The Law of 22 Prairial

By June 1794 there were concerns amongst revolutionaries in Paris that counter revolutionaries in league with foreign powers were casting their shadowy hand across France.  The prisons across France were filling with alleged counter revolutionaries.  Worse still there had been attempted assassination attempts on leading figures of the Republic such as Collot d'Herbois and Robespierre and with the memory of the murdered Marat still fresh in their minds concern grew.

The Law of 22 Prairial proposed by Georges Couthon in June 1794 and was created to streamline prosecutions.  All political trials were now held at the Revolutionary Tribunal.  The law ensured that no suspect was allowed a defence counsel or call for witnesses.  It also made trials last three days and they could only end in acquittal or death.  It also removed all immunity for any member of the National Convention.  A fact that would quickly account for the trials and execution of Danton and his allies and in time Robespierre himself.  The law gave the Revolutionary Tribunal and thus the Committee for Public Safety the chance to centralise the Revolution further and to grant individuals such as Robespierre dictatorial power.  The executions accelerated and the Terror truly began.

Barère on the Law of the 22nd of Prairial.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 2, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p165-166

The Feast of the Supreme Being having been decided, Robespierre affected, as everyone knows, to be the leader of the Convention. This haughty affectation of being the first amongst deputies who were all equal displeased the people and the Convention. Several called him the revolutionary Pope. It was to give him the sceptre and censer, like Mahomet. This was the forecast of his fall in publIc opinion. Yet he himself did not expect it, for on the following day he proposed the frightful law of the 22nd of Prairial, which deprived revolutionary justice of the little form it had, diminished the number of jurors, established a real judicial tyranny—or, rather, a system of assassination with the sword of revolutionary laws. I demanded the adjournment in vain. All were frightened at the ascendancy Robespierre had acquired among the Jacobins, or were bowed down by the yoke of terror he had organised. The law passed through the silence of legislators rather than by their consent. The murmurs produced by this legislative violence led the Committees of Public Safety and of General Surety to complain that the new law had not been proposed, known, or deliberated previously by either of the two committees, although the object of this law touched the functions of the Committee of General Surety, and it was proposed by a member of the Committee of Public Safety. The deputies of the Convention were very much astonished at learning that we had no part in it, and that the bill was the fabrication of the triumvirate of Couthon, Saint-Just, and Robespierre. The horrible law was passed ; its consequences were deplorable. It was by virtue of its clauses that those wholesale executions took place, and that monstrous huddling together of prisoners of all classes, astonished and frightened at being assembled in the same prisons and accused by the same laws.