The Army, Politics and Public Order in Directorial Provence, 1795–1800

Abstract

Under the French Directory the line army was called into many parts of France to protect law and order and to shore up the regime. The authors of regional studies in the period have alluded to military presence but have failed to draw general inferences about the importance of military policing. The political ambitions of commanders-in-chief of fighting armies after the fall of Robespierre and the nature and history of operations have long been the subject of historical research, but no-one has yet investigated the nature of relations between civil and military authorities in any part of the interior that was not a war zone. The line army had been used in a policing role during the old regime and the early years of the revolution, but the advent of war in 1792 removed it to the frontiers. This suited revolutionary governments which were uncertain of its loyalty and uneasy about the reduction of discipline. In 1793 and 1794 revolutionary order was imposed instead by an increasingly centralized network of civilian elites and militias – revolutionary armies, committees, tribunals and representatives on mission – which operated by means of intimidation and civic denunciation. The dismantling of this apparatus of Terror in the year III (late 1794/5) in favour of a liberal constitution which breathed new life into the elective institutions of local government unleashed an anarchy of frustrated aspirations and hatreds born out of the turbulence of the revolutionary experience. Individuals and factions vied for control of local judicial and executive positions in order to make up revolutionary losses and to keep out their enemies.