Thermidorian reaction fails

tenthring

Banned
What if the Thermidorian reaction which overthrew Robespierre failed?

There were lots of coups during the revolution. What eventually happened is most of the ideologues eventually got purged whether they were right or left. True ideologues are committed to something other then power itself. Eventually you got the directory, which was pretty committed to its own power, and then Napoleon who was very much a power lust kind of person.

Robespierre would have been overthrown because he didn't have the skill or desire to hold it all together. He wanted to do what he wanted to do. Once that stopped being what works he was done, if not at that moment then later.
 
You'd still have something coming at this point, less because the Revolution would have been prone to spontaneous coup, but because the Terrorist take of Jacobins looked more and more obsolete from one part, and because the radical take Robespierre took not only on public service (while Robespierre more incarnated some centrist take within Jacobins) but within Jacobin Club, personally threatened many people (as for exemple, Fouché).

Eventually, at this point, the de facto alliance between "rightists" from Jacobins, non-Jacobine Montagne and Plaine was powerful enough and with enough popular support outside Paris and other great cities to be victorious.

Basically, the opposition between compromising (and compromised?) elected structures, and the popular parallel semi-institutional structures (Jacobine succursals, Commune de Paris, etc.)
With the legalism (and maybe some sort of classism) quite present among Jacobin club, it remained largely apathic.

Maybe, with Robespierre dying during his arrest, murdered for exemple (assuming the version with Merda shooting him is the historical one), both Commune and Jacobins could react hard enough to crush most of Thermidorian coup.

The situation would be, however, much troubled and going in the way of a liberalisation of the regime.

I could see without much doubt Saint-Just leading the Jacobines at this point, as it almost happened IOTL, but it would be at the cost of some form of reconciliation with compromised Jacobins and Montagnards in order to strike back at the coup.

It would probably increase the gap between revolutionary far-left and Jacobine left, especially with a tactical alliance between Jacobins and moderates against still likely royalist outbursts (as Neo-Jacobins did IOTL, while being much more standing on the left).
 
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