Criminal Tribunal Policy During the Great French Revolution: The Lessons of History

This article continues a series of publications by the author that examine the historical background of modern forms and methods of anti-criminal policy in Russia and abroad. It contains a historical-legal analysis of the criminal tribunal policy during the French Revolution, namely, the establishment and functioning of emergency courts (tribunals) that provided the possibility of carrying out criminal and quasi-criminal repressions, and had a preventive anti-criminal effect in the situation when the French society was divided and a new bourgeois statehood was emerging. The author examines the circumstances in which the French revolutionary-tribunal justice was formed, in particular, the establishment of the High National Court. The prerequisites of forming the National Tribunal are analyzed. The causes predetermining the appearance of sovereign people’s tribunals, their forms and work methods are studied. Finally, the conditions for the organization and functioning of the Revolutionary Tribunal are researched. The author concludes that the criminal-tribunal policy carried out during the French revolution was a logical phenomenon predetermined by the necessity to ensure revolutionary legal order and to prevent counter-revolutionary actions during the abolition of absolute monarchy and the transition to the republican forms of statehood, i.e. by the same circumstances that determined all suchlike measures undertaken in many other states plunged into the chaos of revolutions, including the Soviet Russia in 1917–1922. The author claims that all such tribunals were typical emergency courts which considered and resolved criminal and quasi-criminal cases regarding counter-revolutionary actions. It is stated that they differed from “traditional” court bodies by the principles of their organization and structure, as well as the forms and mechanisms of exercising their jurisdictional powers.