Georges Danton

“ He works this as absolutely the unique policy. He seems to have forgotten all questions of diplomacy, nearly to have despaired of settling the quarrel between Paris and the Girondins. In fine, Danton, when first in power, had been a man so representative of France as to have many different objects, and to attempt their co-ordination. We see him the brief fortnight of Louis’s execution violent, angry, unreasoning; we see him again in less than a month transformed into a man with a single object, pursued and succeeded in with the tenacity common to minds much narrower than his own. ”

“ Had Danton been present he would have been a man against a boy: a loud and strong voice, not violent in utterance, but powerful in phrase and in delivery, a character impressing itself by sheer force of self upon vacillating opinion. Had Danton spoken in reply, his hearers would have said with that moral conviction which is stronger than proof, “This man is the chief lover of France.” ”

“ Danton was only a strong man, who wished for a strong government in the interest of the people, and in his own. In point of doctrine, he cared for little but the relief of the poor by taxing the rich. He had no sympathy with the party that was gathering in the background, whose aim it was not only to reduce inequalities, but to institute actual equality and the social level. There was room beyond for more extreme developments of the logic of democracy; but the greatest change in the modern world was wrought by Danton, for it was he who overthrew the Monarchy and made the Republic. ”

“ It is a point of special moment in the appreciation of his politics that Danton was alone in this position. He was the only man who acted as one of the innumerable peasantry of France would have acted, could fate have endowed such a peasant with genius and with knowledge. The others to the left and right were soldiers, poets, or pedants every one. Heroic pedants and poets who were never afraid, but not one of them could forget his theories or his vision and take hold of the ropes. Such diplomacy as there is is Danton’s ”

“ We know that again and again his friends urged him to seek safety in flight.
“Does a man carry his country on the sole of his shoe?” he retorted fiercely, but it may well be that he here envied weaker men. Danton’s character was thoroughly French. His ambition was as he said to retire to Arcis-sur-Aube and there plant cabbages. A devoted son, husband and father, his affections were also centred upon others not of his blood and name. ”

“ Its orators were the Dantonist group; its instigators, I fear, the unprincipled men who surrounded D’Orleans, its committee-room and centre (as it were) the Café Foy. Still, by the action of the main virtue of revolutions, the general sense of the meeting was stronger than any demagogue; for in such times society is not only turbulent but fluid, and while it will support a leader who can swim, no mortal force can give it any direction other than that which it desires.
In this great daily crowd Danton was a prominent but not a principal figure ”

“ Danton belonged to the bourgeoisie in rank, to the less visionary in the bent of his mind. A young and successful lawyer of thirty, the Revolution found him unknown to politics and not desiring election. It was the accident of oratory that gave him his first position. He discovered himself to be a leader, and there grouped round him a knot of the most ardent, some of them the most brilliant, younger reformers. The electoral district to which he happened to belong became through him the most democratic, and, in some ways, the most violent of Paris. ”

“ But as the one active man in the Cabinet he is the pivot of the whole time. Those qualities in him which had so disgusted the men of letters were the exterior of a spirit imperatively demanded in Paris at the time. His heavy, rapid walk, the coarseness and harshness of his voice, his brutality in command, exercised a physical pressure upon the old man Roland, the mathematician Monge, and the virtuous journalists who accompanied them. I know of but one character in that set which could have prevented Danton’s ascendancy, and have met his ugly strength by a force as determined and more refined. ”

“ Ready as he had always been to see the real rather than the imaginary conditions, he recognised death with one chance only of escape. He knew far better than did poor Desmoulins the power of a State’s machinery; he felt its grasp and doubted of any issue. The people, for Desmoulins, were the delegators of power; for Danton the people were those who should, but who did not rule. To live again and enter the arena and save the life of the Republic the people must hear his voice, or else the fact of government would be more strong than all the rights and written justice in the world. ”

