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)"

Thomas Jefferson, like many of the Founding Fathers, believed that violence was justified in order to overthrow tyrannical regimes and governments--as exemplified in the American Revolution itself. Jefferson was even in favor of there being small violent uprisings in the United States, in order to "refresh the tree of liberty" from time to time.

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