For seventeen months, one man had summoned before him, in the Great Hall of the Palais de Justice, every suspect France could muster: a queen, generals, farmers-general, poets, artisans, and servants. His name was Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, and he was the Public Prosecutor attached to the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris. In the spring of 1795, it was his turn to take his place upon the prisoners’ bench.
He was not alone there. Behind him, the Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux marshals—as one might marshal the witnesses of an age sitting in judgment upon itself—the long roll of the Tribunal’s former judges and jurors: three-and-twenty names, among them that of Maurice Duplay, the master carpenter under whose roof Robespierre had lodged. All stood accused of having abetted sentences dispatched in a matter of minutes, and of having consigned to the scaffold men whom no one had even troubled to hear.
One must read, in the Gazette, the recital of the exhibits produced by the prosecution; no formal indictment can match that austere inventory. There one finds sentences signed in blank, to be filled in thereafter; unendorsed erasures; names appended at the foot of a list, others struck through without anyone knowing why or by whose hand; women with child condemned to die, whom the very laws of the day commanded to be spared until their delivery; and wretches led to the guillotine whose names figured in no bill of indictment whatever, taken, it was said, in error for others.
The entire mechanism stands revealed therein, in its terrible simplicity. It demanded neither singular cruelty nor any genius for evil; a quill, a list, and a tumbril departing every afternoon were quite enough.
Fouquier-Tinville defended himself with a constancy that his bitterest enemies never denied. Such facts as he could disown, he disowned. For the rest, he pleaded superior orders: he had done no more, he maintained, than execute the decrees of the Convention and the orders of its Committees; he had no acquaintance with the conspirators he was charged with having spared or pursued; he was a mere instrument.
The court sitting in judgment upon him was not of that mind. One may observe, without detracting in the least from the justice of the verdict, that this court was itself an extraordinary tribunal, and that the Revolution, in trying its own executioners, still retained something of their manner of passing judgment.
The trial dragged on for more than five weeks. On the 7th of May 1795—the 18th of Floréal, Year III—Fouquier-Tinville was drawn to the Place de Grève beside fifteen of his co-defendants. The populace, which had so long watched him pass on the side of the victors, thronged his path to heap revilement upon him. Such was the close of that affair, which concluded in blood, as it had lived, the annals of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris.
One cannot but ponder those judgments signed in blank. Far better than any speech, they lay bare how an institution of justice turns into a machine: not through the malice of a single man, but through the routine of the many, who one day cease to read what they sign.
Source: Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, Year III (1795), trial of the former judges and jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris.