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Having withdrawn from Paris with most of his troops on the evening of July 12, the Baron de Besenval had returned to Versailles where he found himself besieged by rumors that he would be arrested or assassinated. Yet, his self-described devotion to duty and the royal family was so great that he only agreed to flee when Louis XVI “ordered” him to do so. But once the decision to try to escape was made, attention needed to be given to the problem of eluding the revolutionary “chasseurs”: The entire kingdom being in arms, with all outlets closed, it was doubtful I could go far without being arrested. Suggestions were made that I disguise myself and I rebuffed them impatiently. But they kept hounding me. Finally, I agreed to dress myself as a gendarme. The Prévôt-Général gave me two cavaliers as an escort, and I left Versailles at dusk. The problem with this account, however, is that it doesn't explain why one of the French army's highest ranking officers was left to flee the country without the kind of military protection made available to many of the other fugitives. Broglie, Lambesc, and many of the other top military leaders had gone to Saint-Denis (where most of the troops had been sent after July 14) and had then left for the eastern frontier. Why didn't Besenval go there? Or why wasn't he furnished with a more substantial escort of his own? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first year of the French Revolution, responsibility for political justice was largely shared by two institutions, the Paris Comité des Recherches, an investigatory and prosecutory agency which served as the capital's political police, and the Châtelet, an ancient royal court which held temporary authority over all lèse-nation cases in France. Though their formal powers derived from separate sources, the Comité being a creation of the Paris municipal council and the Châtelet being designated as lèse-nation tribunal by the National Assembly, these two institutions actually functioned as the central components of a single system of political justice, a system which operated under the aegis of the Commandant-General of the Paris National Guard, the Marquis de Lafayette. The first year of the Revolution was, as Georges Lefebvre put it, “Lafayette's year.” With his dominance of the Parisian municipality already established during the summer of 1789, the “Hero of Two Worlds” was able to turn that curious episode known as the October Days to his own advantage and induce both Louis XVI and the National Assembly to move from Versailles to Paris. Having thereby consolidated and enhanced his position as the most powerful man in France, Lafayette moved, towards the end of October, to protect his authority against enemies on both the right and the left by instituting the system of political justice that would remain in place until his own ascendancy began to fade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Comité des Recherches prosecutors and Châtelet judges now finally in place, the new Fayettist system of political justice was immediately confronted with an important piece of unfinished business left over from the previous summer. For by putting off the creation of a lèse-nation tribunal until after the October Days, the National Assembly had, in effect, been suspending judgment on the “aristocratic conspiracy” that had provoked the Paris Revolution of July 12–14. In the next two chapters, I will look into the controversies that developed after July 14 around the question of whether the defeated “conspirators” should be punished by the victorious revolutionaries, controversies that would be inherited by the Châtelet and the Comité. In doing so, I will pay particular attention to the case of the Swiss-born military commander Pierre-Victor-Joseph Baron de Besenval (1721–91), who, for reasons that will soon be made clear, would be the only major “July conspirator” actually put on trial. In examining the Besenval case and a group of associated cases, I will trace the emergence of a dialogue between two competing conceptions of revolutionary justice: a conciliatory and indulgent justice that reflected the humanitarian assumptions of the pre-revolutionary judicial reform movement, and a repressive and punitive justice that would become increasingly dominant as the Revolution unfolded. However, before turning to this dialogue, let us briefly explore a parallel dialogue that had been carried on within court circles prior to the July Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]