Each year, one-third of the chambers was to be renewed. The executive power lay with five directors hence the name 'Directory' for this form of government with a five-year mandate, each year one of them being replaced. The early directors did not much understand the nation they were governing; they especially had an innate inability to see Catholicism as anything else than counter-revolutionary and royalist. Local administrators had a better sense of people's priorities, and one of them wrote to the minister of the interior: "Give back the crosses, the church bells, the Sundays, and everyone will cry: "’vive la République!’"" French armies in 1796 advanced into Germany, Austria and Italy. In 1797, France conquered Rhineland, Belgium and much of Italy, and unsuccessfully attacked Wales. Parliamentary elections in the spring of 1797 resulted in considerable gains for the royalists. This frightened the republican directors and they staged a coup d'état on 4 September 1797 (Coup of 18 Fructidor V) to remove two supposedly pro-royalist directors and some prominent royalists from both Councils. The new, 'corrected' government, still strongly convinced that Catholicism and royalism were equally dangerous to the Republic, started a fresh campaign to promote the Republican calendar officially introduced in 1792, with its ten-day week, and tried to hallow the tenth day, "décadi", as substitute for the Christian Sunday. Not only citizens opposed and even mocked such decrees, also local government officials refused to enforce such laws. France was still waging wars, in 1798 in Egypt, Switzerland, Rome, Ireland, Belgium and against the U.S.A., in 1799 in Baden-Württemberg. In 1799, when the French armies abroad experienced some setbacks, the newly chosen director Sieyes considered a new overhaul necessary for the Directory's form of government because in his opinion it needed a stronger executive. Together with successful general Napoleon Bonaparte who had just returned to France, Sieyes began preparing another coup d'état, which took place on 9–10 November 1799 (18–19 Brumaire VIII), replacing the five directors now with three "consuls": Napoleon, Sieyes, and Roger Ducos. During the War of the First Coalition (1792–97), the Directoire had replaced the National Convention. Five directors then ruled France. As Great Britain was still at war with France, a plan was made to take Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, a British ally.