Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.19 This was unlikely to happen in a legislature as fluid and unstable as that of late 1799, which included covert royalists, Feuillant constitutionalists (moderates), former Girondins, neo-Jacobin ‘patriots’, but precious few supporters of the Directory. By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian,
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