the fall of robespierre

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    AUGUST HISTORY TODAY  

    The Fall ofRobespierreThe momentous final days of the French revolutionary are wellknown and well documented. Yet, argues Colin Jones, many of

    the established ‘facts’ are myths that do not stand up to scrutiny.

    The decapitated headof Robespierre, woodengraving, 1794.

    THERMIDOR

    T

    HE FACTS ABOUT the overthrow of Maximilien

    Robespierre, leading figure in the French Revol-

    utionary Government’s Committee of Public

    Safety, on July 27th, 1794, or 9 Thermidor, Year IIin the Revolutionary Calendar, are well established. On this

     journée (day of Revolutionary action), right-wing elements

    within the national assembly, or Convention, organised a

    coup d’état against Robespierre and his closest allies in the

    hall of the Convention, located within the Tuileries palace

    (adjacent to the Louvre). These men at once set out to

    end the Terror, which Robespierre had conducted over the

    previous year. They instituted the so-called ‘Thermidorian

    Reaction’, which moved government policies away from

    the social and political radicalism espoused by Robespierre’s

    Revolutionary Government towards constitutional legal-

    ism and classically liberal economic policies. In the hours

    following the Thermidorian coup, Robespierre’s supporters

    in the Paris Commune (the city’s municipal government,

    housed in the present-day Hôtel de Ville) had sought to

    organise armed resistance against the Convention among

    the city’s sans-culottes, the street radicals who had been

    instrumental in bringing Robespierre to power during thecrisis months of 1793, when France had been wracked by

    civil and foreign war. But the Parisian popular movement

    proved to be marked by political indifference and apathy at

    this decisive moment. Shortly after 8pm, some 3,400

    The sans-culottes had been

    instrumental in bringingRobespierre to power during

    the crisis months of 1793

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    HISTORY TODAY   AUGUST

    THERMIDOR

    sans-culottes, mainly National Guardsmen from the citizen

    militias of each of the city’s 48 sections, along with over 30

    of their cannon, had gathered on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville

    after a call-up by the Commune. Though seemingly at that

    moment primed for action, by midnight the popular forces

    had scattered, speeded on their flight by a shower of rain,

    which dampened revolutionary ardour. The people of Paris

    preferred to go home to bed, it seemed, rather than stay upand fight for Robespierre’s cause. Shortly after midnight, the

    Convention’s National Guard, drawn from the bourgeois,

    western city neighbourhoods, attacked the Hôtel de Ville,

    in which Robespierre was holed up. In the mêlée accom-

    panying his arrest, Robespierre sought to commit suicide,

    managing only to blow a hole in the lower part of his cheek.

    He was guillotined the following evening, July 28th.

    Robespierre was certainly overthrown on 9 Thermidor

    and he was certainly guillotined on July 28th. But most of

    the other established ‘facts’ in the above account are either

    completely false or else require substantial qualification.

    Indeed the above paragraph contains no fewer than six

    myths about the journée – and one continuing conundrum.

    L ET US START WITH the conundrum, namely, of

    whether Robespierre did attempt suicide. Witness-

    es to the act either did not live to tell the tale – his

    co-conspirators were executed alongside him and

    were never interrogated about the facts of the day – or else

    are unreliable. The man who led the assault on the Hôtel

    de Ville, Convention deputy Léonard Bourdon, claimed

    that National Guardsman Charles André Méda (or Merda,

    a name he understandably chose to change) had fired the

    shot that incapacitated Robespierre. Merda is depicted in

    the most famous engraving of the Hôtel de Ville episode

    and, long after the event, his memoirs recounted his role in

    the day. However, that account is so full of self-aggrandis-ing exaggeration that his testimony seems fundamentally

    untrustworthy. In hundreds of accounts of the day, which

    I have located in, for example, the Archives parlementaires

    and the Archives nationales, Paris, as part of a wider project

    to write the history of the journée of 9 Thermidor, Merda’s

    name never occurs, save in occasional association withBourdon. If he really was the day’s hero, as he claimed, one

    would have expected others to accredit at least part of his

    story, which seems in fact to be largely fantastical. Against

    his candidature must also be weighed the fact that the story

    on the streets of Paris merely hours after the event was that

    Robespierre had indeed sought to take his own life. A much

    more plausible representation of this decisive moment in

    the Hôtel de Ville is an engraving by the Parisian sans-culotte 

    artist, Jean-Louis Prieur, which was until very recently

    believed to show the September prison massacres of 1792.

    On the shooting incident, the jury is still out and the conun-

    drum remains in place, but overall a botched suicide attempt

    seems the most likely conclusion.

