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On the morning of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, member of the Committee of Public Safety (the most important of the Committees of the National Convention), rose to make a speech in the Convention in which he intended to support his colleague and friend on the Committee, Maximilien Robespierre. As Saint-Just began to speak, he was interrupted by a fellow Montagnard, Jean-Lambert Tallien, who pushed his way to the rostrum, supported by a concerted group of revolutionaries, many of them also Montagnards, to denounce Robespierre. Tumult ensued. Over several hours accusations spiralled, culminating with the arrest of five deputies: Robespierre, his younger brother, Augustin, Saint-Just, Georges Couthon (also on the Committee of Public Safety), and Philippe Le Bas, of the Committee of General Security. Both Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas had actually asked to be arrested, rather than become party to arresting the others. By nightfall of the following day, 10 Thermidor, all five were dead. This moment, the Thermidorian moment, marked the onset of a sea-change in revolutionary politics, whereby the immediate past would be rewritten and reinvented, in order to blacken the reputations of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their adherents as having been personally responsible for creating a ‘system of terror’, whilst exculpating many surviving revolutionaries, who had been equally involved in revolutionary government and the recourse to ‘terror’ policies, but who had chosen the winning side in the conflict of Thermidor.

Bertrand Barère, who had been a close colleague of Robespierre and Saint-Just on the Committee of Public Safety, took an early lead in the frantic rush to distance himself from the fallen deputies. In his speech on 14 Thermidor, Barère separated ‘terror’ from ‘justice’, two terms that Robespierre had often tied together. Arguing that ‘terror was always the arm of despotism [whereas] justice was the weapon of liberty’, he urged the Convention to ‘substitute inflexible justice for terror’.⁷ Barère knew very well – none better – how the repressive legislation against the opponents of the Revolution, real or imagined, had been conceived and implemented, for he had been at the heart of it. Now, in a remarkable political volte-face, Barère removed any responsibility from the Convention, in particular from members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security (the Committee of General Security had responsibility for policing, security and prisons). Barère denounced the ‘usurpation of national authority’ that Robespierre and his followers had committed when they had imposed decrees in response to ‘circumstances forced and prepared by themselves’.⁸

Less than three weeks later, on 2 Fructidor (9 August), an exchange between three other Montagnard deputies illustrated the divide within the Convention. Louchet, the Montagnard deputy who had been the first to demand the vote authorizing the arrest order against Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, now took to the floor to defend policies of terror. He underlined the seriousness of the dangers threatening the Republic and the need to combat them, stating that he was ‘convinced that there is no other way to do so than to maintain terror as the order of the day everywhere’.⁹ With the hall resounding with cries of ‘justice, justice!’, Louchet clarified his position by associating the two words: ‘I understand by the word “terror” the most severe justice’. This position was immediately supported by Charlier: ‘Justice for patriots, terror for aristocrats’.¹⁰ A third Montagnard, Tallien, who had led the attack on Robespierre and his fellow Montagnard deputies, Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas and Augustin Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, defined ‘terror’ as a weapon of tyranny, even while supporting the idea that justice must remain severe against ‘the enemies of the nation’. According to Tallien: ‘Robespierre too constantly repeated that terror needed to be made the order of the day, and while with such language he imprisoned patriots and led them to the scaffold, he protected the rascals that served him’.¹¹ This was another political sleight-of-hand. In Robespierre’s speeches and writings he had always linked the terms ‘terror’, ‘justice’ and ‘virtue’; whilst the expression ‘terreur à l’ordre du jour’ (‘terror made the order of the day’) was not his doing. Robespierre had mentioned these two words together only four times. In the summer of 1794, he used them to refer not to the repressive measures put in place by the Convention and its committees but to a ‘system of terror and slander’ targeted towards him, depicting him as a dictator, and attempting to destroy the revolutionary government.¹² It was Tallien, rather than Robespierre, who would develop the political concept of the ‘system of terror’ just a few days later.

It was on 11 Fructidor (28 August), that Tallien elaborated the concept of a ‘system of terror’. While he was not the first to use the term, previously deputies had mentioned it almost in passing, and directing it at different political rivals.¹³ In his momentous speech Tallien developed and defined a new theory of a ‘system of terror’. In speaking of this system, he coined a new term, one which would haunt our modern world: that of ‘terrorism’. He also called it a ‘government of terror’ and a ‘terror agency’. He took great pains to exclude the new – post-Robespierre – revolutionary government of which he was himself a member (he had been rewarded for his part in the fall of Robespierre by a seat on the Committee of Public Safety) from this supposed system. Thus he could better denounce terror as an illegitimate system of the immediate past, whilst safeguarding the legitimacy of the current revolutionary government, which was to serve the Thermidorians’ new political agenda. In defining the ‘system of terror’ he gave a vivid picture of the feelings of fear it engendered: terror took place in the mind’s imagination, as well as in reality:

