Francisco de Miranda had taken an active part in the French Revolution from 1791.

In Paris, he had befriended the Girondists Jacques Pierre Brissot and Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, and had briefly served as a general in the section of the French Revolutionary Army commanded by Dumouriez, fighting in the 1792 campaign in the Low Countries.

Miranda is first arrested in April 1793 on the orders of Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, Chief Prosecutor of the Revolution, and accused of conspiring against the republic with Dumouriez.

Though indicted before the Revolutionary Tribunal—and under attack in Jean-Paul Marat's L'Ami du peuple—he conducts his defense with such calm eloquence that he is declared innocent.

Even so, the campaign of Marat and the rest of the Jacobins against him does not weaken.