Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
French Consulate
Summary
The Consulate (Le Consulat) was the top-level Government of France from the fall of the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire on 10 November 1799 until the start of the Napoleonic Empire on 18 May 1804. By extension, the term The Consulate also refers to this period of French history.
During this period, Napoleon Bonaparte, as First Consul (Premier consul), established himself as the head of a more authoritarian, autocratic, and centralized republican government in France while not declaring himself sole ruler. Due to the long-lasting institutions established during these years, Robert B. Holtman has called the Consulate "one of the most important periods of all French history." By the end of this period, Napoleon had engineered authoritarian personal rule which has been viewed as military dictatorship.
30 Prairial and 18 Brumaire
French military disasters in 1798 and 1799 had shaken the Directory, and eventually shattered it in November 1799. Historians sometimes date the start of the political downfall of the Directory to 18 June 1799 (Coup of 30 Prairial VII by the French Republican calendar). This was when anti-Jacobin Director Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, after only a month in office, with the help of the Directory's only surviving original member, Paul Barras, also an anti-Jacobin, successfully rid himself of the other three then-sitting directors. The March–April 1799 elections to the two councils had produced a new Neo-Jacobin majority in the two bodies, and being unhappy with the existing five man Directory, by 5 June 1799, these councils had found an irregularity in the election of the Director Jean Baptiste Treilhard, who thus retired in favor of Louis Jérôme Gohier, a Jacobin more 'in tune' with the feelings in the two councils. The very next day, 18 June 1799, the anti-Jacobins Philippe-Antoine Merlin (Merlin de Douai) and Louis-Marie de La Revellière-Lépeaux were also driven to resign, although one long time anti-Jacobin, popularly known for his cunning, survived the day's coup; they were replaced by the Jacobin Baron Jean-François-Auguste Moulin and by the non-Jacobin, or 'weak' Jacobin, Roger Ducos.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.