(^126) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
democratic republic espoused by the new constitution, the Convention created a twelve-
man Committee of Public Safety and invested it with almost total power in order that it
might secure the fragile republic from its enemies. Within the Committee, a young lawyer
from the provinces, Maximilien Robespierre, gained control through his ability to persuade
both his fellow Jacobins and the san-culottes crowd to follow him.
Under Robespierre’s leadership, the Committee instituted what has come to be known as
the Reign of Terror. Arguing that, in times of revolution, terror was the necessary companion
to virtue, Robespierre created tribunals in the major cities of France to try individuals suspected
of being enemies of the Revolution. During the period of the Terror, between September
1793 and July 1794, between 200,000 and 400,000 people were sentenced to prison; between
25,000 and 50,000 of them are believed to have died either in prison or at the guillotine.
Among the victims of the Terror were those who rivaled Robespierre for power. In April
1794, when Robespierre had the popular and influential Jacobin leader, Georges-Jacques
Danton, arrested and executed for daring to suggest that it was time to reassess the Terror,
he lost the support of both the Jacobins and the crowd. In July 1794, Robespierre was
arrested, tried, and executed by the same Terror machine that he had created. The execution
of Robespierre marked the end of the radical phase of the Revolution, as an exhausted
Paris, devoid of its radical leaders, succumbed to a reassertion of power by the propertied
bourgeoisie.
The Final Phase of the French Revolution: Thermidor and the Rise
of Napoleon (1794–1799)
For several months following the execution of Roberspierre, the revolutionary terror was
replaced by the Thermidor Reaction, so named after the month of the revolutionary
calendar in which Robespierre was executed. What followed was a terror of reaction char-
acterized by a purge of the remaining Jacobins, and a reversal of Robespierre’s policies.
In the Convention, the moderates wrote a new constitution limiting political suffrage
to propertied middle classes, eliminating price controls and printing currency to handle
debts. The resulting inflation hurt lower socioeconomic classes, but any unrest was quickly
subdued. The executive functions of the government were placed in the hands of a five-man
board known as the Directory. Increasingly, the Directory relied on the military to keep
order and to protect it from both the sans-culottes, who stormed the Convention in May
1795, and from the Royalists, who attempted a coup five months later.
When the war against the European coalition began to go badly, conservative factions
within the Convention conspired with the ambitious and popular army general, Napoleon
Bonaparte, to overthrow the Directory. On November 9, 1799, the conspirators staged a
successful coup, and Napoleon acquired the powers necessary to govern as “first consul.”
By 1804, Napoleon had rid himself of his co-conspirators and had France proclaimed an
“empire” and himself “emperor.” He governed France with a mixture of reform and tradi-
tionalism and oversaw the military expansion of the French Empire until his defeat at the
hands of coalition forces at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.Post-Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Code
By the time Napoleon had himself declared emperor in 1804, he was well on his way to
completing the process, begun by the Revolution, of creating a strong central government
and administrative uniformity in France.16_Bartolini_Ch16_119-132.indd 126 27/04/18 1:55 PM