The document summarizes two laws passed during the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution: the Law on Suspects of 1793 and the Law of 22 Prairial Year II of 1794. These laws gave the revolutionary government broad powers to arrest and execute those deemed enemies of the revolution. They legalized mass surveillance committees and loosened standards of evidence, leading to a major escalation of the bloodshed and executions during the Terror. Over 15,000 people were guillotined under these laws as the revolutionary government took increasingly tyrannical and dictatorial actions in the name of protecting liberty.

1. The French Revolution
Topic: The French RevolutionOrder DescriptionIn 1793 – 1794 the French Revolution, due
to conflict between rival factions, descended into the Reign of Terror. During this period
tens of thousands of people were executed and the guillotine became a symbol of the French
revolutionary government. The leaders of the Terror, most notably Maximilien Robespierre,
assumed tyrannical powers and wielded them in the name of liberty. Robespierre equated
terror with revolutionary justice. Thus, the Reign of Terror was justified as being the only
means to combat counterrevolutionary elements in France.The Terror was instigated with
the passage of laws, such as the Law on Suspects in September 1793 and the Law of 22
Prairial Year II in June 1794, aimed at wiping out suspected enemies of the Revolution.
These laws gave legal legitimacy to the spiraling bloodshed. Think about how the contents
of these laws incited the Terror and how these laws were used to justify the despotism of
the French revolutionary government. Consider the effects that the implementation of these
laws had on French society during the Terror.Write an essay that describes the dictatorial
nature of these two laws, including the specific powers the laws gave the French
revolutionary government. How did these laws usher in the Reign of Terror period of the
French Revolution?The National Convention, "Law on Suspects (1793)" and "Law of 22
Prairial Year II (1794)"________________________________________The constitutional monarchy fell
with a second revolution in August 1792, when revolutionaries in Paris toppled the king
and government, declaring a republic in France. The assembly for the early republic, called
the National Convention, served as a provisional government while they drafted a new,
republican constitution. This government, however, was plagued by crisis and divisions,
made worse by their war with Europe, which the government had entered into in April
1792. By April of 1793, most of the powers of the National Convention were centralized in a
smaller sub-committee of the assembly called the Committee of Public Safety. The
Convention created this sub-committee, comprised of 12 men elected by the larger
assembly, in an effort to streamline decision and policy making to better fight the European
war as well as the growing counter-revolutionary movement at home. All of these
developments contributed to the advent of the Terror (1793-1794), a period of mass
executions and political massacres throughout France. The Law of Suspects, passed by the
Convention in September of 1793, creating the laws and institutions of the Terror. The
Convention voted to further expand and strengthen these powers a year later, in June of
1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Prairial Year II.Source: Frank Maloy Anderson, ed.,
The Constitution and Other Select Documents of the History of France, 1789-1907 (New

