The People’s Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic

A major new interpretation of the French Revolution that brings to life the criminal tribunals at the heart of the Republic’s political culture In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution.From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789-1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions.Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict. More than 5,000 political trials were prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone, and, with an acquittal rate of more than 50 percent, these were neither perfunctory nor foregone in their outcomes.They had a repressive function, to be sure, but