Nicholas Negroponte

The Convention thermidorienne is the name given to the third period of the history of the national Convention energy of the July 27th 1794 with the October 26th 1795.

After the Fall of Robespierre, a fight opposes, within the national Convention, the Montagnards of year III, around Barère, Billaud-Game preserve or Collot d' Herbois, in favor of the maintenance of the revolutionary government, of economic state intervention, with the maximum and the price control of the grains, and the Terreur, on the one hand, and the moderate majority of the assembly, gathering the mountain dwellers dantonists around Tallien or Fréron and the deputies of the Marais, around Sieyès, Cambacérès, Daunou or Boissy d' Anglas, holding of a return to the economic liberalism and the constitutional government. March 8th, 1795, Marie-Joseph Chénier obtains the return of the 22 chiefs of Gironde proscribed after the days of May 31st and of June 2nd, 1793 and the federalistic Insurrections (of which Louvet de Couvray) and of the 73 deputies (of which Louis-Sebastien Mercier) which had been imprisoned after having protested against the arrest of the 22, reinforcing thus clearly the moderate camp.

The revolutionary government is gradually dismantled, with the establishment of the renewal per quarter every month of the members of the Comité of public hello and the reduction in its attributions after Thermidor, then its disappearance in 1795, the suppression of the maximum on December 24th, 1794 or the final re-establishment of the Bourse de Paris on October 10th, 1795 (which supports the development of the Spéculation).

The winter 1794-95 is particularly hard, the price of the bread increases, and populates it of Paris knows a low register Disette, that the liberal policy of Convention does not make it possible to stop. Also, anger thunders among the popular sections. The more so as France undergoes a Economic crisis at that time and financial and that the Assignat, that the revolutionary government had more or less succeeded in stabilizing in 1793, undergoes a vertiginous fall.

In parallel, after Thermidor, a great part of the suspects imprisoned under Terror - royalists, federalists, monopolizers - are widened, while many revolutionary militants are stopped and the civils servant suspected of “complicity” with the “tyrant” (Robespierre) revoked. In the same way, the excesses made within the framework of the civil war which opposed the republicans to the federalists and to the royalists into 1793 are revealed, and certain representatives on mission is considered and carried out (Carrier with Nantes or Joseph Lebon in Cambrai), as well as the revolutionary Tribunal of Paris and the popular Orange commission, with the encouragement of families of the victims and suspects freed, supporting near the opinion the image of a violent and sanguinary Terror.

Within the framework of this reaction thermidorienne, the moderate and royalist press breaks out against the “terrorists”, treaties of “tyrants” and “drinkers of blood”. Fréron, representative of Convention in the South with Barras in 1793, where it had been characterized by its violence and its plunders, makes reappear starting from September 11th, 1794, the Speaker of the People , of which it makes the body of the propaganda reactionary and where it shows a virulent antijacobinism. In the same way, the royalist Méhée of the Key publishes the lampoon the Tail of Robespierre , and Ange Pitou spreads in the streets of the royalist refrains. In addition, verbal violences and physics against all those which resemble closely or by far a “Jacobin” multiply. Fréron and Tallien organize bands of muscadins, which run up against the Jacobins, in particular on September 19th, 1794, with the Palate-Equality (the Palais Royal). The brawls multiply between the young jet set and the republicans, in particular the soldiers. Benefitting from these violences, the authorities close the Club of the Jacobins in November 1794. In 1794-95, bands from 2.000 to 3.000 “black Collets”, organized by Tallien and Fréron and taken along by the Marquis de Saint-Huruge (1750-1810), around the figures of the singer and type-setter Pierre Garat, of Pitou, François Elleviou and Langlois, and composed of suspects left prisons, unsubmissive people, journalists, artists, clerks, brokers, small shopkeeper - vêtus of a dress skimped “color of droppings” to the black velvet collar, the Basque cut in cod tail and the breeches tightened under the knee -, rossent the passers by having bad figure (Jacobins). Even of Gironde Louvet de Couvray, which denounces the royalists as well as the Jacobins in his newspaper, the Sentinel , is taken with part by royalist youth in its bookstore-printing works of the Palais Royal, in October 1795.

The Jacobins, confronted with the double hostility of the moderate republicans and the royalists, push the popular sections with the revolt. However, the insurrections of the germinal 12 and the 1 {{er}} meadow year III (April and May 1795) fail, and the authorities order the disarmament of the “terrorists”. They are the last popular insurrections before the Révolution of 1830.

Benefitting from the weakening of the Jacobins, movements of spontaneous revenge on the royalists, victims' families of Terror and catholics fanatic develop during the year 1795, in the South-east of France, more particularly the valley of the Rhone, against the “terrorists”. The Companies of Jéhu to Lyon and of the Sun, pursue and massacre Jacobins, republicans, priest constitutional, Protestant, political prisoners of the prisons, with Lons-the-Salt maker, Bourg, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Aix, Marseilles, Toulon, Tarascon, etc, generally with the complicity of the municipal authorities and secondary roads, when they are not representatives on mission, who are pressed on the royalists in their fight against the Jacobins.

However, the unloading missed of the emigrants with Quiberon in June - July 1795, and the royalist Insurrection of the 13 vendémiaire year IV (October 5th, 1795) makes become aware with the Convention of the threat represented by the royalists and, during a few months, at the autumn and the winter 1795-96, tries to restore the union between the republicans against their common enemy. Fréron is sent to Marseilles at the end of 1795, to repress white Terror (he will be recalled as of January 1796); the officers relieved Jacobins are reinstated in the army (Jean Antoine Rossignol, Napoleon Bonaparte…) ; the continuations against the Mountain dwellers are stopped, by the decree of October 13rd; a general amnesty “for the facts properly relating to the Revolution” (from which the emigrants are excluded, the deportees, defendants of Vendémiaire, as well as the forgers) is voted on October 26th, 1795. The Club of the Pantheon, composed former terrorists and Jacobins, all resulting from the lower middle class, opens its doors on November 6th.

Inspired by the deputies of the Plain, Convention thermidorienne thus put an end to the government revolutionary and marked the return to the capacity of a liberal and moderated middle-class republic. It provided the foundations of the Directoire by the drafting of the Constitution of year III establishing the Suffrage censitaire.

Random links: