Themed Set: Thermidor
July 22nd, 2008 Headsman
Paris, 1794
It is Thermidor — Month of Heat — by that queer artifact of the times, the Revolutionary calendar, and in the blistering summer the guillotine rots its own scaffold.
It is the climax of that emblematic moment of the French Revolution, often wrongly standing to casual observation as synonymous with the entire revolution. Jarring indeed how brief the span of those pregnant, dangerous days, that upon the storming of the Bastille the guillotine had not yet been erected and from that traditional birthdate of the Revolution were eclipsed successively the Bourbon monarchy, the Constitutionalist Assembly, the Girondin liberals, Marat, Danton … culminating in the bloody hegemony of Robespierre and the fatal test between the Jacobins and their enemies.
By the spring and summer of 1794, Paris is delivered fully to Robespierre. “Terror,” he says, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” A blip on the screen chronologically, this period seems endless to those who survive it, and it reverberates endlessly to those who succeed it.
For the next week, join Executed Today in 1794’s Month of Heat as day by day the Terror rages at its apex, inscrutably suffering citizens to live or die — until of a sudden it succumbs to its own rot.
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July 22 (4 Thermidor): The Noailles family
July 23 (5 Thermidor): Alexandre de Beauharnais
July 24 (6 Thermidor): Not Thomas Paine
July 25 (7 Thermidor): Andre Chenier
July 26 (8 Thermidor): Loizerolles and others for the “Conspiracy of the Prisons”
July 27 (9 Thermidor): The last cart of the Terror, not including the Marquis de Sade
July 28 (10 Thermidor): Maximilien Robespierre
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Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
Tags: 1794, black comedy, paris, robespierre, sanson, the terror, thermidor, thermidorean reaction
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19 Comments Add your own
1. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]
2. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]
3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 25th, 2008 at 2:05 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]
4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]
5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
[...] the Place de la Nation. Whether the result of another of the many bureaucratic snafus we’ve witnessed this week or a well-placed bribe from his friend and/or mistress Marie-Constance Quesnet, the guards were in [...]
6. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 3rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[...] Terror” is usually dated from September 1793 through July 1794, but only during its bloodiest last two months would so many as 52 have been guillotined together; at the time of Carton’s execution, half [...]
7. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
[...] famous and infamous blade dropped for the last time at Les Baumettes prison in Marseilles on Hamida Djandoubi, a [...]
8. 1793: Sydney Carton Posin&hellip | October 9th, 2008 at 2:29 am
[...] “The Terror” is usually dated from September 1793 through July 1794, but only during its bloodiest last two months would so many as 52 have been guillotined together; at the time of Carton’s execution, half as [...]
9. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 16th, 2008 at 1:23 am
[...] Themed Set: Thermidor 1794: Alexandre de Beauharnais, widowing Josephine for Napoleon [...]
10. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 16th, 2008 at 1:36 am
[...] wanton, senseless … her death was all of these, but then many others in the Terror suffered the same, as many others had under the [...]
11. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 am
[...] Brit Jack Ketch, prolific French Revolution headsman Sanson, U.S. President Grover Cleveland and (helpfully, for Halloween) flamboyantly costumed Italian [...]
12. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 1st, 2008 at 8:17 am
[...] As the terrible year of 1793 unfolded, the Girondins discovered themselves successively overthrown, expelled from the Convention, proscribed, and hunted. Though many more — Girondists and others — were to follow in their steps, the trial of these 21 before the Revolutionary Tribunal and subsequent guillotining, the first notable mass-execution of the Revolution, raised the curtain on the Terror. [...]
13. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 am
[...] the natural-born gadfly didn’t pick her battles with injustice, and the Terror was a bad period to be indiscriminate. Like some of her Girondist associates, she risked the Paris [...]
14. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | January 25th, 2009 at 2:07 am
[...] Meaning (though unnamed as such by Balzac), the phenomenally prolific Sanson. [...]
15. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | May 7th, 2009 at 1:23 am
[...] … when the Terror ended, our good state’s attorney even signed off on the execution of Robespierre, with what must [...]
16. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | May 28th, 2009 at 1:06 am
[...] Whatever the true death toll, it massively surpassed that of the much more eagerly commemorated Revolutionary Terror. [...]
17. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 16th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
[...] a body of soldiers stand guard upon it, as if they fear that it might grow thirsty and insatiate as in the days of its youth. The multitude press up again, reinforced every hour, and at last the pale day climbs over the [...]
18. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 17th, 2009 at 1:39 am
[...] had doomed the liberals who were her political fellow-travelers and opened the door to the very Terror she meant to avert. (And also that the gesture might have been better directed elsewhere, since [...]
19. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 22nd, 2009 at 10:20 am
[...] three months after the Bastille was stormed, France was merely pregnant with its coming Terrors. The Revolution was in its “moderate [...]
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