Thermidorian Reaction

12 Key excerpts on "Thermidorian Reaction"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Companion to the French Revolution

  • Peter McPhee(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  PART VII

  Searching for Stability, 1794–99

  Passage contains an image

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Thermidorian Reaction

  LAURA MASON

  In the final volume of his magisterial history of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet described Maximilien Robespierre’s defeat on 9 Thermidor II (27 July 1794) and the agonizing death that followed. Then he came to a full stop. “Breathe,” he counseled readers, “let us avert our eyes” (Mathiez 2010 [1929]: 7). Convinced that this fatal moment did not merely end the Terror but prepared a reversal of the Revolution’s greatest achievements, he would go no further. His successors advanced to take fuller measure of the Thermidorian Reaction, the fifteen months that separated Robespierre’s defeat from the Directory’s inauguration, but they shared Michelet’s conviction that here the Revolution doubled back on itself. So, for a century and more, historians confined themselves to debating the scope and merits of that reversal. Marxists like Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul agreed that the Reaction returned France to the liberal aspirations of 1789 and collectively regretted this repudiation of republican social revolution (Lefebvre 1964 [1957]; Mathiez 2010 [1929]; Soboul 1975 [1962]). The revisionist François Furet distinguished himself by extending the Reaction’s reach, to argue with Tocquevillian ambition that it resumed a centuries-long consolidation of the administrative state, and by celebrating Thermidor as a liberation, claiming that it freed civil society from the ideological servitude of the Terror (Furet 1981; Furet and Richet 1970). So fixed was the notion of reversal that no one offered a fundamentally new diagnosis until the late twentieth century, when the Polish philosopher Bronislaw Baczko argued that the Thermidorian Reaction did not reverse the Revolution but posed the complex question of how to end it (Baczko 1989, 1994).

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  A Short History of the French Revolution

  • Jeremy D. Popkin(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The overthrow of Robespierre on 9 thermidor did not immediately result in a change of political institutions. The “thermidorians,” as the deputies of the Convention who survived Robespierre came to be known, continued to govern the country for another fifteen months. In October 1795, a new constitution drafted by the Convention went into effect. The new government consisted of a bicameral legislature and a five-man executive committee known as the Directory. The political leaders of the Directory regime, which governed France until 1799, were mostly former Convention deputies, and the policies they followed largely continued those adopted after thermidor, so historians usually treat the period from 1794 to 1799 as a unit.

  The thermidorian and Directory governments both claimed to be consolidating the essential achievements of the Revolution, while avoiding the excesses committed during the Reign of Terror. Liberty and equality were still official slogans, the government remained republican in form, and the revolutionary calendar, which glorified the Convention’s proclamation of the Republic in September 1792, remained in use. The post-thermidorian Republic carried on the war begun in 1792, kept up the struggle against the Catholic Church, and maintained the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The biggest difference in policy between this period and the one that preceded it was in the relationship between the government and the lower classes. Sobered by what they saw as the consequences of unlimited democracy, the thermidorians openly worked to establish a political regime dominated by the wealthy and educated. Only in this way, they believed, could social order be reconciled with a republican form of government.

  The Thermidorian Reaction

  Initially it was not clear whether the Convention deputies who had overthrown Robespierre also meant to end the Terror. Many of the leading thermidorian conspirators, such as Fouché, one of the most prominent activists in the de-Christianization movement of 1793, and the deputy Tallien, who had publicly justified the September massacres and directed the repression of the federalist revolt in Bordeaux, had been active in the Terror. But thermidor unleashed a reaction against the Terror and the radical Revolution that soon escaped the plotters’ control. For the next five years, the question of how to repudiate the worst excesses committed in 1793–1794 without endangering the Revolution as a whole and all of those who had participated in the revolutionary government dominated French life.

