There have been endless attempts by shallow historians to explain Robespierre’s downfall. This they attribute to ‘issues’ such as his style of dress, which is alleged to have alienated the ‘dishevelled’ sans-culottes, or in his imperious manner. Trotsky comments in this respect:
The stages of the revolution and counter-revolution succeed one another at an accelerated pace, the contradictions between the protagonists of a certain programme and the changed situation acquired an unexpected and extremely acute character. That gives the historian the possibility of displaying his retrospective wisdom by enumerating the mistakes, omissions, ineptness. But unfortunately, these historians abstain from indicating the right road which would have been able to lead a moderate to victory in a period of revolutionary upswing, or on the contrary to indicate a reasonable and triumphant policy in a Thermidorean period.
In these words, Trotsky demonstrates that it was not the weaknesses or mistakes of Robespierre and his supporters, byt the changed objective situation following the victory at Fleurus in particular which was the reason for his overthrow. However, while the objective situation was decisive, certain measures of the Committee, as we have seen, alienated the sans-culottes.
The Paris Commune, stuffed with supporters of Robespierre, decided at long last on 23 July to publish the new rates of wages which would operate on the basis of the amended maximum. This caused outrage amongst the Parisian workers and was hardly calculated to bind them to the Robespierre administration. The Paris Commune, at the very moment when the Convention was about to unseat Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (27 July), was preparing a military force to keep the workers in check. Despite the offer of his opponents in the Committee, led by the mediator Barère, for a reconciliation, Robespierre, on 8 Thermidor (26 July, 1794), denounced his opponents and called for the removal of a small group of ‘impure men’. At first, the Assembly voted that his speech be printed and transmitted to the municipalities. But when he was called upon to name these ‘impures’, he refused and therefore the Plain, fearing that Robespierre wished to have a blank cheque to continue the terror, voted to reverse its decision.
The next day, when Robespierre and Saint-Just attempted to speak to the Convention, they were shouted down. An alliance of ‘moderate’ Jacobins, the Plain and also ‘terrorists’ had united in a common fear of the Robespierrists. During the night of 8 Thermidor, they had planned with military precision, whereas Robespierre and Saint-Just were relying on their powers of oratory to sway the Convention. As soon as Robespierre stood up, his speech was drowned with cries of ‘Down with the tyrant’. Saint-Just was similarly shouted down and, on the afternoon of 9 Thermidor, the arrest of Robespierre and his associates was ordered. Yet, Robespierre and his supporters still enjoyed huge authority in the Commune and the Paris Sections. Both the Jacobin Club and the Commune voiced support for the arrested men. Hanriot, Robespierrist chief of the National Guard, escaped from the squad sent to arrest him. The turnkey of the prison to which Robespierre and Saint-Just were sent refused to acknowledge the mandate of their escort. They were freed, to seek refuge amongst their friends in the Commune. And yet, despite their considerable advantages and the forces at their disposal, Robespierre and the Commune were defeated.
On the surface, the balance of forces seemed to be weighted in favour of the Robespierrists. The National Guard was under the same commander, which in June 1793 had forced the Convention to submit and accept the Montagnards’ dictatorship. And yet, after a few hours, this force was to abandon the Commune and the Jacobin leaders, and rally to their enemies in the Convention. There was bungling on the part of Hanriot, and both Robespierre and Saint-Just demonstrated a lack of will and decisiveness. However, the critical factor in the whole episode was that the Jacobin leaders had lost the support of the Parisian sans0culottes. It is true that a force of 3000 men with 30 cannon were assembled in the Place de Grève at 7 o’clock ready to defend the Robespierrists. Yet, they lacked leaders and were reluctant to take the offensive against the Convention. The Convention in turn outlawed the accused and the rebels, at the same time intimidating the revolutionary committees and the Sections. The Jacobins deliberated, but reached no decision. Robespierre and Saint-Just were actually free and arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, but did not take charge or organise for an insurrection. As Lefebvre comments, ‘They did not disavow it [the plans for an insurrection], byt they probably felt that it was hopeless. Having always declared that they were governing in the name of the national representation, they were paralysed by the contradiction, and abandoned themselves to their fate’.
