mayed when they saw how tamely
France accepted this astounding stroke. Some allowance was naturally
to be made, at first, for the popular apathy: the Jacobins, already
discouraged by past repression, were partly dazed by the suddenness of
the blow, and were also ignorant of the aims of the men who dealt it;
and while they were waiting to see the import of events, power passed
rapidly into the hands of Bonaparte and his coadjutors. Such is an
explanation, in part at least, of the strange docility now shown by a
populace which still vaunted its loyalty to the democratic republic.
But there is another explanation, which goes far deeper. The
revolutionary strifes had wearied the brain of France and had
predisposed it to accept accomplished facts. Distracted by the talk
about royalist plots and Jacobin plots, cowering away from the white
ogre and the red spectre, the more credulous part of the populace was
fain to take shelter under the cloak of a great soldier, who at least
promised order. Everything favoured the drill-sergeant theory of
government. The instincts developed by a thousand years of monarchy
had not been rooted out in the last decade. They now prompted France
to rally round her able man; and, abandoning political liberty as a
hopeless quest, she obeyed the imperious call which promised to
revivify the order and brilliance of her old existence with the
throbbing blood of her new life.

The French constitution was now to be reconstructed by a
self-appointed commission which sat with closed doors. This strange
ending to all the constitution-building of a decade was due to the
adroitness of Lucien Bonaparte. At the close of that eventful day, the
19th of Brumaire, he gathered about him in the deserted hall at St.
Cloud some score or so of the dispersed deputies known to be
favourable to his brother, declaimed against the Jacobins, whose
spectral plot had proved so useful to the real plotters, and proposed
to this "Rump" of the Council the formation of a commission who should
report on measures that were deemed necessary for the public safety.
The measures were found to be the deposition of the Directory, the
expulsion of sixty-one members from the Councils, the nomination of
Sieyes, Roger Ducos, and Bonaparte as provisional Consuls and the
adjournment of the Councils for four months. The Consuls accordingly
took up their residence in the Luxemburg Palace, just vacated by the
Directors, and the drafting of a consti