The Gilded Youth of Thermidor is a historical account of the Thermidorian Reaction following the fall of Robespierre in July of 1794. François Gendron has made an exhaustive examination of the 36,000 files of the Revolutionary police to reconstruct events on the streets as they parallelled those in the Assembly and provides a picture of social and political life in Paris at the time. He describes how the sans-culottes, the lower-class radicals who had been the mainspring and vanguard of the French Revolution, were crushed, and analyses the role played by the jeunesse dorée in their defeat.