• DOI:10.1086/241988
• Corpus ID: 154019725

The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795-1799: The Road to Brumaire

@article{Hunt1979TheFO,
  title={The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795-1799: The Road to Brumaire},
  author={Lynn A. Hunt and David M. Lansky and Paul R. Hanson},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1979},
  volume={51},
  pages={734 - 759}
}

• L. Hunt, D. Lansky, P. Hanson
• Published 1 December 1979
• History
• The Journal of Modern History

The 18th Brumaire of the first Napoleon never had its Karl Marx. To many contemporaries and most historians, some kind of military intervention seemed inevitable in 1799, and no one, then or since, lamented the passing of a regime consistently characterized as corrupt and ineffectual.1 Marx himself never mentioned the Directory years when castigating the revolutionaries of 1848 for mimicking the 1789 Revolution, and he evidently considered the Directory part of the "long crapulent depression" that "lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period.'2 For Marx, as for most other commentators, the Directory had nothing in common with the high drama of the Revolution's earlier years. Marxist historians of the 1789 Revolution implicitly follow the lines of Marx's analysis of 1851 when they get to Brumaire. Albert Soboul, for example, claims that 18th Brumaire brought the revolutionary era to a "definitive close. Consolidation was to succeed upheavals, the social primacy of the propertied classes was to be established once and for all."3 According to Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon "arranged a temporary reconciliation between the diverse elements of the modern dominant class. This permitted it (under the tutelage of its protector) to shape institutions and codify legislation in its own way, to establish itself in the high positions of the state