Definition of "Thermidor"

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

2003, David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, OUP Oxford, page 329

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.

2008, Martin Malia, Terence Emmons, History's Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, Yale University Press, page 304

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.

2008, Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia, Yale University Press

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

2009, Philip Abbott, Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates, Fourth Edition, Waveland Press, page 46