92

The resurgence, if not of a “party”, at least of a royalist opinion has long been highlighted in the public debates of 1795 in France and in Europe. Jacques Godechot, and more recently Roger Dupuy and Jean-Clément Martin, have insisted on the complex character of the so-called “royalist” movement in the year III. If a good number of the royalists from “outside” were clearly counter-revolutionary and rejected the entire Revolutionary process begun in 1789, still there were some who rejected the prospect of an armed restoration and who, on the contrary, defended a strategy of “consensus” aimed at regrouping “honnêtes gens” to put an end to the Republic and the Revolution. Among them, Charles-François Dumouriez, then in exile on Danish territory in Altona near Hamburg, intervened several times in the European public debate to criticize the counter-revolutionaries' strategy of shock and to defend the idea of a national monarchy.