Robespierre’s Terror functioned as a middle-class holding operation against both right and left.

Evidence

Essentially, Guérin has rewritten the classical schema of the Great Revolution along the lines of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, as a kind of holding operation by the victorious middle classes. The functional purpose of Robespierre in this new reading of the Revolution was to eradicate whatever elements—whether counterrevolutionary or genuinely popular—remained to endanger the control of the middle classes; and when this was done, he himself was dispensable and could give way to that enjoyment of the fruits of the enterprise which was the Directory. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire reading of the French state; connects to Jameson’s dialectical method and to the historical-comparative method Jameson draws from Marx rather than from anarchist or liberal historiography.