Robespierre Arrested: Reign of Terror Collapses

The man who had signed more than 2,600 execution orders in fourteen months found himself standing on the wrong side of the National Convention's judgment. Maximilien Robespierre was arrested on 9 Thermidor, Year II of the revolutionary calendar, ending the most lethal phase of the French Revolution and the political career of its most polarizing figure in a single chaotic parliamentary session. Robespierre had dominated the Committee of Public Safety since the summer of 1793, directing a program of revolutionary justice that sent aristocrats, moderates, political rivals, and ordinary citizens to the guillotine. The Terror was driven by a combination of genuine military emergency, with France fighting simultaneous wars against most of Europe, and an ideological purity campaign that consumed anyone suspected of insufficient revolutionary commitment. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone executed 1,376 people between March and July 1794. The coalition that brought Robespierre down was not motivated by moral revulsion but by survival. Several Convention members, particularly those who had directed brutal military campaigns in the provinces, feared they would become the next targets of the Committee's purges. Joseph Fouche, who had overseen mass executions in Lyon, and Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had his own record of provincial brutality, organized a bloc of deputies who understood that their lives depended on acting before Robespierre acted against them. On 9 Thermidor, Robespierre rose to address the Convention but was repeatedly shouted down. When he attempted to speak again, deputies voted for his arrest. He fled to the Hotel de Ville with loyal allies and attempted to organize resistance, but a jaw wound, either self-inflicted or caused by a gendarme's pistol, left him unable to speak. He was captured, carried to the Convention on a stretcher, and condemned without trial. Robespierre went to the guillotine the following afternoon. The executioner ripped the bandage from his shattered jaw, and witnesses said his scream was the last sound of the Terror.