2. York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 186-187, 154-157; reprinted in The French Revolution: A
Document Collection, eds. Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999),
231-232, 241-243.________________________________________55. Law on Suspects (September 17,
1793)The law on suspects complemented and completed the decrees passed by the
Convention on September 5. Although laws had been passed against particular categories of
enemy – refractory priests, émigrés, speculators – no legal definition of the counter-
revolutionary "suspect" had yet been developed. This law legalized the work of local
committees of surveillance, but its vague definitions suggest the breadth of the
revolutionaries’ fears.The Law on SuspectsImmediately after the publication of the present
decree, all suspect persons who are in the territory of the Republic and who are still at
liberty shall be placed under arrest.The following are considered suspect persons: first,
those who by their conduct, their connections, their remarks, or their writings show
themselves the partisans of tyranny or federalism and the enemies of liberty; second, those
who cannot, in the manner prescribed by the decree of March 21 last, justify their means of
existence and the performance of their civic duties; third, those who have been refused
certificates of good citizenship; fourth, public functionaries suspended or removed from
their functions by the National Convention or its commissioners and not reinstated,
especially those who have been or shall be removed by virtue of the decree of August 14;
fifth, those of the former nobles, all of the husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons or
daughters, brothers or sisters, and agents of the émigrés who have not constantly
manifested their attachment to the Revolution; sixth, those who have emigrated from
France between July 1, 1789, and the publication of the decree of March 30-April 8, 1792,
although they may have returned to France within the period fixed by that decree or
earlier.The committees of surveillance established according to the decree of March 21 last,
or those which have been substituted for them, either by the orders of the representatives
of the people sent with the armies and into the departments, or in virtue of special decrees
of the National Convention, are charged to prepare, each in its district, the list of suspect
persons, to issue warrants of arrest against them, and to have seals put upon their papers.
The commanders of the public force to whom these warrants shall be delivered shall be
required to put them into execution immediately, under penalty of removal.The members of
the committee cannot order the arrest of any person without being seven in number and
having an absolute majority of votes.The persons arrested as suspects shall first be
conveyed to the jail or the place of their confinement; in default of jails, they shall be kept
from view in their respective dwellings.Within eight days they shall be transferred to the
national building, which the administrations of the department shall be required to
designate and cause to be prepared for that purpose immediately upon receipt of the
present decree.The prisoners can cause to be transferred to these buildings the movables
which are of absolute necessity to them; they shall remain there under guard until the
peace.The expenses of custody shall be at the charge of the prisoners and shall be divided
among them equally: this custody shall be confided preferably to the fathers of families and
the parents of citizens who are or shall go to the frontiers. The salary for it is fixed for each
man of the guard at the value of a day and a half of labor.The committee of surveillance
shall, without delay, send the list of the persons whom they have caused to be arrested to

3. the Committee of General Security of the National Convention, with the reason for their
arrest and the papers which have been seized with them as suspect persons.The civil and
criminal tribunals can, if there is need, cause to be arrested and sent into the above-
mentioned jails persons accused of offenses in respect of which it may have been declared
that there was no ground for accusation, or who may have been acquitted of the accusations
brought against them.59. Law of 22 Prairial Year II (June 10, 1794)With the passage of the
law of 22 Prairial, the Terror reached the moment of its greatest intensity. In introducing
the law on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, the deputy Georges Couthon argued
that patriots had nothing to fear from patriotic judges, that legal forms were the tricks of
deceptive lawyers, and that written records and oral testimony were not reliable proof
because they could be falsified. In short, Couthon proposed sweeping away regular judicial
procedure as he broadened the category of capital offenses. For the next two months, until 9
Thermidor, executions rose dramatically, especially in the capital: 1,515 people were
executed in Paris during June and July.The revolutionary tribunal shall have a president and
four vice-presidents, one public accuser, four substitutes for the public accuser, and twelve
judges.The jurors shall be fifty in number.The different functions shall be discharged by the
citizens whose names follow:ÉThe revolutionary tribunal shall divide itself into sections
composed of twelve members, to wit: three judges and nine jurors, which jurors cannot give
judgment at a number less than that of seven. The revolutionary tribunal is instituted in
order to punish the enemies of the people.The enemies of the people are those who seek to
destroy public liberty, either by force or by artifice.Those are reputed enemies of the people
who have promoted the reestablishment of royalty or sought to depreciate or dissolve the
National Convention and the revolutionary and republican government of which it is the
center.Those who have betrayed the Republic in the command of places and armies, or in
any other military function; carried on correspondence with the enemies of the Republic;
labored to make the supplies or the service of the armies fail;Those who have sought to
impede the supplies for Paris or to cause scarcity within the Republic;Those who have
seconded the projects of the enemies of France, either in aiding the withdrawal and
impunity of conspirators and the aristocracy, or in persecuting and calumniating patriotism,
or in corrupting the servants of the people, or in abusing the principles of the Revolution,
the laws, or the measures of the government, by false and perfidious applications;Those
who have deceived the people of the representatives of the people in order to lead them
into operations contrary to the interests of liberty;Those who have sought to promote
discouragement, in order to favor the enterprises of the tyrants leagued against the
Republic;Those who have spread false news in order to divide or disturb the people;Those
who have sought to mislead opinion and to prevent the instruction of the people, to deprave
morals and corrupt the public conscience, to impair the energy and the purity of the
revolutionary and republican principles, either by stopping the progress of them, or by
counter-revolutionary or insidious writings, or by any other machination;Contractors
whose bad faith compromises the safety of the Republic, and the wasters of the public
fortune, other than those included in the provisions of the law of 7 Frimaire;Those who,
being charged with public functions, abuse them in order to serve the enemies of the
Revolution, to distress the patriots or to oppress the people;Finally, all those who are

