68 Facts About French Directory

French Directory was continually at war with foreign coalitions, including Britain, Austria, Prussia, the Kingdom of Naples, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

The French Directory established 196 short-lived sister republics in Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The French Directory defeated a resurgence of the War in the Vendee, the royalist-led civil war in the Vendee region, but failed in its venture to support the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and create an Irish Republic.

The French Directory stopped printing assignats and restored the value of the money, but this caused a new crisis; prices and wages fell, and economic activity slowed to a standstill.

The French Directory was forced to resume deliveries of subsidized food to the very poor, the elderly, the sick, and government employees.

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In 1795, the French Directory faced a new threat from the left, from the followers of Francois Noel Babeuf, a talented political agitator who took the name Gracchus and was the organizer of what became known as the Conspiracy of the Equals.

Babeuf did not believe that the mass of French Directory citizens was ready for self-government; accordingly, he proposed a dictatorship under his leadership until the people were educated enough to take charge.

The Conspiracy of Equals was organized in a novel way: in the center was Babeuf and the Secret French Directory, who hid their identities, and shared information with other members of the Conspiracy only via trusted intermediaries.

The French Directory took other measures to prevent an uprising; the Legion of Police, a local police force dominated by Jacobins, was forced to become a part of the Army, and the Army organized a mobile column to patrol the neighborhoods and stop uprisings.

Austria proposed a European congress to settle borders, but the French Directory refused, demanding direct negotiations with Austria instead.

French Directory forced Austria to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio, whereby the emperor ceded Lombardy and the Austrian Netherlands to the French Republic in exchange for Venice and urged the Diet to surrender the lands beyond the Rhine.

French Directory was eager to form a coalition with Spain to block British commerce with the continent and to close the Mediterranean Sea to British ships.

French Directory presented this information to Carnot, and Carnot agreed to support his action against the Councils.

The next day, the French Directory annulled the elections of about two hundred deputies in 53 departments.

French Directory died in prison on 6 April 1804, either strangled or having committed suicide.

The French Directory imposed a substantial tax on all newspapers or magazines distributed by mail, although Jacobin publications, as well as scientific and art publications, were excluded.

The French Directory authorized the opening and reading of letters coming from outside of France.

Political repression and terror under the French Directory were real, but they were on a much smaller scale than the Reign of Terror under Robespierre and the Convention, and the numbers of those repressed declined during the course of the French Directory.

French Directory was then summoned back to Paris to take charge of an even more ambitious project, the invasion of Britain, which had been proposed by Director Carnot and General Hoche.

French Directory directly attacked the authority of Pope Pius VI, who governed Rome and the Papal States surrounding it.

The French Directory approved the first permanent law of conscription, which was unpopular in the countryside, and particularly in Belgium, which had formally become part of France.

French Directory itself was not enthusiastic about the idea, which would take its most successful general and his army far from Europe just at the time that a major new war was brewing.

Idea presented two other problems: Republican French Directory policy was opposed to colonization, and France was not at war with the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt belonged.

The French Directory fleet stopped briefly at Malta, capturing the island, the government of which offered little resistance.

French Directory wrote a letter to the Pascha of Egypt, claiming that his purpose was to liberate Egypt from the tyranny of the Mamluks.

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The French Directory made the error of sending one of the most prominent revolutionaries of 1789, the Abbe Sieyes, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, as ambassador to Berlin, where his ideas appalled the arch-conservative and ultra-monarchist king.

Peace negotiations with Austria went nowhere in the spring of 1799, and the French Directory decided to launch a new offensive into Germany, but the arrival of a Russian army under Alexander Suvorov and fresh Austrian forces under the Archduke Charles for a time changed the balance of power.

French Directory sent one of his military aides to meet with Turkish government officials and to try to get news from France, but the officer was intercepted by the British navy.

French Directory's orders permitted him to return home any time he chose.

French Directory handed over command of the army to General Kleber and left Egypt with a small party of senior officers aboard the frigate La Muiron.

