Remembering 9 Thermidor, the End of the Terror

This year, 27 July marked the 230^th anniversary of an event that still reverberates in history and remains known by a date from the long-extinct French revolutionary calendar: 9 Thermidor. On that day, a revolt in the nearly two-year-old French National Convention toppled the radical Jacobin regime led by Maximilien Robespierre and ended the Reign of Terror.

The term Thermidor has also acquired a larger meaning: Merriam-Webster defines it as “a moderate counterrevolutionary stage following an extremist stage of a revolution.” For the left, it has remained a term of opprobrium. A 1996 essay by French philosopher Alain Badiou, a staunch proponent of revolutionary communism and an idol of the radical Left, argues that the term “Thermidorian” denotes a worldview that corrupts and neutralises the transformative potential of revolution. (At least, that’s the argument one can glean from such jargon-riddled phrases as, “the concept of the subjectivity constituted through the termination of a political sequence.”)  While Badiou used the term to attack the anti-communists of his time, Canadian writer Jeet Heer has made “Thermidorian reaction” his go-to term for the centrist liberal pushback against the radical social justice movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and climate protests.

Some people who replied to Heer’s threads pointed out that, in his analogy, progressive movements are equated with the Terror. But that may not necessarily be a bad thing on today’s Left, where makeshift guillotines have been deployed at protests as a symbol of righteous retribution.