thermidor

name

1. (historical)The eleventh month of the French Republican Calendar, from July 19 or 20 to August 17 or 18.

noun

1. A counterrevolution; a coup d'état resembling the Thermidorian Reaction.

   “According to Sartre — this was a famous polemic — Camus had now made his Thermidor (counter-revolution) by attempting to stand outside or above history;”

   “So the author, after seeking vainly between the editions of 1938 and 1965 a peg on which to hang his Thermidor, in the end gave up and labeled the Russian case "permanent revolution," without, however, explaining how this aberrant outcome of the Bolshevik fever came about.”

   “The year —that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.43 Thus Trotsky finally recognized that a Thermidor had in fact occurred, not as an overt bourgeois coup but as a more subtle political shift within the ruling party.”

   “Usually, in a Thermidor, the democratic reforms that appeared early in the revolution are wiped out along with many of the radical policies.”