CHAPTER I

DANTON

A STUDY

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC, B.A.

LATE BRACKENBURY SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE,

OXFORD

New York

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1899

TO

ANTHONY HENLEY

PREFACE

An historian of just pre-eminence in his university and college, in a

little work which should be more widely known, has summed up the two

principal characters of the Revolution in the following phrases: “the

cold and ferocious Robespierre, the blatant Danton.”[1] The judgment is

precipitate and is tinged with a certain bias.

An authority of still greater position prefaces his notebook on the

Revolution by telling us that he is going to describe the beast.[2] The

learned sectarian does not conceal from his readers the fact that a

profound analysis had led to a very pronounced conviction. So certain is

he of his ground, that he treats with equal consideration the evidence

of printed documents, of autograph letters, and of a chance stranger

speaking in a country inn of a thing that had happened forty years before.

The greatest of French novelists and a principal poet has given us in

“Quatre-vingt-treize” a picture moving and living. Yet even in that

work much is admitted, for the sake of contrast and colour, which no

contemporary saw. The dialogue between Danton and Marat, with its

picturesque untruths, is an example.[3]

If facts so conflicting be stated as true by men of such various calibre,

it would seem a very difficult task to write history at all. Yet there is

a method which neither excludes personal conviction, nor necessitates

the art of deceit, nor presupposes a primitive ignorance.

It is to ascertain what is positively known and can be proved, and with

the facts so gathered—only with these—to paint a picture as vivid as

may be; on a series of truths—with research it grows to respectable

proportions—to base a conviction, general, wide, and capable of constant

application, as to the character of a period or of a man.

Such was the method of Fustel de Coulanges, and on his model there

has arisen from the minute, the sometimes pedantic accuracy of French

scholars, a school which is the strongest in Europe.

The method I have been describing has also this advantage, that the least

learned may enter upon such a path without confusion and may progress,

and that a book of no pretensions can yet, by following these rules, at

least avoid untruth. With inferior tools, and on an over-rough plan, I

shall yet attempt in this life of Danton to follow the example.

The motto which is printed at the head of this book, and which is

borrowed from the most just of biographers, must give a note to the

whole of my description. What was the movement which founded our modern

society? what were its motives, its causes of action, its material

surroundings? And what was the man who, above all others, represented

that spirit at its most critical moment?

To find a right answer to such questions it is necessary to do two things.

First, we must make the sequence of cause and effect reasonable. In

giving an explanation or in supposing a motive, we must present that

which rational men, unbiassed, will admit. To put in the same character

irreconcilable extremes is to leave no picture. To state a number of

facts so that no thread connects them, so that they surprise by contrast

but leave only confusion in the mind, is a kind of falsehood. It is the

method most adopted by partisans; they frame a theory upon the lines

of which such and such facts will lie, but they omit, or only mention

as anomalies, facts which are equally true, but which would vitiate

their conclusions. We must (to use a mathematical metaphor) _integrate_

the differentials of history; make a complete and harmonious whole of a

hundred aspects; strike a curve which shall unite in a regular fashion

what has appeared as a number of scattered points. Till we can say, “This

man—seeing all his character and innumerable known acts—_could not_

have acted as such and such a report would have us believe;” or again,

till we can say, “This epoch, with its convictions, its environment,

its literature, _could not_ have felt the emotions which such and such

an historian lends it,”—till we can say this, we do not understand a

personality or a period.

In the second place, we must recognise in all repeated and common

expressions of conviction, and in all the motives of a time of action,

some really existing ideal. There was a conviction common to many

thousands of Parliamentarians in the earlier stages of the English Civil

War. There was a genuine creed in the breasts of the well-paid Ironsides

of its later period. There was a real loyalty and an explicable theory of

kingship in the camp of Charles the First.

