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part moderate men, distinguished by their information and probity, and strangers to revolutionary excess. Their old colleagues instantly stigmatized them as royalists, ere they opened their mouths: suspicion cannot separate itself from guilt. Amongst the married members above forty years of age, a ballot took place; 250 were thus chosen to form the upper chamber, or council of ancients. The next important step was the choice of the five members of the executive directory. In this, too, the conventionalists had provided for the maintenance of their system and influence: being the majority, they had entered into a private compact to nominate none save those who had voted the death of Louis XVI., the shibboleth of their party. Accordingly, the choice fell upon Barras, Reubel, Lareveillère, Lepaux, Letourneur, and Sièyes. The last, either from dislike to his colleagues, or in pique that his plan of government had not been adopted, refused the office; and Carnot was chosen in his room. The newlyelected deputies proposed Cambacérès, who had voted for the imprisonment, not the death, of Louis; but the majority did not consider him sufficiently staunch.

It required an inordinate measure of their courage or ambition to accept the office of government at such a moment. The legislature, and of course its executive, could reckon on the support of no party. The discomfited citizens were indignant; the patriots not reconciled. The five directors, in repairing to the palace of the Luxembourg, which had been assigned them, "found there not a single article of furniture. The porters lent them a rickety table, a sheet of paper, and an ink-bottle, to enable them to dispatch the first message announcing their accession. There was not a sous in the treasury. Each night were printed the assignats requisite for the service of the morrow; and they were issued whilst yet moist from the presses of the republic. The greatest uncertainty prevailed as to the provisioning of the capital; and for some days the people had received but a few ounces of bread and some rice each.

For a long period there had been scarcely such a thing as revenue. Whatever was not paid in kind was paid in assignats; and these were but of nominal value, 3000 francs in them being given for a louis d'or. There were nine thousand millions of francs of this paper money in circulation; a quantity that the property of church and aristocracy, if quintupled, could not pay; yet a fresh issue of millions was indispensable, in order to supply the thousands requisite for current expenses. After discussing and rejecting divers plans, the rev

1796.

THE DIRECTORY.

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olutionary one of a forced loan was found to be the only practicable scheme, and was accordingly decreed.

Amidst such difficulties, aggravated by bad tidings from the armies, did the executive directory commence its reign. Formed of regicides, and supported by a self-created majority of the same party, its choice amidst the opinions of the day ould not be doubtful. A hatred and persecution, not only of royalism, but even of moderate republicanism, was in fact imposed on it. A law passed immediately previous to its election, not only banishing the wives of emigrants, but excluding even their relatives from all functions. It also excluded those who had favored the insurrection of the sections, or who had shared in the similar reaction which had taken place in the south.

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It was in enforcing their unjust laws that the directory and the conventionalists first found their measures opposed by the little knot of the newly-elected deputies. These men, stigmatized as royalists, and certainly beginning to despair of seeing liberty established in France under a republic, represented the wisdom, the moderate and just wishes, of the nation. Their names, Dupont de Nemours, Barbé Marbois, Matthieu Dumas, Le Brun, Portalis, Boissy d'Anglas, Lanjuinais, have since become all more or less celebrated. baudeau, to whom they then looked as a leader, had been elected by thirty departments. He was a staunch republican, and the political opponent of Tallien and the Thermidorians, who now occupied the Mountain, or left side of the assembly, and who showed strong inclinations to readopt the old system of the terror. We have the testimony of Thibaudeau,— whose memoirs form the best record of these times, and where every page wears the character of honesty and veracity,-that the members most suspected of royalism, Boissy and himself, were, on the contrary, true to the established system, and that the outcry of the conventionalists was but a pretext. These last, to mark their suspicions, and cast obloquy on their new antagonists, proposed and decreed a kind of legislative fête in honor of the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of Louis. The members were obliged to swear hatred to royalty. Dupont, as he repeated this, added “hatred to all kinds of tyranny," an allusion that the conventionalist majority took immediately to themselves, and forced Dupont tc unsay it. The directory itself showed more generosity than the party from which it sprung. It contained two weak men, Lepaux, a Girondist, and a dreamer; and Letourneur, a cipher. Barras took the lead, especially in domestic affairs. He was a Dantonist: in other words, a profligate republican,

and, as such, averse to Carnot, who was a puritanical patriot, and one of Robespierre's terrorist committee. Barras, however, from his birth and superior knowledge of life, necessarily held the directorial court, and thus assumed the chief influence. He had served in India, where he had learned to love magnificence; and, under his direction, the Luxembourg soon presented the appearance of a palace, by the richness of ts decorations, crowds of suitors in the day, and gay assemblies of both sexes at night. Luxurious pride, though too selfish to be really generous, loves at least to be magnanimous. Thus Barras now restored the daughter of Louis XVI., the orphan of the Temple, to her family. The unfortunate young prince, her brother, had died some time previous, of the effects of bad nourishment, cruelty, and confinement. The princess, since duchess of Angoulême, was exchanged for the commissaries of the convention, delivered up by Dumouriez to Austria. Amongst them was Drouet, the postmaster at Varennes, who had stopped the flight of Louis. He was so mortified at having lost, by his captivity, the pleasure of the revolution, that he instantly fell to work to recommence it, joining with the anarchists, and plotting with them the reestablishment of the terror.

