Tinville

I have had a long standing fascination for the French Revolution because it was the forerunner of the totalitarian states that were to cause so much carnage in the 20th century.For instance domiciliary visits carried out in the night by the revolutionary sections which were a forerunner of the secret police raids in the night by the fascist regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union and other States. The state seized by a small minority and kept in power by the use of state terror.Just a couple of examples.

In Paris during the Terror all households had to have a list of all the people in residence posted on the outside door. It was death for the occupants if a person named on the list was not there at the time of a night raid. Identity papers were to be carried by the citoyens at all times or be subject arrest which in turn meant a trip to the revolutionary tribunal then the guillotine.

All this is a lead in about a book I just finished titled The Tribunal of The Terror which was the Revolutionary Tribunal overseen by Fouquier-Tinville who was the State prosecutor.Tinville became the functionary who saw to the carrying out of the state murder of thousand of his fellow citizens in Paris during 1793-94 until his boss Robespierre was overthrown and executed with his gang of psychopaths thus ending the Terror.

A year later it was Tinville's turn to face prosecution in the very hall of justice in which he had sent thousands to the chopper after a sham trial lasting less time than it took to take the condemneds' heads off. Unlike his victims his trial lasted 41 days during which his only defence was that he was just following orders, again a forerunner of the pleas by the murderous functionaries of the infamous regimes of the last century.

He died unrepentant to the end.The mob around the guillotine demanded to be shown his head which was a thing rarely done by that time.
The book was published in 1909 and its author had access to the records of the revolutionary tribunal kept at the national archives of France a fact borne out by the numerous footnotes.

Two examples of the savagery of that era found in the records:A juryman on the tribunal took to writing beside the names of the accused foutu before any verdict was given.Later he was foutued. Sanson the executioner wrote to Tinville demanding his compensation for the expenses of operating the chopper including new clothes for his valets whose old ones were rotting away from all the blood covering them.

I found the book at a site called Open Library. I intend to search it further.