Gilded Youth of Thermidor (PDF)

The Gilded Youth of Thermidor is a historical account of the Thermidorian Reaction following the fall of Robespierre in July of 1794. François Gendron has made an exhaustive examination of the 36,000 files of the Revolutionary police to reconstruct events on the streets as they parallelled those in the Assembly and provides a picture of social and political life in Paris at the time. He describes how the sans-culottes, the lower-class radicals who had been the mainspring and vanguard of the French Revolution, were crushed, and analyses the role played by the jeunesse dorée in their defeat.The jeunesse dorée, or "gilded youth," were a parallel militia recruited from the ranks of minor officials and small shopkeepers. They formed a distinctive subculture, defined by age and social origin, with their own forms of extravagant dress, their own anthem ("Le Réveil du Peuple"), their own affectations of speech, their own regular meeting-places in the cafés of the Palais-Royal, and even their own passwords, which were usually indirect references to Louis XVII. Gendron sees them as the shock-troops of the Thermidorian Convention, encouraged and sometimes employed by its Committee of General Security to force the pace of the reaction against the "terrorists," the sans-culottes. This provocation led to the uprisings of Germinal and Prairial and the consequent eviction of the sans-culottes from the political arena.