Under the French Directorate, they began to play an increasingly important role on the political right, embracing moderatism republicans and monarchists, namely those who still believed that in a constitutional monarchy based in part on the British model lay the best future for France.
[2] Within the span of political opinion, those members of the Clichy Club who figured among the Monarchiens signalled their party loyalties in the long black waistcoats they wore.
In a rearguard reaction to preserve the rapidly dissolving powers of the Directorate in the face of public opinion, after 205 of 216 conventionnels who ran for re-election in 1797 were rejected by the limited group of enfranchised voters (though two of the Clichyens were seated),[4] the extremists among the Clichy Club were intent on turning out the Directors and repealing Revolutionary legislation, especially that directed against the returned émigrés and the Catholic Church.
Divisions among the group pitted about 80 intransigent partisans for the return of monarchy, headed by Jean-Louis Gibert des Molières, against moderates around Mathieu Dumas, who avoided confrontations with the five-man Directorate.
Napoleon Bonaparte's reaction was a proclamation to the army denouncing the Clichyens and matters rapidly evolved in the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor.