Thermidorian Reaction

• 1. Introduction

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  The Thermidorian Reaction begins at roughly 2 a.m. on the 28th of July 1794, when troops under the command of Paul Barras approached the Hotel de Ville in Paris. Inside, Maximilien Robespierre, his jaw broken by a possibly self-inflicted gunshot wound, was taken along with most of his supporters. He had been the dominant force on the Committee of Public Safety. He had overseen a period of revolutionary terror that killed over 40,000 people. And now, less than twenty-four hours after the National Convention declared him an outlaw, he was in custody. He would be executed that same day, alongside 21 of his associates. That moment on the 9th of Thermidor Year II, the 27th of July by the ordinary calendar, set off a chain of events that would reshape France. Who would fill the vacuum Robespierre left? What would the Convention do with the machinery of terror it had built? And what happens when a revolution turns on its own revolutionaries?

• 2. The Fall of Robespierre

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  Jean-Lambert Tallien, a member and former president of the National Convention, struck first on the floor of that body on 9 Thermidor. He impugned Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and then moved to denounce Robespierre himself as a tyrant. Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne took up the attack. Cries of "Down with the tyrant! Arrest him!" rose from the deputies. Robespierre appealed to the deputies of the right for support, and failed. An arrest order was issued for Robespierre and his followers.

  Loyal troops from the Paris Commune arrived at the jail to free the prisoners. The Convention responded by ordering Barras to lead its own troops in response. The Robespierrists barricaded themselves inside the Hotel de Ville. The Convention then made a decisive legal move: it declared the Robespierrists outlaws. Under that designation, they could be executed within 24 hours without trial. When Barras's forces arrived in the early morning hours of the 28th of July, the Commune troops had already deserted. The fortress had fallen without a real fight.

  Among those executed alongside Robespierre were François Hanriot, the former commander of the Parisian National Guard; Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot-Lescot, the mayor of Paris; Georges Couthon; Saint-Just himself; and René-François Dumas, the former president of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Why Robespierre never ordered his supporters to launch an offensive, as he had done in the past, remains a subject of historical debate.

• 3. The White Terror

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  On July 29th, the day after Robespierre's execution, the victors of 9 Thermidor condemned 70 members of the Paris Commune to death. That mass execution was the largest ever carried out in Paris. It set the tone for what followed: a period of violent retribution against anyone associated with the radical left.

  Hostility toward the old regime did not expire with Robespierre. Jacobin Club members, their supporters, and anyone suspected of past revolutionary activity became targets. Prison massacres were carried out. Trials proceeded without due process. The movement of violence against these groups became known as the White Terror, and a group of dandyish street fighters called the Muscadin helped carry it out, organized under the new government.

  The conditions imposed on the left echoed what the counter-revolutionaries had endured during the Reign of Terror itself. In May and June of 1795, the White Terror intensified across France. The victims of this phase were imprisoned officials of the Terror; the judges were bourgeois moderates. In Paris, royalist sentiments were openly tolerated. Even Montagnards who had participated in the conspiracy against Robespierre found themselves excluded from power under the new regime.

• 4. Politics and Purges

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  The Thermidorian regime reorganized French political life with a combination of selective rehabilitation and exile. Tallien, Barras, Joseph Fouché, and Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron rejoined the leadership. Others fared far worse: Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois were sentenced to exile in South America. Barère and Vadier received similar sentences, though both managed to evade arrest.

  Freedom of worship was extended first to the Vendée and later to all of France. On the 24th of December 1794, the Maximum, which had imposed controls on prices and wages, was abolished. The government then worsened its own inflationary problem by issuing additional assignats, the paper currency of the Revolution. In April and May of 1795, protests and riots broke out in support of the radicals, culminating in an insurrectionist mob invading the Convention on the 20th of May. The Convention struck back on the 22nd of May, sending troops under Pichegru to surround the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and force the rebels to capitulate.

  A new constitution, the Constitution of the Year III, was drawn up on the 22nd of August 1795. It pulled back some of the democratic provisions of the 1793 constitution. It established an electoral college for choosing officials and a bicameral legislature, with provisions designed to protect those currently holding power.

• 5. Napoleon and the Directory

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  French armies during this period had not been idle. They overran the Netherlands and established the Batavian Republic, occupied the left bank of the Rhine, and forced Spain, Prussia, and several German states to seek peace terms. These military successes bolstered the Convention's standing even as domestic politics remained turbulent.

  On the 5th of October 1795, the 13th Vendémiaire by the Republican calendar, royalists launched a revolt against the Convention. It was crushed by troops under a general named Napoleon Bonaparte, who suppressed it with what became famously described as "a whiff of grapeshot." That action marked one of Bonaparte's first prominent appearances in French political life. Twenty days later, on the 25th of October, the Convention declared itself dissolved. On the 2nd of November 1795, the Directory took power: an executive body of five men who would govern France into a new phase of the Revolution.

• 6. Thermidor as Historical Concept

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  Historians of revolutionary movements have given Thermidor a meaning that extends well beyond 1794. The term now describes a phase that appears across revolutions: the moment when power slips from the original radical leadership and a more conservative group takes control, sometimes pushing politics back toward something resembling the pre-revolutionary order.

  Leon Trotsky applied this framework in his book The Revolution Betrayed, arguing that Joseph Stalin's rise to power represented a Soviet Thermidor. Trotsky's case was careful: he did not claim Stalin had restored capitalism, but called it a counterrevolutionary regression within the Soviet system, just as Thermidor had not restored the French monarchy. Marxist-Leninists and Stalinists later turned the same lens on Nikita Khrushchev, arguing that his rise and the implementation of De-Stalinization constituted the Soviet Union's own Thermidor. A CIA document went further, suggesting that Khrushchev's speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" may have marked the Thermidor of the Russian Revolution itself.