Ministers,
though some directing agency seemed needed as a spur to energy and a
check against royalist plots. In brief, the Committee of Public
Safety, purged of its more dangerous powers, was to furnish the model
for a new body of five members, termed the Directory. This
organism, which was to give its name to the whole period 1795-1799,
was not the Ministry. There was no Ministry as we now use the term.
There were Ministers who were responsible individually for their
departments of State: but they never met for deliberation, or
communicated with the Legislature; they were only heads of
departments, who were responsible individually to the Directors. These
five men formed a powerful committee, deliberating in private on the
whole policy of the State and on all the work of the Ministers. The
Directory had not, it is true, the right of initiating laws and of
arbitrary arrest which the two committees had freely exercised during
the Terror. Its dependence on the Legislature seemed also to be
guaranteed by the Directors being appointed by the two legislative
Councils; while one of the five was to vacate his office for
re-election every year. But in other respects the directorial powers
were almost as extensive as those wielded by the two secret
committees, or as those which Bonaparte was to inherit from the
Directory in 1799. They comprised the general control of policy in
peace and war, the right to negotiate treaties (subject to
ratification by the legislative councils), to promulgate laws voted by
the Councils and watch over their execution, and to appoint or dismiss
the Ministers of State.

Such was the constitution which was proclaimed on September 22nd,
1795, or 1st Vendemiaire, Year IV., of the revolutionary calendar. An
important postscript to the original constitution now excited fierce
commotions which enabled the young officer to repair his own shattered
fortunes. The Convention, terrified at the thought of a general
election, which might send up a malcontent or royalist majority,
decided to impose itself on France for at least two years longer. With
an effrontery unparalleled in parliamentary annals, it decreed that
the law of the new constitution, requiring the re-election of
one-third of the deputies every year, should now be applied to itself;
and that the rest of its members should sit in the forthcoming
Councils. At once a cry of disgust and rage arose from all who were
weary of the Convention and all it