Even as it was the courts did not grow
thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came
to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and
relatively benign revolutionary tribunal, established in March, 1793,
was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following
autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of
September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal
was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic
head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the
object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a
capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by
a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a
malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high
tension, the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually
during civil wars test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to
discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually
burnt alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation,
and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the
principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation
of property.
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