The administrative efforts to revive foreign commerce under the Directory still remain largely unknown. The unpublished survey written on December 5, 1796 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs with « enlightened » merchants clearly reveals the issues involved and the methods proposed. Not only does this survey underscore the contradiction between the commercial diplomacy and the politics of the Customs, but it highlights the reasons for the persistent separation between high commerce and the administration as well. Indeed, it was because of the political inability to escape the directed economy of the Year II, and a kind of unbridled liberalism of the Year III that merchants criticized, at the same time as they reactivated, the imperatives of liberty and the protection inherited from the liberalism of the Eighteenth Century. While this survey was never the subject of a systematic statistical study, it has not been without ideological influence, for it made possible the first formulation of a « liberal republicanism » by the person to whom the task of its reading and analysis was entrusted : Charles Théremin.