Napoleon Comes To Power

Late-20th-century research has suggested that the Bonapartist dictatorship was by no means a foregone conclusion, the inevitable outcome of a corrupt and discredited revolutionary regime. Historians now seek to gain a greater awareness of the difficulties faced by the Directory (as the constitutional system was called after 1795) in steering a middle course between Royalism and Jacobinism and also a greater recognition of its achievements. It is now a widely-held view that by the time Napolean crowned himself Emperor in 1804, the Revolution was effectively over.