We banish them (the terrorists) for the massacres of September 2nd, May 31st, the Babeuf plot, and every subsequent attempt."[169] The Council thereupon unanimously affirmed the need of an exceptional measure, and adopted a suggestion of Talleyrand (probably emanating from Bonaparte) that the Senate should be invited to declare by a special decision, called a _senatus consultum_, whether such an act were "preservative of the constitution." This device, which avoided the necessity of passing a law through two less subservient bodies, the Tribunate and Corps Legislatif, was forthwith approved by the guardians of the constitution.

It had far-reaching results.

The complaisant Senate was brought down from its constitutional watchtower to become the tool of the Consuls; and an easy way for further innovations was thus dextrously opened up through the very portals which were designed to bar them out.
The immediate results of the device were startling.

By an act of January 4th, 1801, as many as 130 prominent Jacobins were "placed under special surveillance outside the European territory of the Republic"-- a specious phrase for denoting a living death amidst the wastes of French Guiana or the Seychelles.

Some of the threatened persons escaped, perhaps owing to the connivance of Fouche; some were sent to the Isle of Oleron; but the others were forthwith despatched to the miseries of captivity in the tropics.