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  Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799

  • P. McPhee(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  8 Settling Scores: The Thermidorian Reaction, 1794–95 163 Wherever they lived, the experience of French people in the years between July 1792 and July 1794 had been unimaginable. In some parts of the coun- try, particularly the Vendée and the hinterland of ‘federalist’ cities such as Lyon and Marseille, these had been years of mass killing and suffering. In solidly pro-revolutionary areas, the years of military crisis had been ones of ceaseless demands for men and food for the armies at the same time as the once immutable authority of King and Pope and, at a local level, of seigneur, priest and local notable was repudiated. Success in the mass mobilization of the nation’s resources for the war by June 1794 finally exposed the divisions in the popular alliance of the Year II. The geographic incidence of executions until March 1794 had been concen- trated in departments where the military threat had been greatest; but now, as the military threat receded, the number of executions for political opposi- tion increased. A speech to the Convention by Robespierre on 8 Thermidor Year II/26 July 1794, with his vague threat to unnamed deputies, provided the motivation for reaction from those fearful that he intended to call them to account for their bloody repression of revolts in Lyon, Toulon and Marseille. The execution of Robespierre and his associates on the twenty-eighth marked the end of a régime which had had the twin aims of saving the Revolution and creating a new society. It had achieved the former, at horrific cost, but the vision of the virtuous, self-abnegating civic warrior embodying the new society had palled for most people within the Convention and across the country. The expression ‘the system of the Terror’ was first used two days later. The year of the Terror had etched divisions deep into French society.

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  The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

  A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia

  • Bailey Stone(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Such a decision regarding periodization would resultantly leave us with an English “Thermidor” more or less coterminous with the Protectorate of 1653–59, a French Thermidor extending from the Convention’s final year (1794–95) to the Bonapartist coup of November 1799, and a Russian Thermidor extending from early 1921 to, say, 1928 or 1929. Proceeding (for the sake of argument) on this basis, we may then find ourselves, as comparativists, concerned to substantiate three propositions that go far toward defining these final stages of the upheavals under review. (1) The Thermidorian eras sometimes depicted in textbooks as little more than “reactions to Terror” turn out, on closer scrutiny, to have been much more complicated, in some respects, than once thought. (2) Ther- midorian geopolitics involved one of two possible courses of action: whereas the French embarked on unabashed expansionism, England (under Cromwell) and Russia (under Lenin and his successors) followed more cautiously crafted, opportunistic foreign policies. (3) In all three countries, those we may refer to as “late-revolutionary” protagonists found themselves grappling with crises of revolutionary legitimacy within long-established contexts of interrelated for- eign and domestic pressures bearing on their respective states. The Complexities and Contradictions of Thermidor Since the term Thermidor drew its initial inspiration from the French revolu- tionary experience, it might be best to explore the complexities and contradic- tions of this phenomenon first of all in connection with the post Robespierrist French Republic. We can then cast our comparative/analytic glance forward to the Russia of 1921–28, and finally back to the England of 1653–59.

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  The French Revolution

  Faith, Desire, and Politics

  • Noah Shusterman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  After the violence of Germinal and Prairial III, French politics during these five years were stable if compared to the five preceding years, although that was a low bar to clear. But the government was never able to capture the enthusiasm of even a significant portion of the nation. The men who led the governments during this time were eager to avoid extremes. They did not want a return to monarchy; nor did they want a return to the Terror. In the aftermath of Robespierre’s fall, the character of Thermidorian politics began to take shape. This was a government committed to some form of republic, one that maintained many of the gains of the first years of the Revolution while hoping to avoid a repeat of the Terror. It remained far to the left of anything that had existed in the first few years of the Revolution. Even with the surviving Girondins reinstated, it was still a Convention dominated by men who were committed to the cause of republican France. It was also a Convention dominated by men who, in January 1793, had voted for the death of the king. Of all events from the first five years of the Revolution—from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of Robespierre, passing through the revolt of August 10, the September Massacres, the expulsion of the Girondins—it was the execution of Louis XVI that became the touchstone for political participation during Thermidor, what Furet called “the demarcation line between the sure and the unsure.” 14 For the men in the government, their goal was to move the Revolution forward, preventing any return of the monarchy while emphasizing the protection of property and preventing the crowd from influencing politics as it had in earlier years. There was not, however, a stable or strong enough middle upon whose support the government could rely

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  The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie

