Fall of Robespierre

The Great Terror

Seven weeks under the law of 22 Prairial

On 10 June 1794 (22 Prairial Year II) Georges Couthon, one of Robespierre's closest allies on the Committee of Public Safety, presented a new law on the Revolutionary Tribunal. It took away the defendants' right to counsel, made witnesses optional, widened the definition of the “enemies of the people” and left the jury a single choice: acquittal or death. The Convention passed it the same day, and the guillotine in Paris began to work faster than ever. The seven weeks that followed are remembered as the Great Terror.

Yet the emergency that had justified the Terror was passing. On 26 June the French won the battle of Fleurus, and the Republic's armies were advancing once more into the Austrian Netherlands. The Terror went on all the same, and resentment of those who seemed to direct it grew. Within the Committee of Public Safety, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois clashed with Robespierre; the Committee of General Security, in charge of the police, resented the rival police bureau run by Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon. In the Convention, representatives recalled from their missions in the provinces — Tallien from Bordeaux, Fouché from Lyon, Barras and Fréron from the south — had reason to fear they would be the next to stand trial. Robespierre himself had stayed away from the Committee for most of July.

The speech of 8 Thermidor

On 26 July (8 Thermidor) Robespierre returned to the Convention's tribune for the first time in weeks and spoke for about two hours. He defended himself against the charge of seeking a dictatorship, attacked the way the Committees ran affairs and denounced a conspiracy of corrupt men within the Convention and the government itself. The traitors, he said, had to be punished and the Committees purged. But he named almost no one.

At first the deputies voted to have the speech printed and sent to every commune in France. Then Cambon, whom Robespierre had attacked by name over the finances, rose to answer him, and others followed, demanding that he name those he accused. Robespierre refused. The Convention reversed its decision to send the speech to the communes, leaving it printed for the deputies alone — a public rebuff. That evening Robespierre read the speech again at the Jacobin Club, to loud applause, and Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois were shouted out of the hall. During the night the deputies who felt threatened, the members of the Committees who had fallen out with him and the moderates of the Plain, the centre of the Convention, came to an understanding: Robespierre had to be stopped the next day.

9 Thermidor

Shouted down in the Convention

The session of 27 July opened late in the morning. Around noon Saint-Just went up to the tribune to read a report; he had got through only a few sentences when Tallien interrupted him, and then Billaud-Varenne, both denouncing a plot against the Convention. Each time Robespierre tried to reply, the president's bell drowned him out and the floor went to someone else, while the benches shouted “Down with the tyrant!”. As his voice gave out, a deputy called out at him.

In the afternoon an obscure deputy, Louchet, moved Robespierre's arrest, and it was voted amid applause. His brother Augustin asked to share his fate, and so did Philippe Le Bas; Saint-Just and Couthon were added to the decree. The five were taken to the Committee of General Security.

The night at the Hôtel de Ville

The Commune of Paris, loyal to Robespierre, came to his aid. The mayor, Fleuriot-Lescot, and the national agent, Payan, sounded the tocsin and called the sections to arms, and the jailers, on the Commune's orders, refused to receive the prisoners. Turned away from the Luxembourg prison, Robespierre was taken to the city's police offices on the Quai des Orfèvres, and late that night he too joined the others at the Hôtel de Ville. Cannon and National Guards gathered in the square outside.

The Convention answered by declaring the rebels outlaws — which meant death without trial once their identity was established — and gave the deputy Paul Barras command of its forces. Most of the forty-eight sections sided with the Convention, and the crowd before the Hôtel de Ville, left without orders, thinned away in the rain. In the small hours of 28 July the Convention's columns entered the building almost unopposed. Le Bas shot himself; Augustin Robespierre jumped from a window and was badly hurt; Couthon fell down a staircase. A pistol shot shattered Robespierre's jaw. A young gendarme, Charles-André Méda, later claimed to have fired it; others believed Robespierre had tried to kill himself.

Thermidor

The Terror dismantled

Robespierre spent the rest of the night lying on a table in an antechamber of the Committee of Public Safety in the Tuileries, his jaw bound up, before being taken to the Conciergerie. As outlaws, he and his companions needed no trial: the Revolutionary Tribunal had only to confirm who they were. On the evening of 28 July (10 Thermidor) he was guillotined on the Place de la Révolution with twenty-one others, among them his brother, Saint-Just, Couthon, Hanriot, commander of the Paris National Guard, and the mayor, Fleuriot-Lescot. About seventy members of the Commune followed the next day.

Many of the victors had meant only to remove a rival, not to end the Terror; but the Convention and the country took his fall as its end. On 1 August the law of 22 Prairial was repealed, and over the following weeks thousands of suspects left the prisons. The Committees lost their grip on power, the Commune of Paris was not re-established, and Fouquier-Tinville, the Tribunal's public prosecutor, was arrested and later guillotined. Bands of well-dressed young men, the jeunesse dorée, hunted Jacobins in the streets, and in November the Convention closed the Jacobin Club. The period that followed, until the Directory in 1795, is known as the Thermidorian reaction, and “Thermidor” has since stood for the moment when a revolution turns back from its most radical course.