Search results
In 1799, after several defeats, French victories in the Netherlands and Switzerland restored the French military position, but the Directory had lost all the political factions' support, including some of its Directors.
Directory, the French Revolutionary government set up by the Constitution of the Year III, which lasted four years, from November 1795 to November 1799. It included a bicameral legislature known as the Corps Législatif.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- A New Constitution
- The Directory
- Economic Troubles
- Social Unrest: 1796-1797
- Coup of Fructidor
- Military Successes
- End of The Directory
On 28 July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) and 21 of his allies were guillotined in Paris, marking an end to the Jacobin-led Reign of Terror. The 15-month period that followed, the Thermidorian Reaction, saw a pivot away from Jacobin radicalism and back towards stable, more conservative policies that favored the bourgeois class. The Thermi...
The Constitution of Year III (1795), as this new constitution was known, was faintly reminiscent of its two immediate predecessors; it included the seminal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizenas its preamble, albeit in an amended form. Yet, the Thermidorian constitution was less democratic than its Jacobin cousin, limiting the voting...
One of the most pressing issues facing the new Directory was the matter of inflation. By December 1795, the value of the assignat currency had fallen to 1 percent of its face value; in Paris, bread was costing 50 livres, butter 100, and soap 170. Prices had also been driven up by a British blockade and a poor harvest season, forcing the government ...
France's food scarcity and economic issues did nothing to ease the general suffering felt throughout the nation. As the winter of 1795-96 proved just as bad as the year before, citizens began to look back with nostalgia to earlier, better days; for Jacobins and impoverished sans-culottes, this referred to the days of the Terror, when bread had been...
The rise of the royalists signaled trouble for the republic. Great Britain and Austria, the last of Europe's great powers to still be at war with France, immediately moved to start peace negotiations, in the hopes that they would get better terms from a divided France; likewise, the royalists hoped that conditions of peace could include a restorati...
The era of the Directory was defined largely by French military victories, as the groundworks for the Napoleonic Wars were inadvertently being lain. In 1795, Prussia and Spain dropped out of the War of the First Coalition, and the Dutch Republic was turned into the Batavian Republic, a French client state and the first of many 'sister republics'. L...
General Bonaparte returned from Egypt in October 1799 as a popular man. By this point, the 1799 elections had confirmed neo-Jacobin control of the legislature; Napoleon's own brother, Lucien, was a staunch Jacobin who was elected president of the Council of 500, although he was only 24. That same year, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès became a Director; Siey...
Apr 9, 2017 · By the start of 1799, with war, conscription and action against refractory priests dividing the nation, confidence in the Directory to bring about the much-desired peace and stability was gone. Now Sieyès, who had turned down the chance to be one of the original Directors, replaced Reubell, convinced he could effect change.
Napoleon overthrows the Directory. Key People. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. Theorist and clergy member who maneuvered his way onto the Directory in May 1799 while plotting with Napoleon, enabling Napoleon to take control upon returning to Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte.
Coup of 18–19 Brumaire, (November 9–10, 1799), coup d’état that overthrew the system of government under the Directory in France and substituted the Consulate, making way for the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte. The event is often viewed as the effective end of the French Revolution.
3 days ago · To fight the War of the Second Coalition that began in 1799, the Directory mobilized three “classes,” or age cohorts, of young men but encountered massive draft resistance and desertion in many regions.
