uprising of extreme Jacobinism, which sent an opposition delegation
into the councils too strong to be thus supplanted or overthrown.
The new legislature met the executive, and at once, with their own
weapons. Aided by public clamor, and by the influence of a widely read
pamphlet which Carnot had written in justification of his course, they
obtained in June a virtual reconstruction of the Directory. Barras,
who had become known as a weak trimmer, was suffered to remain.
Rewbell, as a supporter of the unsuccessful Schérer and the
pertinacious associate of Rapinat, a dishonest contractor connected
with the Army of Italy, had been himself suspected of peculation,
although unjustly, and his time having expired, he was not reëlected.
The others went as a matter of course; Merlin and Larévellière were
permitted to resign because, although troublesome, they were
nonentities; Treilhard, though honest and able, could not make himself
felt, and a flaw in his election was used as a pretext to replace him
by Gohier, who, though he had been formerly minister of justice, was a
feeble creature. Sieyès was put in Rewbell's place in order to secure
a better constitution. He carried into his new sphere the same habits
of supercilious mystery which he had always had, continuing likewise
the scheming for radical change which he had so long carried on. He
looked to Joubert as the popular general most likely to become an easy
tool, and formed an intimacy with him. The two other places were
filled by utter mediocrities: Roger-Ducos, a moderate, and Moulins, a
radical. This revolution of the thirtieth of Prairial, another "day,"
was held to be a Jacobin counterstroke to that of the eighteenth of
Fructidor. The legislature had shown itself as lawless as the
Directory; the constitution was proved to be worthless: another must
be enacted. With Fouché at the head of the police, and other
Robespierrians restored to office, it appeared to the majority of the
nation as if all constitutional government were jeopardized, as if the
Terror were to be revived, as if such madness could be repressed only
by military force.