Had the elections been free during this state of exasperation it is probable that one-half of France would have voted for men of the ancient regime--Catholics, Royalists, or, at least, the Monarchists of 1790.
Let the reader imagine facing this party, in the same chamber, about an equal number of representatives elected by the other party; the only ones it could select, its notables, that is to say, the survivors of preceding assemblies, probably Constitutionalists of the year IV and the year V, Conventionalists of the Plain and of the Feuillants of 1792, from Lafayette and Dumolard to Daunou, Thibaudeau and Gregoire, among them Girondists and a few Montagnards, Barere,[2116] with others, all of them wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions.
To one who is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State, property, religion, the Church, the ancient regime, the Revolution, the present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the parliament.

Certainly the Right would like to see the First Consul a Monck, which would lead to his becoming a Cromwell; for his power depends entirely on his credit with the army, then the sovereign force; at this date the army is still republican, at least in feeling if not intelligently, imbued with Jacobin prejudices, attached to revolutionary interests, and hence blindly hostile to aristocrats, kings, and priests.[2117] At the first threat of a monarchical and Catholic restoration it will demand of him an eighteenth Fructidor[2118]; otherwise, some Jacobin general, Jourdan, Bernadotte, or Augereau, will make one without him, against him, and they fall back into the rut from which they wished to escape, into the fatal circle of revolutions and coups d'etat.
VII.

Establishment of a new Dictatorship.
The electoral and legislative combinations of Sieyes.
-- Bonaparte's use of them .-- Paralysis and submission of the three legislative bodies .-- The Senate as the ruler's tool.
-- Senatus-consultes and Plebiscites .-- Final establishment of the Dictatorship .-- Its dangers and necessity .-- Public power now able to do its work.
Sieyes comprehended this: he detects on the horizon the two specters which, for ten years, have haunted all the governments of France, legal anarchy and unstable despotism; he has found a magic formula with which to exorcise these two phantoms; henceforth "power is to come from above and confidence from below."[2119]--Consequently, the new constitutional act withdraws from the nation the right to elect its deputies; it will simply elect candidates to the deputation and through three degrees of election, one above the other; thus, it is to take part in the choice of its candidates only through "an illusory and metaphysical participation."[2120] The right of the electors of the first degree is wholly reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the second degree is also reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the third degree is finally reduced to designating one-tenth of their number, about six thousand candidates.

On this list, the government itself, by right and by way of increasing the number, inscribes its own high functionaries; evidently, on such a long list, it will have no difficulty in finding men who, as simple tools, will be devoted to it.

Through another excess of precaution, the government, on its sole authority, in the absence of any list, alone names the first legislature.