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His menacing speeches to the legislative councils provoked the very use of outright military force that it was hoped to avoid: deputies were obliged to flee after they had verbally and physically assaulted the general in an effort to secure his arrest. The use of bayonets, which Mirabeau had vowed to resist in , proved decisive a decade later, though the coup remained bloodless. A rump of deputies was subsequently reassembled to register the edicts which replaced a defunct Directory with a Provisional Consulate and nominated two legislative commissions from the suspended councils to draw up a fresh constitution.

The Austrians were soon joined by the Prussians, and the allied enemies made early successes against a French army weakened by the emigration of most of the officer corps. Military conflict introduced a fatal dialectic into the Revolution, encouraging radicalism as a means of self-defence and turning dissenters into traitors, who deserved short shrift; the king himself would be an early victim of this increasingly intimidating atmosphere. A democratic republic, 1792–1794? By the summer of  France was being invaded and Paris itself, a mere  kilometres from the north-eastern border, was cruelly exposed.

Napoleon I, as he became known after his coronation, had promised to end the Revolution and he succeeded in this regard for longer than any of the preceding regimes. One obvious explanation resides in his monopoly of military force, as commander of the armies during a period of persistent warfare and much attendant gloire. Yet to label his regime a military dictatorship begs many questions, not least because the imperial government was administered by civilians and much of the revolutionary heritage was maintained.