The 10th
of August is not, in the history of the Revolution, a turning-point or a new
departure merely; it is rather a cataclysm, the conditions before and after
which are absolutely different. You may compare it to the rush of the Atlantic,
which “in one dreadful day and night” swept away the old civilisation in the
legend. It is like one of the geological “faults” which form the great inland
escarpments, and to read or to write of it is like standing on the edge of
Auvergne. You have just passed through a volcanic plateau, rising slowly, more
and more desolate: you find yourself looking down thousands of feet on to the
great plain of Limagne.
There is
no better test of what the monarchy was than the comparison of that which came
before with that which succeeded its overthrow. There is no continuity. On the
far side of the insurrection, up to the 9th of August itself, you have armies
(notably that of the centre) contented with monarchy; you have a strong
garrison at the Tuilleries, the ministers, the departments, the mayor of Paris
(even) consulting with the crown. The King and the Girondins are opposed, but
they are balanced; Paris is angry and expectant, but it has expressed nothing—it
is one of many powers. The moderate men, the Rolands and the rest, are the
radical wing. It is a triumph for the Revolution that the Girondins should be
again in nominal control. Pétion is an idol. The acute friction is between a
government of idealists standing at the head of a group of professional
bourgeois, and a crown supported by a resurrected nobility, expecting succour
and strong enough to hazard a pitched battle.
Look
around you on the 11th of August and see what has happened. Between the two opponents
a third has been intervened—Paris and its insurrectionary Commune have suddenly
arisen. The Girondins are almost a reactionary party. The Crown and all its
scaffolding have suddenly disappeared. The Assembly seems something small, the
ministry has fallen back, and there appears above it one man only—Danton,
called Minister of Justice, but practically the executive itself. A crowd of
names which had stood for discussion, for the Jacobins, for persistent
ineffective opposition, appear as masters. In a word, France had for the moment
a new and terrible pretender to the vacant throne, a pretender that usurped it
at last—the Commune.
The nine
months with which this chapter will deal formed the Republic; it is they that
are the introduction to the Terror and to the great wars, and from the
imprisonment of the King to the fall of the Girondins the rapid course of
France is set in a narrowing channel directly for the Mountain. The Commune,
the body that conquered in August, is destined to capture every position, and,
as one guarantee after another breaks down, it will attain, with its extreme
doctrines and their concomitant persecution, to absolute power.
What was
Danton’s attitude during this period? It may be summed up as follows: Now that
the Revolution was finally established, to keep France safe in the inevitable
danger. He put the nation first; he did not subordinate the theory of the
Revolution; he dismissed it. The Revolution had conquered: it was there; but
France, which had made it and which proposed to extend the principles of
self-government to the whole world, was herself in the greatest peril. When
discussion had been the method of the Revolution, Danton had been an extremist.
He was Parisian and Frondeur in 1790 and 1791; it was precisely in that time
that he failed. The tangible thing, the objective to which all his mind leaned,
appeared with the national danger; then he had something to do, and his way of
doing it, his work in the trade to which he was born, showed him to be of a
totally different kind from the men above whom he showed. I do not believe one
could point to a single act of his in these three-quarters of a year which was
not aimed at the national defence.
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; It is Danton who attempts
compromise, and it is Danton who persistently recalls the debates from
personalities to work. It is he who warns the Girondins, and it is he who, in
the anarchy that followed defeat, produced the necessary dictatorship of the
Committee, Finally, when the Committee is formed, you glance at the names, the
actions, and the reports, and you see Danton moving as a man who can see moves
among the blind. He had been once “in himself the Cordeliers”—it had no great
effect, for there was nothing to do but propose rights; now, after the
insurrection, he became “in himself the executive” and later “in himself the
Committee.” So much is he the first man in France during these few months of
his activity, that only by following his actions can you find the unity of this
confused and anarchic period.
It falls
into four very distinct divisions, both from the point of view of general
history and from that of Danton’s own life. The first includes the six weeks intervening between the 10th of
August and the meeting of the Convention; it is a time almost without
authority; it moves round the terrible centre of the massacres. During this
brief time the executive, barely existent, without courts or arms, had him in
the Ministry of Justice as their one power a power unfortunately checked by the
anarchy in Paris.
The
second division stretches from the meeting of the Convention to the death of
the King. It covers exactly four months, from the 20th of September 1792 to the
21st of January 1793. It is the time in which the danger of invasion seems
lifted, and in which Danton in the Convention is working publicly to reconcile
the two parties, and secretly to prevent, if possible, the spread of the
coalition against France.
The
third opens with the universal war that follows the death of Louis, and
continues to a date which you may fix at the rising of the 10th of March, or at
the defeat of Neerwinden on the 19th. Danton is absent with the army during the
greater part of these six weeks; he returns at their close, and when things
were at their worst, to create the two great instruments which he destined to
govern France—the Tribunal and the Committee.
Finally,
for two months, from the establishment of these to the expulsion of the
Girondins on the 2nd of June, he is being gradually driven from the attempt at
conciliation to the necessities of the insurrection. He is organising and
directing the new Government of the Public Safety, and in launching that new
body, in imposing that necessary dictator, we shall see him sacrificing one by
one every minor point in his policy, till at last his most persistent attempt—I
mean his attempt to save the Girondins—fails in its turn. Having so secured an
irresistible government, and having created the armies, the chief moment of his
life was past. It remained to him to retire, to criticise the excesses of his
own creation, and to be killed by it.
Immediately
after the insurrection, a week after he had taken the oath and made the short
vigorous speech to the Assembly,[1]
Danton sent out his first and almost his only act as Minister of Justice, the
circular of the 18th of August,[2]
which was posted to all the tribunals in France. It is peculiar rather than
important; it is the attempt to convince the magistracy and all the courts of
the justice and necessity of the insurrection, and at the same time to leave
upon record a declaration of his own intentions now that he had reached power.
In the first attempt he necessarily fails. The old judicature, appointed by the
Crows, and by the moderate ministers, largely re-elected by the people, wealthy
for the most part, conservative by origin and tradition, would in any case have
rejected such leadership; but the matter is unimportant; this passive body,
upon which the reaction had counted not a little, and which De Cicé had planned
to use against the Revolution, was destined to disappear at the first demand of
the new popular powers. France for weeks was practically without courts of law.
Those
passages, on the other hand, in which Danton makes his own apology are full of
interest. They contain in a few sentences the outline of all his domestic
policy, and we find in them Danton’s memories, his fears of what his past
reputation might do to hurt him.
“I came
in through the breach of the Tuilleries, and you can only find in me the same
man who was president of the Cordeliers. . . . The only object of my thoughts
has been political and individual liberty, . . . the maintenance of the laws, .
. . the strict union of all the Departments, . . . the splendour of the State,
and the equality, not of fortune, for that is impossible, but of rights and of
well-being.”
If we
except the puerilities of the new great seal, the Hercules with eighty-four
stars (to represent the union of the Departments), replaced by the conventional
Liberty and fasces, there is practically nothing more from Danton as Minister
of Justice. 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. Roland’s wife might have done it, but though she was the soul of the
ministry, she was hardly a minister, and being a woman, she was confined to
secondary and indirect methods. Her hatred of Danton increased to bitterness as
she saw him succeed, but she could not intervene, and France was saved from the
beauty and the ideals which might have been the syrens of her shipwreck.
