Law of 22 Prairial

A tribunal for the enemies of the people

Why the Committee wanted a new law

The Revolutionary Tribunal had judged political crimes in Paris since March 1793, with a jury, witnesses and defence counsel, and a single trial could take days. In the spring of 1794 the Committee of Public Safety wanted it faster. It had sent the Hébertists to the guillotine in March, and Danton and Camille Desmoulins in April, after a trial in which the accused were silenced by a decree of the Convention. In April another decree ordered that people accused of conspiracy anywhere in France be brought to Paris for trial, and the prisons of the capital filled.

Two attacks at the end of May sharpened the sense of danger. On the night of 22 May a man named Admirat fired at Collot d’Herbois, a member of the Committee; the next day a young woman, Cécile Renault, was arrested at the house where Robespierre lodged, carrying two small knives. On 8 June Robespierre, then president of the Convention, led the Festival of the Supreme Being. Two days later, on 22 Prairial Year II, his friend Georges Couthon, a member of the Committee who had lost the use of his legs, laid the new law before the Convention.

What the law said

The law rebuilt the Tribunal around a single aim: to punish the “enemies of the people”, those who sought to destroy public liberty “by force or by cunning”. A long article listed who counted: not only royalists, traitors and those who starved Paris, but anyone who spread false news, misled opinion or “depraved morals”. For all of them there was one penalty, death. Proof could be “material or moral”, anything that would win the assent of a just and reasonable mind, and the jurors were to be guided by their conscience, “enlightened by love of the fatherland”.

The protections of the accused went one by one. The private questioning before trial was abolished as superfluous; witnesses need not be heard if the court held other proof; and defence counsel disappeared altogether, for the law gave “slandered patriots” patriotic jurors as their defenders and granted none to conspirators. Every citizen, finally, was bound to denounce the conspirators he knew of.

Voted in a day

The deputies were alarmed. Ruamps, a deputy of the Mountain, asked for the debate to be adjourned and declared that if the law passed without delay he would blow his brains out. Robespierre opposed any delay and asked the Convention to debate it article by article there and then, and the law was voted in the same sitting.

What worried the deputies most was what the law left out. It named the only authorities that could send anyone before the Tribunal, the two great committees among them, and it overrode every earlier law that disagreed with it, including, it seemed, the rule that no deputy could be tried without a vote of the Convention. On 11 June Bourdon de l’Oise had the Convention declare that this right remained its own; on 12 June Couthon and Robespierre protested that the committees were being slandered, and the declaration was withdrawn. From then on many deputies believed that the committees could send them to the scaffold at will, and that fear helped bring Robespierre down seven weeks later.

The Great Terror

Seven weeks in Paris

The Tribunal now tried the accused in batches, dozens at a time, each allowed a few minutes. Informers in the prisons reported “conspiracies” among the prisoners, and those they named went before the Tribunal in groups. On 17 June fifty-four people accused of plotting the attacks on Collot d’Herbois and Robespierre, Admirat and Cécile Renault among them, were taken to the scaffold dressed in the red shirts of parricides. The victims of those weeks included sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, on 17 July, and the poet André Chénier, on 25 July, two days before Robespierre fell.

The guillotine had left the Place de la Révolution, in the heart of the city; from mid-June it stood at the Place du Trône-Renversé, on the eastern edge, and the bodies of more than 1,300 people were buried in pits in the garden of a former convent at Picpus.

Yet the war was turning in France’s favour: on 26 June the victory at Fleurus opened Belgium to its armies. Robespierre himself stopped attending the Committee after a quarrel at the end of June, though the machinery went on without him.

After Thermidor

On 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, the Convention turned on Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just, and the fall of Robespierre took the authors of the law to the guillotine the next evening, with Dumas, the president of the Tribunal, among those who died with them. On 1 August the Convention repealed the Law of 22 Prairial, and the same day it ordered the arrest of Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, who went to the guillotine in his turn in May 1795. Suspects were soon released by the thousand.

The law has remained the emblem of revolutionary justice at its worst, and historians still ask why it was passed when the war was already being won — one of the questions at the heart of the argument over the Terror. Some see in it the answer of frightened men to the attempts on their lives, others the logic of the Terror carried to its end, and others a weapon Robespierre was preparing against deputies he distrusted, which is how many of those deputies saw it at the time.