Establishment of the Directory — 26 octobre 1795

The Constitution of Year III established an executive of five Directors and two Councils, the Ancients and the Five Hundred. Caught between royalists and neo-Jacobins, the regime survived only through coups and annulled elections, living off the levies raised by its generals. Its financial and military discredit paved the way directly for 18 Brumaire.

The Constitution of Year III

Adopted on 22 August 1795, the Constitution of Year III drew the lessons of the Terror by dividing power. The legislature went to two chambers, the Council of Five Hundred which proposed and the Council of Ancients which approved; the executive to five Directors, one fifth renewed each year, installed at the Luxembourg Palace. The franchise again became property-based.

The Convention dissolved itself on 26 October 1795 and the new regime took office in the following days. It inherited a European war, a collapsed currency and a country whose west remained in insurrection.

Governing by coup

No stable majority emerged: the Directory annulled the elections it disliked. Fructidor Year V, in September 1797, broke the royalist return with the army's support; Floréal Year VI removed elected Jacobins; Prairial Year VII saw the Councils turn on the Directors themselves. The regime held on by force against its own ballot boxes.

Finances did not recover: the assignat disappeared, the territorial mandate followed, and the bankruptcy of the two thirds, in September 1797, wiped out two thirds of the public debt at a stroke. Taxes came in badly, and the armies lived off the occupied countries.

The army becomes the arbiter

From these four years came a decisive shift: victorious generals, paid by foreign contributions, became autonomous powers. Bonaparte signed the armistice of Cherasco and then the Treaty of Campo Formio on his own authority, without waiting for Paris.

When Sieyès joined the Directory in May 1799 looking for a sword to revise the Constitution, he was no longer looking for an executant but for a partner. On 18 Brumaire Year VIII, 9 November 1799, the regime fell in two days without a single force rising to defend it.