Law of Suspects

Terror, the order of the day

How the law came about

By the late summer of 1793 the Republic was at war with most of Europe and with rebels at home. The Vendée had risen in March; after the leading Girondins were expelled from the Convention in June, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and other cities had turned against Paris in what the Montagnards called “federalism”; and at the end of August the royalists of Toulon handed the port and its fleet to the British. In Paris bread was scarce and dear. On 23 August the Convention decreed the levée en masse, putting every French citizen at the service of the war.

At the Jacobin Club speakers had been calling for terror for days. On 5 September crowds of sans-culottes, led by the Paris Commune, marched on the Convention demanding bread and action against the Republic’s enemies within. The deputies gave way. They voted to raise a revolutionary army to carry the Revolution into the countryside, and Bertrand Barère, speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, took up the cry: “Let us make terror the order of the day.” Twelve days later, on 17 September, Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai presented a decree on suspects on behalf of the Committee of Legislation, and the Convention adopted it.

Who was a suspect

Six categories and a certificate

The first article ordered the arrest, at once, of every suspect still at liberty. The second said who they were, in six categories: partisans of tyranny or federalism, known by their conduct, their connections, their words or their writings; people who could not account for their means of living and the performance of their civic duties; anyone who had been refused a certificate of civism, the paper by which a commune vouched for a citizen’s patriotism; dismissed officials; former nobles and relatives of émigrés who had not “constantly” shown their attachment to the Revolution; and émigrés who had come home.

Most of these were not crimes. They described a person’s opinions, family, friends or past, and they left the judgment to those who applied the law. In October the Paris Commune, urged on by its procureur, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, published its own list of signs by which a suspect could be known, among them “those who, having done nothing against liberty, have also done nothing for it”. Four years earlier the Declaration of the Rights of Man had promised that no one could be arrested except in the cases determined by law, and that everyone was presumed innocent. The Law of Suspects kept to the letter of the first promise, since it was itself the law, and turned the second on its head: now the suspect had to prove his civic virtue.

Committees and prisons

Held until the peace

The law was enforced by the surveillance committees, set up in March 1793 in every commune and in each section of the large towns. They drew up the lists, signed the warrants and sealed the suspects’ papers, then sent the names and the reasons for each arrest to the Committee of General Security in Paris, the Convention’s police committee. Suspects were to be held “until the peace”, at their own expense.

The prisons filled quickly. In Paris the old ones were soon not enough, and former convents, colleges and palaces were turned into jails, among them the Luxembourg, the Carmelite convent in the rue de Vaugirard and Port-Royal, renamed Port-Libre. Across France, by the usual estimates, between 300,000 and half a million people were held as suspects during the Terror, many of them for months, and thousands died in custody. Most never came to trial. The courts that did judge, the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris and the courts and commissions in the provinces, passed some 17,000 death sentences between them, most of them for rebellion or treason, as told in What was the Terror?

“Open the prisons”

From clemency to Prairial

By the winter the prisons had become a political question. In December 1793 Camille Desmoulins, an old schoolfriend of Robespierre, took up the suspects’ cause in his newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier.

He asked for a “committee of clemency” to examine their cases. Robespierre at first shielded him, then broke with him, and on 5 April 1794 Desmoulins went to the guillotine with Danton and the other “Indulgents”. The Committee of Public Safety went the other way. In February and March 1794 the Ventôse decrees, proposed by Saint-Just, provided for the property of suspects recognised as enemies of the Revolution to be seized and given to poor patriots; they were never really applied. On 10 June the Law of 22 Prairial widened the definition of the enemies of the people still further, abolished defence counsel before the Revolutionary Tribunal and left it a single penalty, death.

After the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), the committees began releasing suspects by the thousand, and the law that had made them suspects fell out of use. Merlin de Douai went on to serve the Directory as minister of justice and then as one of its five Directors.

Why it matters

The Law of Suspects turned the Terror from a string of emergency measures into a system. It set up no court and passed no sentence, but by making suspicion itself a ground for arrest, and by putting the power to arrest in the hands of thousands of local committees, it placed much of France under watch. Its name became a byword for laws that punish people for who they are or what they might think: in 1858, after an attempt on the life of Napoleon III, the Second Empire’s law of general security was at once nicknamed a new “law of suspects”.