Right-wing men staged an insurrection, which Napoleon Bonaparte helps put down. The national government decides to take its distance from the right after the directory is elected. So they reach out and become friendly again with men on their left who were old Jacobans. Some of them are willing to go along with the directory because they don't think they have any better options.
Featuring Laura Mason on her book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Mason discusses Babeuf's call to abolish property, his radically egalitarian conspiracy against the Directory government, and the end of the French Revolution. How a centrist government turned its back on popular democracy, presided over growing inequality and working-class poverty, and abetted the rise of the reactionary right that would ultimately overthrow it.
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