As the deputies to the Estates-General gathered in Versailles in the spring of 1789, their mandate to help institute a systematic reform of the criminal justice system could hardly have been clearer. Speaking of the reforms “we have been thirsting after for so long,” one confident pamphleteer asserted that “the representatives of the Nation will assist in the completion of an absolutely necessary task. This desire is in every heart and is echoed by every mouth.” Or, as one nineteenth-century student of the cahiers of 1789 explained, “it was the entire nation which demanded reform.” Moreover, if we are to believe a Parisian magistrate who was destined to play a prominent role in administering revolutionary justice during 1789–90, public opinion had been solidly behind such demands for some time. Writing in 1781, Châtelet judge André-Jean Boucher d'Argis declared that “criminal law reform is being called for by everyone, by Magistrates as well as by Citizens.” And even the recalcitrant Parlement de Paris had to acknowledge in 1786 that a “general cry” had been raised against the existing procedures, now seen as nothing but “a remnant of ancient barbarism.”

But what was the nature of this “reform” that everyone wanted, or at least everyone whose views somehow registered in what passed for pre-revolutionary public opinion?