In the hot Paris summer of 1794, the fall of Robespierre signaled the end of the Reign of Terror and opened a fresh era of calm and consolidation. It was the year II in the new French revolutionary calendar, and the month was named Thermidor. In his classic analysis, The Anatomy of Revolution, the late Harvard historian Crane Brinton called Thermidor "a convalescence from the fever of revolution."
THE American racial revolt of the 1960s has in no sense been a full-scale upheaval like the French Revolution. Yet it can be said that in the relatively cool American summer of 1969, a...
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