Robespierre wife

Robespierre guillotine

After 18 Brumaire only the heroic Napoleonic narrative was allowed and censorship closed down on discordant stories. There was much to celebrate after 14 July and 10 August but celebration was not investigation. And what marks 9 Thermidor off from all others is that the day was followed by extraordinarily detailed attempts to recapture exactly what had happened in all parts of the city.

The reason for this was the determination of government to root out and to punish those individuals within the State, in public life and across the city who had supported Robespierre. So the key question was, had an individual shown support for Robespierre and his supporters in the Paris Commune in their attempt to overthrow the government and purge the national assembly?

Or did they remain loyal to the national assembly and the rule of law? Newspaper reports, political pamphlets and later memoirs invariably contain accounts of the day. Yet this was only the tip of the iceberg. A few days after the event, Paul Barras , the deputy whom the government charged with the security of the city on the night of 9 Thermidor, initiated a punctiliously thorough review of everything that had happened within each of the 48 Parisian sections on 8, 9 and 10 Thermidor.

Inform me of all orders that you gave and all that you received; but above all, be precise on the dates and the hours; you will appreciate their importance. Many of the individual accounts were broken down for key periods of the day into quarter-hourly chunks. Besides this capital source, the Convention also set up a special official commission to make a report on the day, which was presented in the assembly exactly a year later.

And finally, literally hundreds of individual police dossiers over the next year or so also provide similar micro-accounts of episodes and moments of the day as ordinary citizens were pressed to prove their loyalism. Most of these extremely rich sources — never before tapped by historians in quite this way — are to be found in the French National Archives, particularly in series relating to policing and judicial affairs.

Taken together, they allow us to see the city in close-up during these 24 hours through a mosaic of thousands of narrative micro-fragments, as its inhabitants confronted and grappled with a decision that would affect not only their own futures but also the future of the Revolution. Studying these accounts, collating them and analysing them at the micro-level not only gives us an extraordinarily vivid picture of a city at a pivotal moment in its history.

It also allows us to present a new narrative of the day and a new analysis of what was at stake within it.