With such weapons in hand, the Directory was for the moment invulnerable. But the royalist majority in the councils rushed madly on their fate. Infuriated by the presence so near to Paris of the soldiers brought in from the Army of the Sambre and the Meuse, they put their own guard under a royalist commander, closed the constitutional clubs which had been formed to offset that of Clichy, and in an irregular meeting of September third a proposition of General Willot to rise next day and destroy the government was received with applause. That night Augereau put himself at the head of about twelve thousand troops. With these he mounted guard throughout the city, seized the legislative chambers, and thus ended the first short constitutional régime of his country. The next morning, the eighteenth of Fructidor, the radical triumvirate of the Directory had entire control of the city and of the country. Of course all this was done in the name of public safety. Carnot, who had been kept in ignorance of Barras's dealings with Hoche, and had been reasoning with Bonaparte by letter as if his correspondent were an honest patriot, was rudely awakened from his illusion that others were as honest and sincere as he, and, seeing too late the snare which had been spread, took refuge in flight. Barthélemy was seized and imprisoned. Two new radicals, Merlin and François de Neufchâteau, were appointed to the vacancies. Barbé-Marbois, the royalist president of the Ancients, with eleven members of that body; Pichegru with forty-two deputies from the Five Hundred, and one hundred and forty-eight other persons, mostly journalists, were proscribed. All these, with the exception of a few who escaped by flight, were sent to languish in the pestilential swamps of Cayenne, where there was already a colony of transported priests. Although the guillotine was not again erected, yet the eighteenth of Fructidor brought in a revolutionary government, an administration resting on force, though under the forms of the constitution. The Fructidorians claimed to be strict constitutionalists, and posed as such before the country. But facts were more convincing than their professions. Their rallying-point was the Directory, and the Directory having twice appealed to the army, the army was now its real support. The liberty of the press was abolished, and martial law was proclaimed wherever the executive thought best. Moreover, Bonaparte had shown the way and furnished the general; he had taken another step toward his eventual appearance as the ruler of the army, and through it of the country. Such a forced relation led to mutual distrust, and finally to hatred.