Remembering 9 Thermidor, the End of the Terror
9 Thermidor was a victory over a bloodthirsty tyranny claiming to act in the name of progressive ideals.

This year, 27 July marked the 230th 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.
I'm old enough to remember when a Thermidorian Reaction would take many months to organize. Now the bourgeois can pull it off in a few weeks. Must have something to do with social media, chat rooms, etc.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 13, 2020
Remember when there was a very large mass movement to challenge unchecked police power, quickly followed by a Thermidorian Reaction by elite pundits and political leaders (of both parties) to delegitimize this movement? That was wild.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 31, 2022
1. The current Thermidorian Reaction we're witnessing (establishment backlash against trans rights, #metoo, BLM) echoes a forgotten moment in history: the widespread elite freak-out over 2nd wave feminism and gay rights in 1969-1973, after Stonewall ignited new militancy.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 25, 2022
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.