Thermidorian Reaction

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 plurality.

The Reaction saw the Left suppressed by brutal force, including massacres, as well as the disbanding of the Jacobin Club, the dispersal of the sans-culottes, and the renunciation of the Montagnard ideology.

The name Thermidorian originated with 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the date according to the French Republican Calendar when Maximilien Robespierre and other radical revolutionaries came under concerted attack in the National Convention.

On that very day, Robespierre was executed with twenty-one of his closest associates, including[6] François Hanriot, ex-commander of the Parisian National Guard; Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot-Lescot, mayor of Paris; Georges Couthon, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and René-François Dumas, ex-president of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Instead, the people decided to blame those who were involved with Robespierre in any way, namely the many members of the Jacobin Club, their supporters, and individuals suspected of being past revolutionaries.

[8] Often, members of these targeted groups were the victims of prison massacres or put on trial without due process, which were overall similar conditions to those provided to the counter-revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror.

[7] As part of the reorganization of French politics, practitioners of the terror were called to defend their records; some such as Tallien, Barras, Fouché and Fréron rejoined the leadership.

[citation needed] In April and May 1795, protests and riots in support of the radicals broke out culminating in an invasion of the convention by an insurrectionist mob on 20 May.

Meanwhile, French armies overran the Netherlands and established the Batavian Republic, occupied the left bank of the Rhine and forced Spain, Prussia and several German States to sue for peace, enhancing the prestige of the convention.

[13] Uttaldo Buttafava, a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist stated that the end of Stalin's rule Nikita Khruschev's rise to power in Russia, and the economic policies of the time were a kind of Thermidor within the Soviet Union.