Ending the Terror makes accessible for the first time to an English-speaking readership a major revisionist assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. The months that followed the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 mark not only a turning point in the history of the Revolution: 'Thermidor' is also a symbolic moment which came to haunt the subsequent revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By this date the Terror as a system of power was discredited, and the engineers of the Terror were confronting the problem of how to dismantle it without repudiating the aims of the Revolution itself and its work. Professor Baczko analyses the Terror in detail through the political history of the French National Assembly, and looks at the broader issues of the political culture of Revolutionary France.

He also uses the problem of the ending of the Terror to highlight contemporary problems in the breakup of the communist system.