The
three weeks following the 10th of August were filled with the news of the
invasion. The King of Prussia had hesitated to march. France, full of herself,
never understood that such a thing was possible. The kings were on the march,
the great and simple ideas, so long in opposition, had met in battle. All
France thought that 1792 was already 1793. Perhaps there were only two men in
the country who saw the immaturity, the complexity, and the chances of the
situation—I mean Danton and Dumouriez: Dumouriez, because he was by nature a
schemer who had seen and was to see the matter from close at hand; Danton,
because, from the first moment of his entrance into the ministry, he had
gathered up the threads of negotiation into his hand.
The King
of Prussia had hesitated, so had Brunswick. It was the success of the
insurrection that decided them. They made the error that the foreigner always
makes, the error that led the most enlightened Frenchmen to exaggerate the
liberal forces in England, the error of seeing ourselves in others. They
imagined that “the sane body of the nation,” the Frenchmen that thought like
Prussians, would rise in defence of the monarchy and in aid of the invasion.
They had no conception of how small in number, how hesitating, and how vile
were the anti-national party.
On
Sunday the 19th the frontier was crossed; on the Thursday Longwy capitulated,
and a German garrison held the rocky plateau that overlooks the plain of
Luxembourg. A week later, Thursday the 30th, Verdun was surrounded.
From the
hills above the town, the same hills which make of Verdun the fifth great
entrenched camp of modern France, the Prussian batteries bombarded with a
plunging fire. There may have been food and ammunition for two or three more
days, but fire had broken out in several quarters, and the town council was
imploring Beaurepaire to surrender. Brunswick proposed a truce and terms of
capitulation. On the Saturday, the 1st of September, after a violent
discussion, the terms were rejected, but Beaurepaire knew that nothing could
save the town, and in the night he shot himself. On the next day, Sunday the
second, Verdun yielded and the road to Paris lay open.
Meanwhile,
in the capital itself, a vortex was opening, and the poor remnants of public
authority and of public order were being drawn down into it. The 10th of August
had been a victory into which there entered three very dangerous elements.
First, it was not final; it had been won against a small local garrison under
the menace of an invasion, and this invasion was proving itself irresistible.
Secondly, it had left behind it terrors accentuated by success; I mean whatever
fears of vengeance or of the destruction of Paris existed before the
insurrection were doubled when so much greater cause had been given for the “execution”
that Brunswick had threatened. Finally, the success of the insurrection had of
itself destroyed the last shadow of executive power, for all such power, weak
and perishing though it was, had centred in the King.
But
besides these clear conditions which the 10th of August had produced, there was
something deeper and more dangerous the fear which fed upon itself and became
panic, and which ran supported by anger growing into madness. There was no news
but made it worse, no sight in the streets and no rumour but increased the
intolerable pressure. Trade almost ceased, and the whole course of exchange,
which is the blood of a great city, seemed to have run to the heart. Over the
front of the Hotel de Ville hung that enormous black flag with the letters “Danger”
staring from it in white, and in the heavy winds another blew out straight and
rattled from the towers of Notre Dame. Every action savoured of nightmare, and
suffered from a spirit grotesque, exaggerated, and horrible. The very day after
the fight a great net had been cast over Paris and drawn in full of royalists.
The gates had been shut suddenly, and every suspect arrested by order of the
Commune. The prisons were full of members of the great conspiracy, for in civil
war the vanquished appear as traitors. Then there arose a violent demand for
the trial and punishment of those who had called in the foreigner, and a demand
as violent, touching on miracle, for innumerable volunteers. In every project
there ran this spirit of madness mixed with inspiration.
If Paris
lost its head, so did the Assembly and the Moderates, but in another fashion.
Paris was pale with the intensity of anger, Roland from a sudden paralysis. The
fear of Paris was an angry panic; with the Girondins it was the sudden sickness
that takes some men at the sight of blood. Paris had clamoured for an excess
when it demanded the trial of the Swiss, who had done nothing beyond their
mercenary duty; but the executive met it by an excess of weakness when it
produced its court of ridiculous and just pedants, afraid to condemn, afraid to
decide. Already the people had learned the secret payments of the old civil
list,[3]
the salaries paid to the emigrants, the subsidised press. Golier’s report had appeared
but a day before the invasion.
The news
of Longwy was already known. Verdun stood in peril, when the acquittal of
Montmorin on Friday the 31st seemed to be the deciding weakness of the
government that pushed the populace to their extreme of violence.
He had
been governor of Fontainebleau, openly and patently a conspirator on the side
of the Tuilleries; he was not acquitted of this. It was admitted that he had “planned
civil war;” he was released by that heroic but fatal fault of the Girondins, the
fault that later sent them to the guillotine, and that now inspired their
tribunal—they would not bend an inch to compromise with necessity; rather than
do so they would deliberately aggravate the worst conditions by inclining
against the passions of the moment. They seemed to say, “You clamour for mere
reprisals; we will show, on the contrary, that we are just, and we will even
irritate you with mercy.” Yet they knew that Montmorin deserved death.
After
that decision, and when Osselin the judge took with great courage the prisoner’s
arm in his own and led him away, a voice in the court cried out, “You acquit
him now, and in a fortnight his friends will march into Paris.” The massacres
were certain from that moment; the thing had been said which made the small
band of murderers start out, which made Paris look on immovable, and which kept
the National Guard silent, refusing to stop the carnage. “We will go to the
frontier, but we will not leave enemies behind us. If the law will not execute
them, the people will.” The damnable spirit which runs in colonies and wild
places had invaded civilised Europe, and the lynching was determined.
When the
Assembly had yielded to the Commune, when it was certain that the
insurrectionary Commune would have its own way, and when it was known that
Longwy had fallen, that Verdun was surrounded, there took place one of those
scenes that stand out like pictures in the mind, and that interpret the
characters of history for us better than any accumulation of detail.
In the garden
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at its end, and away from the house, and
under the low foliage, the six ministers were met in an informal
gathering—rapid, half -silent, a council not predetermined, suited to the time;
a few hurried words, whose description has come down to us by no minute, but by
the accident of Fabre’s presence. Fabre D’Eglantine, the uncertain poet, Danton’s
protégé, and dangerous, ill-balanced friend,[4]
stood watching at a little distance.
Roland
spoke for all his friends. He was very pale and broken-down; he leaned his head
against a tree—“We must leave Paris.” Danton spoke louder, “Where do you mean
to go?” “We must go to Blois. 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; I brought my children yesterday. If the Prussians are to come in, I hope
it may be into a Paris burnt down with torches.” Then he turned round to Roland
in person and threw out a fatal sentence, necessary, perhaps, but one of many
that dug the great gulf between him and the Girondins. “Take care, Roland, and
do not talk too much about flight; the people might hear you.”[5]
I know
of no anecdote that tells more about Danton, or explains with greater clearness
his attitude during the crisis that brought on the massacres. For these
over-vigorous words, full of excess, were uttered by a man whose character was
all for material results—results obtained, as a rule, by compromise. This same
Danton, who talked of “torches” and “Paris en cendres,” was the only man in
France who had the self-control to negotiate for the retreat of the Prussians
after Valmy. His “mother of seventy years” had indeed been brought to Paris,
but from Arcis, which every one knew to be right in the track of the invasion.
What we have to discover in this speech, as in every phrase he uttered, is the
motive; for with any other of the great Revolutionaries words were the whole of
the idea, and sometimes more than the idea, but with Danton alone words were
the means to a tangible end.
