10 Thermidor

Requiescant in pace les Robespierristes. Not just the famous ones, and not just those who died 216 years ago today, but to all the victims of the Thermidorian reaction.

In related news, I decided that, since everyone is always citing it, it might be a good idea for me to take a break from the six books I'm currently reading to read Françoise Brunel's Thermidor. You know, in commemoration. I don't know if anyone else on my f-list has read it (I seem to remember maelicia saying she had, but I could be misremembering) but if anyone has, were you at all disappointed with it? Because I was.
 
First with the conclusion - obviously, all the really reactionary after-effects happened in Year III, but that doesn't really make Thermidor a  non-event. I've always seen Thermidor as the turning-point that allowed those later events to take place, and after reading Brunel, for lack of a better explanation, I still think that. It's not a new observation that the Revolutionary government wasn't dismantled the second Robespierre was executed, nor that dismantling the Revolutionary government was not the intention of really any of the Thermidorians. That doesn't on its own make Thermidor insignificant. Unless I'm missing something (which is always quite possible)...

Second, with Brunel's assertion that there was no conspiracy. I can see where she's coming from in terms of the seemingly improvised character of the whole thing, but her proofs aren't really that convincing to me. She's at her best with her explanation of why someone like Billaud-Varenne (who shared most of Robespierre's core beliefs) would become a Thermidorian, but that explanation alone doesn't suffice. Let's say for a moment that there was no conspiracy - an idea that the concerted shouts of "à bas le tyran" alone would seem to invalidate, and one that is certainly not disproven by the absence of someone like Fouché from the list of speakers on 9 Thermidor, open contestation not being Fouché's modus operandi (and this is assuming the procès-verbaux, which we know were fabricated after the fact, to be accurate) - in the absence of a conspiracy, the feelings of alienation of a couple of Billaud-Varennes, even coupled with the tensions between the two Committees over the police bureau are not enough in themselves to make Thermidor happen...

Unless, as Brunel's account leaves us to infer, Robespierre just enjoyed randomly sabotaging himself for no reason. And this is probably the single biggest problem I have with this book: I've never seen an account in which Robespierre is simultaneously so absent from, and yet responsible for, his own fall. Yes, I get that Brunel was probably trying to avoid the approach which sees Thermidor as nothing but the last chapter in a biography of Robespierre, to look at its larger implications, but if Robespierre's point of view isn't examined at all, his actions make no sense. So the explanation becomes: Thermidor happened because Robespierre alienated his colleagues. Which may well have been, at least in part, the case. But then, it seems to me, you need to pose certain questions: Why did he do this? Did he realize he was doing it? What is his justification for his conduct? Do what extent do we believe his justification? And so on. I realize she's writing a short work of only a little over a hundred pages, but Brunel poses none of these questions, questions which are, however, fundamental not just to understanding why Robespierre acted as he did, but also, at least potentially, to understanding the role of certain Thermidorians as well. I mean, if the latter's post-Thermidorian justifications, dubious as they are, can be used as a historical source, surely the former's can as well...?

And we get that, briefly. Too briefly: if all you get out of Robespierre's last speech is a vague feeling that he was suicidal, you've nailed one angle of it and missed a hundred others, it seems to me. With no other explanation offered, one is left to infer that Robespierre, feeling suicidal, deliberately alienated his colleagues, thus backing them into a corner where they had no choice but to turn on him. Mind, though I disagree with it, this might be a valid argument if it were actually ever made. In fact, however, it's not made, just implied, which means that it never has to be defended - and why should I, the reader, believe in an implied argument that even its own author doesn't bother to defend? Am I missing something?

No, seriously: am I missing something? Because it seems to make sense enough to everyone cites it. Is it just assumed that people are already familiar enough with Robespierre's point of view that they can fill that part in for themselves? Am I just not sophisticated enough to grasp Brunel's argument? (Yes, that's a genuine question, because to be honest, at the moment I feel rather more like an idiot than "ah-ha! I have spotted the holes in your argument!" *so confused*)