Ending the Terror makes accessible for the first time to an English-speaking readership a major revisionist assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. The months that followed the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 mark not only a turning point in the history of the Revolution: 'Thermidor' is also a symbolic moment which came to haunt the subsequent revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By this date the Terror as a system of power was discredited, and the engineers of the Terror were confronting the problem of how to dismantle it without repudiating the aims of the Revolution itself and its work. Professor Baczko analyses the Terror in detail through the political history of the French National Assembly, and also looks at the broader issues of the political culture of Revolutionary France.

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Robespierre-the-king ...; 2. The end of Year II; 3. 'Horror the order of the day'; 4. The vandal people; 5. The Thermidorean moment; By way of a conclusion: Thermidor in history; Chronology of events mentioned in the text; Index.