If you’re new to this corner of the internet, and what you’ve mainly seen is the sensationalist side of French Revolution history, you probably picture Paris as a continuous procession of carts rolling toward the guillotine. And, by the same logic, you’re probably imagining the Revolutionary Tribunal as a kind of legalised abattoir: a place where everyone arrived as a suspect and left with their head in a basket.
Unfortunately, despite what some books, films, and even documentaries would have you think, the Tribunal was, for quite a long time, a fairly dull bureaucratic institution where you had a respectable chance of being told to go home.
And today, because I like numbers, I’m not going to spend much time getting lyrical about the intricacies of the Tribunal or its most important cases. I’m just going to show you the statistics of the cases it handled.
The Tribunal was created on 10 March 1793 while the Republic was pretty much a mess. France was fighting most of Europe and losing at its borders, and people at home were getting restless.
The idea was pushed by Georges Danton (1), who famously argued that the state needed to be terrible so the Parisian mobs would not have to be. In other words, he wanted a formal court to deal with traitors before the public decided to deal with them itself, with pitchforks, as it had during the September Massacres (2).
In its first year, the Tribunal was very... judicial.
In fact, in 1793, most people brought before the Tribunal were acquitted. The Tribunal handled its highest volume of cases in July 1793, with a total of 66. That same month also saw the highest number of acquittals: 47. Death sentences reached their high point in September 1793 at 17. Seventeen for the whole month. Not exactly an abattoir, is it?
By the spring of 1794, the revolutionary government decided to shut down most of the special provincial courts. Revolutionary justice would now be dispensed, strictly, in Paris. Decrees passed in April and May ordered that suspects from across the Republic be sent directly to the capital.
This created a serious bottleneck.
But to secure convictions in high-profile political show trials, the government had already started stripping away legal protections in a fairly methodical way. During the trial of the Girondins (3) in October 1793, the Convention decreed that juries could simply stop deliberating after three days if their consciences had been sufficiently enlightened. When Danton used his oratorical skill to dominate his own trial (4), the Convention passed another decree allowing the court to silence and remove defendants who resisted or insulted the justice of the nation.
In other words, the protections given to suspects were already being worn away before what is so often presented as “the law of the Great Terror,” and as the final proof that Robespierre wanted to become a dictator and purge his enemies: the Law of 22 Prairial.
First, let me state my bias plainly: I am not especially fond of the Law of Prairial. I think parts of it should have been thought through a good deal better (for example, the whole acquit-or-die arrangement... the military-court atmosphere... I understand why those things are there, but on moral grounds, I am not a fan). That said, I also do not really see it as some uniquely bloodthirsty innovation. If anything, it looks more like a continuation of what had already been happening for several months.
The law redefined several basic parts of the judicial process. It officially removed the old category of “suspects,” replacing it with a new one: “enemies of the people.” However, this new definition remained extremely broad, covering anyone accused of trying to destroy public liberty, deceive the people, protect traitors, spread defeatism, or obstruct food supplies.
To speed trials up, the law removed the right to defence counsel and allowed juries to convict on the basis of moral, verbal, or written proof, using their own common sense, sometimes without even hearing witnesses. Judges and juries were also limited to just two possible outcomes: full acquittal or death, with no possibility of appeal.
Now, if you are looking at your screen or phone and thinking, well, whoever wrote this must have been insane, bloodthirsty, or angling for dictatorship, allow me a moment.
I will not go into too much detail here, because I think the law deserves an article of its own, but in brief, Couthon (5) (because it was Couthon who wrote it) and Robespierre did not simply wake up one morning and say: “muahhahahahah, we shall now dismantle a fair justice system so we can kill whoever we want”.
The law was not written in a vacuum. It was not some legal novelty appearing from nowhere. In fact, for the deputies of the Convention, the actual substance of the Law of Prairial was not necessarily a shocking innovation, because it directly repeated provisions from the decree of 23 Ventôse. The Ventôse decrees (6) had already begun the process of centralising revolutionary justice by suppressing existing tribunals and setting up six central commissions to judge the enemies of the Revolution under the tight supervision of the government committees.
