ABSTRACT
The Jacobin levelling experiment of 1793–94 left in its wake an embittered society. As a reaction to the events of Thermidor gathered pace, the country seemed to divide into those who had been involved in the politics or the bureaucracy of Terror and those who counted themselves among its victims. The readmission to the Convention of the surviving Girondins, together with those deputies who had protested against the 31 May–2 June purge carried out by the Montagnards and their street supporters, only exacerbated the tension. Before long, the stern figures in the two Committees who had helped to dislodge Robespierre (Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Vadier, Amar, etc.) would be called to account as ‘terrorists’ in their turn. The task facing France’s legislators from the autumn of 1794 was an exceptionally difficult one, therefore. They had to find a means of repairing the damage done by the Terror to the social fabric of the nation, while at the same time devising a system of government that would enshrine both freedom of parliamentary expression and solid guarantees against dictatorship by the executive arm. Their failure to resolve the bitter legacy of the Terror is one reason why historians tend to pass over these years as though nothing durable or constructive took place between 1795 and 1799. Better, therefore, either to ‘end’ the revolution with the fall of Robespierre, or to treat the regime brought into being by the new Constitution of 1795 as an extended chronological prelude to the arrival in power of Napoleon Bonaparte.
