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Executive Power
In the meantime the idea of an executive directly elected by the citi zens had not occurred to anyone, not even to the most radical men of 1789 or of 1793. Neither Babeuf nor Robespierre, not even Hébert or any of his fanatical followers imagined that such a thing might be possible, or at least desirable. Only Condorcet had raised the issue, in a pamphlet published in July 1791 under the title “On the Institution of an Elective Council,” but his argument in f avor of a council elected by the citizens that would take the place of the king, composed of persons “chosen by the same electors as the members of legislatures,” went unnoticed.15 His position was all the more original considering that he still considered the executive to enjoy the same legitimacy as the legislature. What Con dorcet had in mind, anticipating the later republican ideal, was an ex ecutive power that would owe its authority to the fact that it had been democ ratically sanctioned by popular vote. He continued to defend this idea a year and a half later, as part of his constitutional scheme of Feb ruary 1793, emphasizing that “the members of the Council w ill not be elected by the legislative body, since they are the officers of the p eople, and not of their representatives.”16 But his proposal on this point, no less contrary to the prevailing opinion than before, was not even discussed.
Bonaparte: Return of a Proper Name, New Regime of the Will From 1789 to 1794, owing to the breathless pace of events and the con stant need to deal with crises, revolutionary thinking about govern mental powers had preserved its mostly theoretical character. Only after ward, during the period of the Directory, the five years that followed the adoption of the Constitution of Year III (1795), was it to be put to the test in a practical way. It soon came to be realized that the new regime was incapable of managing the nation’s affairs with the institutions that had been put in place earlier. Threatened on both its right and its left, the Directory was torn between a desire to lower the pol itical temperature, to avoid returning to a time that had been dominated by the “magic of words,” as Sieyès put it,17 and a resolve to use the force of the state, be ginning in Year IV, in order to stem the tide of royalist feeling that had resurfaced with popular election. These years, in which parliamentary impotence was compounded by intellectual confusion, inexorably
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