The Law of Prairial effectively completed that process, bringing an end to the administrative confusion of earlier laws and to the incoherence of having several overlapping courts.
In fact, the only “innovation” that scandalised members of the Convention was the provision allowing deputies to be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior parliamentary approval. That was the real panic. (7)
Given that Paris was now responsible for all the cases coming before the Revolutionary Tribunal, both the workload and the number of death sentences went up. In six weeks, the court handed down 1,376 death sentences. Prosecutors used prison informers to draft indictments grouping together multiple suspects who were often entirely unrelated. During the month of Messidor, 796 death sentences were pronounced.
That is a sharp increase. That is a great many deaths. That is something that needs to be put in context.
France had, at the time, 28 million people and was at war.
After Robespierre’s death and the Thermidorian Reaction, the Revolutionary Tribunal survived for less than a year, until May 1795. In that span, between 1793 and 1795, the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal pronounced exactly 2,639 death sentences, while acquitting almost as many people: 2,357 individuals.
Again, more than 2,500 people is not a trivial number. But in a country of 28 million, in a national state of emergency, it is not exactly abattoir-level either.
In fact, when you look at the broader picture of the Terror across France as a whole, the total number of official death sentences handed down by all revolutionary courts and commissions was 16,594. Which means the Paris Tribunal accounted for only 16% of the official executions, while the vast majority, 84%, or 13,955 death sentences, took place in the provinces, especially in regions in the midst of civil war, like the Vendée (8).
If you widen the statistics to include incidental victims, such as those who died of disease in overcrowded prisons (usually estimated at between 10,000 and 12,000), and those summarily executed without any formal trial at all (another 10,000 to 12,000), the overall death toll of the Terror rises to somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people.
To put the Tribunal’s numbers in perspective, the 2,639 death sentences handed down in Paris over the course of the Terror is actually fewer than the 2,700 individuals condemned by French military courts during the First World War. Likewise, the total 16,594 official executions across all of France during the entire Reign of Terror is roughly equivalent to the 15,000 to 17,000 Communards executed in Paris in a single week in May 1871 (9)
(1) Georges Danton (1759–1794) was a major French revolutionary politician and orator, especially prominent in 1792–93. He was later tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed in April 1794.
(2) The September Massacres were the killings of prisoners in Paris between 2 and 6 September 1792. They were carried out by crowds who feared invasion, counter-revolution, and plots inside the prisons.
(3) The Girondins were a loose group of republican deputies associated with provincial interests, economic liberalism, and distrust of Parisian radicalism. Their trial in October 1793 ended with the execution of leading members after a strongly political prosecution.
(4) Danton’s trial took place in late March and early April 1794 and ended with his execution on 5 April. It happened in the context of the Indulgents, who were the more moderate revolutionary faction associated with a wish to ease the measures of the revolutionary government.
(5) Georges Couthon (1755–1794) was a deputy, member of the Committee of Public Safety, and close ally of Robespierre.
(6) The Ventôse decrees were laws passed in February and March 1794, mainly associated with Saint-Just, providing for the confiscation of property from those classed as enemies of the Revolution and its redistribution to needy patriots.
(7) Tellingly, the very first piece of the law to be repealed immediately after Robespierre’s execution was the article allowing deputies to be arrested without a prior Assembly hearing. Self-preservation, it turns out, is a powerful legislative motivator.
(8) The Vendée War was a civil war in western France from 1793, fought between the revolutionary government and a largely Catholic and royalist insurgency. It was the bloodiest conflict of the Revolution. I talk a lot about it on this blog, so check out the "vendee war" tag if interested.
(9) In May 1871, Paris was in the final phase of the Paris Commune, an insurrection against the government based at Versailles. The month ended with the Bloody Week, when government troops retook the city and killed large numbers of Communards.
Sources
Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935
Walter, Gérard, editor. Actes du tribunal révolutionnaire. Mercure de France.
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