upon Vienna did not go well, while the Irish expedition was thwarted when the ships carrying Hoche’s men were dispersed in a storm. It was only from Italy that news of great victories was received. From there came reports that the King of Sardinia’s forces had been overwhelmed and that he had been obliged to cede Savoy and the area around Nice to France; that the Austrians, defeated at the bridge of Lodi on the Adda, at Arcola and at Rivoli, had been compelled to sign peace preliminaries at Leoben leading up to the Treaty of Campo-Formio at Passariano; that the Austrian Emperor had been forced to recognize the annexation by France not only of what had formerly constituted the Austrian Netherlands but also the left bank of the Rhine, and had been obliged as well to acknowledge the creation of a Cisalpine Republic out of the territories which the French had conquered in northern Italy. As a recompense the Venetian Republic, which Bonaparte had occupied, had been handed over to the Austrians after the French had stripped Venice of great quantities of her treasures including the famous bronze horses outside Saint Mark’s basilica which, made in classical times, had been looted by the Venetians from Constantinople.
These famous horses formed part of an enormous amount of treasure which Bonaparte shipped back to France. Works of art, pictures, statuary, rare books and huge amounts of bullion reached French ports or were trundled across the frontier in loaded wagons. Delighted as they were to receive their share of these millions of livres’ worth of loot, the Directors could not but be concerned by Bonaparte’s independence. They had intended to satisfy themselves with what Danton had referred to as France’s ‘natural frontiers’, with a few modifications here and there in France’s favour, and to seize territories beyond these frontiers so that they could negotiate with their defeated enemies from a strong position. But Bonaparte had ignored their instructions. The peace negotiations, like the campaign, were largely conducted and concluded in accordance with his own ideas. Bonaparte had thus become an irresistible force in the conduct of France’s foreign affairs. He was now also to become profoundly influential in affairs at home.
Anxious to have his Italian policies ratified by the Directors, Bonaparte had listened sympathetically to their overtures when the elections of April 1797 had resulted in hostile majorities in the Councils. He had agreed to send home the huge and vulgar, foulmouthed Pierre Augereau, one of his roughest generals. Augereau had been born into a poor family in Paris and, having enlisted in the carabiniers at the age of seventeen, had had to flee abroad after drawing his sword on an officer. He had subsequently served in the Russian, Prussian and Neapolitan armies before the Revolution had brought him back to France again. Bonaparte considered him ‘an ignoramus’ but just the man for the job in hand. Augereau thought so himself. ‘I have come here,’ he announced confidently on his arrival in Paris, ‘to kill the royalists.’ Reubell judged him ‘a splendid brigand’.
Under his command the Directory’s forces occupied the city for the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor. General Pichegru, the royalist general who, having been elected for the Jura, was now President of the Five Hundred, was arrested. So was François Barthélemy, Letourneur’s successor, the one Director, other than Carnot, who was in sympathy with the Councils. Carnot himself escaped and fled abroad. The Councils were then purged, the elections in forty-nine departments being annulled and 177 deputies displaced. Journals antagonistic to the Directory were suppressed, various opponents of the three Directors who had organized the coup were transported to Guiana where a large number of them perished, and others were arraigned before military tribunals, condemned to death and shot. Émigrés were given a fortnight to leave France on pain of death. Deported priests who had returned to France were also ordered to leave the country or risk sentence to the ‘dry guillotine’ of Guiana. All other priests were required to swear an oath of hatred of both the monarchy and the Constitution of 1793.
The victory of the Directory was for the moment complete. But only for the moment, for it had been achieved by a fatal reliance upon the army; while the Councils, provoked by the methods of the Government which became more and more authoritarian and anti-clerical as time went by, awaited an opportunity for revenge.
The Jacobins also were mustering their forces for an onslaught against the Directory, which was given little credit for the undoubtedly beneficial administrative reforms carried out by the Ministries of Finance and of the Interior. Unfortunately, it was unable to profit from England’s remaining the only country still at war with France after the signing of the Treaty of Campo-Formio. The appearance of a large French army at Brest had provoked such forceful reaction from the British Government that Bonaparte advised against the projected invasion of England and pressed instead for an Egyptian expedition, the beginning of the realization of his ‘Eastern dream’.