The Never-ending Convention: The Regicides in the Court of the Past (1815-1830)

The Law of Amnesty of 12 January 1816, which banished in perpetuity from French territory the regicide Convention members who had rallied to the Hundred Days, engaged the authorities of the Restoration, within a few weeks, in a considerable work of investigation of the history and memory of the revolutionary past of the former Convention deputies. Also subject to constant surveillance from this time on, they found themselves to be not only prisoners of the past, but also political prisoners (all their actions, all their movements and all their contacts were analysed through the lens of political conspiracy). The implications of this "pathology of memory" under the Restoration, which affected both the deputies sentenced to exile and those who benefited a priori from a royal pardon, were far from being merely theoretical. This article therefore proposes to examine the forms, meaning and consequences of this impossible appeased memory of the Convention, by analysing in detail what happened to the former deputies of the Ariege, Aude and Pyrenees-Orientales between 1815 and 1830.