The Revolutionary Tribunal

In early 1793 many in France were concerned at the failures of the French army in the Austrian Netherlands.  It was thought by the revolutionaries that this was explained by the presence of counter revolutionaries real and imagined.  In March 1793 Danton and Carrier proposed the establishment of a new court system for dealing with enemies of the revolution.

The five man court was created to deal with the backlog in cases and to specialise in counter revolutionary activities.  The power of the court would increase as the terror increased in its ferocity and the Committee of Public Safety its authority over France.  The Law of 22 Prairial would not allow prisoners to have counsels for their defence and did not allow defendants to call witnesses.  It also made the only two results of the Tribunal be acquittal or death.  The numbers of those sentenced to death accelerated rapidly.

Soon the Revolutionary Tribunal began to be seen as an instrument of the radical revolutionaries and then Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre in particular.  Jacques Hébert condemnation of Marie Antoinette led her to the Revolutionary Tribunal and her execution.  Only for Jacques Hébert and his followers to be condemned, tried and executed for his radical tendencies and then Danton and his associates to follow the same path.  In the wake of Thermidor the Tribunal would continue only to be wound down as did the terror.

Barère on the establishment of Revolutionary Tribunals.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 2, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p69-70

The establishment of a revolutionary tribunal had already been proposed to the Convention. I opposed it, as may be seen by reference to the Moniteur of that time. I even carried opposition to the establishment of this odious tribunal so far as to appear in the tribune with Sallust's work on the war of Catiline, a book in which that honest historian powerfully describes the dangers of such tribunals, which begin by attacking and punishing several guilty parties, and finish by ruining the best citizens. On the motion of Jean Debry revolutionary committees had also been established—frightful institutions, which, by their excesses and abuses, contributed more than any other institution of that epoch to provoke hatred of the revolution and to deprive France of liberty. Observe that the tribunal and the committees were decreed by the Convention on the simple motion of its members long before there was a Committee of Public Safety.

Letters from Helen Maria Williams on a visit to Revolutionary Tribunals.  Taken from Letters Written in France, Broadview Literary Texts, Ormskirk (2002) p186-187

The revolutionary tribunal, which from its institution, and the horrible assassinations which it had been the instrument of committing, will remain forever a striking monument of the perversion that tyrants can make of law and justice, now became the instrument of national vengeance in the punishment of those who have been the immediate actors in these judicial matters…..

I went to the revolutionary tribunal on the day when the public accuser recapitulated the charges, after the examination of the witnesses was finished.  I felt an emotion of the deepest horror on entering that hall, where so many persons who were dear to me had undergone a mockery of a trial, and from whence they had been dragged to death.  A thousand tender and cruel remembrances pressed upon my heart; I looked eagerly towards the benches where my friends had once been placed, and saw those very seats occupied by their murderers.  I gazed with a gloomy kind of curiosity upon the countenances of those assassins, which I expected to find impressed with the savage character of their souls; but in this I was deceived; I saw faces that indicated no marks of villainy, and some that bore the traces of the better feelings of our nature, and bespoke minds that only extraordinary circumstances and temptation had rendered wicked.

Gouverneur Morris comments on the end of Danton.  Taken from Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1989) p185

Danton, when condemned, or shortly before it, told his judges that he had observed in reading history that men generally perished by the instruments of destruction which they themselves had created. ‘I’ (says he) ‘created the Revolutionary Tribunal by which I am shortly to be destroyed.’  Shakespeare had made Macbeth pronounce the same dreadful sentence on the wickedly ambitious long ago.