On November 9 of 1799 Napoleon overthrew the Directory and established the Consulate. It was a huge improvement because instead of a five-man executive and a chaotic legislature you had a feeble legislature and a three-man executive and Napoleon was the man. Well, it was a huge improvement if you were Napoleon.

It’s called the Coup of Brumaire because in those days the French still had the new months the radical excesses of the Revolution had foisted upon them. It’s never a good thing when they start renaming months, even if “Foggy” is kind of a funny name for a month. And the result was a typically foggy French political arrangement.

The legislature had one chamber that could discuss bills but not vote on them, one that could vote but not talk, and one that could do both but was secretly part of the executive and was appointed by it. So the executive was pretty much all powerful. And within it, guess who was in charge. Right. The guy who staged the coup partly because at age 30 he was too young to be a Director under the old system.

I find the whole thing unfair because the Directory had itself gotten rid of the infamous Committee of Public Safety, ended the reign of terror by executing a few of its leading advocates including the egregious Robespierre, and tried to restore sanity to economic policy including ending the hyperinflation idiocy of the assignats. If ever a French government did not deserve to be overthrown, and frankly it’s a short list, it’s the Directory.

There’s one humorous aspect to this whole business. Beyond the fact that French politics is almost always funny as well as alternatively infuriating and tragic. And that’s the thought of two other guys agreeing to form a triumvirate with Napoleon Bonaparte and having no idea they were patsies. It’s been done before, including with Julius and Augustus Caesar. And maybe the others were formidable characters too and it’s only with hindsight that their fate seems predictable. But here’s a challenge: Name either of Napoleon’s other consuls.

I can’t either. But I Googled and they are, or briefly were, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, 1st Duke of Parma, and Charles-François Lebrun, duc de Plaisance. And perhaps neither was quite the chump he seemed, as Cambacérès wrote the Code Napoleon (not a good thing, but an impressive career achievement) and lived until 1824 and died peacefully, having outlasted Napoleon himself, while Lebrun later became “Arch-Treasurer” under the Empire which is a pretty cool title, and also lived until 1824.

Still, you’d have to be some kind of sucker to have Napoleon say “Hey, let’s share power” and go “Yeah, sure, sounds good to me.”

“Where troops have encamped/ There will brambles grow;/ In the wake of a mighty army/ Bad harvests follow without fail.” Lao Tzu

In my latest National Post commentary I ask what would happen if a Canadian (or American) politician tried being as sorry for a scandal or a bungle as South Korea's president Park Geun-hye.

You know what would be a great, original, sure-fire idea? A massive infrastructure program to stimulate the economy. Like the one the US just inaugurated on November 8. Of 1933.

That’s right. The Civil Works Administration, an early serving of New Deal alphabet soup that aimed to create millions of jobs, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a month, and build or fix roads, sewer pipes, schools, playgrounds and, something you don’t see today, a quarter of a million outhouses.

That’s right. The U.S. government got into the business of building kaibos for the helpless populace. But hey, jobs jobs jobs, right? And of course it worked. The U.S. government lurched into action when the Great Depression hit, raising taxes, restricting trade, deliberately reducing production of both agricultural and industrial products to increase prosperity (the AAA and NRA particularly), meddling everywhere, insulting businessmen and by golly, the economy recovered in just a decade.

It was, some quibbled, the longest depression in American history precisely because the government decided to wallop the economy at the worst imaginable moment and adopted a long and politically very successful strategy of continuing the floggings until morale improved. But let us not be small-minded.

To this day, every politician faced with a downturn wants to be Franklin Roosevelt. And they hype their plans to spend money we don’t have on infrastructure we didn’t want until the slump hit. And the longer it goes on, the longer the slumps last and the more disappointing the performance of the economy.

I guess we better do it again, huh?

“There is one striking feature about [General and future President Ulysses S.] Grant’s orders: no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever has the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or ever has to read them over a second time to understand them.”

“General Meade’s chief of staff” quoted by Horace Porter Campaigning with Grant

In my latest National Post column I argue that the push for 100 million Canadians so at last we can begin to live is a classic case of the false ideal of progress toward some glittering unattainable future state for other people as a substitute for the hard work of living worthwhile lives ourselves in the present.

T.S. Eliot says the last temptation is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Which brings me to the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America.

It happened on November 7, 1775, in Virginia. Which is 156 years too late, as slavery began in Virginia in 1619 in the same place and same year, in bitter irony, as the first representative legislature in the New World. But we’ll take it, right?

Well, not this way. The problem is, royal governor John Murray, a.k.a. Lord Dunmore, issued his proclamation under duress, offering freedom to any slave who fought for the British. It is hard to think of a less promising moment or setting, including by making emancipation seem like a threat to the freedom of the white inhabitants.

It would have been far better had the British gently encouraged and facilitated growing sentiment for abolition in the northern colonies before 1776, instead of actively opposing it (to the point that Thomas Jefferson, in a monumental act of gall, included an indictment of George III for encouraging the slave trade in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence).

Dunmore’s proclamation didn’t free every slave because slavery was wrong. It made it conditional, and conditional on something difficult and dangerous that not everyone could do. Despite which hundreds, possibly as many as 2,000 slaves did indeed join the royalist forces… who lost anyway. Indeed Dunmore himself had to pull out of Virginia in 1776, taking about 300 ex-slaves with him and leaving the rest in the lurch, if they hadn’t already died of the smallpox epidemic that ravaged his forces.

In 1779 General Sir Henry Clinton issued a more general emancipation decree, freeing slaves owned by revolutionaries throughout the colonies whether or not they enlisted. But even there, the counsel of pseudo-prudence that left humans in bondage if their owners were loyal undermined the moral and even practical impact of the policy.

I do not know that there was anything the British could have done to end slavery in North America in 1775. And indeed a vigorous effort earlier might have produced revolt sooner, at least in the south. Unless of course it had been undertaken in the 17th century before this hideous thing took root. But sometimes you just have to do the right thing.

Doing it at the wrong time for the wrong reason in the wrong way is unlikely to work. So you might as well try to get at least a few of the lesser things right as well.

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” Albert Einstein (“Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 9 2012)