to occupy it.

As the army and not the people had made the coming administration
possible, the executive power would from the first be the creature of
the army; and since under the constitutional provisions there was no
legal means of compromise between the Directory and the legislature in
case of conflict, so that the stronger would necessarily crush the
weaker, the armed power supporting the directors must therefore
triumph in the end, and the man who controlled that must become the
master of the Directory and the ruler of the country. Moreover, a
people can be free only when the first and unquestioning devotion of
every citizen is not to a party, but to his country and its
constitution, his party allegiance being entirely secondary. This was
far from being the case in France: the nation was divided into
irreconcilable camps, not of constitutional parties, but of violent
partizans; many even of the moderate republicans now openly expressed
a desire for some kind of monarchy. Outwardly the constitution was the
freest so far devised. It contained, however, three fatal blunders
which rendered it the best possible tool for a tyrant: it could not be
changed for a long period; there was no arbiter but force between a
warring legislative and executive; the executive was now supported by
the army.

It is impossible to prove that Buonaparte understood all this at the
time. When at St. Helena he spoke as if he did; but unfortunately his
later writings, however valuable from the psychological, are worthless
from the historical, standpoint. They abound in misrepresentations
which are in part due to lapse of time and weakness of memory, in
part to wilful intention. Wishing the Robespierre-Salicetti episode of
his life to be forgotten, he strives in his memoirs to create the
impression that the Convention had ordered him to take charge of the
artillery at Toulon, when in fact he was in Marseilles as a mere
passer-by on his journey to Nice, and in Toulon as a temporary adjunct
to the army of Carteaux, having been made an active participant partly
through accident, partly by the good will of personal friends. In the
same way he also devised a fable about the "day of the sections," in
order that he might not appear to have been scheming for himself in
the councils of the Convention, and that Barras's share in his
elevation might be consigned to oblivion. This story of Napoleon's has
come down in three stages of its development, by