July or Thermidor?

On 9 Thermidor 1794, the Convention, disregarding the threats and violence of the Parisian mob, repudiated Robespierre. We now see that this event marked a decisive and irreversible turn in the French Revolution. Robespierre and eighty of his colleagues were executed. The Terror was brought to an end, the extreme Jacobins were discarded, and the course of the Revolution, with the help of Napoleon’s dictatorship, was contained within bourgeois limits.

On July 3/4, 1917, 200,000 workers and thousands of armed soldiers took to the streets of Petrograd to demand “All Power to the Soviet.” The Bolsheviks had opposed the demonstration as “premature,” but joined and more or less led it when they realized they could not stop it. This event marked a major turn in the Russian Revolution. The demonstration’s collapse threw the revolutionary gears into reverse. The Bolshevik leaders went into hiding (Lenin, Zinoviev) or jail (Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Trotsky). The parties seeking to hold post-Czarist Russia within a European sociopolitical frame were reinforced. Nevertheless, though the turn was real and drastic, we now see that it was not decisive. The revolution shifted back on course. Four months later the Bolsheviks took power.

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James Burnham

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On 9 Thermidor 1794, the Convention, disregarding the threats and violence of the Parisian mob, repudiated Robespierre. We now see that this event marked a decisive and irreversible turn in the French Revolution. Robespierre and eighty of his colleagues were executed. The Terror was brought to an end, the extreme Jacobins were discarded, and the course of the Revolution, with the help of Napoleon’s dictatorship, was contained within bourgeois limits.

On July 3/4, 1917, 200,000 workers and thousands of armed soldiers took to the streets of Petrograd to demand “All Power to the Soviet.” The Bolsheviks had opposed the demonstration as “premature,” but joined and more or less led it when they realized they could not stop it. This event marked a major turn in the Russian Revolution. The demonstration’s collapse threw the revolutionary gears into reverse. The Bolshevik leaders went into hiding (Lenin, Zinoviev) or jail (Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Trotsky). The parties seeking to hold post-Czarist Russia within a European sociopolitical frame were reinforced. Nevertheless, though the turn was real and drastic, we now see that it was not decisive. The revolution shifted back on course. Four months later the Bolsheviks took power.