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Updated: June 21, 2025
Herein lies the chief chance of immortality for the name of Barras; not that, as a terrorist, he slaughtered royalists at Toulon; not that he was the military chief of the Thermidorians, who, from fear of their own necks, ended the supremacy of Robespierre; not even that he degraded the new régime by a cynical display of all the worst vices of the old; but rather because he was now privileged to hold the stirrup for the great captain who vaulted lightly into the saddle.
Then the Thermidorians also began to convoke their people, by appealing to the support of the sections. At the same time Freron called the young men at arms, in his journal l'Orateur du Peuple, and placed himself at their head. This new and irregular militia called itself La jeunesse doree de Freron.
This state of war and disorder would necessarily have an end; and since the parties had not the wisdom to come to an understanding, one or the other must inevitably carry the day. The Thermidorians were the growing party, and victory naturally fell to them.
It was men like Collot d'Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrère, the bloodiest of the Terrorists, who, to save their own heads, united to cast the odium of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him. The Thermidorians had no intention of staying the Terror and the actual consequences of their success were wholly unexpected by them.
Strip each of them of the beauty of character with which the poet's imagination has endowed them, add instead passion, violence, envy, egoism, malice; then you understand how in the very face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened the knife for the men of the Mountain, Hébertists screamed for the lives of Robespierrists, Robespierre struck off the head of Danton, Thermidorians crushed Robespierre.
This, too, was but a subterfuge; on August twentieth he was restored to his rank. A few weeks later commissioners from the Thermidorians arrived, with orders that for the present all offensive operations in Italy were to be suspended in order to put the strength of the district into a maritime expedition against Rome and ultimately against Corsica, which was now in the hands of England.
Of the Thermidorians Barras alone remained, and Barras, after five years of uninterrupted power and luxury, was used up as a man of action; he was quite ready to come to reasonable terms with Sieyès, or, if matters should turn that way, with the Comte de Provence, whose agents were in touch with him.
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