Under Jacobin rule the revolution turned more and more atheistic. The monarchy had been abolished and universal manhood suffrage had been adopted, which to its supporters was a natural progression of the newfound freedom and liberalism embodied by the revolution. Many provincial people at the time felt that with the Jacobin in power the revolution "was no longer "free-; it had been confiscated by the sans-culottes agitators of the capital."" Yet, the Jacobin, and the Committer of Public Safety that they governed by, squashed any political dissent and inflicted the Terror on the citizens of France. This was surely against the spirit of the revolution. It must also be noted that by further secularizing the government and alienating the church they also offended the people of the republic they were supposed to represent.
Finally, the third stage of the revolution brought in the Directory. The Directory has few supporters and is regarded by many as having been "rotten and impotent a failure in economic policy, a failure in foreign policy, a failure in domestic politics."" They showed themselves incapable of implementing positive reforms to fix the problems incurred by the revolution. While the Directory ended the Terror, they implemented a constitution that drastically limited the franchise. They also lacked support from the peasantry because they coddled more to the wealthy. While they allowed for more freedom they also seemed to move away from equality, something that upset many people. Perhaps the biggest weakness of the Directors was a habit of violating the constitution and manipulating election results to suit their own needs, an issue that discredited Republican politics. They also came to rely too much on the army to carry out their policies, which ended up leading to their downfall.
Napoleon's place in all this is a mixture of all three phases of the revolution. He was a Corsican provincial who would have never been able to come to power were it not for the revolution.
