ABSTRACT
The Consul and the Consulate The coup of 18 brumaire, which brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power, was more the work of Sieyès, the veteran politician who had done so much to launch the Revolution ten years earlier, than of the man who reaped the main benefit from it. Sieyès’s intentions were the same as those of the authors of the 1795 constitution: to consolidate the power of moderate republican politicians and bourgeois property holders and to prevent any revival of either royalism or Jacobinism. To achieve this, Sieyès planned to abolish the parliamentary elections that had troubled the Directory so much. Instead, he proposed a system of co-optation, in which politicians already in power would pick their own successors from lists of property-owning “notables” drawn up by local electoral assemblies. Before Sieyès could implement his ideas, however, he had to negotiate with the young general he had been forced to bring into his coup plan. He quickly discovered that Napoleon Bonaparte had definite ideas of his own about how France should be governed. The rest of France soon learned the same lesson.