So in the period of which we deal there was a clear doctrine of political

right, held by probably the strongest intellects, and defended by

certainly the most sustained and enthusiastic courage that ever adorned

a European nation. We must recognise the soul of a time. For were there

not a real necessity for sympathy with a period which we study, were

it possible for us to see entirely from without, with no attempt to

apprehend from within, then of many stupendous passages in history we

should have to assert that all those who led were scoundrels, that all

their lives were (every moment of them) a continuous piece of consummate

acting; that our enemies, in fine, were something greater and more wicked

than men. We should have to premise that all the vigour belonged to the

bad, and all the ineptitude to the good, and separate humanity into two

groups, one of righteous imbeciles, and the other of genius sold to hell.

No one would wish, or would be sincerely able to place _himself_ in

either category.

We must postulate, then, of the Revolution that which Taine ridiculed,

that for which Michelet lived, and that which Carlyle never grasped—the

Revolutionary idea. And we must read into the lives of all the actors

in that drama, and especially of the subject of this book, some general

motive which is connected with the creed of the time. We must make his

actions show as a consonant whole—as a man’s—and then, if possible,

determine his place in what was not an anarchic explosion, but a regular,

though a vigorous and exceedingly rapid development.

A hundred difficulties are at once apparent in undertaking a work of this

nature. It is not possible to give a detailed history of the Revolution,

and yet many facts of secondary importance must be alluded to. It is

necessary to tell the story of a man whose action and interest, nay,

whose whole life, so far as we know it, lies in less than five years.

Danton’s earlier life is but a fragmentary record, collected by several

historians with extreme care, and only collected that it may supplement

our knowledge of his mature career. The most laborious efforts of his

biographers have found but a meagre handful of the facts for which they

searched; nor does any personal inquiry at his birthplace, from what is

left of his family or in his papers, augment the materials: the research

has been thoroughly and finally made before this date, and its results,

such as they are, I have put together in the second chapter of this book.

He does not even, as do Robespierre, Mirabeau, and others, occupy the

stage of the Revolution from the first.

Till the nation is attacked, his rôle is of secondary importance. We have

glimpses more numerous indeed, and more important, of his action after

than before 1789. But it is only in the saving of France, when the men of

action were needed, that he leaps to the front. Then, suddenly, the whole

nation and its story becomes filled with his name. For thirteen months,

from that 10th of August 1792, which he made, to the early autumn of the

following year, Danton, his spirit, his energy, his practical grasp of

things as they were, formed the strength of France. While the theorists,

from whom he so profoundly differed, were wasting themselves in a kind

of political introspection, he raised the armies. When the orators could

only find great phrases to lead the rage against Dumouriez’ treason, he

formed the Committee to be a dictator for a falling nation. All that was

useful in the Terror was his work; and if we trace to their very roots

the actions that swept the field and left it ready for rapid organisation

and defence, then at the roots we nearly always find his masterful and

sure guidance.

There are in the Revolution two features, one of which is almost peculiar

to itself, the other of which is in common with all other great crises in

history.

The first of these is that it used new men and young men, and

comparatively unknown men, to do its best work. If ever a nation

called out men as they were, apart from family, from tradition, from

wealth, and from known environment, it was France in the Revolution.

The national need appears at that time like a captain in front of his

men in a conscript army. He knows them each by their powers, character,

and conduct. But they are in uniform; he cares nothing for their family

or their youth; he makes them do that for which each is best fitted.

This feature makes the period unique, and it is due to this feature

that so many of the Revolutionary men have no history for us before the

Revolution. It is this feature which makes their biographies a vividly

concentrated account of action in months rather than in years. They come

out of obscurity, they pass through the intense zone of a search-light;

they are suddenly eclipsed upon its further side.

The second of these features is common to all moments of crisis. Months

in the Revolution count as years, and this furnishes our excuse for

giving as a biography so short a space in a man’s life. But it is just

so to do. In every history a group of years at the most, sometimes a

year alone, is the time to be studied day by day. In comparison with the

intense purpose of a moment whole centuries are sometimes colourless.

