Thermidorian Reaction

The Thermidorian Reaction (27 July 1794) was the turning point in the French Revolution when the Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, was overthrown and its principal members executed. The reaction ended the Reign of Terror — a period of revolutionary violence that had consumed not only the revolution's enemies but its own leadership — and initiated a conservative retrenchment that preserved the republican framework while dismantling its most radical institutions. The Thermidorians were not royalists; they were revolutionaries who had concluded that the revolution was devouring itself, and who chose to save the republic by killing its most zealous defenders. The event demonstrates how revolutionary systems generate internal correction mechanisms — feedback loops that terminate runaway dynamics not through external intervention but through the exhaustion of the system's own participants.