Two Days to Remember

The 230th Anniversary of Thermidor, the End of the Reign of Terror

Throughout Europe the day was Sunday, July 27, 1794, with two exceptions: the Russian Empire, where it was, per the Julian Calendar, July 14th, and France, where the official date was Mulberry Day, the ninth of the month of Thermidor in Year II of the Republic.

When the Sun rose that day, the most feared man in France was Maximilien Robespierre “the Incorruptible”, the apostle of Virtue enforced by Terror. He had lately been inattentive to immediate matters of state. He had been devoting his energies to warning against the counterrevolutionary plots that, he believed and insisted, enveloped the Republic and penetrated the innermost counsels of its government. In a dramatic two-hour speech on Eighth Thermidor, delivered to both that day’s session of the National Convention and a late night meeting of his center of power, the Jacobin Club, he insinuated that members of the Committee of Public Safety itself were part of the “foreign plot” to murder the Incorruptible and restore the Ancien Régime. He had announced that he would deliver the decisive hammer blow against the conspiracy when the Convention convened today.

By sunset of the following day, Maximilien Robespierre was dead, the victim not of an English-paid assassin but of the National Convention itself, where a well-planned coup, led by the presiding officer and supported by men who had hitherto been his allies, prevented him from delivering his J’accuse. Instead of the anticipated denunciation of “traitors”, the Convention heard denunciations of Robespierre as a contemporary Catiline, Caesar and Cromwell. It ordered his arrest, along with his younger brother and his most prominent acolytes. A tumultuous evening and night ensued. An insurrection in favor of the condemned men failed. While trying to escape, Robespierre was shot in the jaw. When he was arraigned before the Convention on Tenth Thermidor, he could only mumble. He requested pen and paper to write a defense; they were denied him. That evening he died by the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, where Louis XVI had suffered martyrdom a year and a half earlier.

In revolutionary mythology, “Thermidor” is a synonym for reaction and “Thermidorian” a term of abuse. They ought to be honorifics. What Thermidor reacted against was brutal tyranny of the worst type, for the tyrants were motivated by self-righteous confidence in the justice of mock trials and summary executions of those whom they identified as the enemies of Virtue. July 27th and 28th ought to be days of celebration by all those who honor the Rule of Law.

Perhaps Thermidor would be better remembered if its aftermath had been more fortunate. The men who overthrew Robespierre were, by and large, his intellectual kindred. Like him, they wished to create a new society “unburdened by what has been”.

Their first impulse was retribution against those Robespierrists who hadn’t changed their coats quickly enough. The “White Terror” was on a far smaller scale than its predecessor but was no more observant of due process of law. Then, when revenge was sated, the new masters of the Republic constructed out of airy theorizing the “Constitution of the Year III”, a masterwork of treating men like mechanisms. Executive power was vested in a five-man Directory, which was granted enough power for its members to profit corruptly from tenure in office but not enough to deal competently with the challenges that faced the Revolution. Bonaparte was the natural successor.

France’s situation pre-Thermidor bears a certain, albeit very far from exact, resemblance to America’s today. “Cancel culture” does not murder its perceived enemies, but it does seek to silence and impoverish them in the name of protecting the body politic from the subtle conspiratorial arts of purveyors of “disinformation”. Its “whole of society” approach to enforcing the contemporary analogue to Virtue (“distributed totalitarianism”, as I have called it) is subtler than the Committee of Public Safety’s web of informers and deputies-on-mission but also more intrusive and effective.

There are signs today, as there were preceding Ninth Thermidor, that the system of intellectual control is less secure than it seems. As happened 230 years ago, the dominant powers may be overthrown by a sudden “preference cascade”, the realization by individuals who believe themselves to be isolated dissidents that they in fact are the majority. The transition will be perilous. The French Republic of 1794 was at war with the other Great Powers of Europe, a war that it had initiated to assert “the Rights of Man and the Citizen” throughout the continent. The American Republic of 2024 is engaged in a more diffuse war that it did nothing to provoke, unless its mere existence is deemed a provocation, but it is a war that cannot be won by the advent of a Bonaparte. We must hope that the modern Thermidorians will be wiser than the originals.

Further Reading: Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris is an hour-by-hour account of Thermidor, based on hundreds of first person accounts collected by Convention officials in the days after the events.