How did Jefferson justify the killing of innocent people during the French Revolution ?
(read the text bellow)
"But it is a fact, in spite of the mildness of their
governors, the [French] people are ground to powder
by the vices of the form of government. Of twenty
millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of
opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched,
more accursed in every circumstance of human
existence than the most conspicuously wretched
individual of the whole United States. (1785) "
"In the struggle which was neces- sary, many guilty
persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them
some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody,
and shall deplore some of them to the day of my
death. But I deplore them as I should have done had
they fallen in battle. . . . But time and truth will rescue
and embalm their very liberty for which they would
never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The
liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue
of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so
little innocent blood? (1793)"