Barras is looked upon as a feeble politician, yet he had the merit of perfectly understanding his position. Chief of a government based on neither popularity nor right; exposed to the attack of all parties, who would inevitably conspire, and have recourse to the old revolutionary measure of sedition; Barras re-established the old machinery of despotism,-a minister of police, with the usual concomitants. By these means he hoped to discover the machinations of the different parties, and anticipate their explosion by acts of vigor; and he succeeded. To this he added what was called a constitutional guard, being a faithful corps of troops at the immediate service of the directory. Thus, under the specious outside of liberty, not only tyranny, but those secondary props and pillars which support it, were carefully set up by the regicide government.

Despite its hatred and hostility to royalists and moderates, the directory was nevertheless first assailed by a democrat conspiracy. The old terrorists, elated by the support which they had afforded the convention in Vendemiaire, expected a more ample reward. Disappointed, they formed a new club, like the Jacobins of old, and installed themselves in the church of St. Généviève, otherwise called the Panthéon. At their head was an embryo Marat, one of those logical heads that can systematize the most atrocious principles, and preach them

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as a kind of political religion. This man was called Babœuf, to which he prefixed the name of Gracchus. He did not insist so much as his prototype on the necessity of cutting off heads; but he went farther in another direction, declaring that the revolution wanted yet one thing to its perfection, viz. an agrarian law. All the anarchists rallied to the utterings of such flattering doctrines,-Drouet, Santerre, Rossignol, and the surviving herd of the lower revolutionists. The directors closed the club of the Panthéon. But this merely inspired the members to form a more secret and organized plan, tending to the great purpose of insurrection. Barras, however, ferreted them by agents of his new police, through all their holes and conciliabules; and as their project grew ripe, he enveloped and took the greater number in one net. Babœuf and Drouet were of the number, as well as the infamous Vadier, Amar, and Choudieu, ex-conventionalists, and members of the once celebrated committee of general safety.

Nothing could equal the insolence and confidence of the prisoners. Babœuf, as if he were a Vendean chief, like the brave and unfortunate Charette, proposed to pacify his party at the price of his own liberation. "Do not think it beneath you," wrote he to the directory, "to treat with me on a footing of equality. I am chief of a powerful sect, that can be irritated, not destroyed, by any insults offered to me. Babœuf concluded by saying, that the democrats were the strongest, and must succeed, and that the directory would do well to adopt their side and their opinions.

Although Barras crushed this sect, still his intriguing temper had led him into communication with them, when he asserted that he himself was an honest Jacobin. In fact, he stooped to flatter the democrats, as he afterwards flattered Bonaparte, in order to stand well with the victors in case of defeat. This manœuvring excited the suspicions even of his colleagues. Whilst, at the same time, such is the fate of duplicity, Tallien and the Thermidorians dreaded that the chief director was meditating to strike them. Warrants of arrest had been issued by mistake against four conventionalist members of the five hundred. In the midst of the discussion which this produced, Tallien entered, somewhat in his cups. inebriety prompting him to vent his suspicions and the fear, which never ceased to haunt his guilty mind. He exclaimed against the new police, against the supposed employment of emigrés, and spoke of a meditated reaction against the patr ots. This imprudent confession of fear on the part of Tallien gave rise to the suspicion that he was connected with the anarchists.

The arrest of Babœuf took place in the spring of 1796, a year in which the thick-coming tidings of victory from the army of Italy absorbed all attention. The trial of the prisoners was deferred and forgotten. Their followers were not so oblivious, and formed divers plans for insurrection, and for liberating their chiefs. One, which they executed, was, to scatter white cockades in the streets; to pretend that a royalist conspiracy existed; and in the midst of the tumult excited by this discovery, the anarchists were to meet, attack the prison of Babœuf, and release him. This having failed, their next attempt was to surprise the camp of Grenelle, where the army of the interior, as it was called, was stationed to support the authority of the directory. One of the regi ments was supposed to be favorable to them. Collecting to the number of several hundred armed men, they made an attack upon the quarter of the camp occupied by the friendly regiment. The latter, however, surprised or wavering, gave the anarchists a rough reception, and took upwards of 100 prisoners. These were judged by a military commission, and three ex-conventionalists found among them were shot. The directory now pressed the trial of Babœuf. It lasted for a long time, and was remarkable for the insolence and audacity of the accused. Gracchus Babœuf and one of his brother scribblers were condemned to death; a judgment which they endeavored to anticipate by suicide. Six or seven were transported, and the rest acquitted.

But we must now quit the struggle of parties, to paint the rising fortunes of the warrior who was destined to swallow them up. This history has been before likened to a river: the deep majestic current of the monarchy burst its banks at the revolution, and spread over an immense extent, forming in its wide inundation a lake with islands interspersed with various channels, inlets, too intricate and vast for the eye to grasp at one view. Now, however, as the revolution draws to its close, the current narrows; and, like water at the termination of a lake, we see the large events of a nation's history contract and deepen, in order to run in the bounded channel of an individual's fortune. In other words, the history of France becomes for a long and glorious period identified with the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.

We have seen this youth start to distinction at the siege of Toulon, and in the day of the sections. Ambition was from the first the impulse of his mind; for all, who in more tranquil times sigh for greatness, in that stirring period strove for it. He essayed to attract notice by his pen: an academic essay, and a Jacobin pamphlet, did not produce the desired

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