Gradually, the sans-culottes melted away and in the early hours of 10 Thermidor (28 July) a force of 6000 men under the control of Barras appeared in the city hall and, on behalf of the Convention, re-arrested the Robespierrists. The bourgeois Sections in the west of Paris – Tuileries, Champs Elysées, Républic (Roule), Louvre, Révolutionnaire (Pont Neuf), and even Piques (Robespierre’s own Section) rapidly declared for the Convention. But it was equally striking that some of the most radical Sections such as Quinze Vignts, Unité, and Maison Commune supported the Convention. Moreover, the Gravilliers Section which had not forgotten Jacques Roux and thereby hated Robespierre despatched a column to support the Convention. Even Babeuf at first welcomed the overthrow of the Robespierrists and was sympathetic to the Thermidoreans. He was to regret this, along with many of the sans-culottes, later on.
During the night of 9 Thermidor, 39 of the Sections were in permanent session – and yet 35 declared unequivocally for the Convention, with only two holding out to the end for Robespierre. The mass of the workers of Paris remained largely hostile or indifferent to the pleas of Hanriot and others for a rising to defent their ‘protector’ and ‘father’. As one report explained: ‘The workers listened to him for a moment, shout “Long live the republic” and go back to their work’. Moreover, when the councillors of the Commune, two days after Robespierre’s execution, were being trundled through the streets of Paris to meet the same fate, workers were reported to have shouted as they passed, ‘To hell with the maximum’.
Such was the alienation of the sans-culottes that many had come to believe that the removal of Robespierre would actually mean the end of the maximum. This would in turn, they believed, end the limitation of wages, thereby restoring their living standards. Robespierre, when he realised that all was lost, attempted to shoot himself but only succeeded in shattering his jaw. He was arrested in the Hôtel de Wille without a shot being fired, and a huge round-up of the Commune members and Jacobins then ensued. On 10 Thermidor, Robespierre and Saint-Just, with 18 others, were guillotined in the Place de la Révolution.
The next day the largest batch of the whole revolution, 71 in total, were guillotined. Thus ended the Montagnards’ dictatorship which had lasted from 26 July 1793, for just over a year, until 10 Thermidor (28 July 1794). Robespierre, the most hated of all the figures of the revolution as far as bourgeois historians are concerned, was nevertheless the figure that best embodied the needs of historic progress. It was not the cowardly big bourgeois, but the Jacobin dictatorship, raised on the backs of the heroic sans-culottes of Paris, which had purged France of all the feudal rubbish and secured the victory of the revolution in 1793-94. Robespierre was one of the towering figures of the eighteenth century, as Cromwell had been in the seventeenth century. The selfless devotion of the lawyer from Arras – described by Carlyle as the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ – died a poor man, leaving just one hundred pounds in his estate.
The curve of revolution declines
Robespierre and his friends were not just killed – they were slandered and vilified by the Thermidoreans. They were pictured as ‘royalists and as men who had sold themselves to foreigners’. Thermidor reflected a deep-going rearrangement of class forces that had taken place. At the top, the Thermidoreans themselves believed that little had changed, that a few ‘intransigents’ had been removed. Yet, it was the pressure of the possessing classes, first of all on the Jacobins themselves, which was reflected in Thermidor. They wished above all to enjoy the fruits of their property. They exerted pressure on the state apparatus and on the Jacobin Clubs, many of whom also felt themselves to be property owners, upholders of ‘order’. The Jacobin party was forced to regroup, to advance those who were swimming with the new stream and to link up with those, not of Jacobin origin, who reflected the new situation. At the same time, those who reflected the interests and passions of the urban masses were struck down. Trotsky comments:
The first shift of power was expressed in the movement within the same old ruling party: some Jacobins forced out others. But that too was – to use Lenin’s words – a stepping stone, a bridge, a rung on the ladder, upon which later the big bourgeoisie, headed by Bonaparte, was to step into power.