He
desired to prevent that fatal breach with Paris which he had foreseen to be a
risk from the beginning, and which Mirabeau in his time had thought so near as
to be necessary. He was determined to keep this shadow—the national
executive—in reach of the one thing that was alive and vigorous and defending
the nation. It is of the greatest importance in appreciating his attitude to
know that he dreaded the Commune. Later, no one of the deputies of Paris in the
Convention saw as he saw the necessity of amalgamation with the Departments.
Marat he thoroughly despised. Most of the men of the Commune had sat in one
room with him; Panis and Sergent had even desks under him. He knew them, and he
contemned them all. He did not know to what crimes they were about to commit
themselves, or perhaps he would have interfered, but he knew they were
worthless.
Behind
them, however, he saw Paris, and in Paris he ardently believed, in its position
and in its necessity. He was entirely right. Once let the ministers leave the
city, and civil war would begin—a civil war waged within ten days’ march of the
enemy, and between what forces? An imbecile, a man like one of our moderns, who
thinks in maps and numbers, would have said, “Between eighty-three departments
and one.” But Danton knew better. He had that appreciation which is common to
all the masters; he knew the meaning of potential and of the word ‘quality.’ It
would have been a fight between the members and the brain, and the brain would
have died fighting, leaving a body dead because the brain had died.
Thus
while the Assembly and the Commune fight their sharp battle of the last days of
August, while the Parliament commands new municipal elections, breaks the
municipality, then flatters it, then yields and permits it to be practically
reinforced under the form of a fresh vote from the Sections,[6]
Danton acts as though both Parliament and Commune had dropped from the world.
There are two speeches of his, one of the 28th of August, one of the 2nd of
September, and between them they mark his attitude and form also the origins of
that full year of action and rhetoric which define him in history.
In the
first, he proposes and carries the measure which has been made an excuse for
laying upon his shoulders the responsibility of the massacres. The speech was
made for a very different purpose. He authorised the domiciliary visits, but
his object was to obtain arms. One thought only occupied him: to counteract the
intense individualism of the Moderates, to force despotic measures through a
Parliament that hated them, and to force these measures because without them
the situation was lost. He got his arms, and just afterwards his mass of
volunteers, but the other measure which he had introduced to pacify the
Commune, the domiciliary visits, have marked more deeply in the memories of the
time, because in the troubled days that followed these visits seemed to be a
beginning.
It was
Sunday morning, the 2nd of September. Verdun (though no one knew it yet in
Paris) had just fallen; Beaurepaire was dead. The “Comité de Surveillance” of
the Commune had admitted Marat illegally,[7]
and for a sinister reason. For three days the prisons had been marked, and
those whom the Comité wished to save had been withdrawn; and though the
movement was spontaneous, though the most of the Sections spoke before Marat,[8]
yet there was an executive and a directory, and that madman was its chief. The
moment that the massacres were beginning at the Cannes, Danton was making the
last effort to turn the anger of the moment into an enthusiasm for the Champ de
Mars and for the volunteers. If ever there was an attempt to influence by
rhetoric a popular emotion which could not be checked, and to direct energy
from a destructive to a fruitful object, it is to be found in this his most
famous speech—the speech that even the children know to-day in France, the
closing words of which are engraved upon his pedestal. For the only time in his
life he turned and leant upon the mere power of words: there is something in
their extraordinary force which savours of despair, and they rise at the close
to an untranslatable phrase in which you hear rhythm for the first and last
time in his appeals: “De 1’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace—et
la France est sauvée.”[9]
He did
not wholly fail. When he had rung the great bell of the Hotel de Ville and had
gone to the Champ de Mars, he looked over a great and growing crowd of young
men running to the enlistment. But for four days—days in which he doggedly
turned his back to the Commune which called him—the killing went on in the
prisons. He and his volunteers, his silence, were most like this: a man in a
mutiny on ship-board, in a storm at night, keeping the helm, saving what could
be saved and careless whether the morning should make him seem a traitor on the
one hand or a mutineer upon the other. For the tragedy of those five days the
days of Sedan—always seems to be passing in a thick night. We read records of
action at this or that hour in the daylight, but we cannot believe the sun
shone. Maillard, tall and pale in his close black serge and belt, is a figure
for candles on the Abbaye table and for torches in the cloisters and the
vaults. There never was a horror more germane to darkness.
But why
did Danton not save the prisoners? I know that question is usually answered by
saying that he was indifferent. So much (it seems to me) survives of a legend.
For history no longer pretends that he organised or directed the crime. Indeed,
history finds it daily more difficult, as the details accumulate, to fix it
upon any one man. But the fact that he persistently defended the extremists in
the following month, that he made himself (for the purposes of reunion) an
advocate for many men who were blameworthy, and tried to reconcile the pure
minds of the Girondins with such terrible memories in a word, the fact that for
months he sacrificed himself in the Convention, that he demanded union, has
condemned him to every suspicion. Que mon nom soit flétri et que la France
soit libre.
He
might, indeed, have spoken. Popular, the one vigorous and healthy personality
in the face of Paris, he might have bent his energy to the single aim of
preventing an outbreak. I will not deny that in his mind, over which we have seen
passionate anger falling suddenly in October 1789 and in June 1792, there may
have arisen some such feeling as that which restrained the vast mass of the
Parisians from interfering with the little band of murderers a feeling of
violent hatred, a memory of the manifesto and a disgust which made the
partisans of Brunswick seem like vermin. There is something of that deplorable
temper in the anecdote which Madame Roland gives of him, striding through the
rooms on the second day and saying that the prisoners “could save themselves.” But
this anecdote is not history; it is an accusation, and one made by a partisan
and an enemy.[10] There is
another and better reason for his action, which must, I think, have made the
greater part of his motive. To have spoken would have been to play a very heavy
stake. If he spoke and failed to prevent the rising, he ceased to be Danton,
His influence fell, he became a Moderate, and himself, the one man left to
direct affairs, entered the confused ranks of opposition—un-Parisian, rejected
of either party, while Prance beneath him fell into mere anarchy.
It would
have been gambling with all that he most desired: the English neutrality, the
union of the coming Parliament, the rapid organisation of the armies, all this
staked to win something that was not precious to him at all—the lives of a mass
of men the bulk of whom had demanded the success of the invasion.
Why did
he not act? Because nobody could act. Remember the phrase which he delivered
while Louis was being executed four months later: “Nulle puissance humaine.”[11]
We are so accustomed to an aristocratic and orderly society that a title of
office implies power. The Home Secretary or some other man “does this,” but the
man who really does it—does it with his hands—is the policeman or the soldier.
Now these did not exist at the moment in Paris. It explains a hundred things in
the Revolution to remember that every successive step reduced society to
powder, to a mere number of men, Rousseau had said that this compact, this
thing based on voluntary union, was not made for the cities. Paris gave us in
September an awful proof. Roland, a man whom Marat had put upon his list and
whom Danton had saved, talked on the Monday of the “just anger of the people.” Yet
Roland was a just man, and brave in matters that affected himself alone, and
the massacres chiefly concerned him. He was Minister of the Interior, that is,
responsible for order, but there was nothing with which to work. On the Tuesday
he sent to Santerre and said, “Call out the National Guard.” Santerre answered
that he could not gather them. He was right. Again, Pétion was an honest man, a
Moderate, the mayor of Paris; all he could do was to sit at a useless committee
of the Sections and talk of the “National Defence;” that utter disintegration
which the theories of the Revolution had produced that purely voluntary
condition of the soldier, the official, the police (a mere anarchy)—was
irresistible when there was spontaneity of action; it was useless where the
conditions demanded organisation and initiative. It withstood the cannonade at
Valmy, it stormed the height of Jemappes, but it fled in rout when the spring
had melted enthusiasm. So here police, the function that most requires
discipline, was lacking in the State. And the whole situation is summed up in
the sharp picture we have of Manuel pushing his way though the crowd with “two
policemen” who had “volunteered,” and trying in vain to stop the lynching at
the Carmes. It was to this anarchy that Danton, after six months of struggle,
succeeded in giving government during 1793.
