I am always working my way through several books simultaneously - I trust I am not alone in this. One of my current reads is "Paris in the Terror" by Stanley Loomis.

I read this passage earlier tonight:

The Law of Suspects was passed during the first week of September [1793]. This bit of legislation defined in vague and allusive terms those who were to be considered suspect and therefore liable to arrest - "persons who, by their conduct or language either written or spoken, have shown themselves to be partisans of tyranny or Federalism [a knife thrust at the Girondins] and enemies of Liberty." The number of fish that might be scooped up in this net left nothing to be desired by the Revolutionary Tribunal or its energetic prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Also suspect were those citizens "who could not give a satisfactory account of their means of support or their discharge of civic obligations since the preceding March 21."

The Girondins had been in "charge" for about a year before they started to lose power - eventually 21 of them would be sent to the guillotine in one day (I note that the bracketed term referring to the Girondins is Loomis, not me). The Law of Suspects was crafted by one Robespierre and seems very similar to the laws of other authoritarian systems. The "means of support" clause seems to be aimed at Danton (Robespierre's main rival for control) who, it was suspected, had been taking a little extra from the government till.

However bad the preceding "law" seems to be, it gets worse:

The third article in this list was particularly odious. It stated that persons who had not received "good citizenship certificates" from their local Section leader were also to be considered suspect.

Now, students of public choice should be able to fill in what comes next. The remainder is below the fold:

The Vigilance Committees of each Section - to whom the unhappy resident of Paris had to apply in order to obtain his certificate - were, in Taine's words, "composed of social outcasts and perverts of every known sort, subordinates full of hate and envy, vagabonds off the street and idlers who lived in drinking shops...many of whom adopted the Revolutionary faith only because it offered them means to sate their appetites and fill their pockets." The power given by their prerogatives to issue "good citizenship certificates" was an open invitation to these people to fill their pockets: "The Vigilance Committees were very profitable. The men who sat on them trafficked in certificates of civism and warrants of arrest. People paid them not to be included in the list of suspects; they paid to be released; they paid to have their records mislaid. The only way to save oneself was to pay one's potential executioners by gradual installments, to pay them like wet nurses by the month, on a scale proportional to the activity of the guillotine."

Wow.