page_title: French Directory
section_title: Coup d'état is launched (9–10 November)
hierarchical_section_title: French Directory / History / Bonaparte returns to France, coup d'ètat and the end of the Directory / Coup d'état is launched (9–10 November)
context_page_description: The Directory was the governing five-member committee in the French First Republic from 2 November 1795 until 9 November 1799, when it was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Coup of 18 Brumaire and replaced by the Consulate. It gave its name to the final four years of the French Revolution. Mainstream historiography also uses the term in reference to the period from the dissolution of the National Convention on 26 October 1795 to Napoleon's coup d’état.
  The Directory was continually at war with foreign coalitions, including Britain, Austria, Prussia, the Kingdom of Naples, Russia 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 in Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The conquered cities and states were required to send 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.
context_section_description: Early in the morning of 9 November, army units began taking positions in Paris, and the members of the Council of Ancients were awakened and instructed to come to the Tuileries Palace for an emergency meeting. When they gathered at seven-thirty, they were told that a Jacobin conspiracy to overthrow the government had been discovered and that they should transfer their meeting the next day to the Château de Saint-Cloud, where they would be in safety. The members were asked to approve a decree to move the meeting site, and to appoint Bonaparte as commander of troops in Paris to assure their security.  Alarmed, they quickly approved the decree. Bonaparte himself appeared with his staff and told them, "Citizen representatives, the Republic was about to perish. You learned of it and your decree has just saved it". At eleven in the morning, the members of the Council of Five Hundred met at the Palais Bourbon and were given the same message. They agreed to move their meeting the following day to Saint-Cloud.
  As planned, by the afternoon Sieyés and Roger Ducos had given their resignations. Talleyrand was assigned to win the resignation of Barras. Talleyrand was supplied with a large amount of money to offer Barras to quit; historians differ on whether he gave the money to Barras or kept it for himself. Barras, seeing the movements of soldiers outside and being assured that he could keep the great wealth he had acquired as a Director, readily agreed to leave the Directory. With three members gone, the Directory could not legally meet. The Jacobin directors Moulin and Gohier were arrested and confined to the Luxembourg Palace under the guard of General Moreau. The first day of the coup had gone exactly as planned.
  On 10 November, the members of both councils were taken in a procession of carriages with a strong military escort to Saint-Cloud. 6,000 soldiers had already been assembled at the château; because their pay had repeatedly been delayed, they were particularly hostile to the members of the Chambers. Bonaparte spoke first to the Council of the Ancients, assembled in the Orangerie of the domain of Saint-Cloud, and explained that the Directory was no more. Bonaparte was received coldly, but the Council did not offer any opposition. He then moved to the Council of Five Hundred, which was already meeting under the presidency of his brother Lucien. Here he received a far more hostile reception from the Jacobin deputies. He was questioned, jeered, insulted, shouted down, and jostled. His 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. If the Council voted him outside the law, Bonaparte could be arrested and executed immediately without trial. While the deputies raged and argued, Bonaparte and his brother, escorted by a handful of soldiers, left the Orangerie, approached the unit of grenadiers of General Murat waiting impatiently outside, and told them that the deputies had tried to assassinate Bonaparte with their pens. The grenadiers charged into the hall and quickly emptied it of deputies.
  Bonaparte wrote his own official version of what happened, which was published in all newspapers and posted on placards on walls all over France; it vividly described how he had narrowly escaped death from the hands of "twenty Jacobin assassins" and concluded: "The majority returned freely and peacefully to the meeting hall, listened to the propositions which had been made for assuring the public safety, deliberated and prepared a beneficial resolution which should become the new law and basis of the Republic."
  With that event, the Directory was finished. A new government, the Consulate, was founded. According to most historians, the French Revolution was over.
caption: Bonaparte confronts the members of the Council of Five Hundred on 10 November 1799
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