Thus in the political history of the English thirteenth century, the

little space from the Provisions of Oxford to the battle of Evesham

is everything; in the study of England’s breach with the Continental

tradition, the period between the Ridolphi plot and the Armada; in the

formation of the English oligarchy, the crisis of April to December 1688.

This second feature, the necessity for concentration, would excuse a

special insistence on the two years of Danton’s prominence, even if his

youth were better known. The two conditions combined make imperative such

a treatment as I have attempted to follow.

As to authorities, three men claim my especial gratitude, for the work in

this book is merely a rearrangement of the materials they have collected.

They are Dr. Bougeart, who is dead (and his clear Republicanism brought

upon him exile and persecution); M. Aulard, the greatest of our living

writers on the Revolutionary period; and Dr. Robinet, to whose personal

kindness, interest, and fruitful suggestion I largely owe this book. The

keeper of the Carnavalet has been throughout his long and laborious life

the patient biographer of Danton, and little can now be added to the

research which has been the constant occupation of a just and eminent

career.

We must hope, in spite of his great age, to have from his hands some

further work; for he is one of those many men who have given to the

modern historical school of France, amid all our modern verbiage and

compromise, the strength of a voice that speaks the simple truth.

DANTON

A STUDY

[Illustration: _This Portrait is presumably a David, both from its

style and from the fact that it is the companion picture to that of

Madame Danton which is certainly by that master. Its date is either the

Autumn of 1792 or possibly early 1793. It is mentioned by Madame Chapin,

Danton’s sister-in-law, in a letter which she writes during the Empire

to the two boys, Danton’s sons: she says “I am sending you the portrait

of your Father ... it has been retouched ... the coat especially has

been made dark-blue, as that is the colour he ordinarily wore. Madame

Dupin,” (Danton’s second wife) “has just seen it and calls it a striking

likeness.” Both this letter and the picture are in the possession of Dʳ

Robinet, to whom they were given by Danton’s grand-daughter & by whose

permission this portrait is reproduced._]

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE vii

I. THE REVOLUTION 1

II. THE YOUTH OF DANTON 40

III. DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 57

IV. THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 114

V. THE REPUBLIC 171

VI. THE TERROR 211

VII. THE DEATH OF DANTON 249

VIII. ROBESPIERRE 282

APPENDICES—

I. NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS 321

II. NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK 327

III. NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON 331

IV. NOTE ON DANTON’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MASSACRES OF

SEPTEMBER 340

V. SHORT MEMOIR BY A. R. C. DE ST. ALBIN 347

VI. EXTRACTS SHOWING REIMBURSEMENT OF DANTON’S OFFICE 365

VII. EXTRACTS CONCERNING DANTON’S HOUSEHOLD 373

VIII. CATALOGUE OF DANTON’S LIBRARY 380

IX. EXTRACTS FROM THE MEMOIR WRITTEN IN 1846 BY THE SONS OF

DANTON 384

X. NOTES OF TOPINO-LEBRUN, JUROR OF THE REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL 395

XI. REPORT OF THE FIRST COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY 403

INDEX 430

THE LIFE OF DANTON

CHAPTER I

THE REVOLUTION

Before writing a life of Danton in English it is necessary to do three

things. First, to take a definite point of view with regard to the whole

revolutionary movement; secondly, to explain, so far as is possible, the

form which it took in France; thirdly, to show where Danton stood in the

scheme of events, the nature of his personality, the effects of his brief

action. This triple task is necessary to a book which, but for it, would

be only a string of events, always confused, often without meaning.

What was the Revolution? It was essentially a reversion to the normal—a

sudden and violent return to those conditions which are the necessary

bases of health in any political community, which are clearly apparent in

every primitive society, and from which Europe had been estranged by an

increasing complexity and a spirit of routine.

It has never been denied that the process of gradual remoulding is a

part of living, and all admit that the State (which lives like any other

thing) must suffer such a process as a condition of health. There is in

every branch of social effort a necessity for constant reform and check:

it is apparent to the administrator of every kind: it is the business of

a politician continually to direct and apply such correction:—the whole

body of the law of England is a collection of the past results of this

guiding force.

But what are the laws that govern it? What is the nature of the condition

that makes reform imperative? What distinguishes the good from the bad in

the matter of voluntary change, and separates the conservative from the

destructive effort?

It is in the examination of this problem that we may discover how great a

debt the last century owed to nature—a debt which demanded an immediate

liquidation, and was often only paid at the expense of violence.

It would seem that the necessity of reform arises from this, that our

ideas, which are eternal, find themselves expressed in phrases and

resulting in actions which belong to material environment—an environment,

therefore, that perpetually changes in form. It is not to be admitted

that the innermost standards of the soul can change; if they could, the

word “reform” would lose all moral meaning, and a thing not being good

would cease to be desired. But the meaning of words, the effect on the

senses of certain acts, the causes of pleasure and pain in a society, the

definition of nationality—all these things of their nature change without

ceasing, and must as ceaselessly be brought into accordance with the

unchanging mind.

What test can be applied by which we may know whether a reform is working

towards this rectification or not? None, except the general conviction

of a whole generation that this or that survival obstructs the way of

right living, the mere instinct of justice expressed in concrete terms

on a particular point. It is by this that the just man of any period

feels himself bound. This is not a formula: it seems a direction of the

loosest and of the most useless kind; and yet to observe it is to keep

the State sane, to neglect it is to bring about revolution. This much is

sure, that where there exists in a State a body of men who are determined

to be guided by this vague sense of justice, and who are in sufficient

power to let it frame their reforms, then these men save a State and

keep it whole. When, on the contrary, those who make or administer the

laws are determined to abide by a phrase or a form, then the necessities

accumulate, the burden and the strain become intolerable, and the

gravitation towards the normal standard of living, which should act as a

slight but permanent force, acts suddenly at a high potential and with

destructive violence.

As an example of the time when the former and the better conditions

prevailed, I would cite the period between the eleventh and the

fourteenth centuries, when a change of the most fundamental kind

passed over the society of Europe, indeed a change from barbarism to

civilisation, and yet the whole went well. Reform, being continual, was

easy. New institutions, the Parliaments, the Universities, the personal

tax, rose as they were demanded, and the great transition was crowned

with the security and content that surrounded St. Louis. Simplicity, that

main condition of happiness, was the governing virtue of the time. The

king ruled, the knight fought, the peasant dug in his own ground, and the

priest believed.

It is the lack of simplicity that makes of the three centuries following

the fifteenth (with vices due perhaps to the wickedness of the fifteenth)

an opposite example. Every kind of phrase, emblem, or cloak is kept;

every kind of living thing is sacrificed. Conditions cease to be

flexible, and the body of Europe, which after all still breathes, is shut

in with the bonds of the lawyers, and all but stifled.

In the sixteenth century one would say that the political quarrels of

the princes were a mere insult to nature, but the people, though they are

declining, show that they still exist; the passions of their religions

enliven the dead game of the Tudors and the Valois. In the seventeenth

the pedants give their orders, the upper classes fight the princes, the

people are all but silent. Where were they in the Fronde, or in that less

heroic struggle the Parliamentary Wars? As the eighteenth century falls

further and further into decay all is gone; those who move in comfort

above the souls which they have beneath them for a pavement, the rich and

the privileged, have even ceased to enjoy their political and theological

amusements; they are concerned only with maintaining their ease, and to

do this they conjure with the name of the people’s memories.

They build ramparts of sacred tombs, and defend themselves with the bones

of the Middle Ages, with the relics of the saint and the knight.