Following Robespierre’s execution, the curve of revolution moved downwards. The Thermidoreans represented reaction, but it was a reaction on the basis of the gains of the revolution itself. Analogies can be and were drawn by Trotsky at one stage between the Thermidorean period of the French revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia. The development of the Stalinist one-party totalitarian regime in Russia was separated by a river of blood from the heroic period of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky between 1917 and 1923. Nevertheless, the Stalinist bureaucracy rested on the foundations of the planned economy, the main conquest of the Russian revolution. Stalin slaughtered those who made the Russian revolution and annihilated the Bolshevik Party itself. In the same way, the Thermidoreans, having despatched Robespierre and his supporters, sought to secure the power of the bourgeoisie by attacking the sans-culottes and the gains which had accrued to them through the revolution.
Thermidor in power
Thermidor seemed to unwind the film of revolution. But the film did not go back to the beginning. It did not end up with a return to the ancien regime. In the same way as in the period of the upswing of the revolution, so in the downswing, new periods of dual power, of unstable equilibrium between different class forces, were established, not ‘peacefully’, but by means of civil war. This, in the counter-revolution, clearly delineated under Thermidor, and largely at the expense of the sans-culottes, in turn resulted in the insurrections of 12 Germinal and 1-4 of Prairial in Year Three of the revolution (1 April and 20-23 May 1795). This represented a rearguard and heroic effort on the part of the Parisian sans-culottes to re-assert themselves. But it would result in their final demise as an effective political force. A popular movement, this time an avowedly proletarian movement, was not to arise until the next round of revolutions in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1830. And yet, at the outset, the former Jacobins who collaborated with the Thermidoreans believed that the removal of Robespierre was a little local difficulty, ‘a partial commotion that left the government intact’ (Barère). Yet the forces with the Thermidoreans had unleashed meant a sharp swing towards the right.
Rudé correctly described the Thermidorean regime as the ‘Republic of proprietors’, the backbone of which were those who had grown rich and powerful through the revolution. The heterogeneous coalition which had been united on 9 and 10 Thermidor by its hostility to Robespierre presented a confused picture in the beginning. The former members of the Committee of Public Safety wished to retain their power, shorn of the Robespierrist group. But the Plain was to have none of that. As early as 29 July 1794, it decreed that a fourth of each committee should be renewed, and that no member be reelected, after an interval of one month. The apparatus of revolutionary government was rapidly dismantled with the revolutionary tribunal no longer functioning and the large scale release of suspects.
Within one month, most of the Jacobins were dismissed from the Committee and one year later they were on their way to Devil’s Island as ‘terrorists’. Carnot, because of his specialist qualities as a military leader, was retained, and former ex-Jacobin terrorists such as Tallien, Barras and the notorious renegade Fréron moved to the right and began attacking their former allies. Fréron organised the notorious jeunesse dorée (‘gilded’ or ‘golden youth’). The ranks of this reactionary scum were filled out with armed bands of draft dodgers, deserters, shopboys, and law clerks encouraged by their employers to attack the Left. Armed with cudgels, they unleashed a reign of terror on the streets against patriots while the police stood by. The Jacobins wilted under this onslaught. Given the impotence of the Commune, the National Guard, and the demise of the revolutionary Sections, no organised opposition showed itself. While the right could mobilise at will, the sans-culottes were occupied with the daily struggle for existence. Organised mass action was possible only later by means of the journées (days) – mass demonstrations and petitions. The influence of the sans-culottes had been considerably weakened in the Sections through the withdrawal of the forty sous compensation attendance allowance. At the same time, the assemblies were instructed to meet only once every ten days. The 48 revolutionary committees which previously existed were grouped into 12 comités d’arronsiddement from which all Jacobin militants were excluded. Merchants, civil servants and professional men held sway in these truncated committees. The Thermidoreans also further amended the maximum legislation in order to allow prices to rise. What terror remained was directed almost entirely against the former supporters of the Mountain. The jeunesse dorée (sometimes called Muscadins) ruled the streets of Paris and, with their bourgeois sponsors, controlled the Sections which they had revived. There were denunciations of Jacobins, intimidation and beatings but little bloodshed in Paris. This was not the case however in the provinces. There a white terror was unleashed and frenzied bands of the ‘Companies of Jesus’ and the ‘Companies of the Sun’ hunted patriots ‘as though they were partridges’. However, ‘the hard faced men who had done well out of the war’, the real backbone of the Thermidoreans, above all detested the controlled economy. It was their pressure which resulted in the amending of the maximum, which allowed prices to be raised to a level of two-thirds above that of June 1790.
