established in March, 1793,
was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following
autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of
September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal
was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic
head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the
object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a
capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by
a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a
malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high
tension, the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually
during civil wars test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to
discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually
burnt alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation,
and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the
principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation
of property.

The question which the Convention had to meet was how to establish the
existence of a criminal mind, when nothing tangible indicated it. The
old regime had tortured. To prove heresy the Church also had always used
torture. The Revolution proceeded more mildly. It acted on suspicion.
The process was simple. The Committee, of whom in this department
Robespierre was the chief, made lists of those who were to be condemned.
There came to be finally almost a complete absence of forms. No evidence
was necessarily heard. The accused, if inconvenient, was not allowed to
speak. If there were doubt touching the probability of conviction,
pressure was put upon the court. I give one or two examples: Scellier,
the senior associate judge of the tribunal, appears to have been a good
lawyer and a fairly worthy man. One day in February, 1794, Scellier was
at dinner with Robespierre, when Robespierre complained of the delays of
the court. Scellier replied that without the observance of forms there
could be no safety for the innocent. "Bah!" replied Robespierre,--"you
and your forms: wait; soon the Committee will obtain a law which will
suppress forms, and then we shall see." Scellier ventured no answer.
Such a law was drafted by Couthon and actually passed on 22 Prairial
(June 10, 1794), and yet it altered little the methods of
Fouquier-Tinville as prosecuting officer. Scelli