Law, suspicion and social hermeneutics at the inception of the Terror, April 1793

Abstract

This article revisits the genesis of the Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793, locating it in the longer durée of community and police surveillance, and the semantic field of ‘suspicion’ from the early eighteenth century to April 1793. It argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion, deployed by both citizens and the police, as a means to ensure public safety was a practice of keeping a watch out for suspicious social types (vagabonds, demobilized soldiers, foreigners, religious minorities etc.): people out of place or without occupation. With the Revolution of 1789, the social valences of suspicion underwent a carnivalesque inversion: the idle were now aristocrats rather than the poor; the drifter was now an émigré rather than a vagabond, immigrant, or solider; the religious outsider was now the recusant priest. But as the crisis of 1793/94 deepened, fear corroded all efforts to classify the social world. The Law of Suspects was an effort to rein in popular violence by offering a new way of reading social life through speech, comportment, and behaviours, rather than fixed categories of identity. ‘The suspect’—an identity defined only by transgression—incarnated the evil-doppelgänger of ‘the citizen’, whose legal parameters were yet to be defined.