During this period, Napoleon Bonaparte, with his appointment as First Consul, established himself as the head of a more autocratic and centralised republican government in France while not declaring himself sole ruler.

Success was reserved for Bonaparte, suddenly landing at Fréjus with the prestige of his victories in the East, and now, after General Lazare Hoche's death (1797), appearing as sole master of the armies.

The four aforementioned governmental organs were retained under the Constitution of the Year XII, which recognised Bonaparte as the French sovereign, but their respective powers were greatly diminished.

While this near-unanimity is certainly open to question, Bonaparte was genuinely popular among many voters, and after a period of strife, many in France were reassured by his dazzling but unsuccessful offers of peace to the victorious Second Coalition, his rapid disarmament of the Vendée, and his talk of stability of government, order, justice, and moderation.

At the Battle of Marengo on 14 June 1800, what briefly seemed like a potential defeat for France was ultimately secured by the generals Louis Desaix and François Christophe de Kellermann.

The royalist plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise on 24 December allowed Napoleon to make a clean sweep of the democratic republicans, who despite their innocence, were deported to French Guiana.

Austria, which had been disarmed by Moreau's victory at the Battle of Hohenlinden, gave nearly the whole of Italy to France, and permitted Bonaparte to eliminate from the Assemblies all the leaders of the opposition in the discussion of the Civil Code.

The Organic Articles hid from the eyes of his companions-in-arms and councillors a reaction which, in fact if not in law, restored to a submissive Church, despoiled of her revenues, her position as the religion of the state.

[3] The March 1802 Peace of Amiens with the United Kingdom, of which France's allies, Spain and the Batavian Republic, paid all the costs, gave Napoleon a pretext for endowing himself with a consulate, not for ten years but for life, as a recompense from the nation.

Like the old monarchy, he re-introduced plenipotentiaries; over-centralised, strictly utilitarian administrative and bureaucratic methods, and a policy of subservient pedantic scholasticism[clarification needed] towards the nation's universities.

He constructed or consolidated the funds necessary for national institutions, local governments, a judiciary system, organs of finance, banking, codes, and traditions of conscientious of a well-disciplined labour force.

Prior to this, Paris had often suffered from hunger and thirst, and lacked fire and light, but under Bonaparte, provisions became cheap and abundant, while trade prospered and wages ran high.

[8] In strengthening the machinery of the state, Bonaparte created the Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honour), the Concordat, and restored indirect taxes, an act seen as a betrayal of the Revolution.

The British government of William Pitt the Younger had contributed to this royalist conspiracy by financing one million pounds and providing naval transport (with the ship of Captain John Wesley Wright) to the conspirators Georges Cadoudal and General Jean-Charles Pichegru for their return to France from England.

The next day, a British secret agent named Courson was arrested and he, under torture, confessed that Pichegru, Moreau, and Cadoudal were conspiring to overthrow the consulate.

D'Enghien during his questioning at the court told them that he was being paid 4,200 pounds per year by Britain "in order to combat not France but a government to which his birth had made him hostile."