“ On the scaffold he says, "Danton, no weakness! Thou wilt show my head to the people--it is worth showing." So passes this Danton; a very man; fiery-real, from the great fire-bosom of nature herself.
Foul Hébert and the Hébertists, great Danton and the Dantonists, are gone, swift, ever swifter, goes the axe of Samson; Death pauses not. But on Prairial 20, the world is in holiday clothes in the Jardin National. Incorruptible Robespierre, President of the Convention, has decreed the existence of the Supreme Being; will himself be priest and prophet ”

“ Pourtant, ils donnaient en mariage à leur fille une somme de 40,000 francs, ce qui était pour l’époque une dot considérable. Ils imposaient à leur gendre une seule condition, c’est qu’il exerçât un état; c’est qu’il fût occupé. La profession d’avocat au parlement était sans doute une profession honorable et libre, mais trop libre peut-être, et qui ne commandait pas un travail assez assidu. Danton promit de remplir les vœux de son beau-père; il s’exprima dans des termes si chaleureux, que le père et la mère Charpentier se mirent à aimer Danton presque autant que leur fille. ”

“ Danton, unlike the Girondins, accepted the fury of popular passion as an inevitable incident in the work of deliverance. Unlike Billaud Varenne or Hébert, or any other of the Terrorist party, he had no wish to use this frightful two-edged weapon more freely than was necessary. Danton, in short, had the instinct of the statesman. His object was to reconcile France with herself; to restore a society that, while emancipated and renewed in every part, should yet be stable ”

“ He retires in a kind of despair to Arcis, and with his return a new phase is entered. The Committee is striking furiously; the Terror has taken root; and by an action of generosity, or perhaps of wisdom, Danton sets himself against his own creation. These few months—the winter of 1793-1794—give us that side of Danton which at the time was least explicable, but which best defines him for posterity. He puts his whole weight as an orator, and, through the genius of his friends, he puts the journals also against the Terror. ”

“ Il était assez habile à cet exercice pour être cité au premier rang; il y trouva un encouragement digne de son émulation. Il sauva plusieurs fois de la mort des camarades qui auraient péri s’il n’était [355] venu au secours de leur imprudence et de leur faiblesse. Quelques-uns d’entre eux ont raconté les tours de force véritables que Danton exécutait dans les courants les plus difficiles de la rivière. ”

“ All these victories were the allies of the party of indulgence. The men who said, “The Terror has no raison d’être save that of the national defence,” found themselves expressing what all France felt. After such successes it only remained to add, “The nation is safe; the Terror may end.” Already Danton had called up a reserve, so to speak, in the shape of the genius of Desmoulins. The first issue of “Vieux Cordelier” had appeared, and the journal was read by all Paris.
That club, in which we saw the origin of Danton’s fame, was now the Hébertists, and nothing more. ”

“ But by far the most interesting acquaintance at this most historic little town was the great-nephew of Danton. Middle-aged, unpretentious of aspect, yet with that unmistakable look partly of dignified self-possession, partly of authority, seldom absent from the French official, I looked in vain for any likeness to the portraits of his great kinsman. Yet perhaps in the stalwart figure, manly proportions and bronzed complexion, might be traced some suggestion of the athlete, the strong swimmer, the bold sportsman, whose mighty voice once made Europe tremble. ”

“ Danton trouva quelque différence dans la comparaison de ce nouveau régime avec les tendresses de sa mère et de son aïeul: non moins sévère que la demoiselle Lambercier de J.-J. Rousseau, la maîtresse d’école croyait ne pouvoir se passer de verges pour diriger les enfants, et Danton [350] lui avait paru avoir les premiers droits à ses corrections. Tous ses contemporains se souvenaient de l’avoir vu faire trop souvent l’école buissonnière et employer les heures de classe à barboter dans l’Aube. Il préférait la liberté de vivre à l’ennui de répéter les caractères de l’alphabet. ”

