Thermidor

Thermidor, famous incident in the French Revolution, named after a summer month of the French Republican calendar (from July 20 to August 18), which took place on 9 Thermidor An II (July 27, 1794), when Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety were forcibly removed from power. Since the execution of Jacques-René Hébert and his extremist associates in March 1794 and of Georges Danton and his companions in April, Robespierre had been the unrivalled political leader. He passed laws intensifying the Reign of Terror. Between June 10 and July 27, around 1,500 people were guillotined. Robespierre also instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being in a special ceremony in which a statue of Atheism was burned. Continuing terror created apprehension, while the new religion encouraged mockery. The victory of the French army at Fleurus in Belgium on June 26 meant that the threat of invasion by counter-revolutionary forces was greatly reduced. It was asked if Robespierre was still necessary. Plots for his overthrow were devised. On 8 Thermidor (July 26), Robespierre spoke to the National Convention and said that further executions were necessary: but since he did not give the names of his targets, many felt that they were threatened, and deputies of all factions began to work together to topple him. The next day Paul Barras, Joseph Fouché, and other worried conspirators arranged that Jean-Lambert Tallien should interrupt proceedings and demand the arrest of Robespierre. Other accusers stood up to make further charges, and the President of the Convention, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, prevented Robespierre from speaking by ringing his bell. Finally Robespierre, with his lieutenants Louis Saint-Just and Georges Couthon, was arrested. During the night of 9-10 Thermidor an attempt was made to rescue Robespierre by soldiers of the Paris Commune, but he was recaptured by the forces of the Convention. In the struggle he was either wounded or attempted suicide, receiving a pistol shot which left a gaping hole in his jaw. However, he remained alive, and was guillotined on 10 Thermidor (July 28). Over 100 of his associates followed him over the next few days.

Thermidor marked the end of the Reign of Terror, and the restoration of the National Convention’s authority over that of the Committee of Public Safety. A “White Terror” against radical revolutionaries followed in the French Provinces. Thermidor also marked the end of revolutionary extremism and the beginning, with the Directory regime, of a more moderate phase of the Revolution and an experiment with a form of democratic government which ended when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799.