Danton
himself, after four months of vain effort to reconcile his enemies, put the
whole matter in the last phrase of his defence: “No human power” could have
stopped the massacres;[12]
all that could be done was to work, from that moment forward, against the
extreme theories of a voluntary state, and towards the establishment of a
strong government.[13]
When, on
the Thursday, September 6, the wave receded, and when on the morrow Pétion was
able to interfere, the people and the Assembly looked round them and saw that a
thing had happened which was to hurt the future of the Revolution more than all
the armies. It was like the breaking of day after that moral night, a daybreak
in which the wind goes down and you see the wreckage.
Paris
was very silent; the accusations had not yet begun; the Assembly was dying. The
electoral council of Paris had met during the very days of the massacre, and
had proceeded to choose the members who were to represent the capital in the
Convention that was about to meet. It also voted in silence, and sat in the
mingled panic and remorse that oppressed the whole city. The names came out in
the balloting. On the 5th (the murderers were still growling in the streets)
Robespierre was elected in a small meeting of 525; on the 6th Danton was
elected second, but with a much larger attendance and with a much greater
majority—638 votes out of an attendance of 700, a curious result. Danton’s name
forced itself upon them, was acclaimed beyond any other; yet his attitude of
conciliation, his attempt to have all Paris represented, was set aside. The man
and his reputation succeeded, his policy failed. They elected also Marat,
Panis, Sergent those who had directed the crime. Danton and Manuel alone of all
the twenty-four had any touch of the Moderate about them. The long list ends
with the name of Egalité, elected by a majority of one.[14]
There
came, therefore, into the Convention an apparently united body of men from
Paris—the Mountain, Up on the benches of the extreme left, in the grey, dark
theatre of the Tuilleries, there were to sit, in a compact group, these
extremists; and across the floor the Departments, the pure Republicans of the
south, who despised the city and them, who feared them terribly, and who hated
with the force of a religion, were to single them out as tyrants. And in this
Mountain, this body of Reds, Danton was to find himself imbedded, bound up,
falsified. He had determined to prevent such parties. He had tried hard to make
Paris elect not only Robespierre but Pétion also as a mark of unity: he had
failed.
When the
country members came up to the capital, September had grown to be an awful
legend. The number of those killed was multiplied ten times,[15]
twenty times—number lost meaning. Paris seemed a city of blood. Guides
volunteered story after story. “, in the Abbaye, the blood had risen so high”—they
made a mark in the wall; “there, under that tree, the massacres were planned by
such and such a one”—any name suited, sometimes it was Robespierre, sometimes
Danton. The deputies came from their little towns and from the fields, over
seven hundred—pilgrims from places where the pure enthusiasms of 1790 still
lingered, where even 1792 had brought no passion. They came, many of them for
the first time, bewildered in the enormous city; its noise confused them, its
crowds, its anger “Yes; that was where the massacres were committed a fortnight
ago—we can believe it.” The Convention from its first day seemed a battlefield—Paris
defiant in the Mountain, and the Departments silent with an angry fear in the
plain and on the benches of the right. And when the newcomers asked to be shown
the group of deputies for Paris, as men would ask to be shown lurking enemies
or wild beasts, they would have their gaze directed to that high place on the
left where sat the names that had terrified and fascinated them in the prints
of their country-sides.
There
were no windows; the skylight, high above that deep well of a room, sent an
insufficient light downwards upon the foreheads, making the features sharp and
yet lending them a false gloom. That man with the small squat body and the frog’s
face was Marat; you could just see his great vain mouth in the dim light. Those
small, keen features, well barbered and set up, the high forehead, the pointed
bones of the cheek and chin, stood for Robespierre. The light fell chiefly on
the white of his careful wig; his thin smile was in shadow. And who was that
huge figure, made larger by the darkness and carrying a head like Mirabeau?
They saw it moving when the others were fixed. He would speak to his neighbours
with heavy, sweeping gestures. They grew accustomed to the half-light, and they
could distinguish his face—the strong jaw, the powerful movement of the lips,
torn and misshapen though they were; the rough, pitted skin, the small, direct,
and deep-set eyes. Who was he? He seemed to them the very incarnation of all
the bloodshed and unreason which they hated in Paris, a master of anarchy. It
was Danton.
Against
that impression all policy and wisdom broke. He demanded unity; he checked the
growing attack on the rich; he said things that were like France speaking. But
the voice was harsh and loud; they heard it in their minds at the head of mobs;
they fled from him to the Girondins; they forced him back upon the Mountain,
and he had to do his work alone in spite of those orators whom he would have
befriended and whose genius he loved in spite of those madmen who surrounded
him, and who later killed him and the Republic with one axe.
It was
on the 25th of September, a Thursday, that the Convention met in the
Tuilleries; on the Friday, in the same place, with doors shut and with the
galleries empty, they declared the Republic, and moved off to the Manège, where
their predecessors had sat. In those two days the violent quarrel between Paris
and France was hushed for a moment. Danton, in the lull, said all he could to
define his own position and to prevent that quarrel from ever reaching a head.
He went out to meet the Moderates. He declared, with the common sense of the
peasant, that property must first be declared inviolable; and it is curious
that the Convention, the majority that misunderstood him and broke with him,
was yet less moderate than he; it passed the resolution, but in the form, “property
is under the safeguard of the nation.” In order to calm opinion he resigned the
Ministry of Justice on the spot;[16]
he did everything to make his position clear and true, and to save the unity of
the Parliament.
But the
attack came from the others. Within a week Lasource had proposed a guard for
the Convention, “drawn from the departments;” and in the face of this
proposition, that was almost civil war, Danton found himself able to speak once
more for unity. The Girondins had elected one of themselves for president, and
had chosen from among their own members the secretaries of the Assembly; they
had wittingly ostracised the left, and they desired to make it dumb. Danton
still attempted union. “I myself come from the Departments, from a place to
which I always turn my eyes. But Paris is made of the Departments, and we are
not here as members of this place or that, but as members for France.” He
continually presented the idea of France united; the Girondins as continually
rejected it. He knew that they thought him a shield for Marat; he rejected
Marat openly from the tribune. But all this intense and personal action had but
an effect upon individuals. Two especially it moved—Vergniaud, the young orator,
sincere and brave beyond all his colleagues, and more far-seeing than any of
the dreamers around him; Condorcet, to whom a year before Danton had seemed so
repulsive, but whose calm and just mind had arrived at the truth; who had said,
“Danton has that rare faculty of neither hating nor envying genius in others;” who
had voted and spoken for his appointment as Minister of Justice, and who, up to
the catastrophe of the following June, continued to understand and to support
him.
But, for
the mass of the Girondins, he remained an outcast. He used words that one could
not use before Roland’s wife, and the great group that surrounded her (men
over-full of Utopias, but heroic, men whom Danton himself regretted bitterly)
made him an outcast. He replied often with passion, and once with insult, but
as we shall see he did not abandon them entirely till the insurrection
destroyed them in ‘93.
