Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc, Le Directoire: La République sans la démocratie. Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2018. 304 pp. Notes, chronology, bibliography, and index. 15€ (pb). ISBN 9782358721646.
Reviewed by Laura Mason

Long derided as petty and corrupt, the Directory was redeemed by late twentieth century historians. François Furet played a particularly important role in that recuperation because his insistence that Thermidor marked the rebirth of civil society excited decades of scholarship. While Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc acknowledge the achievements of that work, they take the distance announced in their subtitle, naming the Directory not as “la république sans révolution” but “la république sans démocratie” (p. 20). As they retreat from the celebration of civil and political renewal favored by Furet’s heirs, they ask us to consider the demobilization of popular activism and repudiation of citizens’ right to subsistence effected in the same era....Founded on an exclusion of le peuple from political life, the Directory devolved to a narrow oligarchy....By refusing to ally with the left against the reactionary right or even accept democrats as loyal opponents, the regime doomed the republic, resorting to military coups to defend the increasingly narrow center it defined. Attending to the Directory’s special animus against democrats would clarify the point Belissa and Bosc make in concluding that Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1799 conspiracy to found a government on “une limitation radicale du principe représentatif et une limitation aux riches et aux notables des pouvoirs administratif et judiciaire” (p. 256) ..."

https://lists.uakron.edu/sympa/arc/h-france/2019-08/msg00079.html