Cps Vs. Writs Of Assistance

The Committee of Public Safety (CPS) was established in 1793 during the French Revolution. The CPS gained complete control of the state of France during the revolution, and soon began persecuting the counter-revolutionaries. The astounding fact about the CPS is that they were a group of twelve men, headed by Maximilien Robespierre, who were able to impose a reign of terror that ultimately killed roughly seventeen thousand people.

First introduced in 1761, the Writs of Assistance were passed to give British customs officials the ability to conduct searches of any place in the colonies suspected of housing smuggled goods. Most of the time, there was no specific item to be searched for, and the premises chosen was done so because someone just "thought" there may be smuggled goods there - there was no need for probable cause in these searches.

The CPS and the Writs of Assistance are similar in the sense that both brought fear into the eyes of their people. While the people in the British colonies were afraid that they would be caught smuggling goods, any counter-revolutionists living in France was afraid of the guillotine. Another similarity is that the people who carried out the work of the CPS and the Writs were minorities in the areas they lived in. The number of colonists greatly outnumbered the British Custom Officials and the twelve men who headed the CPS were clearly insignificant in number compared to the seventeen thousand they ordered to be killed. Both the CPS and Writs helped slow the economic gain for the people they affected. Under the CPS, there were maximum wage and price limit that was not to be passed, and the Writs slowed down the rate of smuggling in the colonies. These economic limitations, along with other factors, led to the overthrow of both the British in the colonies and the CPS in France.