[I]n January 1891, Victorien Sardou premiered his Thermidor at the Comédie Français. The play tells the story of a clerk working for the fearsome Committee for Public Safety who tries to save its victims from the Terror by misplacing their paperwork. The play’s title alludes to the day, 9 Thermidor, when the Committee’s sanguinary chairman, Maximilien Robespierre, was overthrown.

Thermidor’s first night was a great success. Nevertheless, when word circulated that Robespierre was portrayed as the play’s villain, everything changed. The second night’s audience was so abusive that the police were called. Faced with the possibility that more performances would be disrupted (but more likely for political reasons), the Carnot government promptly banned Thermidor. The matter did not end there, however. A few days later, two deputies questioned the government’s action during a session of the National Assembly, arguing that Thermidor’s treatment of the Revolution’s evil aspects did not justify banning. What started as a debate about artistic freedom, however, quickly changed direction when Georges Clemenceau rose to defend the Terror by calling it inseparable from the Revolution. “Gentlemen,” he said, “whether we want or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc . . . from which we can separate nothing.”
A wild & dangerous effervescence (James F. Penrose, March 2020, New Criterion)

Let us do now what the Legislative Assembly did not do. Let us create terror to save the people from doing so. Let us organize a tribunal--it cannot be a perfect one, that is impossible, but the least bad we can make it--and put the sword of justice to the heads of our enemies.

The present state of France was ten times worse than the tyranny of its past. "The French will go from tyranny to tyranny, oppression to oppression until this system crumbles with the ruin and destruction of their unhappy, errant empire." Those in England who supported such a thing, Burke concluded, were not simply mistaken, they were bad men.

Paine expounded to Danton how he thought France must proceed to a republic: the king must not be manhandled or physically harmed, for that would dishonour the Revolution's glorious achievements. What Paine most wanted, Danton understood, was a serene process that would ease the spread of republicanism to England.

Rather as Pitt envisioned it, life for the people of Paris grew more fearful by the day as spring turned to summer in 1793. The population seemed haunted. As a resident in the heart of the capital, Danton watched the mood darken. He wondered what part of the blame he carried.

Before him stood Alexandre de Lameth, one of the high-born pair of brothers who had helped organise the revolutionary parliament's affairs until the monarchy came crashing down on 10 August. Danton himself had personally helped both brothers, Charles and Alexandre, escape abroad in the shadow of the September massacres. This Lameth who came calling was a good fellow who believed in liberty, a cavalry captain who had fought in America for the American colonies' independence. He was an active Jacobin from the club's early days who had managed to compromise himself, however, by sticking to his goal of a constitutional monarchy when the republic was already a certainty. Danton stared at him in disbelief.