François-Noël Babeuf trial before the Aisne tribunal, which acquitted him on 18 July 1794, only days before the Thermidorian Reaction. Babeuf returned to Paris, and on 3 September 1794 published the first issue of his "Journal de la Liberté de la Presse", whose title was changed on 5 October 1794 to "Le Tribun du Peuple". The execution of Maximilien Robespierre on 28 July 1794 had ended the Reign of Terror and begun the White Terror. Babeuf – now self-styled "Gracchus" Babeuf – defended the fallen Terror politicians with the stated goal of achieving equality "in fact" and not only "by proclamation". However
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,