This memorable "day of the sections," as it is often called, was an unhallowed day for France and French liberty. It was the first appearance of the army since the Revolution as a support to political authority; it was the beginning of a process which made the commander-in-chief of the army the dictator of France. All purely political powers were gradually to vanish in order to make way for a military state. The temporary tyranny of the Convention rested on a measure, at least, of popular consent; but in the very midst of its preparations to perpetuate a purely civil and political administration, the violence of the sections had compelled it to confide the new institutions to the keeping of soldiers. The idealism of the new constitution was manifest from the beginning. Every chance which the Directory had for success was dependent, not on the inherent worth of the system or its adaptability to present conditions, but on the support of interested men in power; among these the commanders of the army were not the least influential. After the suppression of the sections, the old Convention continued to sit under the style of the Primary Assembly, and was occupied in selecting those of its members who were to be returned to the legislature under the new constitution. There being no provision for any interim government, the exercise of real power was suspended; the elections were a mere sham; the magistracy was a house swept and garnished, ready for the first comer to occupy it. As the army and not the people had made the coming administration possible, the executive power would from the first be the creature of the army; and since under the constitutional provisions there was no legal means of compromise between the Directory and the legislature in case of conflict, so that the stronger would necessarily crush the weaker, the armed power supporting the directors must therefore triumph in the end, and the man who controlled that must become the master of the Directory and the ruler of the country. Moreover, a people can be free only when the first and unquestioning devotion of every citizen is not to a party, but to his country and its constitution, his party allegiance being entirely secondary. This was far from being the case in France: the nation was divided into irreconcilable camps, not of constitutional parties, but of violent partizans; many even of the moderate republicans now openly expressed a desire for some kind of monarchy. Outwardly the constitution was the freest so far devised. It contained, however, three fatal blunders which rendered it the best possible tool for a tyrant: it could not be changed for a long period; there was no arbiter but force between a warring legislative and executive; the executive was now supported by the army.