However, this was not enough for the bourgeoisie, and their pressure resulted in the complete abolition of the maximum général in December 1794. Even before this, however, the hostility of the masses to the government grew. This took the form of a sullen resentment which police reports commented on: ‘Complaints and rumours are continually heard. The long delays in obtaining rationed bread, the shortage of flour, the high prices of bread, firewood, wine coal, vegetables and potatoes, the price of which is increasing daily in the most alarming manner, are plunging the people into a state of wretchedness and despair that is easy to imagine’.
For the first time since the autumn of 1791, the price of bread became a major social problem. While prices soared, the real wages of the Parisian workers in early 1795 were far lower than in 1793-94. It has been estimated that they ‘had probably fallen back to the catastrophic level of the early months of 1789’.
The national arms factories were run down, finally being closed on 8 February 1795. Lefebvre comments: ‘The debacle was so swift that economic life seemed to come to a standstill. Wages, of course, were unable to keep up with rising prices, and the constriction of markets owing to reduced purchasing power, resulted in a stoppage of production. At Littry, for example, the mines suspended operations’. Famine conditions existed in many areas of the country, with the peasants refusing to bring produce to the towns because they would not accept assignats. The government itself reduced almost to a state of impotence. Its attempt to mollify the right threatened the very gains of the revolution. Thus, in the Vendée, rebels were offered amnesty, the restoration of their property, exemption from military service, freedom of worship and a right to regain their arms and to police their own territory. The consequence of this was to spread the influence of the Chouans (named after Jean Chouan, Vendée peasant leader) into most of Normandy and the virtual abandonment by the revolutionary government of the country districts of the north west of France. The counter-revolution appeared to go unchecked in the winter of 1794-95. Assassins of republicans were freed in Lyons, and royalist terrorists began to organise prison massacres just as brutal, if not on so extensive a scale, as those in Paris in September 1792. According to Lefebvre, ‘By the end of spring, the Thermidoreans were no longer refusing anything, even to avowed royalists’.
The sans-culottes rise once more
The frightful condition of the masses contrasted with the obscene wealth flaunted by the new rich in Paris. The salons revived. Extravagant new fashions displayed by the incroyables and the merveilleuses rivalled the obscene splendour of the aristocracy and the court before the revolution. Families of guillotined royalists entertained each other with the napes of their necks shorn ready for the guillotine and a thin band of red silk round their throats. Starvation for the poor on the one hand and, on the other, luxurious sumptuousness for those who could afford goods at inflated prices. This was the background against which the sans-culottes rose once more in early 1795.
At this time, one worker was heard to declare: ‘As for the merchants, they were pigs fit to be killed’. In desperation, some were seduced by royalist propaganda. One worker assembling at the Tuileries in January 1795 declared: ‘The devil take the republic! We are lacking everything, it is only the rich who lack nothing’. The rumours abounded that the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was once more to march on the Convention, with voices demanding that the Assembly be dispersed. Although the Jacobins had suffered from severe repression, there were some strongholds in Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marces and the Gravilliers Section. The class hostility in early 1795 was very reminiscent of the mood that existed in Paris leading up to the Champs de Mars massacre in July 1791. It was reinforced by the closure of the remaining clubs and the arrest of local leaders – Babeuf amongst them.
