Law of 22 Prairial

The Law of 22 Prairial, also known as the loi de la Grande Terreur, the law of the Great Terror, was enacted on 10 June 1794 (22 Prairial of the Year II under the French Revolutionary Calendar). It was proposed by Georges Auguste Couthon and supported by Robespierre. By means of this law the Committee of Public Safety simplified the judicial process to one of indictment and prosecution.

The immediate background to the introduction of the Prairial Law was the attempted assassinations of Collot d'Herbois on 23 May and of Robespierre on 25 May. Introducing the degree at the Convention, Couthon who had drafted it, argued that political crimes were far worse than common crimes because in the latter 'only individuals are wounded' where as in the former 'the existence of free society is threatened'. Under these circumstances, 'indulgence is an atrocity... clemency is parricide.'. The law was an extension of the centralisation and organisation of the Terror, following the decrees of 16 April and 8 May which had suspended the revolutionary court in the provinces and brought all political cases for trial in the capital. The result of these laws was that by June 1794 Paris was full of suspects awaiting trial. On 29 April it was reported that the forty prisons of Paris contained 6,921 prisoners; by 11 June this number had increased to 7,321 and by 28 July to 7,800.

'No Revolutionary Tribunal could work fast enough to prevent the ship of state sinking under such a sea of crime. What was to be done? Precedents had been created at Lyon, Marseille and elsewhere.... at Orange in particular, there had been set up, by decree of the Convention, a Commission of Five, which, by dispensing with the usual formalities of counsel and witness, had succeeded in condemning to death, within two months, 332 out of the 591 persons brought before it'.

The law was also prompted by the growing sense, shared by Robespierre, Couthon, St Just and others that members of the Convention who had supported Danton were politically unreliable and needed to be brought swiftly to justice without a full debate by the Convention itself. They considered Amar, for example, to be suspect.

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