Thermidorian Reaction
On 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), a coalition of Convention deputies — some fearing they were next in line for the guillotine, others genuinely opposed to the Terror's escalation — rose against Robespierre during a session of the Convention. Robespierre and his allies Saint-Just and Couthon were shouted down, arrested, and guillotined the following day along with over 100 of their supporters in a rapid purge. The execution of Robespierre on 28 July, on the same Place de la Révolution where so many of his victims had died, had an immediate physical effect: the Revolutionary Tribunal's operations halted, the Law of 22 Prairial was repealed, and the surviving prisons began releasing their thousands of detainees. The Thermidorian Convention that followed steered France sharply rightward: the Jacobin clubs were closed, the Paris sections stripped of their emergency powers, and surviving Girondin deputies readmitted. A 'White Terror' in the south saw gangs attack former Jacobins and returned émigrés take revenge on revolutionaries. The sans-culottes rose twice in germinal and prairial Year III (spring 1795) demanding bread and the Constitution of 1793; both uprisings were suppressed and their leaders arrested or executed. The Thermidorian reaction settled into the conservative bourgeois republic of the Directory, stabilising the social gains of the early Revolution while abandoning its popular-democratic ambitions.
- Year: 1794 CE
- Category: Political
