The Letters That No One Reads Anymore
This article is inspired by a post, shared on X by @archeohistories, reflects on letters written by ordinary people condemned during the French Revolution, people whose fate was decided before they were heard.
This is not a claim of equivalence in punishment or suffering. It is a comparison of what happens when systems stop listening.
In 2025, men are not given paper and ink on the eve of execution. They are given forms, case numbers, risk assessments, and silence. No speeches are allowed. No appeals are heard at first. The outcome moves forward whether the truth is spoken or not.
So men sit in small rooms, prison cells, solicitor offices, or spare bedrooms they are no longer allowed to leave. They try to compress a lifetime into statements that no one seems to read. They write emails. They file complaints. They prepare timelines, screenshots, receipts, messages, metadata. They say the same things, again and again: “I didn’t do this. Please look properly. There must be a mistake.”
What makes these accounts so unsettling is not anger or ideology, but how ordinary they are. There is no grand political argument. A father worries about losing contact with his children. A son worries about his mother reading headlines before hearing the truth. A man asks whether he should sell his tools, his car, his home, because he doesn’t know how long this will last.
One man is accused after a relationship ends badly. Another after a financial dispute. Another after police contact is initiated “as a safeguarding measure.” None of them imagined themselves as part of a national conversation about sexual violence. Their crime appears to amount to little more than being present in a story that later needed a villain.
The Scottish Context: Corroboration
In the Scottish legal tradition, the requirement for corroboration was once a fundamental pillar of justice. Today, innocence is frequently treated as implausible—even suspicious. A calm denial is labelled a “lack of insight”; distress is dismissed as “manipulation.”
They insist on their innocence, not always in the legal sense, but in the human one: “I never meant harm.” “I loved her.” “I would never do that.” “I don’t understand how this became a crime.” Again and again, they say the same thing: not that they are perfect, but that they are not monsters.
And yet the machinery does not require monsters. It requires patterns. It requires similarity. It requires narrative. Modern justice does not need a blade to silence people. It only needs procedure that cannot admit error, media that repeats accusation without scrutiny, and a culture that treats doubt as betrayal.
The final mercy offered is process itself. You may appeal. You may complain. You may write. But the decision moves on regardless. These stories endure not because they deny harm exists, but because they expose a quieter danger: that in the pursuit of moral certainty, the individual becomes expendable.
Justice without humility becomes cruelty.
History’s task is to read the letters anyway.