Revolutionary Tribunal Quotes

The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently.

So long as danger threatened from without public opinion tolerated the guillotine.

In a few days, I will have them all guillotined in Paris.

It is not a court, when sentence is passed by judge-bureaucrats who are dependent upon the authorities. In the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal there are no jurors from the general public, there are only state officials, drawing their salaries from the state treasury, which is in the hands of Trotsky and other People’s Commissars. It is not a court, when the accused is not allowed to call witnesses in his defense. … This debauchery is being carried out in your name, Russian worker!

Cut off heads for me! Cut off heads for me! The French Revolution cut off forty thousand, and for all that the population did not diminish.

The reign of terror to which France submitted has been more justly termed "the reign of cowardice." One knows not which most to execrate,--the nation that could submit to suffer such atrocities, or that low and bloodthirsty demagogue that could inflict them. France, in succumbing to such a wretch as Robespierre, exhibited, not her patience, but her pusillanimity.

You [Robespierre] will follow us soon. Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood.

Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that ... Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? ... What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!

Still dreadful news from Paris. The Commune have everything their own way, and they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not yet proceeded to commit all the same horrors.