This article revisits the genesis of the Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793, locating it in the longer durée of community and police surveillance, and the semantic field of ‘suspicion’ from the early eighteenth century to April 1793. It argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion, deployed by both citizens and the police, as a means to ensure public safety was a practice of keeping a watch out for suspicious social types (vagabonds, demobilized soldiers, foreigners, religious minorities etc.): people out of place or without occupation. With the Revolution of 1789, the social valences of suspicion underwent a carnivalesque inversion: the idle were now aristocrats rather than the poor; the drifter was now an émigré rather than a vagabond, immigrant, or solider; the religious outsider was now the recusant priest. But as the crisis of 1793/94 deepened, fear corroded all efforts to classify the social world. The Law of Suspects was an effort to rein in popular violence by offering a new way of reading social life through speech, comportment, and behaviours, rather than fixed categories of identity. ‘The suspect’—an identity defined only by transgression—incarnated the evil-doppelgänger of ‘the citizen’, whose legal parameters were yet to be defined.

中文翻译：

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1793 年 4 月恐怖开始时的法律、怀疑和社会解释学

本文回顾了 1793 年 9 月 17 日《嫌疑人法》的起源，将其置于社区和警察监视的较长时期以及从 18 世纪初至 1793 年 4 月的“怀疑”语义领域中。公民和警察采用的怀疑作为确保公共安全的一种手段，是一种监视可疑社会类型（流浪汉、复员士兵、外国人​​、宗教少数群体等）的做法：异地或无业的人。随着 1789 年革命的爆发，怀疑的社会价态经历了狂欢节般的逆转：游手好闲的人现在是贵族而不是穷人；流浪者现在是一名流亡者，而不是流浪者、移民或士兵；宗教局外人现在变成了不情愿的牧师。但随着 1793/94 年危机的加深，恐惧侵蚀了所有对社会世界进行分类的努力。《嫌疑人法》旨在提供一种通过言论、举止和行为而非固定的身份类别来解读社会生活的新方式，从而遏制大众暴力。“嫌疑人”——仅通过违法行为来定义的身份——化身为“公民”的邪恶分身，其法律参数尚未确定。