“Thermidor” is the conventional name for the movement that, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II in the calendar that the French Revolutionary government had adopted as part of its attempt to erase the past), swept Maximilien Robespierre from power. On 8 Thermidor, tout le monde took it for granted that he was the dominant and domineering force in French politics. On 10 Thermidor, shortly after 7:00 p.m., he was decapitated by the guillotine. The day between those two became one of the most famous in French history and, as Colin Jones observes in The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021), probably the most thoroughly documented before the rise of the modern, all-seeing bureaucratic state.
Thermidor has become the symbol of the Revolution’s change of course, the moment when the murderous idealists of the Reign of Terror gave way to a successor generation of opportunists. That kind of “Thermidorian reaction” is a frequent phenomenon in radical movements. The Trotskyites applied the epithet to Stalin. As Thomas Sowell has noted,
The "betrayal" of ideals is a reiterated refrain in a wide variety of insurgent movements, whether moderate or extreme. Seldom is there a recognition that the institutional success of the insurgency has itself created new incentives attracting new kinds of people and sometimes reorienting some members of the original group. Another factor is that a successful insurgency often puts leaders of the insurgents into closer contact with knowledge that was either unavailable or not so vivid when the insurgents were outsiders, and thereby forces correction of plausible beliefs that will not stand authentication. [Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1996)
Just lately, there have been a few signs, tiny but perhaps prophetic, that the Woke Revolution may be less all-powerful than everyone has imagined. Netflix has given the back of its hand to employees who demand the right to veto “problematic” decisions about what shows to produce. (A pity that they don’t regard imitative, unimaginative mediocrity as problematic.) BlackRock, the mammoth money manager, has switched from championing “stakeholders” (that is, woke activists) to paying attention to stockholders. Jack Dorsey, pioneer in social media “content moderation”, has endorsed Elon Musk’s statement that Donald Trump should again be allowed to rampage on Twitter.
One very significant spoor has been overlooked as the result of misunderstanding. Last week, Republican Congressmen published a letter from an FBI insider revealing that the Bureau “created an internal ‘threat tag’ in fall 2021 to track alleged threats against school boards following an October 4 directive from Attorney General Merrick Garland”. The directive was indeed a scandal, but, as Andrew McCarthy has acutely pointed out, the recipients of the information about the threat tag misapprehended its true significance. Having complied with AG Merrick Garland’s directive pro forma, the FBI in practice ignored it. The “investigations” disclosed by the whistle blower were perfunctory.
The only matter in which the congressmen say the FBI interviewed a potential subject involved a complaint by a school board after a mother made a threat — “we are coming for you” – which the nice progressives at the board took to be a threat of potential violence because the mother was conservative and “a gun owner.” An FBI agent interviewed the mother, learned that the mother was upset about school policy and was working to get the school board replaced through the normal electoral process. The bureau thus quickly closed the matter. . . .
In the other two instances, it is not clear that the FBI even preliminarily investigated anyone.
In the first, the bureau got a patently politicized complaint, on what the congressmen derisively mock as the “snitch-line,” that a father who opposed mask mandates “fit the profile of an insurrectionist,” was a gun owner, etc. The bureau did not investigate the dad; the agents instead decided to question the complainant, who grudgingly conceded that he or she had no actual evidence. The FBI thus dropped the matter – and I imagine, after the visit from the agents, that complainant will think twice before doing something that stupid again.
In the other case, Jordan and Johnson claim that the FBI “opened an investigation of Republican state elected officials” because Democrats claimed that they “incited violence” by complaining about vaccine mandates. But it doesn’t appear that the bureau did anything active except close the case. The congressmen don’t allege that anyone was interviewed or that the bureau did any actual investigating.
In short, the attorney-general of the United States ordered subordinates to go after dissidents from the Woke agenda, and the subordinates ignored him. There is a certain parallel – not a rhyme but perhaps an assonance – to a key event on 9 Thermidor. The Paris city government, which opposed the decision of the National Convention (the French legislative assembly) to arrest Robespierre and his closest associates, ordered the governing bodies of the city’s 48 “sections” to call up their National Guard units to overawe the Convention members. Most sections responded by doing the opposite. The pro-Robespierre faction couldn’t summon enough support to make a decent fight.
What were the key facts about Thermidor?
First, it happened suddenly, at a moment when no one expected any upheaval. The timing was indeed adventitious. One of the men who turned most decisively and effectively against Robespierre acted because he feared that his mistress was in danger of the guillotine.
Second, the reason for the suddenness of the event was that Robespierre’s power rested entirely on perception. Men who called him a tyrant spoke only in whispers; each assumed that he was alone in his opposition. In fact, as the day proved, it was Robespierre who was isolated.
Third, while Robespierre incessantly excoriated the “foreign plot” to overthrow the Revolution, neither royalist émigrés nor British spies played any role in his downfall. (Imprisoned royalists and other personages of the “Right” in fact saw Robespierre as their “protector” against the prospect of an even more dreadful successor.) It was his own allies, fearful of the monster that they had created, who destroyed him and, in the course of doing so, repudiated the central elements of his policy.
Fourth – and now we come to a word of caution – Thermidor led to a better regime than would otherwise have existed but not to a good one. Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue” was on the course to full-fledged totalitarianism. Its sequel was “merely” a series of dictatorships, culminating in Napoleon and leaving France with a permanent Left/Right cleavage that, more than two centuries later, has yet to heal fully.
Whether there will be an American Thermidor is unknowable, but should it happen, it will, I think, look much like its namesake.
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