Meanwhile,
while they voted the Republic in Paris, under Argonne a battle among the most
curious in history was making a momentary security—that is, a momentary union
of good feeling throughout France, and even in Paris itself. The Prussian army
had been checked on the little rise of Valmy. As you stand upon the field in
that same season of the year to-day, in the mist of the early morning, as the
volunteers and the battered remnants of the line stood then; as you look from
that standpoint at the open road, at the great plain of Champagne, so well
suited to maintain an army; as you see to the east the long wall of the Argonne,
and remember that Dumouriez had been outflanked in his Thermopylae, a confusion
seizes the mind. Why on earth was Valmy so important a victory It is a common-place to say that Valmy
was a cannonade, but what was a cannonade in 1792? If indeed to-day a line of
guns were drawn up and served, as I have seen them served in the manoeuvres
within sight of these same hills, and if a force should be discovered capable
of withstanding the shrapnel of twelve batteries of artillery, sure of their
range, turning the mark into a ploughed field—then that force would merit
peculiar names, for it would be immortal. But in the eighteenth century guns
were not the arbiters of battles. Infantry could charge the batteries then.
France, which was crushed yesterday and will succeed to-morrow solely through
artillery, had not a hundred years ago to dread the random solid shot of smooth
bores; what she had to dread was the bayonet charge of that superb infantry
which the great Frederick had trained, and on which the monstrous scaffolding
of Prussia still reposes. All we can say of Valmy is this, that men quite
ignorant of warfare, badly held together, managed to stand firm under an
ill-directed, at times a desultory and distant cannon fire.
Valmy
was not a victory. The results of Valmy have changed the world, but no one
could have seen it then. Goethe, in the course of a long life, discovered it,
and put it beautifully into his own mouth over one of the bivouac fires: “We
entered on a new world then;” but
there were better prophets than Goethe, and not one perceived it. For days the
Prussian army hesitated. Dumouriez did not dare to meet them. A pitched battle
in the last days of September might have changed all history.
Why then
did the King of Prussia retreat? No force compelled, but two arguments
convinced him. The peasantry, and Danton, the man who through the whole year
is, as it were, a peasant trained and illumined. The resistance of the
peasantry had taught the King that to reach Paris it required not a war of the
dynasties, such as had filled the eighteenth century wars in which armies
passed like visiting caravans; the invasion of France would need a crusade. He
was no crusader. He had undertaken the war with only half a heart, and at this
slight check he hesitated. The second argument came from Danton. He bargained
like a peasant secretly for the purchasable and obvious good, while the
Parliament was talking as might talk a conqueror who was something of a poet
and well read in the classics. When there was a talk of negotiations just after
the battle, it launched the great words, “That the Republic does not discuss
till its territory is evacuated.” That was on Tuesday; the Republic was young
to discuss anything—it was four days old. On Wednesday night, Westermann,
Danton’s man of the 10th of August, and his companion at the scaffold, started
off secretly to diplomatise. That foolish man D’Eglantine followed him, but his
folly was swallowed up in the wisdom of Danton, who sent him, a secretary and a
mouthpiece, to do that which, had he done it himself, would have produced some
violent and ill-considered vote. Between them this clique settled the matter,
and the invaders passed back through the Argonne heavily, in wet roads and
through drenched woods, with Kellermann following, impatient, above the
valleys, but bound by Danton’s policy not to harass the retreat; till at last,
more than a month after Valmy,[17]
he fired the salute from Longwy, and the territory was free.
Did Danton
know, as he was pursuing these plans, why Dumouriez helped him? Did he
understand thoroughly that vain, talented, and unprincipled soldier? I think it
certain. It is among those things which cannot be proved; one does not base
such convictions upon documents, but rather on the general appreciation of
character. Thus Danton undoubtedly helped and used Talleyrand at another time
in England, and Talleyrand was patently false. But Talleyrand was, as patently,
the cleverest diplomatist he could find. Dumouriez wished the King of Prussia
to be left unmolested for a number of very mixed reasons, in which patriotism
played a small part; Danton wished it for the sake of France, and for that
only; but if Dumouriez at the head of an army was to hand, so much the better.
Danton supported Dumouriez, his policy, even his retreats up to the disaster of
March. To say “he sympathised with a traitor” is one of those follies which men
can only make when they forget that contemporaries cannot have known what we
know. With all his time-serving and his separate plans, no one dreamt that in
six months the general would join the Austrians; it was a sudden blow even to
those who sat in his tent.
October
was a month of reconciliation. When the man broad awake succeeds, the dreamer
is ready to build a new dream on that result. The Gironde was almost silent,
the Mountain was afraid. In the short visit that Dumouriez paid, between a
victory and a victory, to Paris, Danton appears for a moment a partner in the
mental ease, the brilliant expression, and the Republican faith of the
Girondins. He might perhaps have ended there, and with his great arms and
shoulders have held apart the men whose mutual hatred killed the Republic. In
his success—and every one bore him gratitude after Valmy—that which he most
desired almost happened, and the alliance between the opposing Girondist and
the Mountain was half realised.
Michelet
gives us two pictures[18]
which, like the revelation of lightning, show us that rapid drama standing
still. In the first it is Madame Roland, in the second Marat, who makes the
tragedy. In the first Dumouriez and Danton sat in the same box at the theatre,
and Vergniaud was coming in with the soul of the Girondins. The door opened and
promised this spectacle: Danton and the general and the orator of the pure
Republicans, and the woman most identified with the Right. It would have been
such a picture for all the people there as Danton would have prayed or paid
for. The door was ajar, and, as she came near, Madame Roland saw Danton sitting
in the box; she put out her hand from Vergniaud’s arm and shut the door. There
is in her memoirs a kind of apology, “des femmes de mauvaise tournure.” Utter
nonsense; it was Roland’s box, and his wife was expected, Danton and Dumouriez
were not of the gutter. No, it was the narrow feminine hatred, so closely
allied to her intense devotion, that made Madame Roland thrust Danton at arm’s
length. The same spirit that made her vilify the Left like a fury made her the
calm saint of the Girondins. For she lived entirely in the Idea.
The
second scene is a reception. I will not repeat Michelet’s description; its
spirit is contained in an admirable phrase: “France civilised appealed therein
against France political.” Danton was surrounded with those whom he would have
taught, as he taught all who ever knew him closely, to respect or to love him.
Marat heard that he was there—Marat, whom he had repudiated in public a few
days before. He heard that Danton was there, surrounded by the soldiers, and the
women, and the orators. He called at the door, and shouted in the hall, “I want
to see Danton,” and at the sound of his voice everybody grew troubled, and
Danton was left alone. On the 29th of October Danton attempted openly to break
with Marat: “I declare to you and to France,” he said in the Convention, “that
I have tried Marat’s temperament, and I am no friend of his.” But the attempt
came too late.
The
discussions broke out again in November. On the 10th, the victory of Jemappes was
heard in Paris. This book, dealing only with a man, cannot detail those famous
charges; it was a victory won by men singing the new songs; it is the
inspiration of “La victoire en chantant.” But the security it gave only went
further to destroy what was left of union. Danton found himself more and more
alone. He who had been named on a committee with Thomas Paine, with Condorcet,
with Pétion, on the very day after his election to the presidency of the
Jacobins,[19] who had in
his own temporary success seemed to realise his policy of union, found himself
after a month once more pushed back towards the Mountain. The growing sense of
security had destroyed the chances of union. He remained silent. One would say
that the time passed him by untouched, because the one thing he cared for had
failed, and because the inevitable civil dissensions of the next spring covered
his mind with clouds. France was irretrievably divided. The arraignment of the
King, the discovery of the secret papers, all the movement of November leaves
him, as it were, stranded, waiting his mission to Belgium.