“ There is yet one further point to be mentioned before we can make a complete picture of Danton’s position before these elections of 1789. There can be no doubt that the Masonic lodges had proved a powerful instrument in the preparation of opinion, and though our information on their formation in Paris is scanty, we can safely affirm that Danton belonged to the lodge of the “Nine Sisters,” which included such members as Sieyès or Bailly on the one hand and Collot D’Herbois on the other. [45] It would be foolish to over-estimate the influence of these societies. ”

“ Danton refused such a temptation. He, almost alone at that moment (with the exception, in a much higher sphere, of Mirabeau) , was capable of being taught by defeat. He desired a solid foundation for action. Here were certain existing things: the club of the Cordeliers, which had for a while failed him; the Friends of the Constitution, which were a growing power; the limited suffrage of Paris, which he regretted, but which was the only legal force he could appeal to; the new municipal constitution, which he had bitterly opposed, but which was an accomplished fact. ”

“ Camille. But what is your idea?
Danton. To save the country. Save it at all cost from our sacrilegious quarrels. Do you know the disease that is killing the Republic? Mediocrity. Too many brains are thinking about the State. No nation can stand a Mirabeau, a Brissot, a Vergniaud, a Marat—a Danton, a Desmoulins, a Robespierre. One of these geniuses could have gained the victory for Freedom. But all together, they fight with each other, and France bleeds. ”

“ Nothing republican can be made of a speech which his enemies said was “a loophole for Orleans.”
Danton attacked Lafayette: he saw persons more clearly than ideas, and Lafayette was Danton’s nightmare. He was that being which of all on earth Danton thought most dangerous, the epitome of all the faults which he attacked to the day of his death; in Louis, in Robespierre, “The weak man in power.” He drove him out of the Jacobins on the 21st, and later in the day gave the cry against his enemy in the street, which the fears of the Assembly so much exaggerated. ”

“ But, on the other hand, Danton was a man to whom not only a useless massacre but a useless anything was detestable. Death in itself, the infliction of death on others, even the death to which he himself was led, never seemed to him a matter of vast moment. ”

“ We must take with us the King and the treasure.” So said Servan; so said Clavière. Kersaint, whom Danton had known at the old Commune in 1791, and who was something of Danton’s kind, added his word: “I have just come from Sedan, and I know there is nothing else to be done. Brunswick will be here in Paris within the fortnight as surely as the wedge enters when you strike.” Danton stopped six waverers by a phrase, a phrase of just such a character, exaggerated, violent, as his good sense made use of so often in the tribune. “My mother is seventy years old, and I have brought her to Paris ”

“ No one questions the fact that the leading motive in Danton’s mind was the establishment of a strong government around or in the place of a weak monarchy. He was a true descendant of the lawyers of the Code. The massacres of September took place at a moment when he was using the whole of his personal energy in trying as well as may be to supply that Government. He guides the ministry in Paris; he dominates Roland as a man might dominate a woman. It was of supreme importance to such a scheme that the thin ice between government and anarchy in the days that preceded Valmy should not be broken. ”

“ Danton, who has left no memoirs, no letters even—of whose life we know so little outside the field of politics—can only be interpreted, like any other man, by the mind. We must seek the origin, though we have but a phrase or two to guide us. What was that meditation at Arcis out of which proceeded the forlorn hope of the “Vieux Cordelier” and of the “Committee of Indulgence”? ”

“ Le maître, satisfait et surpris du mérite de l’œuvre, en fait lecture à ses élèves. Il dit qu’il aurait donné la première place à l’auteur s’il n’avait fait l’école buissonnière. Les camarades de Danton s’unissent avec enthousiasme à l’appréciation du maître; ils admirent comment l’enfant prodigue, leur ayant fait un récit aussi piquant, aussi jovial de son voyage, avait pu en même temps mettre dans son style autant de réserve et de noblesse. C’est ainsi que Danton fait admettre ses excuses, et sa grâce est devenue une espèce de triomphe. ”