napoleon's race with revolutionary political parties

The year I794 certainly ended Napoleon's flirtation with Jacobinism and other forms of political radicalism. The Thermidorean reaction meant that landowners and men of property were entrenched as the true beneficiaries of the Revolution, and that there would be no further pandering to the sans-culottes or other dispossessed groups. This hard line by Carnot and his colleagues, together with the famines, harvest failures, unemployment and price rises - for after Robespierre's fall there was a year of chaos with depreciating assignats,

unpaid armies and therefore zero recruitment - brought the old revolutionaries out on the streets again. The crowd stormed the Convention on I2 Germinal Year III (I April I795) and were dispersed by the National Guard. They tried again on May I795 and were again dispersed by the Guard. But the heart had gone out of the revolutionary crowd: these manifestations lacked the zeal and organization of previous post-1789 insurrections and were more like the old-fashioned ancien regime bread riots. Put down ruthlessly, these street revolts proved to be the last hurrah of the Revolutionary crowd, which was not seen in action again until after the Napoleonic era. The  Most of all, the new class was made up of those who had cornered large public monopolies or who had purchased what was euphemistically called 'national property' - in other words, confiscated Church lands or real estate previously belonging to exiled aristocrats. The Thermidorean alliance of the bourgeoisie with the upper peasantry gave Napoleon a valuable lesson in politics.