June, and is
now again played on the 18th of Fructidor.[5174]

VI. The Directory.

Dictatorship of the Directory.--Its new prerogatives.--Purge
of the Legislative Corps.--Purification of the
administrative and judicial authorities.--Military
commissions in the provinces.--Suppression of newspapers.
--The right of voting reserved to Jacobins alone.--Despotism
of the Directory.--Revival of Terror.--Transportation
substituted for the guillotine.--Treatment of the deported
on the way, in Guyana, and on the islands of Rhe and
Oleron.--Restoration of Jacobin feudalism.

This is the way in which the government of 1793 is brought back to life:

The concentration of all public powers in the hands of an oligarchy, a
dictatorship exercised by about a hundred men grouped around five or six
leaders.

More independent, more despotic and less provisional than any Committee
of Public Safety, the Directory has arrogated to itself the legal right
of placing a commune in a state of siege, of introducing troops within
the constitutional circle[5175] in such a way that it may, at its
discretion, violate Paris and the Legislative Corps. In this body,
mutilated by it and watched by its hireling assassins,[5176] sit
the passive mutes who feel themselves "morally proscribed and
half-deported,"[5177] who abandon debate, and vote with its
stipendiaries and valets.[5178] As a matter of fact, the two councils
have, as formerly the Convention, become chambers "of registry" of
legislative mechanism charged with the duty of countersigning its
orders.--Its sway over the subordinate authorities is still more
absolute. In forty-nine departments, specially designated by decree,
all the administrators of departments, cantons and municipalities,
all mayors, civil and criminal judges, all justices of the peace, all
elected by popular suffrage, are dismissed en masse,[5179] while the
cleaning out in the rest of France is almost as sweeping. We can judge
by one example: in the department of Doubs, which is not put down among
those to be purged, five hundred and thirty administrators or municipal
magistrates are dismissed in 1797, and, in addition, forty-nine others
in 1798. The Directory puts its creatures in their places: suddenly,
the departmental, cantonal, municipal and judicial system, which was
American, becomes Napoleonic so that the local officials, instead
of being delegates of the people, are