18 Brumaire - Events of 18 Brumaire, Year VIII

Events of 18 Brumaire, Year VIII

On the morning of 18 Brumaire, members of the Council of Ancients sympathetic to the coup warned their colleagues of a Jacobin conspiracy and persuaded them to remove to the Château de Saint-Cloud, west of Paris. General Bonaparte was charged with the safety of the two Councils. Later that morning Sieyès and Roger Ducos resigned as Directors. Talleyrand persuaded Barras to do the same (the troops in the garden outside were persuasive).

The resignation of three of the five Directors prevented a quorum and thus practically abolished the Directory, but the two Jacobin Directors, Gohier and Moulin, continued to protest furiously. Both men were arrested by Napoleon's ally, General Moreau, and by the following day they were compelled to give up their resistance.

In contrast to the Directory, the two Councils were not yet intimidated and continued meeting.

Read more about this topic:  18 Brumaire

Famous quotes containing the words events, year and/or viii:

    The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.
    —J.G. (James Graham)

    You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
    What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
    —Bible: Hebrew Psalm VIII (l. VIII, 3–4)