The near famine conditions was the background against which the desperate uprising of the sans-culottes took place on 12 Germinal, Year Three (1 April 1795). It was the failure of the bread ration in the last two weeks of March which was the trigger for the masses to come out once more. Women stormed bakers’ shops, workers, including building workers, protested. This culminated in a march on the Convention. Converging from different parts of Paris, with Saint-Marcel and the Gravilliers Section once more in the lead, an insurgent band of men and women broke into the assembly shouting, ‘Bread, bread’ with some wearing on their caps, ‘Bread and the constitution of 1793’. Not only was there hostility from the Thermidoreans and the Plain, but even the Mountain deputies offered them little support. The experiences of the revolution had taught them class discipline and all sections of the bourgeoisie, from the Republicans to partisans of the old regime, united in hostility to the popular movement. The insurgents were leaderless. The Paris Commune, the clubs and the Sections were either impotent or in the hands of the Thermidoreans. Moreover, the flower of republican youth were in the army. The insurgents were therefore dispersed by a force of National Guards backed up by detachments of the jeunesse dorée. This was the signal for a new reign of terror and settling of old scores. Former leading Jacobins were sentenced to the ‘dry guillotine’, deportation to French Guiana. Even some former Jacobins who collaborated in the establishment of Thermidor were forced to flee.
However, the full weight of repression naturally fell on the shoulders of the Parisian sans-culottes. Paris was declared to be in a state of siege, and the leaders of the Germinal uprising were arrested. The Sections, dominated by the jeunesse dorée and the bourgeoisie, pressurised the assembly on 10 April to disarm all who played a leading part in the terror. This effectively resulted in dismissal from public employment and the withdrawal of the passports of sans culottes. A minimum of 1600 were thus affected in the provinces. But the underlying economic difficulties and therefore the food shortages and disorders continued throughout the country, The desperation of the Parisian masses forced many to look back wistfully to the epoch of Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship.
An observer at the time records the views of the sans-culottes: ‘Everyone was better off under the reign of Robespierre; one was then not hard pressed and needy’. A woman referring to the same period comments that, ‘She missed the days of the guillotine, and that she wished that it had been permanent’. The Convention attempted, it is true, to combine repression with some minor concessions. Thus on 2 April the bread ration was to be supplemented with rice and biscuits, with priority being given to distribution to workers. However, this did not solve the question of supplies and during May and April, terrible hunger and suffering were witnessed in the streets of Paris. The numbers of beggars multiplied, people died in the streets like flies and suicides were common.
The revolt of May 1795
The mood was one of resignation and despair but with occasional outbursts of militancy. Remarkably, despite the repression and because of the continuing hunger, after a short lull the movement began in April. Women, workers and some of the Sections such as Montreuil agitated for an increase in the food ration throughout April and early May. When the food ration fell to two ounces per head on 16 May, even the police agents warned about the possibility of an insurrection. It was the Faubourg Saint-Antoine which threatened another march on the Convention unless the food ration was increased. Pamphlets and manifestos were distributed amongst the proletariat calling for an insurrection. On 20 May (1 Prairial), the tocsin was once more sounded in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and again it was the women who took the lead – drawing the men behind them. They called the men out of the workshops at seven in the morning. They organised assemblies outside the bakers’ shops, and compelled queuing housewives to join them in the march on the Convention. In some areas, women broke into meetings of the civil committee and demanded that their leaders put themselves at the head of a march to the Tuileries.