There
belongs to this period only one considerable speech. It is the only thing in
all his public acts in which you can discover beauty. You may find in this
speech the pity and the tenderness which his intimates loved, the memory which
they for sixty years defended, but which no document or letter remains to
perpetuate.
Cambon,
careless of anything but his exchequer, had thought the new era come. That cold
and inflexible head determined, seeing the steep fall towards bankruptcy that
France was making, to save a hundred millions, but to save it at an expense. He
proposed to separate the State from what was left of the Church, to break the
vow of 1790. In almost the last speech before he went off to the armies, Danton
opposed him and gave this passage—a passage better fitted to the defence of an
older and stronger thing than the wretched constitutional priesthood: —
“. . .
It is treason against the nation to take away its dreams. For my part, I admit
I have known but one God. The God of all the world and of justice. The man in
the fields adds to this conception that of a man who works, whom he makes
sacred because his youth, his manhood, and his old age owe to the priest their
little moments of happiness. When a man is poor and wretched, his soul grows
tender, and he clings especially to whatever seems majestic: leave him his
illusions—teach him if you will . . . but do not let the poor fear that they
may lose the one thing that binds them to earth, since wealth cannot bind them.”
Before
he left on the mission to the armies there occurred a scene which has always
been, since Michelet described it, the most striking passage of his relations
with the Girondins. He, the man who saw safety for France only in diplomacy,
had, for the sake of unity, held his tongue when the Girondins passed the
decree of the 19th November, which was to sustain a revolutionary crusade
against Europe. I say that November is full of Danton’s attempt to maintain the
unity of the Parliament. After all these efforts he was worsted, because the
Girondins were possessed by a dream which admitted of no compromise and of no
realities.
The
scene of his last attempt was this: —He made a rendezvous with their party.
They were to meet secretly at night and away from Paris in a house in the woods
of Sceaux at the very end of November. The whole life of this man was a
tragedy, and we see in this sad journey that kind of dramatic presentiment of
his death and of theirs, the “foreknowledge” with which the tragedies of the
world are filled.
He went
through the desolate bare woods of November, under the hurrying sky, that
recalls to our minds in France to-day the charges of Jemappes. The night was as
wild as the time, and as dark as his forebodings, when he came on to the little
group of men in the candlelight, and argued with them, and against them, and
alone. Michelet gives to Danton’s mind a sentiment of coercion. He shows us
Danton dragged by necessity. But I can see no necessity except the supreme
desire to unite the parties and make the government real. They would not
receive his alliance, and he went away from that meeting at midnight, pushed
back upon Paris, thrown into the comradeship of violence. Guadet rejected him
with an especial fervour. Danton as he left turned upon him with this phrase: “Guadet,
Guadet, you cannot understand and you do not know how to forgive; you are
headstrong, and it will be your doom.” The next day he started on his mission
to the army.
During
the arraignment and during the trial of the King the opinions that divided the
Left and the Eight fought it out in his absence.[20]
He was not there to attempt such a movement as his character demanded No one in
all the Assembly dared hold out a hand as he would have done and see whether
after all Vergniaud might not perhaps be right on the one hand, and the
Mountain perhaps be patriots on the other.
There
was in this debate upon one man’s life an element to which Danton’s nature was
well suited, There had to be kept in view for the French nation the effect upon
Europe which would follow from the determination as to the death or life of the
King, and Danton’s great voice has so strongly and so rightly affected the
historians of the period that he thrusts his personality forward into their
narrative, and in at least one notable place Danton appears, in history, and in
one of the greatest pages of history, by no right, and figures upon scenes
which do not possess the advantage of his voice. He has been made to defend
Louis’s life, to plead for a respite, and then by a violent change to vote for
his death.
Let me
now explain how this error passed into the mind of Michelet and of other men.
Danton returned from Belgium on the night of the I4th January. On that same day
a certain Dannon, apparently an honest man,[21]
rose late in the evening and demanded respite for Louis, When Gallois reprinted
the Moniteur, he saw this obscure name coupled with a politic demand; he
read it again, and said, “This Dannon must be a misprint for Danton.” He
corrected it so. On this chance venture there fell the eye of Michelet, the eye
that from a glance or a word could bring back the colours and the movements of
living men. In him also the tragedy of Danton powerfully worked; he moulded a
figure from these few words in the Moniteur, and made of them an
admirable anti-climax. Here was Danton (Dannon) hot from the armies, knowing in
what peril France stood, having seen with his own eyes how momentary had been
the effects of Jemappes. He comes from his travelling coach to the Assembly,
and with the mud of the road yet upon him, gives his expression as an ally to
the Girondins and to the Moderates. Then some rebuff, some unrecorded insult
throws him back again as he had been so often thrown back into the arms of the
Extremists. On the next day, the 15th of January, we are asked to watch him
sitting by the side of his dying wife, sullen and despairing. On the 16th he
comes back furious, and votes for the death of the King.
There
are those for whom detail in history is pedantic, yet here upon three letters
and their order hangs the interpretation not only of an individual character
but of a policy whose effects we are still feeling. Michelet’s great picture is
false from beginning to end. Danton had returned on the 14th, and came jaded
with his journey to the bedside of her who had been his young wife of five
years, who was now near to childbirth and to death. He had his own drama as
well as that of the historian’s, and our own dramas are acted upon a stage
where the results are real. All that night of the 14th and all the 15th he was
watching in his flat of the Passage du Commerce a fate which was coming upon
him, and certainly for whose thirty-six hours the Revolution was a little thing
to him. He came back wearily to his position and to his duties on the 16th; he
remembered there was such a thing as the Revolution—that Louis was after all on
trial, and descended from his home into the hall of the Parliament to give the
short angry sentence in which we seem to read less moderation and less of
diplomacy than was his by nature. The scene in the home had made him not only
bitter but weak, for there is surely weakness in saying, “I am not a statesman,”
in borrowing, that is, the vulgar acrimony of Marat, or in talking of “the
tyrant,” and in repeating the phrases of the Mountain.
But in
the days that followed Michelet finds a good excuse. Certainly one would say,
if one knew nothing about him except his action of January 1793, that Danton
was the Mountain and nothing else. This error would be supported by the
unreasoning vehemence, the almost brutal anger, into which he allows himself to
fall.
They
asked whether the King could be condemned to death by a mere majority, and
whether that majority was decisive. Danton threw back at them: “You decided the
Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole history of the nation by a
mere majority, and now you think the life of one man too great for a mere
majority; you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make blood flow.
When I was on the frontier the blood flowed decisively enough.”
So
naturally was he at that moment the Danton of unreason, so much had his
character yielded to its persistent temptation of violent words, that there
could be heard a voice once calling out to him as he rushed to the tribune
without leave from the Speaker, “You are not a king yet, Danton.” And yet this
was the man who had saved France from any folly of defiance after Valmy, who
was determined upon saving her in the future by keeping upon the helm a quiet
and unswerving hand. Vergniaud’s great simile, “That France might become, if
she did not take care, like the statues of Egypt; they astonish by their
greatness, and yet are enigmas to all who see them, because the living spirit
that made them has died,” passed him by without effect. He was one of those who
voted in the fatal majority, and he threw down as gage of battle the head of a
king.[22]
The word
had become reality, and Louis had stood at mid-day trying to be heard beyond
the ring of soldiers, had cried out that he was innocent, and had died in the
noon of that cold January day. This act was destined to produce the one thing
that Danton had most ardently desired to avoid—it put an end once and for all
to the neutrality of England.
