Justice, vengeance and the revolutionary past: The crimes of the white terror

Abstract

The crimes of the Terror Blanche - or the Reaction, as this episode of the Revolution was called at the time - presented the nascent judicial system of the Revolution with some of its greatest challenges. Throughout the troubled years of the Directory and opening years of the Consulat when the politics of public order necessarily ranked high among government's priorities, the administration and the application of the laws formed a not inconsequential part for the consolidation of the Republic. Indeed, the success of the Directory's political program depended in large part on its ability to find agents in local administrations and the judiciary capable of understanding and implementing the law, and this, often with considerable resistance from local populations on issues of emigration, desertion, conscription, non-juroring priests, and crimes of all sorts, not least political crimes. Some of these political crimes as illustrated by the judgment of those implicated in the prison massacres on the spring of 1795 in the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône - undeniably, among the most spectacular incidents of popular violence of the entire revolutionary decade - proved to be among the longest, most complicated, and most important confronting the criminal justice system of the period. The persistence of the factional strife and the «esprit de parti» were perceptible at many stages of the judicial process and influenced in the judgment of political crimes. This article examines origins of the factional conflict, the tradition of popular violence, the nature and violence of the periods of the reaction, the circumstances of the these prison massacres, their victims and presumed perpetrators as well as the protracted trials related to these events.