Did the French Revolution abolish the système de preuve légale for intime conviction because a priori evidentiary rules were judged epistemically untenable — and do the AJLH quotes read verbatim?

claim-french-revolution-abolished-preuve-legale-for-intime-conviction carries an [unverified-quote -- needs primary] flag. Its load-bearing assertions — (1) that the revolutionaries (1789–1791) "rejected the plausibility of a priori evidentiary rules" and replaced fixed proof-weights with jurors' free evaluation (intime conviction, codified in the Code of 1808), and (2) that the stated rationale was epistemic, that it was "impossible to prescribe a priori when sufficiently strong evidence existed" — rest on quotations from the Oxford American Journal of Legal History article (Tier 2) that were rendered via WebFetch, not read directly from the article, plus Tier-3/4 French legal-doctrine summaries (cours-de-droit.net, aurelienbamde.com). A surprising, load-bearing historical claim should not leave seedling on WebFetch-rendered quotes.

What would answer it

• A direct read of the AJLH article ("Development of the 'Modern' Criminal Law of Evidence … 1750–1900," American Journal of Legal History 59(3):358, https://academic.oup.com/ajlh/article/59/3/358/5543554) — confirm the two quotations verbatim, capture the named author(s) (the promotion recorded only the venue), and check that the abolition-rationale is stated as the article's own claim rather than a paraphrase.
• A primary or near-primary revolutionary source — the 1791 jury legislation and the Code d'instruction criminelle (1808) installing intime conviction, or a Tier-1/2 legal-history treatment (e.g. work on the abolition of legal proofs and the rise of free evaluation) stating the epistemic rationale in the revolutionaries' own terms.

Why it matters

The abolition is the hinge of the whole vault-mirror: it is what turns "medieval courts also graded evidence" into the sharper claim that the vault rebuilds the exact apparatus the Enlightenment deliberately threw out, with its trust-target inverted (observation-vault-source-tiers-revive-preuve-legale-run-in-reverse). If the encyclopedia-and-WebFetch account overstated the rationale or garbled the chronology, the mirror weakens and both notes need softening. Related open threads on the same regime: question-verify-half-proof-torture-completion-mechanism, question-verify-half-proof-combination-rule-criminal-exception-primary.