[Picture: Napoleon Bonaparte as a young officer]
The Directory was crushed, but the coup within the coup was not yet complete. The necessity to use military force had certainly strengthened Bonaparte's hand vis a vis Sieyès and the other plotters. With the Council routed, the plotters convened two commissions, each consisting of twenty-five deputies from the two Councils and essentially intimidated them into declaring a provisional government, the first form of the Consulate with Bonaparte, Sieyès, and Roger-Ducos as consuls, and then into drawing up what Malcolm Crook refers to as the "short and obscure Constitution of the Year VIII", the first of the constitutions since the Revolution without a Declaration of Rights.
The lack of reaction from the streets proved that the revolution was, indeed, over. In the words of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "A shabby compound of brute force and imposture, the 18th Brumaire was nevertheless condoned, nay applauded, by the French nation. Weary of revolution, men sought no more than to be wisely and firmly governed."