against the Montagnards. The morale of the French armies was undamaged by these events on the home front. During the winter of 1794-95, French forces, commanded by General Charles Pichegru, overran the Austrian Netherlands, occupied the United Netherlands, which the victors reorganized as the Batavian Republic, and routed the allied armies of the Rhine. This sequence of reversals resulted in the disintegration of the anti-French coalition. On April 5, 1795, by the Treaty of Basel, Prussia and a number of allied Germanic states concluded peace with the French government. On July 22 Spain also withdrew from the war, leaving Great Britain, Sardinia, and Austria as the sole remaining belligerents. For nearly a year, however, a stalemate prevailed between France and these powers. The next phase of the struggle opened the Napoleonic Wars. Peace was restored to the frontiers, and in July an invading army of migrs was defeated in Bretagne. The National Convention then quickly completed the draft of a new constitution. Formally approved on August 22, 1795, the new basic law of France vested executive authority in a Directory, composed of five members. Legislative power was delegated to a bicameral legislature, consisting of the Council of Ancients, with 250 members, and the Council of the Five Hundred. The terms of one member of the Directory and a third of the legislature were renewable annually, beginning in May 1797, and the franchise was limited to taxpayers who could establish proof of one-year residence in their voting district. The new constitution contained additional evidence of retreat from Jacobin democracy. In its failure to provide a means of breaking deadlocks between the executive and legislative bodies, it laid the basis for constant intragovernmental rivalry for power, successive coups d'etat, and ineffectual administration of national affairs. The National Convention, however, still anticlerical and anti-Royalist despite its o...
