Prisons of The Reign of Terror - Background

Background

Some members of Committee of Public Safety and of Committee of General Security had decided by political calculation, with various ulterior motives, to accentuate Terror by "purging" (it is their word) the prisons of Paris. Those were overflowing since the removal of the provincial revolutionary tribunals, in March 1794—the defendants stopped in the provinces were submitted in Paris, the recrudescence of the orders of arrest launched in Ile-de-France, by the Committee of general security and the "administrative slownesses" of the revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, backed-up by the paperwork, and the need for arguing the charges. Under the law of the 22 Prairal, the alleged conspiracies of prisoners made it possible to go more quickly, and to comb out the prisons. All the prisoners of one or the other of the many Parisian prisons, whatever the reason for their imprisonment - suspects, prevented or already judged, were concerned overall. The alleged conspiracy of Bicêtre, which made it possible to get rid, of more than seventy people, from 28 Prairal, until 8 Messidor, assembled by the Committee of general security, and Voulland in particular, with the downstream of Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, was the first operation of great width assembled after the law of the 22 Pairial. The Osselin deputy, implied in corruption affairs, and who knew something about the corrupt practices of his former colleagues, of the Committee of general security, in particular Jean-Pierre-Andre Amar, and who had avoided capital punishment four months earlier, was one of these victims, from whom they feared revelations. It is Valagnos, a prisoner condemned to irons, and on standby of the deportation who had agreed to bear false witnesses, agreed to come out to charge the defendants at the revolutionary Tribunal. This business of false conspiracy was followed by "the business" of Luxembourg, a conspiracy whose reality rested, still exclusively, on the false witnesses of individuals who, against various promises, had to deposit with the revolutionary Tribunal, and which sometimes themselves were carried out thereafter.