French Revolutionary politics was instability. With the destruction of the centuries-old French monarchy, new systems had to be found to legitimize governmental rule. Above all, rule was increasingly justified as being derived not from God or from tradition, but from the people.33 This change would only come about through a torturous process that unleashed a flood of questions. Even the simplest question — who were “the people” — could not be easily resolved. Were they the well-off bourgeois? The urban destitutes? The landless former peasants? Were they the Catholics? The Protestants? The Jews? Above all, if the government was the direct representation of the will of the people, what happened when an individual person opposed its will? Did he have any rights, or was he a danger to the public good? In light of all of these tensions it is perhaps not surprising that the period between 1789 and 1799 saw the rapid collapse of government after government in France. First, attempts to forge a constitutional monarchy came to nought. Then, the moderate Girondin faction saw its power collapse in the face of a Jacobin onslaught which itself would be destroyed by the conservative Thermidorian Reaction. The Thermidorian Reaction led to the creation of the Directory which would oversee French politics from 1795 to 1799, but
this period was marred by a number of coups — the most prominent of which came in 1797, when a growing royalist faction was purged, and 1799 when Napoleon was involved in a plot that overthrew the Directory and replaced it with the Consulate. At first glance, there was little reason to think that this new government, headed by Napoleon and two of his co-conspirators (Emmanuel Sieyès and Roger Ducos), would be any more durable than the long list of regimes that had come before it. The fact that it would ultimately prove to last, albeit with a series of peaceful transformations, until the collapse of Napoleon’s empire in 1814 owes a great deal to Napoleon and his followers’ remarkable ability to tap into and manipulate the militaristic and nationalist currents that the Revolution had unleashed. While recent scholarship has emphasized that the roots of French nationalism and the French nation-state can be found well before the outbreak of the Revolution, there can be little doubt that the Revolution caused a profound change in the French national identity. Until 1789, there was a split between the nation, which referred to “only those who had a right to participate in politics and to share in the exercise of sovereignty,” and the people as a whole.34 But with its new attempt to
Press, 1988), 13-37. 33. Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (August 2001): pp. 518-519, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351150361-8. 34. Dann and Dinwiddy, Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution, 4.
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