The French Revolution:  A Brief Summary
Part 4:  The End of the Revolution

I. The Thermidorian Reaction: 27 July (9 Thermidor) – 1795

The Revolution now took a turn to the right, known as the Thermidorian Reaction. With the radical Jacobins gone, the Convention was left only with moderates. The Gironde was allowed to return, and the influence of the sans-culottes was replaced by wealthier bourgeois and professionals—similar to the makeup of the original National Assembly. The new, moderate convention undid the more extreme work of the previous regime. It disbanded the Committee of Public Safety; ended the economic controls; and closed the Paris Jacobin club. It also drew up a new constitution. The Constitution of 1793 had never gone into effect; it was now viewed as too democratic. The new one, adopted in 1795, is called the Constitution of the Year III.

II. The Directory, 1795-99

A. The Constitution of the Year III

The Constitution of the Year III restricted voting to men of property who voted only for electors (just as in 1791), with the exception that all soldiers had the right to vote, whether they owned property or not (indicating the importance of the army to the survival of the regime). But whereas the Constitution of 1791 was a constitutional monarchy, since Sept. 1792 France had been a republic, and it remained so. Under the Constitution of the Year III, executive powers would be held not by a monarch but by a committee of five men known as Directors; the form of government is therefore referred to as the Directory. The Directory was in power for four years, until 1799, when it was overthrown in a coup.

B. The End of the Directory

The problem with the Directory was that it had a very narrow base of support, both because of the restrictive constitution and because of the elimination of the Jacobins and sans-culottes. The government’s unpopularity was seen in the winter of 1794-95, when a severe winter caused food shortages. Food prices were very high because the Directory had ended the economic controls in effect under the Committee of Public Safety. The result was food riots, which the government had to suppress by force.

In 1795, counter-revolutionaries who favored restoration of the monarchy took advantage of this economic discontent. On 5 October 1795 (or 13 Vendémiare), a royalist-led rebellion against the government broke out. The Directors called in the army, and a general used artillery to disperse the crowd. The rebellion of Vendémiare was an ominous sign: the people are no longer behind the government, and worse, the government’s survival is in the hands of the military. That means that the army can determine the fate of the government.

In fact, the army did—the general who fired into the crowd that day in Vendémiare was named Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, that same general staged a coup d’état. On 10 November 1799 (or 19 Brumaire), Napoleon had his soldiers drive out the legislature and end the Directory. Brumaire marks the end of the Directory, the end of the Revolution, and the beginning of another story—Napoleon.

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