One outraged bourgeois, observing the action of the women, commented that ‘it wasn’t for women to make the laws’. The women of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine forced shops to close and led groups of armed workers in a march on the Tuileries. Along the way they forced women in shops, in private houses and even those riding in carriages to join them! On their bonnets was once again pinned the slogan, ‘Bread and the constitution of 1793’. They burst into the Convention hall but were quickly ejected, only to return later with armed groups of National Guards in support of them. The detachment of sans-culottes was headed by Guillaume Delorme, a West Indian captain of gunners, where a slave revolution led by the heroic Toussaint L’Ouverture had broken out.
This revolt of Prairial, one of the most stubborn and remarkable of the whole of the revolution, was a social protest against hunger and the hatred of the new rich. It developed over a period of four days and appeared at first as though the sans-culottes would be able to impose themselves on the Assembly. Unlike the movement in Germinal, the massive invasion by housewives and women supported by the armed battalions of the central districts and the Faubourgs, first of all cowed the Assembly. They were forced to listen as the insurgents read out their demands to the Assembly, which this time were supported by some of the deputies of the Mountain. Moreover, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, government troops were won over to the side of the insurgents and the city hall was captured. There was an attempt to take over and reform the Paris Commune. The Convention was surrounded and threatened as in June 1793. Yet, the sans-culottes spent hours in endless discussion, were bought off with promises, and failed to carry the insurrection to its conclusion. When they retired to their homes for the night, a force of 20,000 regular troops surrounded the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. By 23 May, it found itself isolated. The government threatened to proclaim the Faubourg in a state of rebellion and to use the troops if it failed to lay down its arms. With no support forthcoming from the rest of Paris, Saint-Antoine collapsed and with it the insurrection. This was a decisive turning point in the revolution.
Reaction and repression
The popular phase of the revolution was effectively over. Lefebvre comments: ‘This is the date that should be taken as the end of the revolution. Its main spring was now broken’. The repression which followed the Germinal uprising was mild to what followed in the aftermath of Prairial. It was savage and thorough. A military commission was employed for the first time against Parisian revolutionaries. 149 were condemned to death including six Jacobin deputies. 1200 were arrested and 1700 disarmed in a single week in a savage witch-hunt against the sans-culottes. As Rudé says: ‘The Parisian sans-culottes ceased to exist as a political and military force… From now on, the bourgeoisie, the “notables”… could proceed with their work without the embarrassing intervention of their one time allies’.
The heroic but doomed uprising of the Parisian masses in April and May 1795 was to leave its indelible imprint on history and was to inspire future generations. Now, however, terror against the sans culottes and the remnants of the Jacobins went hand in hand with further concessions to the right. Thus, the Convention restored the property of those who had been sentenced to death or deported, suppressed the revolutionary tribunal and pardoned the federalists. It returned the churches to the faithful while insisting that clerics take an oath of submission to the laws. In the wake of the repression against the Jacobins, a royalist insurgence naturally developed. The monarchists openly proclaimed their hopes for a restoration of the king, named members of the Convention who were ready to come to terms with them and agitated for the return of the old regime. The Count of Provence, now in Verona, took the title of Louis XVIII and, on 24 June 1795, issued a manifesto that promised punishment of the revolutionaries and the restoration of the old order.
The royalists were planning another civil war as a prelude to foreign invasion. Once more, the Chouans took up arms and looked towards an invasion by the English forces. The deputies of the Plain, solid representatives of the bourgeoisie who had gained most through the revolution, were alarmed. They sanctioned action against royalist ‘counter-terrorists’ in Lyons, and Jacobins were released. The south was intimidated and an attempted royalist landing at Quiberon on 27 June capitulated to the republican General Hoche. Seven hundred and eighteen emigrés including the former royalist officers were shot. The Thermidoreans, faced with this royalist threat, swung once more to the left. Royalist journalists were persecuted and arrested, while the republican press was subsidised – it was the turn of the jeunesse dorée to face repression at the hands of soldiers and the sans culottes. Young bourgeois draft dodgers were mercilessly pursued.
