French Directory
The Directory or Directorate was a five-member committee that governed France from 2 November 1795, when it replaced the Committee of Public Safety, until 9 November 1799, when it was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, replaced by the French Consulate. It gave its name to the final four years of the French Revolution; the Directory was continually at war with foreign coalitions which at different times included Britain, Prussia, the Kingdom of Naples and the Ottoman Empire. It annexed Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, while Bonaparte conquered a large part of Italy; the Directory established 196 short-lived sister republics modelled after France, in Italy and the Netherlands. The conquered cities and states were required to send to France huge amounts of money, as well as art treasures, which were used to fill the new Louvre museum in Paris. An army led by Bonaparte tried to conquer Egypt and marched as far as Saint-Jean-d'Acre in Syria; the Directory defeated a resurgence of the War in the Vendée, the royalist-led civil war in the Vendée region, but failed in its venture to support the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and create an Irish Republic.
The French economy was in continual crisis during the Directory. At the beginning, the treasury was empty; the Directory stopped printing assignats and restored the value of the money, but this caused a new crisis. In its first two years, the Directory concentrated on ending the excesses of the Jacobin Reign of Terror; the Jacobin political club was closed and the government crushed an armed uprising planned by the Jacobins and an early socialist revolutionary, François-Noël Babeuf, known as "Gracchus Babeuf". However, following the discovery of a royalist conspiracy including a prominent general, Jean-Charles Pichegru, the Jacobins took charge of the new Councils and hardened the measures against the Church and émigrés; the Jacobins took two additional seats in the Directory, hopelessly dividing it. In 1799, after several defeats, French victories in the Netherlands and Switzerland restored the French military position, but the Directory had lost the support of all the political factions. Bonaparte returned from Egypt in October, was engaged by the Abbé Sieyès and others to carry out a parliamentary coup d'état on 8–9 November 1799.
The coup abolished the Directory, replaced it with the French Consulate led by Bonaparte. On 27 July 1794, members of the French Convention, the revolutionary parliament of France, rose up against its leader Maximilien Robespierre, in the midst of executing thousands of suspected enemies of the Revolution. Robespierre and his leading followers were declared outside the law, on 28 July were arrested and guillotined the same day; the Revolutionary Tribunal, which had sent thousands to the guillotine, ceased meeting and its head, Fouquier-Tinville, was arrested and imprisoned, after trial was himself guillotined. More than five hundred suspected counter-revolutionaries awaiting trial and execution were released. In July 1794, the members of the Convention began planning a new form of government and drafting a new Constitution, which would become the Constitution of the Year III. An important aim was to prevent too much power from becoming concentrated in the hands of one man. One of the authors of the new Constitution, François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas, wrote to the Convention: We propose to you to compose an executive power of five members, renewed with one new member each year, called the Directory.
This executive will have a force concentrated enough that it will be swift and firm, but divided enough to make it impossible for any member to consider becoming a tyrant. A single chief would be dangerous; each member will preside for three months. By the slow and gradual replacement of members of the Directory, you will preserve the advantages of order and continuity and will have the advantages of unity without the inconveniences; the Constitution of the Year III began with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and declared that "the Rights of Man in society are liberty, equality and property". It guaranteed freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of labour, but forbade armed assemblies and public meetings of political societies. Only individuals or public authorities could tender petitions; the judicial system was reformed, judges were given short terms of office: two years for justices of the peace, five for judges of department tribunals. They were elected, could be re-elected, to assure their independence from the other branches of government.
The new legislature had two houses, a Council of Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients with two hundred fifty members. Electoral assemblies in each canton of France, which brought together a total of thirty thousand qualified electors, chose representatives to an electoral assembly in each department, which elected the members of both houses; the members of this legislature had a term of three years, with one-third of the members renewed every year. The Ancients could not initiate new laws, but could veto those proposed by the Council of Five Hundred; the Constitution established a unique kind of executive, a five-man Directory chosen by the legislature. It required the Council of Five Hundred to prepare, by secret ballot, a list of candidates for the Directory; the Council of Ancients chose, again by secret ballot, the Direct
François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas
François-Antoine, Count of the Empire was a French writer and politician during the Revolution and the Empire. Born to a Protestant family in Saint-Jean-Chambre, Ardèche, he studied Law and, after literary attempts, became a lawyer to the parlement of Paris. In 1789 he was elected by the Third Estate of the sénéchaussee of Annonay as deputy to the Estates-General, he was one of those who induced the Estates-General to proclaim itself a National Assembly on 17 June 1789, approved, in several speeches, of the storming of the Bastille and of the taking of the royal family to Paris. Boissy d'Anglas demanded that strict measures be taken against the Royalists who were conspiring in Southern France, published some pamphlets on financial issues. During the Legislative Assembly, he was procureur-syndic for the directory of the département of Ardèche. Elected to the National Convention, he sat in the centre, le Marais, voting in the trial of Louis XVI for his detention until deportation should be judged expedient for the state.
