In July 1794, as more moderate Jacobins began to fear that they might be next, Robespierre was shouted down in the National Convention. "Thermador" becomes an occasion to demonize everything that came before, everything that happened in 1793, 94, and to demonize not only Jacobins, but Sainte-Coulette," he says. Some people are really badly implicated because there were deputies who had been sent out into the countryside.
Featuring Laura Mason on her book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Mason discusses Babeuf's call to abolish property, his radically egalitarian conspiracy against the Directory government, and the end of the French Revolution. How a centrist government turned its back on popular democracy, presided over growing inequality and working-class poverty, and abetted the rise of the reactionary right that would ultimately overthrow it.
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