  An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850

  • Sarah Maza, Sarah C MAZA(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The post-Thermidorean years, when political passions be g an to recede and leaders attempted to normalize revolutionary g ains, are a g ood place to explore the lon g er-term cultural le g acy of the Revolution’s more heroic and violent days. IN THE WAKE OF THE TERROR: PATRICIANS, PLEBEIANS, BARBARIANS The re g ime which followed the Rei g n of Terror in 1794 and lasted un-til Napoleon’s coup in 1799 is sometimes known in France as la république bourgeoise, in contradistinction to the previous Jacobin re-g ime. 19 Where the national leadership was concerned, the new re g ime was no more and no less bour g eois than its revolutionary predeces-sors. In reaction a g ainst the violent popular uprisin g s of the sprin g of 1795, the men of the National Convention did draw up a new constitu-tion which broke with revolutionary precedent by settin g up two le g is-latures (the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients) and a five-man executive Directory. But the members of the new as-semblies were no different sociolo g ically from their predecessors (they included, in fact, many who had served in previous assemblies): they hailed from the educated property-ownin g classes, and two-thirds to three-quarters were lawyers and other professionals. 20 What did distin g uish the politicians of the Convention from their predecessors in the Revolution was an open hostility to the g oals and institutions of radical popular politics. The tone was set, for the Thermidorean period, by the events of the Sprin g of 1795 known as the Germinal and Prairial uprisin g s. Already dispirited by the fall of the Jacobin leaders, the Parisian workin g poor were further stricken in the winter of 1794–95 by one of the worst frosts on record. Govern-ment bread subsidies, which had staved off the worst of famine in the winter, were runnin g out by sprin g , and the poor felt utterly betrayed by the men who had brou g ht down Robespierre.

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  Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

  Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals in France

  • Arthur McCalla(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 From Critique of Religion to Religious Policy

  The decade from 1794 to 1804 – or in political terms, the fraught period from the overthrow of the Jacobins through the Directory and the Consulate to the establishment of the First French Empire – brought the Idéologues to the threshold of political power. At the same time, they never renounced their critical perspective and, by the end of this decade, once again found themselves in the ranks of the opposition.104 This chapter traces the Idéologues’ attempts to convert their critique of religion into government policy. It necessarily involves some discussion of political events and structures.

  THERMIDOR AND THE EARLY DIRECTORY

  With its overthrow of the Jacobins, the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794), ended the Terror and revoked most of its exceptional measures. The Thermidorian Convention then set to work on a new constitution that would consolidate the key achievements of the early French Revolution and restore the individual rights that had been effaced during the Terror while restricting the political rights of the poorest classes and repudiating Jacobin excesses. The resulting Constitution of Year III (1795) endowed the new regime of the Directory, which took power in October 1795 after national elections, with a bicameral legislature and an executive of five directors chosen from the legislature. The directors, one of whom would be replaced by lot each year, possessed considerable authority over administration, foreign affairs, and the armed forces but lacked control over finances and had few recourses to counter opposition from legislators. The system of five directors, in fact, represented a deliberate attempt to safeguard against dictatorship by diluting executive power.105

  The Idéologues emerged from the Terror as an influential body whose moderate republican, anti-clerical views aligned them with the Thermidorian political leadership. They held legislative and upper-level administrative and diplomatic positions under the Directory and more generally advised the regime on a range of policy matters.106 The Terror, however, had confirmed for them the wisdom of Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s and Nicolas de Condorcet’s caution that only after the spread of enlightenment to the popular classes could the latter be entrusted with political rights. The Terror, like the Jacobin conception of the general will, in this view, was not an expression of revolutionary values at all but the result of false, even counter-revolutionary, conceptions of popular sovereignty. The Idéologues referred to their alternative political ideal – which they understood as restoring the true values of 1789 – as the democracy of enlightened reason, or what the people would want if they were sufficiently enlightened to recognize that what was best for society as a whole was what was best for themselves as individuals. The Idéologues, in short, viewed equality as a long-term goal, not an immediate right.107 Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s allusion to “equality maintained to the extent that it is possible and useful” encapsulates their view at this time.108

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  The Afterlives of the Terror

  Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France

  • Ronen Steinberg(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  If Thermidor marked the “ending of the Terror” rather than the end of the Terror—that is, a process rather than an event—it was to be an elusive ending. 135 This chapter situated this understanding of the Terror as a difficult past in a broad context, beyond the politics of the Thermidorian Reaction. Collective attitudes to mass violence and cataclysmic events have been changing in the transition from the early modern to the modern period. Secularization and the rise of the public sphere, among other processes of change, led to a view of catastrophes as political and social, rather than theological, events, and created new arenas of debate and contestation, where the effects of such events on the social order, as well as on individual psyches, could be discussed in relative freedom from the imposition of the state or the church. For its part, the French Revolution generated debates on the relationship between violence and the social order. The views of violence that emerged from these debates were ambivalent. Violence was seen as necessary for the creation of a new order, and at the same time, as having the potential to be its very undoing. After 9 Thermidor, this ambivalence rendered representations of the violence of the Terror problematic. Prudhomme’s work was an attempt to create an immediate history of this violence, but the textual topography of his book—its fragmentary nature—and the preoccupation with lists and classification, also suggested an inherent difficulty to read the social reality he purported to describe. The naming of the Terror as a difficult past would have profound implications on questions of accountability, redress, and remembrance in postrevolutionary France.

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  To guarantee that its policies were being implemented, the Committee of Public Safety dispatched specially empowered “representatives-on-mission” from Paris to the provinces and armies for the purpose of reviewing the actions of officials and generals. Failure to satisfy these deputies could precipitate the “swift, severe, and inflexible justice” of the guillotine. Ironically, the Revolution, which began as the most liberating movement in history, had now degenerated into the most pervasive and coercive dictatorship yet known.

  Although frequently criticized for its excesses, the Terror had significant positive results. All things considered, it achieved great success in surmounting the crises confronting France and saving the nation. By the end of 1793, foreign armies had been expelled from French territories and Republican armies had seized the offensive and carried the Revolution to other countries. Meanwhile, all internal rebellions were defeated or contained, and the economy was stabilized and organized for huge improvements in productivity. In the process, a surge of patriotic pride, passionate idealism, and selfless community spirit galvanized French society.

  Indeed, the dramatic success of the Terror led to the final power struggle among the more radical revolutionaries in the spring and summer of 1794. Maximilien Robespierre, the dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety, purged moderates who desired an end to the Terror and radicals who wished to promote more socialist and egalitarian policies until his own ambitions and excesses precipitated his downfall and execution on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor according to the revolutionary calendar). The ensuing Thermidorian Reaction dismantled some of the measures and institutions of the Terror, while returning the First Republic to a moderate or even conservative course.

  During the Revolution’s last five years, the first theorist to espouse communism as later developed by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin appeared. He was François-Noel Babeuf, who called himself Gracchus in honor of the ancient Roman Republic’s reforming brothers; his plot to topple the government was called the Conspiracy of the Equals. Babeuf’s most influential idea called for the seizure of power in a coup d’état by a small, secretive, tightly knit, and well-organized band of dedicated revolutionaries, who would then impose a dictatorship on society until the uneducated popular masses could develop widespread appreciation of and support for their policies. Babeuf and his followers hoped to abolish private property and to distribute the necessities of life equally to all. Furthermore, the Babouvists devised innovative tactics: secret and separate cells of members, code-named agents, infiltration of enemy organizations, and subversion of military and civilian authorities. Their plans, however, were betrayed; Babeuf and his comrades were arrested in May 1796, and he was executed a year later. Yet his goals and methods would live on in the careers of future revolutionaries and the organizations they created.

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  Liberty or Death

  The French Revolution

  • Peter McPhee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SETTLING SCORES

  THE THERMIDORIAN REACTION, 1794–95

  T HE THERMIDORIANS WERE HARDENED MEN WHO HAD LIVED through fifteen months of fearful apprehension, and they were determined that their experience would not be repeated.1 These men, the new majority in the Convention, were former Girondins, the ‘Plain’, and the anti-Robespierrist Jacobins. Their ‘Thermidorian regime’ in place from July 1794 was certainly republican, but driven above all else by the need to end the Revolution, most obviously by suppressing the sources of instability represented by the Jacobins and sans-culottes. In seeking to end revolutionary upheaval, they unleashed ferocious reaction against those blamed for the perceived excesses of what was now called ‘the Terror’, and a counter-reaction from those seeking to protect what had been won by sacrifice and virtue in 1793–94. It was a time of retribution, despair and some optimism for a settled future (Fig. 30 ).

