The White Terror (1794–1795)
The White Terror (Terreur blanche) was the wave of counter-revolutionary violence that followed the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) and continued into 1795. Where the Jacobin Terror had targeted aristocrats, priests, federalists, and 'enemies of the Republic', the White Terror targeted surviving Jacobins, ex-terrorists, former members of Revolutionary committees, and their families. In Paris, the White Terror manifested primarily as political reversal and social humiliation. The jeunesse dorée — young men of royalist sympathies, dressed in extravagant 'incroyable' fashion, carrying weighted clubs — attacked Jacobin clubs, bullied sans-culottes in the streets, and demanded the release of imprisoned counter-revolutionaries. The Jacobin club was closed on 11 November 1794; the Revolutionary Tribunal was reformed and then abolished; Thermidorian deputies began releasing political prisoners. In the south and west of France the violence was far more lethal. In Lyon, where Jacobin forces had executed over 1,900 people during the Terror, Thermidorian gangs massacred hundreds of prisoners in the prisons of Roanne, Saint-Joseph, and Saint-Irénée in May 1795 — events known as the prison massacres (mitraillades). In Provence the Companions of the Sun roamed the countryside attacking former Jacobins. In the Rhône valley the Companions of Jehu systematically murdered released Jacobin prisoners. The death toll in the Midi may have been over 2,000. The Thermidorian Convention was slow to suppress the White Terror partly because many of its own members had survived the Jacobin Terror and were personally sympathetic to retribution, and partly because the violence was directed at their political opponents. The Convention eventually deployed force against the most extreme episodes, particularly after the royalist uprising in Paris on 13 Vendémiaire Year IV (5 October 1795), which was suppressed by Napoleon Bonaparte — his entry into French national politics. The White Terror foreshadowed the pattern of post-revolutionary violence that would recur throughout the 19th century: each regime's fall produced retributive violence against the agents of the previous order, with each cycle of terror and counter-terror making political reconciliation progressively harder.
- Year: 1794 CE
- Category: Political
