The Directory

So lately I've been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, been on the French Revolution season for a while, utterly fascinating stuff especially about a period of history I knew criminally little about. But we're almost at the end now, and now I'm learning about the zombified corpse of the French Revolution that is the late stage Directory and Triumvirate, and learning about it has almost made me a little sad, sentimental, as silly as that sounds, and now I'm writing about it.

I think what gets me about the Directory is that this is how the world's possibly most influential revolution ended up. This was the culmination of a decade of revolution and struggle of men and women across Europe, this little autocratic, self-serving, insular quazi-republic nearly as unresponsive to popular will as the Bourbons had been. The Directory acts as the graveyard of tens of thousands of idealists, dreamers, men and women who dared to dream and fight for a better future, who had given their all against seemingly countless threats and succeeded, their dreams now reduced to the cynical, power-obsessed institution that the Directory became. That and the fact that after all that had been sacrificed to beat back the First Coalition they would almost immediately blunder themselves back into an even worse conflict lol.

Anyway, after this season is done it's on to Haiti, the last of the three revolutions I learned about in a college course last semester, will be fun!

BTW shoutout Georges Danton that's my goat right there

Hi goat...