  One of the first new members of the Committee of Public Safety was Jean-Lambert Tallien, among those most active in the overthrow of the Robespierrists, and under suspicion for having been too influenced in Bordeaux by his lover, the former noblewoman Thérésia Cabarrus. Tallien, when just twenty-six years old, had instigated with Claude-Alexandre Ysabeau a bloodily punitive repression of federalism in Bordeaux in August 1793, but now he appealed to the Convention one year later to dismantle all the evils of the Terror: ‘this was Robespierre’s system; he was the one who put it into practice with the help of a few subordinates.… The Convention was a victim of it, never an accomplice.’ Those who suggested that the Convention should take some responsibility were in fact guilty of sharing in the ‘monster’ Robespierre’s ‘infernal system’.2 Tallien arranged for the release of Cabarrus from prison; they married in December 1794 and Thérésia gave birth to a daughter, named Thermidor. Indeed, Thérésia herself was often called ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’. Those closest to Robespierre, such as Rosalie Jullien, whose young son Jules had confronted Tallien in Bordeaux when an agent for the Committee of Public Safety, now had to appeal obsequiously to Cabarrus as a mother and a woman linked by ‘the natural sensitivity of our sex’ to secure Jules’ release from prison.3

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  The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France

  • Suzanne Desan(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  The con-servative context of the Thermidorian Reaction lent power and credence to this upswell of dissatisfaction, even as court cases continued apace and many family members continued to support the changes. This chapter shifts the focus from proponents of family innovation to its opponents. For their part, revolutionary leaders during Thermidor and the Directory were keenly aware of the social discontent over family reform: they debated family laws repeatedly and discussed—yet again—two more unsuccessful 250 / Reconstituting the Social after the Terror versions of the Civil Code. They peppered their speeches with references to the provincial reception of reforms, often based on impressions gleaned from petitions supporting or opposing the laws. Between 1795 and 1799, the representatives changed only the most radical aspects of the existing laws: they abolished the retroactive clauses of inheritance laws, dismantled the family courts, and made divorce slightly harder to attain. In many ways, the deputies moved haltingly, hesitant to disassemble wholesale the egalitarian and individualist thrust of family reform. Yet through their recurrent de-bates in this era, they formulated key conceptual foundations for the even-tual Civil Code. Finally, with the coming of Napoleon, French lawmakers fundamentally altered the family reforms of the Revolution and produced a unified Civil Code—one whose family laws bore a remarkable resemblance to many of the demands made by the angry petitioners of the mid 1790s.

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  Léonard Bourdon

  The Career of a Revolutionary, 1754-1807

  • Michael J. Sydenham(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  Quick to perceive that the fall of Robespierre was generally regarded as the end of the Terror, these men exploited the new, if unofficial, freedom of the press. They first condoned and then actively encouraged the emergence and brutality of those dandified draft dodgers known as la jeunesse doree, who first abused and then assaulted sansculottes as buveurs du sang. Above all, they constantly played on the general fear that the Monta-gnards, the Jacobins, and the sons-culottes might again combine to renew the Terror. Thus, these men, to whom the name Thermidorians most appropriately applies, and many more, such as Merlin de Thionville, Reubell, Legendre, and Bourdon of the Oise, who for one reason or another rallied to the reaction, gradually became predomi-nant in the final months of 1794. To them, the survival of Monta-gnards such as Barere, Billaud-Varenne, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier, and, In Adversity (July to November 1 794) / 247 at another level, Leonard Bourdon, who did not abjure their past beliefs and actions, or at least quietly defect to the new majority, natu-rally became particularly obnoxious, for their existence seemed to be both a potential danger and a perpetual condemnation of their own self-centred apostasy. Although Bourdon clashed with Freron as early as August 4, when he objected to the latter's inane proposal to demolish the Hotel de Ville of Paris, 3 he is not again recorded as addressing the Convention until mid-September. If, as may be presumed, he shared the general attitude of the staunchest Montagnards during these formative weeks, then he would have welcomed the initial reduction of the power of the authoritarian Robespierrist regime and the interlude of apparent concord that ensued—a time perhaps symbolized by the repeal of the ban on his own dreadful play, Le tombeau des imposteurs.

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