French Directory - Constitution of Year III

Constitution of Year III

Under the French Constitution of 1795, qualified property holders elected 750 legislators, who divided themselves into the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. This bicameral legislature had a term of three years, with one-third of the members renewed every year. The Ancients held a suspensory veto, but possessed no initiative in legislation.

The constitution specified the executive as consisting of five directors, chosen by the Ancients out of a list sent to them by the Five Hundred. One director faced retirement each year. Ministers for the various departments of State aided the directors. These ministers did not form a council or cabinet and had no general powers of government.

The system made provision for the stringent control of all local authorities by the central government. Since the new constitution sought to create a separation of powers, the directors had no voice in legislation or taxation, nor could directors or ministers sit in either house. The law guaranteed freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of labour, but forbade armed assemblies and even public meetings of political societies. Only individuals or public authorities could tender petitions.

From the beginning, however, circumstances restricted the free play of the constitution. The Convention had acquired so much unpopularity that, if its members had retired into private life, they would have courted danger and risked the undoing of their work. Therefore a decree required that two-thirds of the first legislature must come from among the members of the Convention.

When the constitution went before the primary assemblies, most electors held aloof, 1,057,000 voting for and 49,000 voting against it. On 23 September it officially became law. Then all the parties which resented the limit upon freedom of election combined in Paris to rise in revolt. The government entrusted its defense to Barras, but on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) the young General Napoléon Bonaparte quelled ill-equipped and ill-led Parisian insurgents with a few thousand regular troops and well-placed artillery. Further resistance seemed impossible. The Convention dissolved itself on 26 October 1795.

After the selection of the Council of the Ancients by lot, it remained to name the directors. For its own security the Left resolved that all five must be old members of the Convention and regicides. The Ancients chose

• Jean-François Rewbell, an able, although unscrupulous, man of action
• Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, a dissolute and shameless adventurer
• Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, the chief of a new sect, the Theophilanthropists, was therefore a bitter foe to other religions, especially the Roman Catholic Church
• Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot, renowned for his integrity and memorable public services, but not a statesman and hampered by his past
• Étienne-François Le Tourneur, an insignificant person who admired and followed Carnot

Rewbell, Barras and La Révellière Lépeaux had a full measure of the Jacobin spirit; Carnot and Le Tourneur favoured a more temperate policy.