The commissions then drew up the "short and obscure Constitution of the Year VIII", the first of the constitutions since the Revolution without a Declaration of Rights.
Following an unsuccessful campaign in Syria, Bonaparte returned to France without his army, eventually seizing control of the French government during the events of 18 Brumaire.
After Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup against the Directory government in November 1799, the French Republic adopted a constitution which conferred executive powers upon three Consuls, elected for a period of ten years.
For Pierre Larousse, what the Republic's general had done until the coup of 18 Brumaire was virtuous and glorious, but the coup and the subsequent rule of the consul and emperor were a tyrant's doings.
After Napoleon Bonaparte's 18 Brumaire Coup he acquired the paper with which the name of his family has chiefly been connected, the Journal des débats.
Under the French Consulate and the First French Empire he painted several more allegories, including an Allégorie du dix-huit brumaire ou la France sauvée (Allegory of 18 Brumaire, or France saved - 1801, château de Versailles) and an Allégorie de la bataille d'Austerlitz (Allegory of the Battle of Austerlitz - 1806, château de Versailles).
Doulcet was subsequently elected to the French Directory's Council of Five Hundred, but was suspected of Royalist sympathies, and had to spend some time in retirement between anti-monarchist coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797) and the establishment of the Consulate (the 18 Brumaire coup of 9 November 1799).
As president of the Council of Five Hundred — which he removed to the suburban security of Saint-Cloud — Lucien Bonaparte's combination of bravado and disinformation was crucial to the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (date based on the French Revolutionary Calendar) in which General Bonaparte overthrew the government of the Directory to replace it by the Consulate.
It is probably because of his Girondinism that the Council of the Ancients was given the right of convoking the Council of Five Hundred outside Paris, an expedient which made possible Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état (the 18 Brumaire in 1799).