Fresh Look at France's Revolutionary Tribunal
A most notable precedent for the criminal conviction of Donald Trump occurred 230 years ago during Maximilien Robespierre’s Terror designed to cleanse France of “enemies of the people”.
The law which established the tribunals seeking out those “enemies of the people” and killing them was the law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794)
That law legalized the following procedures:
The Revolutionary Tribunal is instituted to punish the enemies of the people.
The enemies of the people are those who seek to destroy public liberty, either by force or by cunning … those who have deceived the people or the representatives of the people, in order to lead them into undertakings contrary to the interests of liberty; …
Those who have disseminated false news in order to divide or disturb the people; …
Those who have sought to mislead opinion and to prevent the instruction of the people, to deprave morals and to corrupt the public conscience, …
The penalty provided for all offenses under the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Tribunal is death.
The proof necessary to convict enemies of the people comprises every kind of evidence, whether material or moral, oral or written, which can naturally secure the approval of every just and reasonable mind; the rule of judgments is the conscience of the jurors, enlightened by love of the Patrie; their aim, the triumph of the Republic and the ruin of its enemies;
…
If either material or moral proofs exist, apart from the attested proof, there shall be no further hearing of witnesses …
The law provides sworn patriots as council for calumniated patriots; it does not grant them to conspirators.
In the criminal proceeding against Donald Trump, and in line with the law of 22 Prairial, the Judge left it to the conscience of the jury to find a crime. His jury instructions encouraged them to indulge in speculation and prejudice.
Nor, during the trial, did the judge permit Trump to have effective assistance of counsel. The judge even refused to let the jury hear germane and material testimony from an expert witness that no crime had been committed under federal election laws.
Trump’s trial, in other words, was a diluted measure of French revolutionary terror seeking to destroy an “enemy of the people”.
Our contemporary revolutionary faction is the Democrats in the White House. They are desperate to crush through state repression those whom they fear as “counter-revolutionary” activists.
Fear of such opposition to the moral hegemony asserted by the Democrats has been given the name of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a kind of elite psychosis.
Looking back, we might even say that Robespierre, Saint Just, and other Jacobins also were under the influence of some derangement of mind and heart.
In Paris, on July 28, 1794, a Revolutionary Tribunal assembled around noon. By 2 p.m. Robespierre and twenty-one other "Robespierrists" had been sentenced to death under the law of 22 Prairial. At approximately 6 p.m., the condemned were conveyed in three carts to the Place de la Révolution for execution.
The dynamic of breaking the law in order to defend the law was presciently described by James Madison in his 10th Federalist Paper on factionalism.
Madison considered any propensity for the “violence of faction” to be a “dangerous vice”. He reasoned:
“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.”
Stephen B. Young is the Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism (CRT). Young was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He served as an Assistant Dean at the Harvard Law School and as the third Dean of the Hamline University School of Law. His new book is Kissinger's Betrayal: How America Lost the Vietnam War.
