Shouldn't this be in the history forum?
Nope never heard of it before. Thanks for the heads-up!
Nope never heard of it before. Thanks for the heads-up!
I'm sensing that this is just one of the FUBAR things going on during the Directorate. Americans notice it since they were directly involved, while in France, where everyone and everything were getting screwed by corruption, it's getting lost in the static of the history of the Directorate. The strong man was Paul Barras, who pretty consistently gets described as "corrupt and amoral".
Which would give an incling of part of why people were happy with a military strong-man coup d'état in Paris in 1799. If Napoleon hadn't made it, the Jacobins were preassuring Bernadotte to make one.
Yes, I have heard of this incident before.
That it is. It's also appeared on Jeopardy! (and if you don't know all of the answers on a given Jeopardy! show, you owe a few days' worth of penance) and it usually pops up in most American quiz bowl tournaments (either as a tossup or as a three-part bonus along with Citizen Genet and the Quasi War).
Yeah, pretty much. I would say that in addition to the massive corruption, the initial French error in believing that Jay's Treaty was indicative of a US-GB alliance (which the Democratic-Republicans would never countenance, of course) was critical and somewhat indicative of the French mindset at the time. This is a state that's used to dealing with others in Europe as though they were conquered enemies (e.g. Austria and Napoleon's dictation of the Treaty of Campo-Formio - and yes, that wasn't even the real reason Austria and Prussia decided to turn away from Western Europe, I know, it was instead the partition of Poland) and thought that they could act that way to the United States, their erstwhile allies, as well.