The French Directory decided to return to the use of gold or silver coins, which kept their value.

The difficulty was that the French Directory had only enough gold and silver to produce 300 million-?.

Under the Constitution, the selection of a new member of the French Directory was voted by the old members of the Councils, not the newly elected ones.

French Directory's idea was to adopt a new Constitution with a supreme court, on the American model, to protect individual rights.

French Directory privately saw his primary mission as preventing a return of Reign of Terror of 1793, a new constitution, and bringing the Revolution to a close as soon as possible, by whatever means.

The club members were not afraid to attack the French Directory itself, complaining of its lavish furnishings and the luxurious coaches used by French Directory members.

The French Directory soon responded to the provocations; Sieyes denounced the club members as a return of Robespierre's reign of terror.

French Directory was welcomed by royalists because he was from a minor noble family in Corsica, and by the Jacobins because he had suppressed the attempted royalist coup d'etat at the beginning of the Directory.

French Directory then approached General Moreau, but Moreau was not interested.

French Directory then moved to the Council of Five Hundred, which was already meeting under the presidency of his brother Lucien.

French Directory was questioned, jeered, insulted, shouted down, and jostled.

French Directory's brother was unable to restore calm, and some of the Jacobin deputies began to demand that Bonaparte be declared outside the law, as Robespierre had been.

Part of the drop in birthrate during the French Directory is attributed to the simplification of divorce, and the change in inheritance laws, which granted equal shares to all descendants.

Generals and other military officers grew greatly in importance during the French Directory and became a caste independent of the political structure.

The French Directory had abolished the Jacobin system of political commissioners who supervised and could overrule the military commanders.

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The French Directory distributed scarce food items, such as cooking oil, butter and eggs, to government employees and to members of the Councils.

The subsidies were reduced in the last years of the French Directory, paying only for bread, but they were an enormous expense for the French Directory.

The French Directory was unable to escape the accusations of widespread corruption.

Many of the economic, social and political woes during the French Directory were results of the breakdown of the financial system.

The French Directory produced only 32 million livres worth of silver-based coins in its first two years.

The shortage of real money in the second part of the French Directory led to a new problem: shortage of credit; interest rates rose to about ten percent, double what they had been in 1789.

The consequence in the last two years of the French Directory was a decline in economic activity, and in wages, while prices rose.

The most effective promoter of French Directory industry was Francois de Neufchateau, who was Minister of the Interior before becoming a Director in 1797.

At the beginning of the period, the French Directory reversed the policy of obligatory and free education for all, largely because of the lack of money to pay teachers.

The French Directory began to create a system of central schools, with the goal of one in each department, which boys could attend from the age of twelve, with a full curriculum of sciences, history and literature.

French Directory focused its attention on secondary education and especially on creating specialized higher schools for training managers, judges, doctors and engineers, for which there was an immediate and pressing need.

However, by the end of the French Directory there were still no law schools, and only two schools of medicine outside of Paris.

French Directory had no public money to spend on architecture, but the newly-wealthy upper class had abundant money to buy chateaux and town houses, and to redecorate them.

The French Directory saw the first widespread use of mahogany, an imported tropical wood used in the making of furniture.

French Directory period produced a small number of important literary works, often very critical of the excesses of Revolution.

The French Directory had been used up like the Committee of Public Safety before it, and the government of Napoleon that followed.

French Directory spoke only at decisive moments, when his voice was stronger than his courage.

French Directory took a share of all the profits of the government suppliers, and alone of the Directors deserved the accusation of corruption.

French Directory was even treacherous toward his colleagues; because all of the criticism that he deserved himself he skillfully managed to shift exclusively onto them.

The religious schism became more acute; the French Directory took severe measures toward the refractory clergy [those who would not swear allegiance to the government].

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French Directory'storians have been quite negative on the Directory's use of military force to overturn election returns that went against them.

Four years of the French Directory were a time of chronic disquiet and the late atrocities had made goodwill between parties impossible.

French Directory was officially led by a president, as stipulated by Article 141 of the Constitution of the Year III.