2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of
action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the
instigation of Danton, and which
a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was
covered with such tribunals.
“One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,” says
Taine, “of which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death
sentences in all parts of the country, which were carried out
instantly on the spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the
9th of Thermidor in the year II. that of Paris guillotined 2,625
persons, and the provincial judges worked as hard as those of
Paris. In the little town of Orange alone 331 persons were
guillotined. In the city of Arras 299 men and 93 women were
guillotined. . . . In the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary
commissioner admitted to 1,684 executions. . . . The total
number of these murders has been put at 17,000, among whom were
1,200 women, of whom a number were octogenarians.”
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only
2,625 victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had
already been summarily massacred during the “days” of
September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of
the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as
Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing
its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms
which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses—
all were finally suppressed. Moral proof—that is, mere
suspicion—sufficed to procure condemnation. The president
usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the
accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed
to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the
Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold
all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred. and
very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an
instrument of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its
founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and
men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create
such a Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of
Lavoisier, nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit
of Malesherbes. “So much talent,” said Benjamin
Constant, “massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of
men!”
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must
return to our conception of the religious mentality of the
Jacobins, who founded and directed it. It was a piece of work
comparable in its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition. The men
who furnished its victims—Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon—
believed themselves the benefactors of the human race in
suppressing all infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to
regenerate the earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the
members of the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000
working-men were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a
capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so
many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But
habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little
attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their
children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to
the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of
the time very indifferent to death. All mounted the scaffold
with perfect tranquillity, the Girondists singing the
Marseillaise as they climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which
very rapidly dulls emotion. To judge by the fact that royalist
risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine
no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror
terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological
process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far
more in threats than in their realisation.
