their military guards, arrested several deputies and seized Barthélemy in his bed. Carnot, on receiving timely warning, fled from the Luxemburg palace and made his way to Switzerland. The remembrance of the fatal day of Vendémiaire 1795 perhaps helped to paralyse the majority. In any case exile, and death in the prisons of Cayenne, now awaited the timid champions of law and order; while parliamentary rule sustained a shock from which it never recovered. The Councils allowed the elections to be annulled in forty-nine departments of France, and re-enacted some of the laws of the period of the Terror, notably those against non-juring priests and returned émigrés. The election of Merlin of Douay and François of Neufchatel as Directors, in place of Carnot and Barthélemy, gave to that body a compactness which enabled it to carry matters with a high hand, until the hatred felt by Frenchmen for this soulless revival of a moribund Jacobinism gradually endowed the Chambers with life and strength sufficient to provoke a renewal of strife with the Directory. These violent oscillations not only weakened the fabric of the Republic, but brought about a situation in which Bonaparte easily paralysed both the executive and the legislative powers so ill co-ordinated by the constitution of the year 1795.
In the sphere of European diplomacy, no less than in that of French politics, the results of the coup d’état of Fructidor were momentous. The Fructidorian Directors contemptuously rejected the overtures for peace which Pitt had recently made through the medium of Lord Malmesbury at Lille; and they further illustrated their desire for war and plunder by initiating a forward policy in central Italy and Switzerland which opened up a new cycle of war. The coup d’état was favourable to Bonaparte; it ensured his hold over the Directors and enabled him to impose his own terms of peace on Austria; above all it left him free for the prosecution of his designs in a field of action which now held the first place in his thoughts—the Orient. Having rivalled the exploits of Caesar, he now longed to follow in the steps of Alexander the Great.
At the time of his first view of the Adriatic (February 1797) he noted the importance of the port of Ancona for intercourse with the Sultan’s dominions; and at that city fortune placed in his hands Russian despatches relative to the designs of the Tsar Paul on Malta. The incident reawakened the interest which had early been aroused in the young Corsican by converse with the savant Volney, author of Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires. The intercourse which he had with Monge, the physicist and ex-minister of marine, during the negotiations with Austria, served to emphasize the orientation of his thoughts. This explains the eagerness with which he now insisted on the acquisition of the Ionian Isles by France and the political extinction of their present possessor, Venice. That city had given him cause for complaint, of which he made the most unscrupulous use. Thanks to the blind complaisance of its democrats and the timid subserviency of its once haughty oligarchs, he became master of its fleet and arsenal (16th of May 1797). Already, as may be seen by his letters to the Directory, he had laid his plans for the bartering away of the Queen of the Adriatic to Austria; and throughout the lengthy negotiations of the summer and early autumn of 1797 which he conducted with little interference from Paris, he adhered to his plan of gaining the fleet and the Ionian Isles; while the house of Habsburg was to acquire the city itself, together with all the mainland territories of the Republic as far west as the River Adige. In vain did the Austrian envoy, Cobenzl, resist the cession of the Ionian Isles to France; in vain did the Directors intervene in the middle of September with an express order that Venice must not be ceded to Austria, but must, along with Friuli, be included in the Cisalpine Republic. To the subtle tenacity of Cobenzl he opposed a masterful violence: he checkmated the Directors, when they sought to thwart him in this and in other directions, by sending in once more his resignation with a letter in which he accused them of “horrible ingratitude.” He was successful at all points. The Directors feared a rupture with the man to Whom they owed their existence; and the house of Austria was fain to make peace with the general rather than expose itself to harder terms at the hands of the Directory.
The treaty of Campo Formio, signed on the 17th of October 1797, was therefore pre-eminently the work of Bonaparte. Already at Cherasco and Leoben he had dictated the preliminaries of peace to the courts of Turin and Vienna quite independently of the French Directory. At Campo Formio he showed himself the first diplomatist of the age, and the arbiter of the destinies of Europe. The terms were on the whole unexpectedly favourable to Austria. In Italy she was to acquire the Venetian lands already named, along with Dalmatia and Venetian Istria. The rest of the Venetian mainland (the districts between the rivers Adige and Ticino) went to the newly constituted Cisalpine republic, France gaining the Ionian Isles and the Venetian fleet. The Emperor Francis renounced all claims to his former Netherland provinces, which had been occupied by the French since the summer of 1794; he further ceded the Breisgau to the dispossessed duke of Modena, agreed to summon a congress at Rastatt for the settlement of German affairs, and recognized the independence of the Cisalpine republic. In secret articles the emperor bound himself to use his influence at the congress of Rastatt in order to procure the cession to France of the Germanic lands west of the Rhine, while France promised to help him to acquire the archbishopric of Salzburg and a strip of land on the eastern frontier of Bavaria.
After acting for a brief space as one of the French envoys to the congress of Rastatt, Napoleon returned to Paris early in December and received the homage of the Directors and the acclaim of the populace. The former sought to busy him by appointing him commander-in-chief of the Army of England, the island power being now the only one which contested French supremacy in Europe. In February 1798 he inspected the preparations for the invasion of England then proceeding at the northern ports. He found that they were wholly inadequate, and summed up his views in a remarkable letter to the Directory (23rd of February), wherein he pointed out two possible alternatives to an invasion of England, namely, a conquest of the coast of the north-west of Germany, for the cutting off of British commerce with central Europe, or the undertaking of an expedition to the Orient which would be equally ruinous to British trade. The inference was inevitable that, as German affairs were about to be profitably exploited by France in the bargains then beginning at Rastatt, she must throw her chief energies into the Egyptian expedition.
One of the needful preliminaries of this enterprise had already received his attention. In November 1797 he sent to Malta Poussielgue, secretary of the French legation at Genoa, on business which was ostensibly commercial but (as he informed the Directory) “in reality to put the last touch to the design that we have on that island.” The intrigues of the French envoy in corrupting the knights of the order of St John were completely successful. It remained, however, to find the funds needful for the equipment of a great expedition. Here the difficulties were great. The Directory, after the coup d’état of Fructidor, had acknowledged a state of bankruptcy by writing off two-thirds of the national debt in a form which soon proved to be a thin disguise for repudiation. The return of a large part of the armed forces from Italy and Germany, Where they had lived on the liberated inhabitants, also threw new burdens on the Republic; and it was clear that French money alone would not suffice to fit out an armada. Again, however, the financial situation was improved by conquest. The occupation of Rome in February 1798 enabled Berthier to send a considerable sum to Paris and to style himself “treasurer to the chest of the Army of England.” The invasion of Switzerland, which Bonaparte had of late persistently pressed on the Directory, proved to be an equally lucrative device, the funds in several of the cantonal treasuries being transferred straightway to Paris or Toulon. The conquest of north and central Italy also placed great naval resources at the disposal of France, Venice alone providing nine sail of the line and twelve frigates (see Bonaparte’s letter of the 15th of November 1797), Genoa, Spezzia, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia and Ancona also supplied their quota in warships, transports,
