Tone arrived at Le Havre on 2 February 1796 after a stormy winter passage. He carried coded introductions from Beckley and Adet but no formal instructions or accreditation from the United Irishmen. He was therefore given total freedom to conduct his mission according to his own guidelines, and proved an effective negotiator. Tone's negotiations in Paris helped shape France's Irish policy for many years to come, and played a crucial role in securing French backing for a major invasion attempt at the end of 1796. Yet his methods were singular. They could easily have miscarried had they not accommodated so well the character of the Directory – the regime which governed France from September 1795 to October 1799. Tone's natural single-mindedness and impatience of red tape brought him almost inevitably to the notice of the main policy-makers, and events took over thereafter.

I

After the bloodshed and turmoil of the Terror and the Thermidorean period, France by 1796 had acquired a moderate, but constitutionally weak, regime in the Directory. National fatigue expressed itself in widespread public apathy. The very constitution inaugurating the Directory encapsulated its weakness. The five members were elected by the two legislative councils which maintained control of finances. A restricted franchise and the annual replacement of a third of their members brought into the legislative councils royalist or Jacobin elements who were hostile to the very existence of the regime. Deprived of legislative and financial teeth, the Directory in time became the prisoner of the military, on which it depended for the many coups designed to restore the political balance. The Directory inherited an empty treasury, valueless paper money, a collapse in the social services, national divisions and an all-engrossing war.

Of the five Directors, La Réveillière-Lépeaux, the well-intentioned and virtuous disciple of Rousseau, and Letourneur, the former civil servant and cipher of Carnot, were nonentities. The three ‘matadors of the Directory’ were Carnot, former member of the Committee of Public Safety, Reubell, the Germanic lawyer from Alsace and a fierce anti-Jacobin, and Barras, the dissolute aristocrat from Provence, whose debauchery and corruption lent to the regime an air of sexual licence which repelled Tone. Reubell and Carnot controlled foreign affairs and war respectively, and had wider powers over the conduct of these matters than any regime since 1789.