The First Directory and the Rule of Law

The Executive Directory took office in November 1795 with a daunting political inheritance. The Thermidorians intended to found the first postrevolutionary regime. Thus the Directory's primary task was to stabilize, consolidate, and protect the revolutionary settlement. Yet the political nation was deeply split by the experiences of the Terror and the Thermidorian Reaction. It was divided both by the mutual antagonisms of the victims of each regime and also by the different conceptions of the revolutionary settlement that each regime represented. At the same time, disaffection was widespread among the peasantry. The religious policy since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the coercive methods of the Terror's regulated economy had lost the Revolution the rural enthusiasm that it might have expected from the destruction of the seigneurial regime. Furthermore, the collapse of the repressive system of the Year II, the development of rural conscription resistance, the growing economic chaos and the Thermidorians' tolerance of political disorder had contributed to the progressive decline of public order. Brigand bands, sometimes with political overtones, infested many rural areas while, in the larger urban centers at least, the violence of the summer of the Year III had left a lingering ferment and confrontation. This general situation allowed royalists to be more active and dangerous than ever before inside France, as witnessed by the abortive Vendemiaire coup. Among the socially dominant, royalism bred upon an innate conservatism exasperated by the Terror and by continuing economic and social disorder. In the countryside, it encountered at least the tacit sympathy of many peasants as a rejection of the Revolution and as the ally of the clandestine cult. The history of the next four years demonstrated that, whatever successes the Directory may have had in such areas as the stabilization

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• Political Convictions

  Allyson Jaye Delnore•Libra•2004

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• Charles IX and the French revolution

  Geoffrey Walton, G Charles Walton•European Review of History Revue…•1997

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• Plume de fer”

  Joseph Zizek•French Historical Studies•2003

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• "The "Bosom of Proof

  Laura Mason•The Journal of Modern History•2004

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