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. But the Parisian popular movement proved to be marked by political indifference and apathy at this decisive moment. Shortly after 8pm, some 3,400 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 up and 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 accompanying 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.

Let us start with the conundrum, namely, of whether Robespierre did attempt suicide. Witnesses 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-aggrandising 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 with Bourdon. 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 conundrum remains in place, but overall a botched suicide attempt seems the most likely conclusion.

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 the assembly were the deputies ideologically closest to Robespierre 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 swinging 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 declined 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 Robespierre 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-mell into 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 Convention 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 that Robespierre 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 Robespierre personally signed a relatively small number of the Committee'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 Committee’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 Government 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-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 Revolutionary Government – altered the political complexion of the Convention in a way that opened the floodgates of reaction. 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 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 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 to establish itself. Further complicating the steady drift to the Right was the fact that some of the most vocal ‘Thermidorians’ attacking the legacy of Revolutionary Government in Year II were individuals who, on 8 Thermidor, Robespierre had in his sights for being too violently 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 Thermidorians 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 Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at 8pm seemingly in the Commune’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 neighbourhood 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 rally at 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 Convention 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 accomplices, 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 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 delegations, 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 simply untrue. 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 individual police dossiers of arrested individuals, plus the background documentation brought together 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 committee had amassed. One full year after the anti-Robespierre coup d’état, Courtois was evidently 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 historians 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.

Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 2014).