    The jury is still out, butoverall a botched suicide

    attempt seems the most likelyconclusion

    Contemporsryportrait ofMaximilienRobespierre byLouis LeopoldBoilly.

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    AUGUST HISTORY TODAY  

    Engraving by

     Jean-Louis Prieurof Robespierreinside the Hôtelde Ville, July 27th,1794.

    If uncertainty still hovers over this part of the day, we

    can be pretty sure that most other ‘facts’ about the day in

    the above account of the day need substantial revision.

    The first myth has it that the deputies who toppled

    Robespierre were from the right wing of the Convention.

    In fact, the coup d’état was very largely concocted and

    conducted by the left-wing caucus of the assembly, the

    ‘Montagne’, as it was known. The ‘Montagnards’ within theassembly were the deputies ideologically closest to Robes-

    pierre and by 9 Thermidor, they were feeling threatened by

    the increasingly erratic behaviour of their colleague. On 8

    Thermidor, Robespierre had come into the Convention and

    made a long and vehement speech. It had been six weeks or

    so since he had actually attended the assembly (and he had

    absented himself from the meetings of the Committee of

    Public Safety for much the same period). The speech was a

    wild, mildly unbalanced and swingeing attack on the way

    the revolution was going. Robespierre voiced his fears for

    the revolution’s future in such a way that it seemed clear

    that he wished to conduct a purge of the government and of

    the Convention itself. When asked to name the individuals

    that he had in his sights, however, Robespierre airily decl-ined to do so. In this he was ill-advised, for it meant that

    no-one within the assembly, save a small cohort of his most

    dedicated supporters, could feel safe. Later that evening,

    Robespierre repeated his speech in the Jacobin Club, very

    much his stronghold at this time, and in the ensuing debate

    named two Montagnard colleagues from the Committee

    of Public Safety as his principal targets, Collot d’Herbois

    and Billaud-Varenne. The two men were present in the

    club and sought vainly to answer back. Shouted down, they

    were driven out of the club with cries of ‘To the guillotine!’

    ringing in their ears.

    IT WAS THUS little wonder that both Collot and Billaud

    should be at the heart of the action in the Convention the

    next day, as concerted efforts were made to silence Robe-

    spierre and to order his arrest. Those who appear to have

    been most closely involved in the plot alongside them were

    other radical Montagnards, including Tallien, Fréron and

    Fouché – men whom Robespierre disliked because of the

    violent ‘ultra-revolutionary’ repression of provincial dissent

    that they had conducted in 1793 and early 1794. Right-

    wing deputies in the Convention had been talking secretly

    for some time about wanting to get rid of Robespierre, but

    without much sign of purposive action. It was Robespierre’s

    wild accusations on 8 Thermidor that drove them pell-mellinto the arms of Montagnard deputies, with whom they

    shared little ideological ground. In all, 33 of the 35 deputies

    who are known to have spoken on the two sessions of

    the assembly on 9 Thermidor were in fact Montagnards.

    Right-wing deputies ensured the success of the Montagnard

    coup only by allowing events to unfold without protest or

    intervention. When Robespierre seemed to gesture directly

    to them for their support, as the attack on him in the Con-

    vention hall shaped up, they simply sat on their hands.

    EVEN BEFORE ROBESPIERRE’S head had hit the guillotine

    basket at around 7pm on 10 Thermidor, a further falsehood

    was visibly taking form. This – our second myth – was thatRobespierre had been principally responsible for the Terror

    through which the Committee of Public Safety had ruled

    the country. He certainly was a very powerful figure. His

    chilling rhetoric had been critical in imposing much of

    the programme of Terror on the Convention, notably the

    General Maximum on prices, the execution of political

    opponents including Danton, Camille Desmoulins and

    Hébert, the notorious ‘Law of 22 Priairial’, which had made

    it even easier for the Revolutionary Tribunal to convict

    and the Cult of the Supreme Being. Yet he was not the

    Terror’s sole artisan. For the previous year he had been

    only one among 12 members of the Committee of Public

    Safety, several of them imposing figures themselves, and all

    committee decisions were collective. Indeed Robespierrepersonally signed a relatively small number of the Com-

    mittee’s decrees. As the number of executions ordered by

    the Revolutionary Tribunal increased in June and July 1794,

    moreover, Robespierre was actually absent from the Com-

    mittee’s meetings. On 9 Thermidor he was attacked less as

    the sole director of Terror than as someone whose prestige

    and behaviour threatened to spin Revolutionary Govern-

    ment out of control, though in what directions seemed

    unclear, given his delphic speech on 8 Thermidor. From that

    moment onwards, however, it suited all sides among his

    assailants to magnify Robespierre’s responsibility, allowing

    him thus to carry the can for the excesses of the Terror. This

    helped to explain the creation of a ‘Robespierre-the-

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    HI STORY TODAY   AUGUST

    THERMIDOR

    dictator’ myth, which has remained surprisingly tenacious.

