Rise of Bonapartism (1)

Rise of Bonapartism (1)

After the collapse of the democratic Republic of the Year II created with the aid of the sans-culottes, succeeded the property-owners’ republic of Thermidor and the Directory, giving way to Bonaparte and his military dictatorship. With the accession of Robespierre and the Jacobins to power, the French Revolution took  a new pace, that of popular democracy and the achievement in concreto of what really means the concept of  popular sovereignty. In this respect, the Jacobin Declaration and Constitution of 1793 marked a turning-point not only in French political history but in that of the world. Here for the First time in history a nation was provided (on paper at least) with a system of government under which all male citizens had the right to vote and a huge measure of control over its representatives and rulers. But following Thermidor reaction, after the fall of Robespierre, Jacobinism and popular Jacobinism died in 1797 when Augereau dispersed the Jacobin mob  Two year later, Bonaparte  ordered his grenadiers to disperse the Five Hundred in 1799 and with it, the first democratic and popular democracy was over and a new began in the history of France, that of Bonaparte dictatorship and the rise of a new form of modern dictatorship, the Bonapartism.