It is this which necessitates and moulds the Revolution. The privileged

men, the lawyers especially, held to the phrase. They excused themselves

in a time most artificial by quoting the formulæ of a time when life was

most natural and when the soul was nearest the surface. They used the

name of the Middle Ages precisely because they thought the Middle Ages

were dead, when suddenly the spirit of the Middle Ages, the spirit of

enthusiasm and of faith, the Crusade, came out of the tomb and routed

them.

I say, then, that the great disease of the time preceding the Revolution

came from the fact that it had kept the letter and forgotten the spirit.

It continued to do the same things as Europe at its best—it had entirely

neglected to nourish similar motives. Let me give an extreme example.

There are conditions under which to burn a man to death seems admissible

and just. When offences often occur which society finds heinous beyond

words, then no punishment seems sufficient for the satisfaction of the

emotion which the crime arouses. Thus during the Middle Ages (especially

in the latter part of their decay), and sometimes in the United States

to-day, a man is burned at the stake. But there are other conditions

under which a society shrinks with the greatest horror from such a

punishment. Security is so well established, conviction in this or that

so much less firm, the danger from the criminal so much less menacing,

that the idea of such an extreme agony revolts all men. Then to burn is

wrong, because it is unnecessary and undesired. But let us suppose the

lawyers to be bent on a formula, tenacious from habit and become angrily

tenacious from opposition, saying that what has been shall be; and what

happens? The Parliament of Strasbourg condemns a man to be burnt while

the States General are actually in session in 1789!

Again, take the example of the land. There was a time when the relations

of lord and serf satisfied the heart. The village was a co-operative

community: it needed a protector and a head. Even when such a need was

not felt, the presence of a political personage, at the cost of a regular

and slight tax, the natural affection which long habit had towards a

family and a name—these made the relation not tolerable, but good. But

when change had conquered even the permanent manorial unit, and the

serf owned severally, tilling his private field; when the political

position of the lord had disappeared, and when the personal tie had

been completely forgotten—then the tax was folly. It was no longer the

symbol of tenure drawn in a convenient fashion, taken right out of the

cornfield from a primitive group of families; it had become an arbitrary

levy, drawn at the most inconvenient time, upsetting the market and the

harvest, and falling on a small farmer who worked painfully at his own

plot of ground.

It is difficult to explain to English readers how far this deadening

conservatism had been pushed on the Continent. The constitution of

England and the habits of her lawyers and politicians were still, for all

their vices, the most flexible in Europe. Even Pitt could tinker at the

representative system, and an abominable penal code could be softened

without upsetting the whole scheme of English criminal law. To this day

we notice in England the most fundamental changes introduced, so to

speak, into an unresisting medium: witness those miniature revolutions,

the Income Tax and Employers’ Liability, which are so silent, and which

yet produce results so immeasurable.

It has always been a difficulty in writing of the Revolution for English

readers, that in England the tendency to reform, though strong, was not

irresistible. It was a desire, but it was not a necessity, and that on

account of the quality which has just been mentioned, the lack of form

and definition in the English constitution and legal habit.

But if we go a little deeper we shall see a further cause. Nothing will

so deaden the common sense of justice in a legislator or a lawyer,

nothing will separate him so much from the general feeling of his time,

as distinction of class from class. When a man cannot frequently meet

and sympathise with every kind of man about him, then the State lacks

homogeneity; the general sentiment is unexpressed, because it has no

common organ of expression, and you obtain in laws and legal decisions

not the living movement of the citizens, but the dead traditions of a few.

Now by a peculiar bent of history, the stratification of society which is

so natural a result of an old civilisation, was less marked in England

than elsewhere in Europe. The society of the Continent is not more

homogeneous to-day, as contrasted with that of modern England, than was

the society of England a hundred years ago, as contrasted with that of

the Continent then; and any English traveller who is wise enough to note

in our time the universal type of citizen in France, will experience

something of the envy that Frenchmen felt when they noted the solid

England of the eighteenth century. There great lawyers were occasionally

drawn from the people; there a whole mass of small proprietors in land

or capital—half the people perhaps—kept the balance of the State, and

there a fluctuating political system could, for all its corruption, find

a place for the young bourgeois Wolfe to defeat the great gentleman

Montcalm.

