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).
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His was instrumental in crushing the Royalist insurgency known as the 13 Vendémiaire, and the important place he occupied at the beginning of the period is indicated by the fact that he was elected by twenty-seven départements as member of the Council of Five Hundred, and became its first president.
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He remained ambivalent towards Napoleon, but, in the latter's controversy with Pope Pius VII, Napoleon, (by then Emperor) was able again to secure from him the learned treatise Sur la puissance temporelle du Pape ("On the Temporal Power of the Papacy, 1809).
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