thumb|Contemporary cartoon showing Robespierre executing the executioner. The monument in the background carries the inscription 'Here Lies All Of France'
The Law of 22 Prairial, also known as the loi de la Grande Terreur, the law of the Great Terror, was enacted on 10 June 1794 (22 Prairial of the Year II under the French Revolutionary Calendar). It was proposed by Georges Auguste Couthon but seems to have been written by Maximilien Robespierre according to Laurent Lecointre. Using this law, the Committee of Public Safety simplified the judicial process to one of indictment and prosecution.
Background
The immediate background to the introduction of the Prairial Law was the attempted assassinations of Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois on 23 May and of Maximilien Robespierre on 25 May. Introducing the decree at the Convention, Georges Couthon, who had drafted it, argued that political crimes were far worse than common crimes because in the latter "only individuals are wounded" whereas in the former "the existence of free society is threatened". Under these circumstances, "indulgence is an atrocity... clemency is parricide". The law was an extension of the centralisation and organisation of the Terror, following the decrees of 16 April and 8 May which had suspended the revolutionary court in the provinces and brought all political cases for trial in the capital. The result of these laws was that by June 1794 Paris was full of suspects awaiting trial. On 29 April it was reported that the forty prisons of Paris contained 6,921 prisoners; by 11 June this number had increased to 7,321 and by 28 July to 7,800.