rabbis, and believed they could be brought into mainstream society and made citizens. Political career after 1795 After the establishment of the Directory in 1795, Grégoire was elected to the Council of Five Hundred. He and his fellow council members opposed the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon seized power and the Hundred Days. The Council issued a proclamation the day after the coup, and so it was named The Council of Five Hundred Concurs. The council warned in this proclamation that this coup would cause France to revert to the times before the Revolution. After Napoleon Bonaparte took power in 1799, Grégoire became a member of the Corps Législatif, then of the Senate (1801). He took the lead in the national Church councils of 1797 and 1801; but he was strenuously opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte's policy of reconciliation with the Holy See, and after the signature of the Concordat he resigned his episcopal see on 8 October 1801. He was one of the minority of five in the Senate who voted against the proclamation of the French Empire, and he opposed the creation of a new French nobility and Napoleon's divorce from Joséphine de Beauharnais. Notwithstanding this, he was created a Count and officer of the Légion d'honneur. During the later years of Napoleon's reign he travelled to England and Germany, but in 1814 he returned to France. In 1814 he published De la constitution française de l'an 1814, in which he commented on the Charter from a Liberal point of view, and this work reached its fourth edition in 1819, in which year he was elected to the Lower Chamber by the département of Isère. This was considered a potentially harmful episode by the powers of the Quintuple Alliance, and the question was raised of a fresh armed intervention in France under the terms of the secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. To prevent this, Louis XVIII decided on a modification of the franchise; the Dessolles ministry resigned; and the first act of Count Decazes, the new premier, was to annul the election of Grégoire. After the restoration of the Bourbons, Grégoire remained influential, though as a revolutionary and a schismatic bishop he was also the object of hatred by royalists. He was expelled from the Institut de France. From this time onward the former bishop lived in retirement, occupying himself in literary pursuits and in correspondence with