    The fact that the 9 Thermidor coup was led from the

    Left rather than the Right determined what happened

    once Robespierre was out of the way. Myth three about the

     journée has it that the Convention immediately initiated the

    Thermidorian Reaction, shifting government policy to the

    Right. In fact, as the composition of the anti-Robespierre

    plotters suggests, many in government expected the Terror

    to continue and indeed to proceed more smoothly now that

    Robespierre’s influence had been removed. Collot d’Herbois

    and Billaud-Varenne, for example, stayed at the helm within

    the Committee of Public Safety. It took time for right-wing

    reaction to gather speed – a process that was immeasurably

    helped by the return to the assembly in December 1794 of

    moderate deputies proscribed by the Montagnards in the

    course of 1793. The reintegration of these men – roughly 80

    in total, all nursing a sense of grievance against the Revolu-

    tionary Government – altered the political complexion of

    the Convention in a way that opened the floodgates of reac-

    tion. The component parts of the programme and personnel

    of the Revolutionary Government had already started to be

    disassembled and the process accelerated. The extent of the

    ‘The FrenchPeople, or theRegime ofRobespierre’,

    France, 1790s.

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    AUGUST HISTORY TODAY  

    the way for an even more dogmatic assertion of economic

    liberalism. By then, deputies saw in Collot d’Herbois and

    Billaud-Varenne less the men who had toppled Robespierre

    than the guilty souls who had been his accomplices over the

    previous year of Terror. They were sentenced to deportation

    to French Guiana.

    THE THERMIDORIAN REACTION was thus a

    slow-burning phenomenon which took time toestablish itself. Further complicating the steady

    drift to the Right was the fact that some of the

    most vocal ‘Thermidorians’ attacking the legacy of Revolu-

    tionary Government in Year II were individuals who, on 8

    Thermidor, Robespierre had in his sights for being too vio-

    lently left-wing : individuals like Tallien, Fréron and Fouché.

    Viewed as extremist (if still Montagnard) radicals before

    9 Thermidor, Fréron and Tallien, for example, switched

    track and led the drift to the Right, marshalling the city’s

    bourgeois youths into the gangs of jeunesse dorée who

    launched violent street attacks on former Jacobins and

    ex-sectional personnel. Renouncing the universal male

    suffrage that had been the crowning institution of the (in

    fact never-implemented) Constitution of 1793, the Thermi-dorians accepted for the new Constitution of Year III (1795)

    a property franchise which would take the vote from most

    erstwhile sans-culottes.

    Had those Parisian sans-culottes been quite such political

    push-overs on the journée of 9 Thermidor as they are usually

    accounted? Myth four regarding the day has it that a shower

    of rain played a key role at a critical juncture in encouraging

    Robespierre’s sans-culottes supporters from staying in the

    streets late at night and staying loyal to his cause. This story,

    much repeated in accounts of the day, is simply false. None

    of the hundreds of micro-narratives of the day that I have

    consulted mention rain. The meteorological data recorded

    at the Paris Observatoire (at the southern end of what is

    now the Boulevard Saint-Michel) is crystal clear. There was

    a mild westerly wind and the day was rather overcast and

    warm: 180C at midday and almost 150 at 10.15pm. But with

    the exception of a light shower in the morning at 9.15am,well before even the overthrow of Robespierre, the day was

    bone dry. No rain fell to test the fidelity of the sans-culottes,

    save in the imaginations of many of the day’s historians.

    This convenient contributing factor to the story of

    Parisian sans-culottes apathy and indifference on the day can

    thus safely be discounted. So, indeed, can Parisian popular

    apathy and indifference, which constitute the fifth myth

    about the day. The picture of sans-culottes demobilisation,

    which appears in almost all accounts, turns out to be false.

    Doubtless, there were cases of individuals who went off to

    bars and taverns or back to their homes and beds. But the

    numerous – and largely neglected – accounts of the day

    that exist show that the vast majority of the men on the

    Had those Parisian sans-culottes been quite such

     political push-overs on the journée of 9 Thermidor asthey are usually accounted?

    powers of the Committee of Public Safety were reduced

    and its members purged. The Paris Jacobin Club was closed

    down altogether and radical sans-culottes driven out of local

    committees within the city’s 48 administrative sections.

