Describes the phenomenon of “Sister Republics” and shows that it was limited until the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. To better understand the interactions between the “mother” Republic and her “daughters,” this chapter studies their constitutions and bills of rights, which reveal that some of them were shaped by native patriots, while others were forced upon them by the French government. In a way, the “Sister” Republics became a “constitutional laboratory” for France. All these changes did not happen without chaos and violence. In the “sister” republics too, force and coercion were necessary to implement the new regimes and to silent the factional struggles and the counter-revolution. Thanks to the French army, however, revolutionary terror did not win the day at least until 1799. In spite of all these problems, the young republics experimented new institutions and improvements for the time being and for the future. But, by a strange irony of fate, the only true “sister” republic was the republic of the United States, that is the only one which was not really influenced by the French Revolution, and which was to become a model in the following revolutionary waves.

Founded by the Constitution of the year III, and with the executive power divided between five Directors, and the legislative power divided into two houses, the Directory sought political middle ground. It defied at the same time the “Jacobins” of Babeuf’s conspiracy and the constitutional circles, and the royalists of the Philanthropic Institute, who were ready to seize power by means of elections or force. In the name of this double danger, real or supposed, the Directors set up coups d’état to nullify election results by associating themselves with generals haloed by their expeditions and their victories abroad (in Egypt or the “sister-republics”). The Directory tried to muzzle the press, supervise the theater, multiply the official celebrations, and reform primary and secondary education. It tried in vain to spread a national religion (theophilanthropy) to control public opinion, to favor a republican elite, to tie scholars to the regime. In charge of a society marked by strong contrasts between the new rich who benefited from the development of the arts, and those left behind (the downgraded, unemployed, deserters, emigrants), it was confronted with corruption and brigandage.