Thermidorian reaction meaning

The Thermidorian Reaction was a coup d’état during the French Revolution resulting in a Thermidorian regime characterized by the violent elimination of its perceived opponents.

Learning Objective

Describe the events of the Thermidorian Reaction

Key Points

• The Thermidorian Reaction was a coup d’état within the French Revolution against the leaders of the Jacobin Club who dominated the Committee of Public Safety. It was triggered by a vote of the National Convention to execute Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and several other leading members of the revolutionary government.
• With Robespierre the sole remaining strongman of the Revolution, his apparent total grasp on power became increasingly illusory. In addition to widespread reaction to the Reign of Terror, Robespierre’s tight personal control of the military, distrust of military might and banks, and opposition to supposedly corrupt individuals in government made him the subject of a number of conspiracies.
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  The Fall of Robespierre

  Tjournée (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 legalism 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 the crisis months of 1793, when France had been wracked by civil and foreign war.

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  Thermidorian Reaction

  1794 French counter-revolution against Robespierre

  In the historiography of the French Revolution, the Thermidorian Reaction (French: Réaction thermidorienne or Convention thermidorienne, "Thermidorian Convention") is the common term for the period between the ousting of Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor II, or 27 July 1794, and the inauguration of the French Directory on 2 November 1795.

  The "Thermidorian Reaction" was named after the month in which the coup took place and was the latter part of the National Convention's rule of France. It was marked by the end of the Reign of Terror, decentralization of executive powers from the Committee of Public Safety and a turn from the radical Jacobin policies of the Montagnard Convention to more moderate positions.

  Economic and general populism, dechristianization, and harsh wartime measures were largely abandoned, as the members of the convention, disillusioned and frightened of the centralized government of the Terror, preferred a more stable political order that would have the approval of the p