4. designated in the preceding laws concerning the punishment of the conspirators and
counter-revolutionaries, and who, whatever the means or the appearances with which they
cover themselves, have attacked the liberty, unity, and security of the Republic, or labored
to prevent the strengthening of them.The penalty provided for all offenses, the jurisdiction
of which belongs to the revolutionary tribunal, is death.The proof necessary to convict the
enemies of the people is every kind of evidence, either material or moral or verbal or
written, which can naturally secure the approval of every just and reasonable spirit; the rule
of judgment is the conscience of the jurors enlightened by love of the fatherland; their aim,
thetriumph of the Republic and the ruin of its enemies; the procedure, the simple means
which good sense dictates in order to come to the knowledge of the truth, in the forms
which the law determines.It is confined to the following points:Every citizen has the right to
seize conspirators and counter-revolutionaries and to arraign them before magistrates. He
is required to denounce them when he knows of them.Nobody can arraign a person before
the revolutionary tribunal, except the National Convention, the Committee of Public Safety,
the Committee of General Security, the representatives of the people who are
commissioners of the Convention, and the public accuser of the revolutionary tribunal.The
constituted authorities in general cannot exercise this right without having notified the
Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security and obtained their
authorization.The accused shall be examined in public session: the formality of the secret
examination which precedes is suppressed as superfluous; it shall occur only under special
circumstances in which it shall be judged useful for a knowledge of the truth.If proofs exist,
either material or moral, independently of the testified proof, there shall be no further
hearing of testimony, unless that formality appears necessary, either to discover the
accomplices or for other important considerations of public interest.In a case in which there
shall be occasion for this proof, the public accuser shall cause witnesses to be summoned
who can show the way to justice, without distinction of witnesses for or against.All the
proceedings shall be conducted in public and no written deposition shall be received, unless
the witnesses are so situated that they cannot be brought before the tribunal, and in that
case an express authorization of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security shall
be necessary.The law gives sworn patriots to calumniated patriots for counsel; it does not
grant them to conspirators.The pleadings finished, the jurors shall formulate their verdicts
and the judges shall pronounce the penalty in the manner determined by the laws.The
president shall propound the question with lucidity, precision, and simplicity. If it was
presented in an equivocal or inexact manner, the jury may ask that it be propounded in
another manner.The public accuser may not on his own authority discharge a prisoner
bound over to the tribunal nor one whom he shall have caused to be arraigned there; in a
case in which there is no matter for an accusation before the tribunal, he shall make a
written report of it, with a statement of the reasons, to the chamber of the council, which
shall pronounce. But no prisoner may be discharged from trial before the decision of the
chamber has been communicated to the Committees of Public Safety and General Security,
who shall examine it.A double register shall be kept of persons arraigned before the
revolutionary tribunal, one for the public accuser and the other for the tribunal, upon which
shall be enrolled all the prisoners, according as they shall be arraigned.The Convention

5. modifies all those provisions of the preceding laws which may not be in agreement with the
present law and does not intend that the laws concerning the organization of the ordinary
tribunals should apply to the crimes of counter-revolution and to the action of the
revolutionary tribunal.The report of the committee shall be joined to the present decree as
instruction.