André Jonas was thirty-one years of age and served as a national gendarme in the Twenty-Third Division. No sooner had word reached him of the death of the ci-devant King than he laid down his arms, deserted his colours, and repaired to Paris.
He was not one for discretion. In May 1793, on several occasions—along the boulevard, in a coffee-house, and elsewhere—he repeatedly declared that after such an outrage he could no longer remain in the army. The Gazette preserved his words, marking the coarsest epithet with a blank: “Am I made to serve the Nation? Not in the slightest. I will serve a king. I am off to Rouen. My design is to avenge the death of Louis XVI. I shall seek every means to do so. Money is no object to me; I have as much of it as I please.”
Such talk scandalised those who overheard it. He was denounced to the surveillance committee of the Section du Temple, which took down several depositions and interrogated him; the police administration issued a warrant for his arrest; he was lodged in Sainte-Pélagie, and thence brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
At the hearing, the Gazette relates, the precision and unanimity of the testimonies reduced him to silence. The man who had held forth so loudly in the coffee-houses along the boulevard found he had nothing left to say.
The jurors found it established that, upon the Boulevard du Temple, in a coffee-house and elsewhere, in the presence of several citizens, utterances had been made tending toward the dissolution of the Republic and the restoration of the monarchy; and that André Jonas had uttered them, and with malice. The Tribunal condemned him to death under the law of December 4, 1792, declared his property forfeit to the state, and ordered the execution to take place upon the Place de la Révolution. Judgment on August 8, 1793; execution that selfsame day.
Whether he truly possessed funds, or what he intended to do in Rouen, remains unknown. The docket contains nothing but words. They were enough: between the judgment and the scaffold, a mere handful of hours elapsed.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1793, Tribunal criminel révolutionnaire, judgment of August 8, 1793.