Coup of 18 Brumaire — 9 novembre 1799

On 18 Brumaire Year VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, supported by Sieyès and his brother Lucien Bonaparte, overthrew the Directory. The session of the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud turned to confusion; the intervention of the grenadiers and Lucien allowed Napoleon to seize power. The Consulate was established, Napoleon became First Consul.

A regime out of breath

The Directory survived only through coups: Fructidor Year V against the royalists, Floréal Year VI against the Jacobins, Prairial Year VII against the Directors themselves. Finances were ruined, war had resumed in Italy and Germany, and conscription was raising the west and the south of France.

Sieyès, who joined the Directory in May 1799, was looking for a sword to revise the Constitution. With Joubert killed at Novi, he turned to Bonaparte, back from Egypt on 9 October and welcomed as a saviour — with no one holding his abandoned army against him.

The two days

On 18 Brumaire the Ancients, invoking a Jacobin plot, moved the Councils to Saint-Cloud and gave Bonaparte command of the troops in Paris. Sieyès and Ducos resigned, Barras was forced to follow: the Directory ceased to exist in a single morning.

On the morning of the 19th, in the Orangery, the Five Hundred met Bonaparte with cries of "outlaw!" and jostled him; he came out pale, his face scratched. It was Lucien Bonaparte, president of the assembly, who saved the day: he left the chair, harangued the grenadiers, swore to run his brother through if he ever attacked liberty, and had the hall cleared at bayonet point by Murat and Leclerc.

The Consulate

That same evening a few dozen rallied deputies voted the abolition of the Directory and handed power to three provisional consuls: Bonaparte, Sieyès, Ducos. The Constitution of Year VIII, promulgated on 24 December, would make the first of them master of the executive; Sieyès, who thought he held the sword, was shunted into the Conservative Senate.

The proclamation of 15 December closed the sequence opened in 1789 with a famous sentence: "Citizens, the Revolution is established upon the principles which began it: it is over."