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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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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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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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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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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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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
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