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French revolutionary legislators faced assassins, violent insurrections, and the risk of being injured or killed while on mission. Statistically, however, the most dangerous place for them was their own legislative assembly. As full-scale parliamentary warfare erupted between different political "factions" in the founding year of the republic, the safeguards of parliamentary immunity were removed and hundreds of legislators were purged. Much research has been done on the famous parliamentary purges of the Terror. The practice continued, however, long after Robespierre's fall as the Thermidorian Reaction experienced a second Terror in the legislature. Little is known about these later purges, and few comparisons have been made to the higher-profile cases of Year II. This article investigates why the Thermidorians failed to halt the cycle of parliamentary violence in the post-Terror era, arguing that the purging of legislators had by then become a destructive, long-term political habit with dangerous consequences for French representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the overthrow of Robespierre in the journée of 9 Thermidor II (July 27, 1794), the Convention set about establishing an official version of the events of the day. The principal protagonists had been Robespierre's fellow Montagnards and the Parisian sections, which responded positively to the Convention's call for armed support against Robespierre and the Paris Commune during the night of 9-10 Thermidor. Yet by the time the moderate deputy Edme-Bonaventure Courtois presented the official report to the assembly on 8 Thermidor Year III (July 26, 1795), a thorough reconceptualization of the day had occurred. The role of the Montagnards and of the people of Paris was simply erased. This rewriting of history was congruent with the general direction of Thermidorian policies toward popular involvement in the revolutionary process. It was also to prove influential in subsequent historiography of the events of 9 Thermidor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not much has escaped the massacre of orthodoxies begun by intellectual Alfred Cobban's attack on the myth of the French Revolution. But the neo-Jacobin version of the period from the fall of the monarchy to the fall of the Girondins has survived relatively unscathed. General accounts of the Revolution still have Jacobins, Montagnards and sans-culottes playing the same roles. And in accounts of the period with which this paper is concerned, from winter 1792 to summer 1793, the Montagnards and Jacobins still emerge as competent chief engineers of the successful republican counter-attack against the Revolution's external and internal enemies.