Another
people, then in their infancy, now old, whom Louis had been persuaded to help
against his will, received the death of Louis like a kind of blow in the face. The
people of the United States in their simplicity had imagined the French king to
be their saviour; they did not know Louis’s phrase, “I was dragged into that
unhappy affair of America; advantage was taken of my youth.” They regarded his
crown with a certain superstition, as they still regard what is left of baubles
in Europe; and when the axe fell upon him, France lost not only the calculating
hypocrisy of Pitt, but the genuine sympathy of the American people.
In the
days that followed (they were only ten) between the 21st of January and the end
of the month, it is still plain that the shock which most affected Danton’s
vigorous and independent judgment was that return after seven weeks to the wife
whom he had passionately loved, and whom this ugly Orpheus felt slipping from
his arms back into the shades. After her death, as we shall see, he did not
reel so heavily, but in that fortnight of January, which was of such supreme
importance, he permitted misfortune to rouse mere passion in his mind; and he who
might have led the Moderates, who might have played with the life of Louis like
a card, chose to remember his rebuff in the winter and threw his trump away.
Many
have tried to explain Vergniaud’s vote. Is it not probable that he was drawn by
the example of a man whom he did not understand, and whose opinion attracted an
orator not unappreciative of energy? Vergniaud has always before history a
doubting and a hesitating face, and it seems more than possible that the wrath
of Danton carried him and many others into the vote for death.
Ever
since the 10th of August had thrust him into unexpected power, Danton had held
in one way or another the threads of a certain diplomacy. It was as follows:
—To rely upon all the elements in Europe which admired or were indifferent to
the Revolution, and to combine them in a kind of resistant body; to use, as it
were, their inertia against those who were setting out as crusaders against
France. On this account the foolish war of propaganda was most distasteful to
him. On this account England’s neutrality haunted his mind. He knew that in
this country there existed a body strong in its influence though not in its
numbers, a body which would have supported the French. Priestley had written to
him before his exile. Talleyrand was working for him at the moment, and
opposing as an informal Dantonist the Girondin acerbity of Chauvelin.[23]
Danton was even willing to use Dumouriez, mainly because Dumouriez was about to
compromise with England. To this policy of observation, a policy which took
advantage of England as the lover of individual liberty and of England as the
merchant, the death of the King put a sudden stop. It was Danton that killed
his own intrigue.
Before
he left on his second mission to the armies on the 31st January 1793, he shows
that new face in which he attempts to retrieve, as far as possible, the errors
of which he had been largely the author. In a speech which shows once again all
his old power of party political action, he demands the annexation of Belgium.
He has seen that general war is inevitable, and harking back again to that
unique French conception of which he was the heir, the raison é’dtat, he
determines to save the State, and to do it by an action which opposed every
theory of the Revolution, He asked “everything of their reason, nothing of
their enthusiasm,” and he demanded the annexation of Belgium with France. It
was pure opportunism—the determination to get hold of a revenue by force of
arms; and the next day, after having painfully come back to his old policy of
the real and objective, burdened by a past error, and having broken with all
that he valued in French opinion, he went off again to the army. While his
chaise was yet rolling on the flat roads of Flanders, Chauvelin returned with
Pitt’s scrawl in his hand, and France was at war with the whole world.
This
next voyage to Belgium occupied but a very short time. He did not get there
until the 3rd February, and he started to come back on the 15th. But the
moment, which is necessarily a silent one in his biography, would be one of
capital importance to us had he remained in Paris to speak, and to leave us by
his speeches some clue as to the revolution through which his mind had massed.
Consider
these contrasting pictures: Danton, up to the death of the King, seems uniquely
occupied in pursuing the threads of a very careful diplomacy, and in welding as
far as possible the opposing factions of the Parliament. Of course, his general
theories in politics remain unaltered, but something has happened which makes
him, on returning from Belgium for the second time, pursue this different
policy: the immediate construction of a strong central government, and the
providing of it with exceptional and terrible machinery. 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.
I know
that events will largely account for the change. The Girondins had repelled
him; diplomacy had no further object when once the universal war was declared;
the grave perils, and later the disasters of the French armies, which he had
seen with his own eyes, called imperatively for a dictatorship. Nevertheless
events will not of themselves account for the very great transformation in all
that he says and does. I believe that we must look to another cause—one of those
causes which historians neglect, but which in the lives of individuals are of
far more importance than their political surroundings. By nature he had great
tendencies to indolence as well as to violence. He was capable of temporising
to a dangerous extent, and this, I think, was largely the cause of his action
in the autumn. But such natures are also of the kind which disaster spurs to
action. As we have seen, the return in January to his household, mined by an
impending fate, made him the violent and bitter speaker who spoiled his own
plans by his own speeches. But returning from Belgium in February, not a menace
but a definite disaster awoke in him a much more useful energy.
Coming
from fields in which he had seen the whole force of the early battles breaking
up in confusion and retreat, he had suddenly to meet the news of his wife’s
death. He bought a light carriage for himself in order to travel with greater
speed, and arrived at the city in time, they say, to have her coffin taken out
of the grave and opened, so that he might look once more upon her face. The
home was entirely empty. The two little children, one of whom was in arms, the
other of whom was just beginning to talk, had been taken away to their
grandmother’s. The seals were on the furniture and on the doors. One servant
only remained. The house had been without a fire for a week when he entered. It
was an opportunity and a command for another origin in his political life.
Coming and going from these rooms, he found them intolerable; he took refuge in
direct and determined action, calling to his aid all that vast reserve of
energy which he was accustomed to expend at the cost of so much future
exhaustion.
Here was
the first thing to be done—to construct at once that strong and simple government
which he had talked of so long. The report which he and the other commissioners
had prepared on the state of the army[24]
was one deliberately intended to make such a government voted. The Commune of
Paris immediately after the preparation of the report made its vigorous appeal
for a further levy, and on the 8th of March Danton made the first of those
speeches which riveted the armour all round France.[25]
In the
first phrase of this speech he strikes the note upon which depended so much of
his power. He reads his own character into that of the nation. “We have often
discovered before now that this is the temper of the French people namely, that
it needs dangers to discover all its energy.” Then he strikes the other note,
the appeal to Paris which had marked so much of his career. “Paris, which has
been given so ill a fame” (a stroke at the Girondins), “I say is called once
more to give France the impulse which last year produced all our triumphs. We
promised the army in Belgium 30,000 men on the 1st of February. None have
reached them. And I demand that commissioners be named to raise a force in the
forty-eight Sections of Paris.”
If there
was some talk at that moment of making him Minister of War after Beurnonville’s
resignation, it was because no one but Danton himself understood how much his
energy could do. He rejected the proposal, but he had the desire to replace the
ministers themselves by a power more formidable and more direct.
In these
days one disaster after another came to help his scheme. More than one of his
enemies had suspected in a vague fashion that he was framing a new power,[26]
but they could not imagine in Danton anything higher than ambition, and they
lent him the ridiculous project of forcing a new ministry upon the Assembly.
What he was really preparing, and what he produced on the 10th of March, was
the weapon which history has called the Revolutionary Tribunal.