    The Revolutionary Tribunal was closed down. The General

    Maximum that had kept food prices low was removed, with

    the deregulated economy creating great hardship for the

    popular classes. When in March and April 1795 there was

    armed protest in Paris against the political and economic

    policies of the Convention – the journées of Germinal and

    Prairial – the deputies initiated a fierce repression, clearing

    Top: Jean-MarieCollot d’Herbois,French, 18thcentury.

     Above: JacquesNicolasBillaud-Varenne,by Jean BaptisteGreuze, c.1790.

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    HISTORY TODAY   AUGUST

    THERMIDOR

    Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at 8pm seemingly in the Com-

    mune’s cause stayed on active duty and simply passed over

    to support the Convention against Robespierre. The city’s

    48 sections acted, too, as mobilisation centres, drawing

    additional recruits into the ranks of the pro- Convention

    National Guard. Orders from the assembly to neighbour-

    hood authorities late in the evening saw half of sectional

    forces patrolling their neighbourhoods to ensure that law

    and order were upheld, with the other half detailed to rallyat the Place du Carrousel outside the Tuileries palace which

    housed the Convention. By then the assembly had also

    placed its forces under the orders of the deputy, Barras. As

    a result of this impromptu call-up, Barras commanded an

    active force far larger – certainly by several multiples – than

    the number of men who had been outside the Hôtel de

    Ville at 8pm.

    At some time after midnight, Barras determined to use

    his forces not only in a defensive stance around the Conven-tion but also as an attacking army against the Commune.

    From 1am, or just after, two citizen’s armies under Barras’

    command, each thousands strong, wended their way in a

    pincer movement from the Tuileries eastward towards the

    Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. They arrived to find it with scarcely

    an individual to be seen. Not a shot needed to be fired

    before the advance guard stormed into the Commune itself

    to confront Robespierre and his allies in their lair.

    Myth six about the journée of 9 Thermidor has it that

    Barras’ troops, who seized Robespierre and his accom-

    plices, were drawn essentially from the more prosperous

    sections of the west of the city. It is certainly true that

    the propinquity of many of these sections to the Tuileries

    Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of Londonand the author of The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris  (Oxford

    University Press, 2014).

    FURTHER READING

    Françoise Brunel, Thermidor: la chute de Robespierre

    (Editions Complexe, 1989)

    Philippe de Carbonnières, ‘Le sans-culotte Prieur’, 

     Annales historiques de la Révolution française (2009)

    Colin Jones, ‘The Overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre

    and thre “Indifference” of the People’, American Historical

    Review (2014)

    palace was such that they had been among the first that

    the Convention mobilised. But the forces that actually

    launched the attack on the Commune were a cross-city

    sampling of sections. One of the most prominent delega-

    tions, for example, came from the Gravilliers section, one

    of the poorest, which had always been among the most

    radical sections in the city. The idea that Robespierre was

    toppled by a bourgeois militia of prosperous Parisians while

    depoliticised sans-culottes slumbered in their beds is simplyuntrue. Robespierre fell to a socially hybrid army. It would

    not be wrong to say that it was the massed forces of Parisian

    sans-culotterie who toppled him.

    IT IS ODD THAT a big political event like the

    day of 9 Thermidor has attracted so much

    mythology and misrepresentation. It is all

    the odder in that the day is exceptionally

    well-documented. Barras ordered each of the 48

    sections to produce multiple accounts of what

    had happened within them on the days of 8, 9

    and 10 Thermidor and these voluminous

    accounts still exist. So too do numerous individ-

    ual police dossiers of arrested individuals, plusthe background documentation brought togeth-

    er by a Convention committee charged on 10

    Thermidor, Year II to produce an official history

    of the day. Headed by the moderate deputy

    Edme-Bonaventure Courtois, this official

    history was presented to the Convention –

    almost as an anniversary gift – on 8 Thermidor,

    Year III (July 26th, 1795). Courtois’ account

    is detailed and thorough, but it has a decided

    ideological parti- pris which is curiously at

    odds with the documentation that his com-

    mittee had amassed. One full year after the

    anti-Robespierre coup d’état, Courtois wasevidently endeavouring to tell the Thermidorian

    reactionaries what he thought by then they

    wanted to hear. He thus vaunted the role of the

    Convention as a whole – and almost completely

    effaced the role of both the people of Paris and

    the Montagnard deputies in securing the day’s

    victory. This was quite a rhetorical achievement

    and, unfortunately, a highly influential one, for Courtois’

    official history has guided the pens of generations of histo-

    rians ever since. If we wish to demythologise the history of

    one of the most epochal days in the whole Revolutionary

    decade, we must return to the archives.

    Membership card

    of a  sans-culottes club fromsouthern France.

    If we wish to demythologise the historyof one of the most epochal days in the wholeRevolutionary decade, we must returnto the archives