Thermidorian Reaction
Robespierre was arrested on 27 July 1794 and guillotined the following afternoon with twenty-one others. The Terror had accelerated after the military situation improved, which is the paradox at the centre of it. The victory at Fleurus in June removed the invasion that had justified everything, and the law of 22 Prairial the same month removed defence counsel and witnesses from the revolutionary tribunal, after which some 1,400 people were executed in Paris in seven weeks. Robespierre had also alienated everyone available. He had destroyed the Hébertists on the left and the Dantonists on the right in the spring, staged a Festival of the Supreme Being in June at which he walked ahead of the Convention and was jeered, and then absented himself from the committee for a month. His speech of 26 July announced that a conspiracy existed within the government and declined to name the conspirators. Every deputy who might be on the list concluded that he was. The next day he was shouted down in the Convention, his voice failed, and a deputy called out that the blood of Danton was choking him. He was arrested, freed by the Commune, and retaken at the Hôtel de Ville, his jaw shattered by a pistol shot fired by himself or by a gendarme. What followed was not a return to liberty. The Jacobin clubs were closed, the tribunal was reversed against the terrorists, and a white terror in the south killed several thousand. The month gave a word to political science. A Thermidor is the moment a revolution turns on its own radicals and settles into something more comfortable and more corrupt, and Trotsky spent the 1930s applying the term to Stalin.
- Year: 1794 CE
- Category: Political
