The Directory

[Written in 1970] Someone needs to write a "Come to Jesus" summary of the French Revolution: An assessment that shows what or that the extraordinary effort and sacrifice had a point for all of us.

What we learn from the brilliant historians (and Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebre who wrote this book

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are among them) is confusing. We have almost no way to incorporate lessons learned. We remain caught in a fog of indifference and the many distractions created by hysterics. Edmond Burke is still cited among English speakers as the expert on the French Revolution. He was not expert in either facts or history or events taking place on another continent in a language he did not speak or remotely understand. He himself betrayed the Directory, which was a conservative effort by the French to recover from the devastations of the Left, and which is what Burke keeps screaming about. By making war on France, the English Burkians pushed France into the hands of Napoleon. Really unforgivable.

Lefebvre gives us the sequence of political events primarily taking place in Paris, 1795-1799. He provides short but keenly accurate biographies of the principals, and makes many of the maneuvres transparent, all without the bias of withholding nasty truth or parading glorious achievements on only one side. No historian or journalist worthy of the name should ever do so. Lefebvre is constantly sifting the grace and cruelties of all sides, although even he has to grit his teeth in doing so. The story is not for sissies.

The story begins after the initial Terror, with the 1795 Directory which served to govern France and which created the platform which Napoleon saved and then seized to become Emperor, in 1799 (the "eighteenth of Brumaire").

Lefebvre carefully goes through the beginning of the Directory and what they had to handle: monetary crisis, completely worthless currency, elections, eruptions of "terror" including the "white terror", betrayals and assassinations, war against England, propaganda, Jacobin and anti-Jacobin insurrections, fraction and civil war, colonial issues, immigration, the Egyptian Expedition, threat of invasion from every neighboring country and all European monarchies, and of course, Napoleon.

"What has endured is the predominance of the notables, the work they completed under his [Napoleon's] guidance, the final consolidation of the Revolution which, by making a dictatorship useless in the future, made it possible to begin the liberal experiment again in 1814. This is the real significance of the eighteenth of Brumaire [1799] [Bonaparte took power upon the false allegations of a terrorist plot]: initiated by a few bold bourgeois, it finally established the power of the bourgeoisie."

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