He was representative on mission to Lyon, charged with investigating frauds in connection with the supplies of the Army of the Alps. Although he had been close to several Girondists, Boissy d'Anglas escaped arrest after François Hanriot's insurrection of 2 June 1793, he was one of several centrist deputies who supported Maximilien Robespierre during the early stages of the Reign of Terror. However, he was gained over by the members of The Mountain hostile to Robespierre, his support, along with that of some other leaders of the Marais, made possible the Thermidorian Reaction. Boissy d'Anglas was elected a member of the Committee of Public Safety, charged with the superintendence of the provisioning of Paris, he presented the report supporting the decree of 3 Ventôse of the year III, which established freedom of religion. In the critical days of Germinal and of Prairial of the year III, he was noted for his courage. On 12 Germinal, the day of insurrection of 12 Germinal year III, he was in the tribune, reading a report on the food supplies, when the hall of the Convention was invaded.
During Insurrection of 1 Prairial, he was presiding over the Convention, remained in his post despite insults and menaces of the insurgents. When the head of the deputy, Jean-Bertrand Féraud, was presented to him on the end of a pike, he saluted it impassively, he was protractor of the committee which drew up the Constitution of the Year III which established the French Directory. This report, the proposal that he made to lessen the severity of the revolutionary laws, the eulogies he received from several Paris sections suspected of Royalism, resulted in his being obliged to justify himself; as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, Boissy d'Anglas became more and more suspected of Royalism himself. He presented a measure in favour of full liberty for the press, which at that time was unanimously reactionary, protested against the outlawry of returned émigrés, spoke in favour of the deported priests and attacked the Directory. Accordingly, he was proscribed after the 18 Fructidor coup, lived in Great Britain until the establishment of the French Consulate.
In 1801 he was made a member of the Tribunate, in 1805 a senator of the Empire. In 1814 he voted for Napoleon's abdication, which won for him a seat in the Chamber of Peers after the First Bourbon Restoration. However, during the Hundred Days he returned to serving Napoleon. After the defeat at Waterloo and the subsequent abdication of Napoleon, 1815 Boissy d'Anglas was one of the five commissioners sent by the Provisional Government to try to negotiate peace terms with the Duke of Wellington and Prince Blücher. For his disloyalty to Louis XVIII, on the Second Restoration, he was for a short while excluded. In the Chamber he still sought to obtain liberty for the press —a theme upon which he published a volume of his speeches, he was a member of the Institut de France from its foundation, in 1816, after its reorganization, became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He published in 1819–1821 a two-volume Essai sur la vie et les opinions de M. de Malesherbes. He married Marie-Françoise Michel on 11 March 1776 in Vauvert.
They had four children: Marie-Anne Suzanne François-Antoine, Jr. prefect of Charente Jean-Gabriel, Orléanist politician Siborne, The Waterloo Campaign, 1815, Westminster: A. ConstableAttribution: This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Anchel, Robert. "Boissy d'Anglas, François Antoine de". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 4. Cambridge University Press. P. 155. In turn, it cites as references: "Notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de M. Boissy d'Anglas" in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, ix. François Victor Alphonse Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Revolution Ludovic Sciout, Le Directoire
Causes of the French Revolution
The causes of the French Revolution can be attributed to several intertwining factors: Cultural: The Enlightenment philosophy desacralized the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, promoted a new society based on reason instead of traditions. Social: The emergence of an influential bourgeoisie, formally part of the Third Estate but had evolved into a caste with its own agenda and aspired to political equality with the clergy and the aristocracy. Financial: France's debt, aggravated by French involvement in the American Revolution, led Louis XVI to implement new taxations and to reduce privileges. Political: Louis XVI faced strong opposition from provincial parlements which were the spearheads of the privileged classes' resistance to royal reforms. Economic: The deregulation of the grain market, advocated by liberal economists, resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it would lead to food scarcity. All these factors created a revolutionary atmosphere and a tricky situation for Louis XVI.
In order to resolve the crisis, the king summoned the Estates-General in May 1789 and, as it came to an impasse, the representatives of the Third Estates formed a National Assembly, against the wishes of the king, signaling the outbreak of the French Revolution. The essence of the revolutionary situation which existed in France in the 1780s was the bankruptcy of the king, hence the state; this economic crisis was due to the increasing costs of government and to the overwhelming costs incurred by fighting two major wars: the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War. These costs could not be met from the usual sources of state revenue. Since the 1770s, several attempts by different ministers to introduce financial stability had failed; the taxation system was burdensome upon the middle class and the more prosperous peasants, given that the nobles were able to exempt themselves from it. As a result, there was "an insistent demand" for reform of these abuses of privilege, for an equitable means of taxation and for improved government processes.
