Thermidor in the French Revolution
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A month of the French revolutionary calendar and, in revolutionary history, the political turning point of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), when Robespierre and his allies were arrested. They were executed the next day. His 8 Thermidor speech was delivered on 26 July. This French context is distinct from Soviet Thermidor, a later analogy about Soviet bureaucratization.
In depth
History
On 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) Robespierre and his allies were put in a minority in the National Convention, arrested, and executed the following day. The National Assembly's own history places this as the end of the Terror and the start of the Thermidorian Convention. In French periodization, the Thermidorian Reaction (Réaction thermidorienne, Convention thermidorienne) is the third and last period of the National Convention, running from 27 July 1794 to the inauguration of the French Directory on 2 November 1795. In this period the Reign of Terror ended, executive power was decentralized away from the Committee of Public Safety, and policy turned from Jacobin (Montagnard) radicalism toward more moderate positions.
The name comes from Thermidor, the eleventh month of the French Republican calendar (from Greek thermos, "heat"), which begins on 19 or 20 July and ends on 17 or 18 August. To historians of revolutionary movements, "Thermidor" has come to mean the phase when power slips from the original revolutionary leadership and a radical regime is replaced by a more conservative one. The name is taken from 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), when Robespierre and other radical revolutionaries came under concerted attack in the National Convention; prominent figures in that attack included Paul Barras, Jean-Lambert Tallien and Joseph Fouché, and Robespierre was executed with 21 associates.
The reaction included the First White Terror against the left, the disbanding of the Jacobin Club, the dispersal of the sans-culottes and the renunciation of Montagnard ideology. On 24 December 1794 the Maximum (price and wage controls) was abolished; the Constitution of the Year III was drawn up on 22 August 1795; the royalist rising of 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) was crushed by Napoleon Bonaparte's troops; and the Convention dissolved on 25 October 1795.
The revolutionary government was progressively dismantled. The Committee of Public Safety's members were renewed by quarters and its powers reduced before its disappearance in 1795. The Maximum was abolished on 24 December 1794 (4 nivôse Year III), and the liberal Convention's policies worsened scarcity and inflation. The personnel of the Terror were also reversed: many suspects imprisoned under the Terror were released while numerous revolutionary activists were arrested, officeholders suspected of "complicity" with Robespierre were dismissed, and representatives on mission such as Carrier and Joseph Lebon were tried and executed.
The White Terror of 1795 comprised numerous imprisonments and several hundred executions, almost exclusively of people on the political left, many without trial; on 29 July 1794 the victors condemned seventy members of the Paris Commune to death. Popular insurrections against the Thermidorian order (12 Germinal and 1 Prairial Year III, April–May 1795) failed, and royalists failed in turn with the émigré landing at Quiberon (June–July 1795) and the 13 Vendémiaire rising. A general amnesty "for acts properly relating to the Revolution" was voted on 26 October 1795 (4 Brumaire Year IV), excluding émigrés, deportees and those accused in Vendémiaire.
The word "Terreur" for the 1793–94 period was itself coined and popularized during the Thermidorian reaction, in order to condemn that period politically because of the violence up to the fall of Robespierre on 28 July 1794 (10 Thermidor Year II).
Distinctions
A narrow event and a period must be kept apart. 9 Thermidor is the single day of 27 July 1794; the Thermidorian Reaction is the last stretch of the National Convention's rule from 27 July 1794 to the Directory; the Directory is the regime that followed. The end date of the Convention's rule differs by measure: the French account gives 26 October 1795, its self-dissolution after the October 1795 elections, while the English account gives the Directory's inauguration on 2 November 1795. This entry reports both rather than resolving them into one date.
The French context is distinct from the "Soviet Thermidor" analogy. In the French Thermidor a more moderate regime replaced the Terror without restoring the monarchy. Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), used "Soviet Thermidor" for Stalin's rise and the post-revolutionary bureaucracy, a "counterrevolutionary regression" within the Soviet regime that did not restore capitalism. In that book he analyzed the triumph of Stalin, the separation of the party from Bolshevism and the rising bureaucratic stratum, arguing the ruling stratum was neither capitalists nor workers but a section of the working class alienated from its class roots. The 1936 book was Trotsky's primary work on Stalinism; he also called Stalinism a form of "Bonapartism" by analogy with Napoleon Bonaparte's capture of the French state after the revolution, and other writers later applied the Thermidor analogy to Khrushchev's de-Stalinization.
Examples
On 26 July 1794 (8 Thermidor), with the Terror contested and Robespierre accused of dictatorship by the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention, he delivered a speech that accused his adversaries without naming them and threatened them; the next day he was prevented from speaking and a decree of arrest was voted, and he was executed on 28 July 1794 together with Saint-Just, Couthon, Lebas and Robespierre the younger.
Examples of the White Terror and its agents: Fréron and Tallien organized bands of muscadins who clashed with Jacobins (notably 19 September 1794); the Jacobin Club was closed in November 1794; and in 1794–95 bands of 2,000–3,000 "Collets noirs" led by the marquis de Saint-Huruge beat passers-by. In 1795 the White Terror spread in south-eastern France (Rhône valley): the Compagnies de Jéhu at Lyon and du Soleil pursued and massacred Jacobins, republicans, constitutional priests, Protestants and political detainees in Lons-le-Saunier, Bourg, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Aix, Marseille, Toulon and Tarascon, often with the complicity of municipal and departmental authorities. Toulon Jacobins and their sympathizers were massacred at Tarascon and Marseille.