Paris in the 18th century Picpus. Among those executed in the last great surge of the reign of terror were the eminent chemist Lavoisier (8 May 1794) and the poet Andre Chenier, executed 25 July 1794, just two days before the end of the Terror. On June 8, 1793, at the debut of the new wave of terror, Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being in the huge amphitheater on the Champs de Mars which had been constructed in 1790 for the first anniversary of the Revolution; the ceremony was designed by the painter David, and featured a ten-hour parade, bonfires a statue
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,