The Terror ended suddenly, but the revolution did not find a stable form. Five years of shaky rule followed, and then a general took power and kept much of what the revolution had built while shutting down its politics.
9 Thermidor
On 26 June 1794 the French won the battle of Fleurus in the Austrian Netherlands, and the threat of invasion faded. Robespierre, meanwhile, gave a speech hinting at a new purge without naming its targets. Deputies who feared they were next, including some who had run bloody missions in the provinces, struck first. On 9 Thermidor Year II, 27 July 1794, the Convention arrested Robespierre, and he was guillotined the next day with Saint-Just and about twenty others.
The Thermidorian reaction
The new leaders closed the Jacobin Club in November 1794 and ended the Maximum in December. Prices soared and the winter that followed was one of hunger. Gangs of well-dressed young men beat up former Jacobins in Paris, and in the south a "White Terror" murdered hundreds of them. In the spring of 1795 hungry crowds invaded the Convention demanding "bread and the Constitution of 1793." The army crushed the risings, and the sans-culottes ceased to be a political force.
The Directory
The Constitution of Year III (1795) tried to block both a new Terror and a return of the king. It created two chambers, the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients, and an executive of five Directors. Most men could vote in primary assemblies, but only property owners could serve as electors who chose the deputies. To keep control, the outgoing Convention decreed that two-thirds of the new deputies must come from its own ranks, which provoked a royalist rising in Paris in October 1795. A young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, dispersed it with artillery, what Thomas Carlyle later called "a whiff of grapeshot."
The Directory steered between enemies on both sides. On the left, Gracchus Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals called for common ownership of property; he was betrayed and executed in 1797, and later socialists saw him as a forerunner. On the right, royalists did well in the elections of 1797, and the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797) annulled royalist election gains with army backing. The next year the Directory struck down results that favored the left. A regime that kept overturning elections taught the country that the army, not the voters, had the final say.
The rise of Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica in 1769 to a family of minor nobility and trained as an artillery officer. He made his name at the siege of Toulon in 1793, won a dazzling campaign in Italy in 1796 to 1797, and led an expedition to Egypt in 1798. Returning in October 1799 as a hero, he joined a plot led by Sieyès, who wanted a soldier to back a stronger government. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès helped plan the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 to 10 November 1799). When the Council of Five Hundred resisted, grenadiers cleared the hall.
The new regime, the Consulate, made Bonaparte First Consul. A plebiscite approved its constitution, though his brother Lucien, the interior minister, roughly doubled the reported yes vote. In December 1799 Bonaparte proclaimed: "Citizens, the Revolution is established upon the principles which began it. It is finished."
What Napoleon kept, and what he ended
The Concordat of 1801 reconciled the French state with the papacy: Catholicism was recognized as the religion of most French people, the state named bishops, and the church gave up claims to its lost lands. The Civil Code of 1804 confirmed equality before the law for men, the end of feudal privilege, secure property and careers open to talent, while greatly strengthening the authority of fathers and husbands. In 1802 he restored slavery in the colonies, a decision that helped drive Saint-Domingue to full independence as Haiti in 1804. In December 1804 he crowned himself emperor. He kept the revolution's legal equality and destroyed its political liberty, ruling through censorship, police and staged plebiscites.
Worked example: why did the Directory fail?
The Directory is often dismissed as corrupt and weak, but its problem was structural. It needed elections to be legitimate, yet the voters kept choosing people who wanted to destroy it, royalists one year and radical Jacobins the next. Each time it annulled the result it lost a little more legitimacy and leaned a little more on generals.
Compare a healthy constitutional system, where losing parties accept defeat because they expect a fair chance to win next time. In France after 1794 neither side trusted the other to play by the rules, so each election felt like a fight for survival. When no group accepts losing, the institution that can win without votes, the army, gains power. Brumaire was less a sudden seizure than the end of a long slide.