France in the long nineteenth century new government. Policy became considerably more radical. The government instituted the "levy-en-masse", where all able-bodied men 18 and older were liable for military service. This allowed France to field much larger armies than its enemies, and soon the tide of war was reversed. The Committee of Public Safety came under the control of Maximilien Robespierre, and the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror (1793–1794). At least 1200 people met their deaths under the guillotine — or otherwise — after accusations of counter-revolutionary activities. In October, the queen was beheaded, further antagonizing Austria. In 1794 Robespierre had ultra-radicals and moderate Jacobins
Prisons of the Reign of Terror decided by political calculation, with various ulterior motives, to accentuate Terror by "purging" (it is their word) the prisons of Paris. Those were overflowing since the removal of the provincial revolutionary tribunals, in March 1794—the defendants stopped in the provinces were submitted in Paris, the recrudescence of the orders of arrest launched in Ile-de-France, by the Committee of general security and the "administrative slownesses" of the revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, backed-up by the paperwork, and the need for arguing the charges. Under the law of the 22 Prairal, the alleged conspiracies of prisoners made it possible to go more quickly,