ABSTRACT
A religion may be steeped in humanitarianism and forbearance, but its sectaries will always want to impose it on others by force, so that violence is the inevitable result. The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the instigation of Danton, and which a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was covered with such tribunals. The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing its orders. To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must return to conception of the religious mentality of the Jacobins, who founded and directed it. The defence of Carrier by which the representatives "on mission" were incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed, from the initiative of a few individuals.
