directory

Directory, group of five men who held the executive power in France according to the constitution of the year III (1795) of the French Revolution. They were chosen by the new legislature, by the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients; each year one director, chosen by lot, was to be replaced. The Directory was balanced by two representative assemblies elected indirectly by property holders. Governing a nearly bankrupt nation, the Directory had a stormy history. Politically, it walked a narrow course between Jacobins on the left and royalists on the right. During its history, the Directory instituted positive monetary reforms, which helped revive trade and agriculture, and provided the basis for Napoleon's restoration of order. But full recovery from the Revolution was not possible. The Directory not only faced a series of political crises, but was riddled with inefficiency and corruption. It suppressed the conspiracies of "Gracchus" Babeuf on the left and royalist uprisings on the right and later annulled some results in the elections of 1797 and 1798. Its increasingly repressive measures resulted in political isolation and bankruptcy. In the coup of 18 Fructidor (Sept. 4, 1797), the more conservative directors, Lazare Carnot and François de Barthélemy were ousted, and measures against the church and émigrés were revived. In addition, the Directory lost control of foreign policy to the generals in the field, especially Napoleon Bonaparte. Some of Napoleon's actions, such as negotiating the Treaty of Compo Formio and the Egyptian expedition, may have led to the formation of the Second Coalition against France. Discontent with the Directory rose to a high pitch with the military reverses of 1799 in which the republics from Holland to S Italy fell to the combined assault of Russian, Austrian, and British forces. Despite the fact that an invasion of France was prevented and these forces were defeated before Napoleon's return, the Abbé Sieyès, elected a director in May, 1799, secretly prepared the coup of 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9, 1799), which put Bonaparte in power, replacing the Directory with the Consulate.

Bibliography

See M. Lyons, France under the Directory (1975).

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Directory

 French Directoire

(1795–99) Government set up during the French Revolution by the Constitution of 1795. Legislative power was placed in the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients, while executive power was placed in a five-member Directory. Though the Directors nominally inherited many of the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, they had no funds to finance their projects or courts to enforce their will. The regime was marked by administrative chaos and corruption and by the uprisings in the Vendée. It was overthrown in Napoleon's Coup of 18–19 Brumaire.

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directory

(1) A simulated file folder on disk. Programs and data for each application are typically kept in a separate directory (spreadsheets, word processing, etc.). Directories create the illusion of compartments, but are actually indexes to the files which may be scattered all over the disk. Unix and DOS use the term directory, while the Mac and Windows use the term "folder."

(2) A database of users, hardware devices and applications in a network. See DSML, directory service and metadirectory.

(3) A Web search engine that catalogs Web sites by subject and also manually indexes the site, providing a brief description of its content. Yahoo! was a directory site in its early days, but then added search bots to automatically index pages as the Web grew too large to manually index. See Web search engines, metasearch sites and Yahoo!.

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directory

1. a book containing the rules to be observed in the forms of worship used in churches

2. Computing an area of a disk, Winchester disk, or floppy disk that contains the names and locations of files currently held on that disk

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(file system)

directory - A node in a hierarchical file system which contains zero or more other nodes - generally, files or other directories. The term "folder" is sometimes used in systems such as the Macintosh or Microsoft Windows in which directories are traditionally depicted as folders (like small briefcases).