Coup of 18 Brumaire

A regime without friends

The Directory had governed France since 1795 under the Constitution of Year III: five Directors held executive power, and two elected councils, the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients, made the laws. A third of the councils was renewed every year, and almost every year the result was overturned — by the coup of 18 Fructidor in 1797 against the royalists, by the annulment of Jacobin elections in 1798, by the councils' purge of the Directors themselves in June 1799. The regime survived by breaking its own rules.

1799 made things worse. The war against the Second Coalition went badly in the spring and summer, and most of Italy was lost; conscription, a forced loan on the rich and a law of hostages aimed at the relatives of émigrés and rebels made the government hated on left and right alike. By autumn the armies had recovered — Masséna beat the Russians at Zurich in September — but confidence had not.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, the author of What Is the Third Estate?, was elected a Director in May 1799, determined to replace the constitution with a stronger one. He needed a general to carry it through. His first choice, Joubert, was killed at Novi in August. On 9 October Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Fréjus from Egypt and was cheered all the way to Paris. Within weeks he and Sieyès had come to terms, with the Director Roger Ducos, the former foreign minister Talleyrand and Bonaparte's brother Lucien, elected president of the Five Hundred late in October; the police minister, Fouché, looked the other way.

18 Brumaire: out of Paris

The plan rested on an article of the constitution that let the Council of Ancients move the legislature out of Paris. Early on 18 Brumaire Year VIII — 9 November 1799 — the Ancients were called to an emergency sitting at the Tuileries; members known to be hostile were not summoned. Warned of a supposed Jacobin plot against the Republic, they voted to move both councils to the château of Saint-Cloud, west of the city, for the next day, and gave Bonaparte command of the troops in Paris. He came to take the oath, then reviewed the troops. When Barras's secretary, Bottot, came to him, Bonaparte answered loudly, before the officers around him, in words meant for the whole country:

Meanwhile the Directory fell apart. Sieyès and Ducos resigned, as planned; Talleyrand obtained the resignation of Barras, who left for his estate at Grosbois under an escort of dragoons. The two remaining Directors, Gohier and Moulin, refused to resign and were kept under guard in the Luxembourg Palace by General Moreau. Without a quorum, the Directory had ceased to exist. Paris stayed calm.

19 Brumaire: Saint-Cloud

The afternoon the coup nearly failed

At Saint-Cloud the halls were not ready, and the councils did not sit until early afternoon: the Ancients in the Galerie d'Apollon, the Five Hundred in the Orangery. The delay gave the opposition time. In the Five Hundred, where the Jacobins were strong, the deputies swore one by one to uphold the Constitution of Year III; among the Ancients, members began to ask about the plot they had been told of.

Losing patience, Bonaparte went before the Ancients and gave a halting, angry speech. Then he walked into the Orangery with a few grenadiers. Soldiers in the chamber of the people's representatives set off an uproar: deputies surrounded him shouting “Outlaw him!”, jostled him and seized him by the collar, and the grenadiers had to pull him out, shaken.

The day was saved by Lucien. From the chair he refused to put the motion outlawing his brother to the vote, and soldiers brought him out of the hall. Outside, on horseback, he told the guard of the legislature that the majority of the council was being terrorised by a handful of deputies armed with daggers and, the story goes, pointed a sword at his brother's chest, swearing to run him through if he ever threatened the liberty of the French. Then, with drums beating, grenadiers led by Murat and Leclerc marched into the Orangery with bayonets fixed. The deputies fled, some through the windows. No one was killed.

Three consuls and a constitution

That night Lucien gathered the deputies of the Five Hundred who could still be found — a few dozen — and with the Ancients they gave the coup its legal form. The Directory was abolished and replaced by three provisional consuls: Bonaparte, Sieyès and Ducos. Some sixty deputies were expelled from the councils, which were adjourned; two commissions of twenty-five members each were to prepare a new constitution. Before the night was over the consuls had taken their oath.

Sieyès had brought an elaborate plan, crowned by a Grand Elector with little power. Bonaparte kept its machinery of assemblies and lists of notables, but put at the top a First Consul who held real power, with a second and a third consul who could only advise. The Constitution of Year VIII, adopted on 13 December 1799, named Bonaparte First Consul for ten years, with Cambacérès and Lebrun at his side; Sieyès and Ducos went into the new Senate. On 15 December the consuls told the French that the Revolution was finished. The constitution took effect on 25 December, before the people had been asked; the plebiscite's result, announced in February 1800, was a landslide inflated by the minister of the interior — Lucien Bonaparte.

Brumaire gave its name to a kind of coup: a general taking power in the name of the Republic, with a show of legality. When Napoleon's nephew did the same in 1851, Karl Marx called his account of it The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.