There are two ways that a government can make itself feared: it can police bad actions, threaten and punish them with proportionate punishment, or it can threaten people, threaten them at all times and for all things, threaten them with whatever the imagination can conceive as most cruel. The impressions that these two methods produce are different: one is a potential fear, the other a ceaseless torment; one is a foreboding of the terror that follows upon a crime, the other terror itself instilled in the soul despite knowing one is innocent; one is the reasonable fear of the laws, the other the stupid fear of persons. The characteristics of terror should be distinguished. Terror is a generalized, habitual trembling, an exterior trembling that affects the most hidden fibres, degrading man and turning him into an animal; it is the disruption of all physical forces, the commotion of all moral faculties, the disruption of all ideas, the upheaval of all emotions …

Since terror is an extreme emotion, it is not susceptible of being either more or less. The fear of the laws, on the other hand, can be increased if needed. Which of these two fears supports, consummates, guarantees the revolution? That is what the question boils down to and what I will examine. Let us begin with terror: judge it by the means it is supposed to employ and by the effects it produces. A government can only inspire terror by threatening capital punishments, only by threatening them with it ceaselessly and threatening everyone, only by threatening through acts of violence ever renewed and ever increased; only by threatening all sorts of action, and even inaction; only by threatening with all sorts of proof and even without a shred of proof; only by threatening with the always striking sight of absolute power and limitless cruelty. To make every person tremble, it is necessary not only to link every action with a torment, every word with a threat, every silence with suspicion; it is necessary to place on every step a trap, in every house a spy, in every family a traitor, in the service of a tribunal of assassins. It is necessary, in one word, to know how to torture all citizens by the misfortunes of some, cutting the life of some by shortening the lives of the others; that is the art of spreading terror. But does this art belong to a regular, free, humane government, or is it tyranny? I often hear it asked why the system of terror cannot be limited to suspect classes while leaving others alone. In response I wish to ask how there can be security for someone where actions are prejudged based on persons, and not persons by their actions. I would like to add that terror must be everywhere or nowhere. The Convention should no longer accept that the republic be divided into two classes, those who create fear and those who live in fear, persecutors and the persecuted. Couthon and Robespierre are no longer here to obstruct the defence of equality and justice. I am also asked if it is possible to strike terror in the hearts of evildoers without troubling good citizens of any class; I answer that it is not, for if the government of the terror pursues some citizens based on presumed intentions, it alarms everyone; and if it only monitors and punishes actions, it is no longer terror that is inspired but another kind of fear that I have already mentioned, the healthy fear of punishment following upon a crime. It is thus right to say that the system of terror presupposes the exercise of an arbitrary power in those charged with spreading it.¹⁴

Tallien added to the horror by stating that the ‘terror’ could strike any citizen anywhere in France; that the increasing number of capital punishments came from the very nature of this ‘system’ that could well fall into excess; that the executions were accompanied by the spectacle of rivers of blood to strike fear even harder into people’s minds; that executing different kinds of people together indiscriminately was another means to instil fear; and, finally, that a most cruel refinement was the collective executions of friends or members of the same family sent to the guillotine together.¹⁵ When it came to the guilt of Robespierre and his co-conspirators, there was, for Tallien, no doubt:

Citizens, everything that you have just heard is but a commentary on what Barère said at this very rostrum on the day that followed Robespierre’s death. I would like to add one thing: this was Robespierre’s system. He was the one who put it in practice with the aid of several subalterns, some of whom were killed alongside him and others of whom are buried alive in public hatred. The Convention was a victim, never an accomplice.¹⁶

In the weeks that followed Tallien’s speech, another new term would be coined, that of ‘terrorist’, to define those who had supported the ‘system of terror’.

The hunt for Robespierre’s surviving ‘subalterns’ started right away. The next day, 12 Fructidor, the deputy, Lecointre denounced seven former members of the two major committees, among them Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, and Barère. The denunciation was timed to follow on from Tallien’s speech. While the accusation was rejected as slanderous, it was followed a month later with a second denunciation, made by another deputy, Legendre, against the three former members. Vadier took it up and an investigative committee was created.¹⁷