However, this was accompanied by further blows at the surviving Montagnards. They were excluded from elections. At the same time, the Thermidoreans sought to legitimise their rule through a new constitution. That of 1793, enshrining as it did the democratic rights of the people, including the right to insurrection, was anathema to the bourgeoisie. As the Prairial and Germinal uprisings had demonstrated, once the masses were on the move they would invoke the 1793 constitution as the most finished example of the democratic spirit of the revolution. It was therefore necessary to bury it once and for all. In its place, a constitution was required which would reflect the interests of the possessing classes. Boissy d’Anglas, the author of the Thermidorean constitution, declares:
We should be governed by the best… those who are the most educated and the most interested in maintaining the laws. With few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who, owning property, are attached to the country in which it is located, to the laws which protect it, to the peace and order which preserve it… A country governed by landowners is in the social order: That which is governed by non=landowners is in the state of nature.
Thus, the male adult suffrage of 1793 was abandoned and a restricted franchise along the lines of the system of indirect elections of 1791 was incorporated. However, ‘active’ citizens now included all Frenchmen aged 21 and paying taxes – other than the priests, returned emigrés and imprisoned ‘patriots’. The right of insurrection was naturally withdrawn and bicameralism was accepted with the Assembly divided into two chambers. Such a step was now possible because, with the crushing of the royalists, a ‘House of Lords’ was not feared by the Thermidoreans. Therefore, they proposed a council of 500, whose members were aged 30 and above, with powers to initiate legislation, while a ‘council of ancients’ would transform the resolutions of the lower chamber into laws. The government was to be made up of five directors (the Directory), each holding office for five years, with the right to nominate ministers who would be responsible only to it.
The Thermidoreans took measures against both the counter-revolutionaries and the Jacobins. Fearing further coordinated action in the capital, to take the place of the Commune and its mayor, they divided Paris into a number of municipalities. The clubs were once more authorised to meet, but transformed into simple public gatherings.
The constitution was, in effect, a thinly veiled dictatorship of the Directory, which gave itself the right to arrest anyone suspected of conspiracy, without the intervention of legal procedures. The laws against emigrés and priests were retained against royalist counter-revolution with relatives of emigrés barred from holding office. In order to counter any danger of a royalist upsurge, two-thirds of the deputies were to be elected from the existing Assembly – in other words, from the ranks of the Thermidoreans themselves. This blatant manoeuvre caused outrage.
The mass of the population was by now completely alienated from the Thermidorean controlled Convention. They were reduced to a frightful state. Inflation was raging ahead. In the year following the abolition of the maximum, the paper currency had increased from 8 billion to 20 billion assignats. At the same time, the poor harvest in many regions meant a shortage of food. Consequently the price of bread rocketed upwards and meat became virtually unobtainable. Government reports indicate the state of suffering of all layers of the population:
The worker’s wage is far too low to meet his daily needs; the unfortunate rentier, in order to keep alive, has to sell his last stick of furniture, which adds to the haul of the greedy speculators; the proprietor, lacking other means of subsistence, eats up his capital as well as his income; the civil servant, who is entirely dependent on his salary, also suffers the torments of privation.
In fact, the petit bourgeois layers were relatively worse off than the workers. Therefore, a ready audience for the growing royalist agitation in the city was to be found amongst this layer. Even amongst the starving and alienated sans-culottes a layer, albeit a minority, denounced the republic and looked towards the restoration of the monarchy for salvation. Citizens in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in July 1795 were overheard to day that they did not care if the enemy came to Paris, ‘because being unable to cope with high prices, it mattered little to them whether they were English or French’. However, the majority of the sans-culottes harked back to the regime of Robespierre and the controlled economy. Jacobin agitation began to revive and there was even talk of a new uprising. Commenting on the mood of the sans-culottes an observer noted in June, ‘People in queues and crowds are saying that everyone thinks the workers are quiet because they have been disarmed. But they will be quite capable of using the same means to procure the bread as they did in the beginnings of the revolution’.