David Thomson argued that the bourgeoisie and peasantry had "something to lose, not something to gain" in their demands for a fairer society and this fear too was a major factor in the revolutionary situation. A growing number of the French citizenry had absorbed the ideas of "equality" and "freedom of the individual" as presented by Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and other philosophers and social theorists of the Age of Enlightenment; the American Revolution demonstrated that it was plausible for Enlightenment ideas about how a government should be organized to be put into practice. Some American diplomats, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, had lived in Paris, where they consorted with members of the French intellectual class. Furthermore, contact between American revolutionaries and the French troops who served in North America helped spread revolutionary ideas to the French people; the population of France in the 1780s was about 26 million, of. Few of these owned enough land to support a family and most were forced to take on extra work as poorly paid labourers on larger farms.
There were regional differences but, by and large, French peasants were better off than those in countries like Russia or Poland. So, hunger was a daily problem which became critical in years of poor harvest and the condition of most French peasants was poor; the fundamental issue of poverty was aggravated by social inequality as all peasants were liable to pay taxes, from which the nobility could claim immunity, feudal dues payable to a local seigneur or lord. The destination of tithes which the peasants were obliged to pay to their local churches was a cause of grievance as it was known that the majority of parish priests were poor and the contribution was being paid to an aristocratic, absentee, abbot; the clergy numbered about 100,000 and yet they owned 10% of the land. The Catholic Church maintained a rigid hierarchy as abbots and bishops were all members of the nobility and canons were all members of wealthy bourgeois families; as an institution, it was both powerful. As with the nobility, it paid no taxes and contributed a grant to the state every five years, the amount of, self-determined.
The upper echelons of the clergy had considerable influence over government policy. Dislike of the nobility was intense. Successive French kings and their ministers had tried with limited success to suppress the power of the nobles but, in the last quarter of the 18th century, "the aristocracy were beginning once again to tighten their hold on the machinery of government". France in 1787, although it faced some difficulties, was one of the most economically capable nations of Europe; the French population exceeded 28 million. France was among the most urbanized countries of Europe, the population of Paris was second only to that of London, six of Europe's 35 larger cities were French. Other measures confirm France's inherent strength. France had 5.3 million of Europe's 30 million male peasants. Its area under cultivation, productivity per unit area, level of industrialization, gross national product all placed France near the top of the scale. In short, while it may have lagged behind the Low Countries, Switzerland, in per capita wealth, the sheer size of the French econom
Senate
A senate is a deliberative assembly the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate, so-called as an assembly of the senior and therefore wiser and more experienced members of the society or ruling class. Thus, the literal meaning of the word "senate" is Assembly of Elders. Many countries have an assembly named a senate, composed of senators who may be elected, have inherited the title, or gained membership by other methods, depending on the country. Modern senates serve to provide a chamber of "sober second thought" to consider legislation passed by a lower house, whose members are elected. Most senates have asymmetrical duties and powers compared with their respective lower house meaning they have special duties, for example to fill important political positions or to pass special laws. Conversely many senates have limited powers in changing or stopping bills under consideration and efforts to stall or veto a bill may be bypassed by the lower house or another branch of government.
The modern word Senate is derived from the word senātus, which comes from senex, “old man”. The members or legislators of a senate are called senators; the Latin word senator was adopted into English with no change in spelling. Its meaning is derived from a ancient form of social organization, in which advisory or decision-making powers are reserved for the eldest men. For the same reason, the word senate is used when referring to any powerful authority characteristically composed by the eldest members of a community, as a deliberative body of a faculty in an institution of higher learning is called a senate; this form adaptation was used to show the power of those in body and for the decision-making process to be thorough, which could take a long period of time. The original senate was the Roman Senate, which lasted until at least AD 603, although various efforts to revive it were made in Medieval Rome. In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Senate continued until the Fourth Crusade, circa 1202–1204.
Modern democratic states with bicameral parliamentary systems are sometimes equipped with a senate distinguished from an ordinary parallel lower house, known variously as the “House of Representatives”, “House of Commons”, “Chamber of Deputies”, “National Assembly”, “Legislative Assembly”, or "House of Assembly", by electoral rules. This may include minimum age required for voters and candidates, proportional or majoritarian or plurality system, an electoral basis or collegium; the senate is referred to as the upper house and has a smaller membership than the lower house. In some federal states senates exist at the subnational level. In the United States all states with the exception of Nebraska have a state senate. There is the US Senate at the federal level. In Argentina, in addition to the Senate at federal level, eight of the country's provinces, Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Salta, San Luis and Santa Fe, have bicameral legislatures with a Senate. Córdoba and Tucumán changed to unicameral systems in 2003 respectively.
In Australia and Canada, only the upper house of the federal parliament is known as the Senate. All Australian states other than Queensland have an upper house known as a Legislative council. Several Canadian provinces once had a Legislative Council, but these have all been abolished, the last being Quebec's Legislative council in 1968. In Germany, the last Senate of a State parliament, the Senate of Bavaria, was abolished in 1999. Senate membership can be determined either through appointments. For example, elections are held every three years for half the membership of the Senate of the Philippines, the term of a senator being six years. In contrast, members of the Canadian Senate are appointed by the Governor General upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister of Canada, holding the office until they resign, are removed, or retire at the mandatory age of 75; the terms senate and senator, however, do not refer to a second chamber of a legislature: The Senate of Finland was, until 1918, the executive branch and the supreme court.
The Senate of Latvia fulfilled a similar judicial function during the interbellum. In German politics:In the Bundesländer of Germany which form a City State, i.e. Berlin and Hamburg, the senates are the executive branch, with senators being the holders of ministerial portfolios. In a number of cities which were former members of the Hanse, such as Greifswald, Lübeck, Stralsund, or Wismar, the city government is called a Senate. However, in Bavaria, the Senate was a second legislative chamber until its abolition in 1999. In German jurisdiction:The term Senat in higher courts of appeal refers to the "bench" in its broader metonymy meaning, describing members of the judiciary collectively occupied with a particular subject-matter jurisdiction. However, the judges are not called "senators"; the German term Strafsenat in a German court translates to Bench of penal-law jurisdiction and Zivilsenat to Bench of private-law jurisdiction. The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany consists of two senates of eight judges each.
In its case the division is of an organization
Claude Ambroise Régnier
Claude Ambroise Régnier, Duke of Massa was a French lawyer and politician. He was a member of the Council of Ancients, a member of the Senate and a Minister. Claude Ambroise Régnier was born in Blâmont, now in Meurthe-et-Moselle, on 6 April 1746. At that time Blâmont was in the Principality of Salm-Salm, his paternal grandfather was Jean-Antoine Régnier, procureur of the bailliage of Saint-Diey-des-Vosges. His maternal grandfather was king's counsel in the Blâmont town hall, his parents were Françoise Thiry. In 1748 his father was an innkeeper. In 1780 he is described as an old fermier des domaines, in 1784 as a merchant. Claude Régnier's mother died in 1785, aged 65, his father lived on until 1806, when he died at the age of 87. Régnier began his studies in Saint-Dié under abbé Régnier, the main parish priest, he went on the University of Strasbourg, graduated with a bachelor-in-law. He entered the Parlement in 1765, began practicing law in Lunéville. In 1769 Prince Louis of Salm-Salm called Régnier to Senones and made him his counselor and Attorney General, entrusting him with the administration of the principality.
Régnier left this position in 1773 to resume his career as lawyer in Lorraine. There he became one of the leading lawyers in the Civil Division. Régnier was enthusiastic about the French Revolution, on 6 April 1789 was elected deputy for the third estate for Nancy in the Estates General, he was a member of the legislative commission. After the flight of the king, on 22 June 1791 Régnier was sent as commissioner to the departments of the Rhine to receive the oaths of the troops. On return, he sat on the constitutional committee, was known for the clarity of his expression. Régnier went underground during the Reign of Terror, only reappearing on the political scene after the promulgation of the Constitution of year III. On 23 Vendémiaire year IV he was elected deputy for the Meurthe Department in the Council of Ancients, was reelected on 23 Germinal year VII, he sat on the left. Régnier supported his coup-d'état. On 17 Brumaire year VIII, he took part in a meeting at the house of Lemercier, Chairman of the Ancients, to prepare for the planned coup.
On the morning of 18 Brumaire he presented to the council a draft decree that transferred the two legislative chambers to Saint-Cloud. He was appointed a member of the Senate and of the Council of State, became one of the main editors of the civil code, he showed a deep understanding of jurisprudence. On 27 Fructidor year X Napoleon named Régnier chief judge and Minister of Justice, positions he held until 20 November 1813; until 10 July 1804 he was in charge of the Ministry of Police, which he handed over to Joseph Fouché. He was made a count of the empire on 24 April 1808 and duke of Massa di Carrara on 15 August 1809. On leaving the ministry of Justice Regnier was made Minister of State and president of the legislative body, he died in Paris on 24 June 1814 a few months after Napoleon fell from power