Contrary to Tallien’s claims, when Barère had denounced Robespierre and his ‘co-conspirators’ on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety on 11 Thermidor, he had made no mention of a ‘system’ they had put in place. Rather, Barère’s denunciation had followed a standard pattern amongst revolutionary factions, of accusing the four deputies who had been executed the previous day of having usurped public authority to make themselves rulers of France, a triumvirate of tyrants. Such accusations owed much to a common trope in revolutionary politics of accusing opponents of imitating Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic.¹⁸ According to Barère’s hastily-manufactured charges, Robespierre was supposed to ‘reign’ over Paris and the central part of the Republic, Saint-Just over the North (a fabrication based on his having served as a deputy on mission to the armies on the northern fronts and the Rhine), whilst Couthon and Robespierre’s brother, Augustin, would rule over the South.¹⁹ Not one word was said on the fifth deputy who died on 10 Thermidor, Le Bas, who chose to commit suicide rather than have the Convention send him to the guillotine with his friends. Barère’s speech contributed to the black legend of Robespierre, the ‘new Catiline’, stories which started circulating in the summer of 1794, if not earlier.²⁰ While Barère’s speech was fundamentally different from Tallien’s in almost every respect, they had one key thing in common: the Convention and its committees (including, of course, themselves) had no responsibility for the ‘terror’ – it was the fault of other men. Dissenting voices could hardly rise to be heard. Thus Cambon was not heard at all when, in spite of denouncing Robespierre and ‘his system of terror’, he also pointed out that a number of exceptional institutions had been created by decrees voted in, quasi-unanimously, by the Convention to meet the crisis: ‘Take note that we are not in an ordinary time; take note that the Declaration of Rights did not institute surveillance committees, and yet you have unanimously judged them necessary.’²¹

The Convention had given itself an amnesty for its actions in supporting crisis measures enabling terror. It gave itself this absolution by making Robespierre the scapegoat, the so-called sole ‘mastermind’ behind a ‘reign of terror’. As a consequence, over the next two centuries, Robespierre would be remembered as the originator and master of the ‘terror’, an all-powerful dictator who had stifled all debate by imposing his domination over the Convention and kept adding names to endless interminable lists of undesirables, a tyrant who dreamed of being crowned king by marrying the daughter of Louis XVI so as to be tied in blood to the Bourbon line, a ferocious triumvir who imposed his authority upon Saint-Just and Couthon (Augustin Robespierre, mentioned by Barère, quickly disappeared from the group, not only to refine the formula of a conspiratorial triumvirate inspired by antiquity but also because he was not condemned to death for any reason except his family name, as no crime could be pinned on him). This allowed the Convention to spread the news over the entire national territory and to the armies, presenting Thermidor as the fall of yet another faction that would have usurped the sovereignty of the nation. A flood of letters gushed in to Paris in the summer and autumn of 1794. Written in a language laden with clichés and a limited, stereotyped range of vocabulary, they give an idea of how the news had been circulated to the provinces and how local authorities, popular societies and simple citizens saluted the Convention for its fine deed against ‘the infamous Robespierre’ or the ‘monstrous triumvirate’.²²

Many pamphlets and brochures came out in the weeks after Thermidor, some waxing on the popular motif of ‘Robespierre’s queue’ – literally ‘Robespierre’s tail’ (meaning the remains of his faction, but also a term with a humorous phallic connotation)²³ or the arrival of Robespierre and the Jacobins into hell.²⁴ Among this mass of writings, the blood spilled in the execution of the ‘system of the terror’ occupied pride of place, while the sexualized humour offered light relief, attracting readers whilst giving an opportunity to exorcize fear through laughter: thus, ‘the revolution’s events often give new words to the republican dictionary – and here is one that makes all the women laugh: everyone wants to know his queue: Robespierre’s queue, give me his queue, respond to the queue, defend your queue, cut off the queue.’²⁵

Mixing the Incorruptible’s queue with his descent into hell, a supposed letter that Robespierre’s ghost sent to his followers from the other side, claims that he explained to the ‘tribunal of hell’ that he wished to apply a ‘policy … just like yours’, sharpening the ‘liberticide daggers’, robbing fortunes, destroying commerce, spreading famine, protecting brigands, ‘immolating so many men in the name of humanity’ – in short, ‘put terror in power’.²⁶ As Robespierre’s ghost adds that it would have ‘taken five mortal years to arrive at [his] goal’, the author provides a chronological list of the projects put in place for the ‘reign of the terror’ between summer 1789 and summer 1794. The political demonstration imparted two ideas to the reader: on the one hand, Robespierre had been moved by an ambition to impose a bloody dictatorship from the beginning of the Revolution; and, secondly, that his execution put an end to ‘the reign of the terror’, an expression with a long life ahead of it.²⁷ Tallien’s political analysis is confirmed, with the word ‘terror’ having a widely different meaning in 1794 than it had in 1789, to say nothing of the fact that ‘terror as the order of the day’ had never been imposed by Robespierre and his supporters.