Did you know that in this week in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte helped stage a coup d’état that led to the fall of the French Directory? Established in November 1795, the Directory was the legislative body that replaced the National Convention. It was composed of two chambers, the Council of 500 and the Council of Elders, and had a five-man directory at its head. Between 9 and 11 November, Napoleon, along with the abbé Siéyès, Lucien Bonaparte, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès and Joseph Fouché, tricked the Council of Elders into believing there was a conspiracy and declaring a state of emergency. After some initial resistance from the Elders, the councils, having been moved to Saint-Cloud, were surrounded by soldiers under the command of Napoleon and overthrown. This marked the beginning of the Consulate period, which lasted until 1804 when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France. Written by Sam Dobbie

For more information, see, for example:

·Robert B. Asprey, The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (2000) 

David A. Bell, Napoleon: A Very Short introduction (2018)

·Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (2006)

·Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory, 1794-1799 (1984)

Image: Coup d’État du 18 Brumaire dans l’Orangerie de Saint-Cloud. Image by Domaine national de Saint-Cloud, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Reproduced without modification.