FYI November 02, 2019

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On This Day

1795 – The French Directory, a five-man revolutionary government, is created.
The Directory or Directorate (French: le Directoire) was a five-member committee that governed France from 2 November 1795, when it replaced the Committee of Public Safety, until 9 November 1799, when it was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, and replaced by the French Consulate. It gave its name to the final four years of the French Revolution. On the other hand, according to the mainstream historiography – for example F. Furet and D. Richet in “French Revolution” (Macmillan, 1970) – with the aforementioned terms is indicated also the regime and the period from the dissolution of the National Convention of Tuileries Palace on 26 October 1795 (4 Brumaire), which was superseded by the two new elected Councils (Ancients and Five Hundred), and the coup d’état by Napoleon. Only in 1798 the Council of Five Hundred moved to the Palais Bourbon (Instead, since the inception, the five members of the Directory remained in the Luxembourg Palace).

The Directory was continually at war with foreign coalitions which at different times included Britain, Austria, Prussia, the Kingdom of Naples, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It annexed Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, while Bonaparte conquered a large part of Italy. The Directory established 196 short-lived sister republics modelled after France, in Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The conquered cities and states were required to send to France huge amounts of money, as well as art treasures, which were used to fill the new Louvre museum in Paris. An army led by Bonaparte tried to conquer Egypt and marched as far as Saint-Jean-d’Acre in Syria. The Directory defeated a resurgence of the War in the Vendée, the royalist-led civil war in the Vendée region, but failed in its venture to support the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and create an Irish Republic.

The French economy was in continual crisis during the Directory. At the beginning, the treasury was empty; the paper money, the Assignat, had fallen to a fraction of its value, and prices soared. The Directory stopped printing assignats and restored the value of the money, but this caused a new crisis; prices and wages fell, and economic activity slowed to a standstill.

In its first two years, the Directory concentrated on ending the excesses of the Jacobin Reign of Terror; mass executions stopped, and measures taken against exiled priests and royalists were relaxed. The Jacobin political club was closed and the government crushed an armed uprising planned by the Jacobins and an early socialist revolutionary, François-Noël Babeuf, known as “Gracchus Babeuf”. However, following the discovery of a royalist conspiracy including a prominent general, Jean-Charles Pichegru, the Jacobins took charge of the new Councils and hardened the measures against the Church and émigrés. The Jacobins took two additional seats in the Directory, hopelessly dividing it.

In 1799, after several defeats, French victories in the Netherlands and Switzerland restored the French military position, but the Directory had lost the support of all the political factions. Bonaparte returned from Egypt in October, and was engaged by the Abbé Sieyès and others to carry out a parliamentary coup d’état on 8–9 November 1799. The coup abolished the Directory, and replaced it with the French Consulate led by Bonaparte.

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Born On This Day

1879 – Marion Jones Farquhar, American tennis player and violinist (d. 1965)
Marion Jones Farquhar (née Jones; November 2, 1879 – March 14, 1965) was an American tennis player. She won the women’s singles titles at the 1899 and 1902 U.S. Championships.[1] She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006.[2]

Biography
Jones was the daughter of Nevada Senator John Percival Jones, co-founder of the town of Santa Monica, and Georgina Frances Sullivan.[3]

Marion Jones was the first Californian to reach the finals at the women’s U.S. Tennis Championships in 1898 where she had a championship point against Juliette Atkinson but lost in five sets.[4] She won the U.S. women’s tennis title in 1899 and 1902, and the U.S. mixed doubles title in 1901. At the 1900 Summer Olympics, she was the first American woman to win an Olympic medal.[5] Her sister, Georgina also competed in the 1900 Olympic tennis events. In 1900, Jones was the first non-British woman to play at Wimbledon where she reached the quarterfinals in which she was eliminated by G.E. Evered in straight sets.[6]

She was mainly a baseline player who possessed a solid backhand and forehand and had good accuracy in her shots.[7][8]

She married architect Robert D. Farquhar in New York City, in 1903. They had three children: David Farquhar (1904 – ), John Percival Farquhar (1912 – 2013 ) and Colin Farquhar (1913 – ). From 1920 until 1961, Marion Jones Farquhar lived in Greenwich Village, where she was well known as a violinist and voice coach. She also translated opera librettos and for a short time was head of the New York Chamber Opera.[9] In 1961 she moved back to Los Angeles, where she lived until her death.[1]

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