This strange ending to all the constitution-building of a decade was due to the adroitness of Lucien Bonaparte.

At the close of that eventful day, the 19th of Brumaire, he gathered about him in the deserted hall at St.
Cloud some score or so of the dispersed deputies known to be favourable to his brother, declaimed against the Jacobins, whose spectral plot had proved so useful to the real plotters, and proposed to this "Rump" of the Council the formation of a commission who should report on measures that were deemed necessary for the public safety.
The measures were found to be the deposition of the Directory, the expulsion of sixty-one members from the Councils, the nomination of Sieyes, Roger Ducos, and Bonaparte as provisional Consuls and the adjournment of the Councils for four months.

The Consuls accordingly took up their residence in the Luxemburg Palace, just vacated by the Directors, and the drafting of a constitution was confided to them and to an _interim_ commission of fifty members chosen equally from the two Councils.
The illegality of these devices was hidden beneath a cloak of politic clemency.

To this commission the Consuls, or rather Bonaparte--for his will soon dominated that of Sieyes--proposed two most salutary changes.

He desired to put an end to the seizure of hostages from villages suspected of royalism; and also to the exaction of taxes levied on a progressive scale, which harassed the wealthy without proportionately benefiting the exchequer.