It was
the moment when the mutterings against the Girondins seemed about to take the
form of an insurrection, when their printing presses were broken, and when, in
the vague panic that always followed any popular movement since September, men
feared a renewal of the massacres. The proposal is put forward with ability of
argument rather than with passion; but, in the teeth of the majority and a
ministry to which such methods were detestable, in the teeth, that is, of the
Girondin idealism which was ruining the country, he affirmed the necessity of
his scheme, and he passed it.[27]
He had given the Revolutionary Government its first great weapon, a weapon that
was later to be turned against himself, his second move was to put it into
vigorous hands.
This
next proposition, which, combined with the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal,
was to change the history of Prance, did not proceed from Danton alone, but it
was based upon Danton’s suggestion; it sprang largely from the vivid impression
he had given of the peril in which France lay and of the necessity of forming
something central and strong, of providing a hand which could use the
dictatorship of the Terror. The Committee of Public Safety, in a word, could
not have been declared but for the interpretation which Danton had given to the
disasters of March.
The
crowning defeat of Neerwinden, which at the time must almost have seemed the
death of the Republic, gave the first impulse. The old Committee of General
Defence was renewed. But though this committee was far too large and far too
feeble, we owe it to Danton that it contained a vigorous minority from the
Left. The final blow that replaced it by an institution round which the rest of
this book will turn was the treason of Dumouriez.
Let us
consider what the situation was at this moment. The Republic had lost every man
upon whose ability she could rely in the leadership of armies. Of all the
school of generals who had grown up under the old regime, Lafayette alone in
his weak way had loved freedom, and Dumouriez alone had remained on the side of
the French. Spain, England, the German Powers—nine allies—were threatening the
territory of the Republic and the very existence of the new regime; the civil
war, which was soon to take such gigantic proportions, had already made its
successful beginning at Machecoul. Between the Convention and immediate
disaster there lay only the personality of Dumouriez. When the news of his
desertion, following on the news of his defeat, reached Paris, the Girondins
were hopelessly discredited, and the line of their political retreat, the pursuit
of their enemies, ran in a direction that Danton’s speeches had prepared.
For
several days he had himself been the object of the most violent attacks,
especially for his friendship with Dumouriez and on the question of the Belgian
accounts. For he had just returned from a third mission to the army, and had
been close to the general On the 1st of April practically the whole sitting was
devoted to an attack upon him and to his defence. Had you been sitting in the
house that night, you would have said that a violent demagogue, surrounded by a
little group of yet more violent friends, was resisting with some difficulty
the attacks of an honest and loyal majority. But this demagogue was so
far-seeing, was so much the greatest of all those in the hall, that when three
days afterwards the Parliament was brought face to face with the reality,
Danton’s method becomes the only solution. They hear of Dumouriez’ treason, and
on the night of the 4th of April, Isnard, himself a Girondin, proposed the
creation of the Committee. Danton supported him at midnight with a definite
speech such as no Girondin would have dared to make. He said practically, “This
Committee is precisely what we want, a hand to grasp the weapon of the
Revolutionary Tribunal.”
It was
Isnard that formulated the idea, but it was Danton that baptised it “A
Dictator.” It was at midnight that he spoke, and he closed his short speech
just on the turn of the morning of the 5th of April. That very day a year later
the Dictator seized him, and his own Tribunal put him to death.
On the
5th of April, the next day, in the evening, we begin to get those large
measures and rapid which came with the new organ of power. And Danton speaks
with a kind of joy, and demands at once such measures as only a dictatorship
can produce—calling all the people to the defence, fixing a maximum upon the
price of bread, even the first mention of a levée en masse. The air is
full of such a spirit as you get in an army, the certitude that with discipline
and unity and authority all things can be done, On the following day, the 6th,
the Committee was chosen, and on the 7th the names were read out, which showed
that the power had finally passed from the Girondins to those whom they had
rejected at the moment when France was forgiving everything for the sake of
Jemappes, The Convention, in need of men of action, had been forced to abandon
its own leaders and to turn to Danton.
The
names that they heard read out were Barrère, Delmas, Bréard, Debry, Morvaux,
Cambon, Treilhard, Lacroix, and Danton.
[1] Journal des Debats, 183.
[2] I take this document from
Robinet, Danton, Homme d'État, pp. 109, 112; but neither he nor Aulard (who
quotes it) gives the authority. The circular is quoted often under the date of
August 19; it was issued on that Sunday, but was drawn up and dated on the
Saturday to which I have assigned it.
[3] Aulard, who quotes from the Moniteur,
xii. 445.
[4] The scene can be reconstructed
from his testimony at the trial of the Girondins and from his speech at the
Jacobins on the 5th of November.
[5] I take all this from Aulard’s
article in the Revolution Française of June 14, 1893.
[6] The votes of the 30th, 31st, and
2nd.
[7] The word “illegally” is just, for
the constitution of the Commune and all its acts were legally dependent on the
Assembly. On the other hand, the Commune had given this committee right to add
to its numbers, but such men as Marat, who was not a member of the Commune,
were surely not intended.
[8] First La Poissonnière,
then the Posits and the Luxembourg.
[9] It is possible that this
sentence, including the preceding phrase, “le tocsin qui va sonner,” &c.,
are the only part of the speech that has been literally reported. The
Logotachygraphe was not founded till January, and while the Moniteur and
the Journal des Debats give much the same version, the latter calls it a
“summary.”
[10] “Appel à l'impartiale posterité.” Madame
Roland had the great historical gift of intuition, that is, she could minutely
describe events which never took place. I attach no kind of importance to the
passage immediately preceding. If Danton and Pétion were alone, as she
describes them, her picture is the picture of a novelist. The phrase quoted
above may be authentic there were witnesses.
[11] Moniteur, January 25, 1793. Speech of
January 21st.
[12] Speech of January 21, 1793.
[13] The accusations against Danton in
this matter are given and criticised in Appendix IV., where the reasons are
also given for omitting any mention of Marat’s circular in the text.
[14] For the figures and very
interesting details as to Egalité’s election see Révolution Française,
August 14, 1893, second note, page 129.
[15] More than 700 and less than 1000
died. The common exaggeration is Peltier’s 12,000.
[16] As a fact, his successor, Garat,
was not elected till the 9th of October, and did not begin to act till the
12th. Danton seems to have remained at the Ministry till the evening of the
11th.
[17] October 23.
[18] Michelet, 1st edition, vol. iv. pp.
392-394.
[19] October 10 and 11.
[20] He made a speech on the 6th of
November demanding (of course) the trial of the King, but not with violence. He
left for Belgium with Delacroix on the 1st of December.
[21] This Dannon was a friend of
Danton’s. He began, but did not complete, a collection of his speeches,
&c., and an inquiry into his accounts. He was a member for Pas de Calais.
It is not easy to get his name accurately spelt I follow the spelling of a list
of the Convention published in 1794, Dannon voted for banishment.
[22] I must not omit to mention one
phrase which is far more characteristic of him that spoken after Lepelletier’s
assassination: “It would be well for us if we could die like that.”
[23] The proofs of the connection with
Talleyrand are based only on inference. They will be found discussed in Robinet’s
Danton Emigré, pp. 12-16 and pp. 270, &c. As for Priestley’s
correspondence, it was sympathetic and deep, and continued in spite of the
massacres of September. There is a draft of a Constitution in the French
archives which some believe to be Priestley’s, but I am confident it is not in
his handwriting.
[24] Moniteur, March 9, 1793.
[25] Ibid. March 10, 1793.
[26] See Patriote Français, No.
1308.
[27] See Moniteur, March 13,
1793.