But while in England reform was possible (though perhaps it has been

fatally inadequate), in the rest of Europe it was past all hope.

Everywhere there must be organs of government, and these on the Continent

could no longer be changed, whether for better or worse: they had become

stiff with age, and had to be supplanted. Now to supplant the fundamental

organs of government, to make absolutely new laws and to provide an

absolutely new machinery—all this is to produce a violent revolution.

You could not reform such a body as the Châtelet, nor replace by a series

of statutes or of decisions such a mass as the local coûtumes. Not even

a radical change in the system of taxation would have made the noblesse

tolerable; no amount of personal energy nor any excellence of advisers

could save a king enveloped with the mass of etiquette at Versailles.

These numerous symptoms of the lethargy that had overtaken European

society, even the disease itself, might have been swept away by a sharp

series of vigorous reforms. Indeed, some of these reforms were talked of,

and a few actually begun in the garrulous courts of Berlin and of St.

Petersburg. Such reforms would have merited, and would have obtained, the

name of Revolution, but they might have passed without that character

of accompanying excess which has delayed upon every side the liberties

of Europe. We should be talking of the old regime and of the Revolution

as we do now, but the words would have called up a struggle between old

Parliaments and young legists, between worn-out customs and new codes,

between the kings of etiquette and the kings of originality, between

sleep and the new science; the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries

would have been united by some curious bridge—not separated by an abyss.

As it is, the word Revolution recalls scenes almost as violent as those

which marked the transition of Rome from the Republic to the Empire.

We remember the name not of Condorcet but of Marat: in place of the

divided Europe and complicated struggle which (on the analogy of the

Reformation) should have attended a movement upon which sympathy was so

evenly divided, in place of a series of long, desultory campaigns, you

have a violent shock of battle between the French and every government

in Europe; you have the world outlawing a people; you have, as a direct

consequence of such a pressure, the creation of a focus from whose

extreme heat proceeds the conquering energy of Napoleon. Blows terrible

and unexpected are struck in the first four years of the war, and there

appears in 1796 a portent—the sword that was not broken until it had cut

down and killed the old society of the West.

To all these accidents which flow from the form the Revolution took, one

more must be added, and that the most important. The shock was of such

violence that all the old bonds broke. I mean the permanent things which

hold society together, not the dead relics, which would in any case have

disappeared.

Many great changes have passed over Europe and have left the fundamentals

untouched; the Revolution, which might so easily have remoulded the

shape of society, did more and possibly worse: it rebuilt from the

foundations. How many unquestioned dogmas were suddenly brought out into

broad daylight! All our modern indecision, our confused philosophies,

our innumerable doubts, spring from that stirring of the depths. Is

property a right? May men own land? Is marriage sacred? Have we duties

to the State, to the family? All these questions begin to be raised. A

German Pole has denied the sequence of cause and effect. Occasionally a

man suddenly rises and asks, “Is there a God?” There is nothing left in

reserve for the amusement of posterity.

Well, this unexampled violence, which, like the wind on the Red Sea, has

bared for a moment things that had lain hidden for centuries—this war of

twenty years and its results were due to the fact that the Revolution,

which might have started in a different form from almost any European

centre, started as fact from France.

That France was the agent of the reform is the leading condition of the

whole story, for it was her centralisation that made the change so rapid

and so effectual, her temperament that framed the abstract formulæ which

could spread like a religion, her political position in Europe that led

to the crusade against her; and this war in its turn (acting on a Paris

that led and governed the nation) produced all the further consequences

of the Revolution from the Terror to Waterloo.

Let us examine the conditions of the Revolution as a purely French thing,

see what it was that made it break out when it did, what guided its

course, what gave Paris its position, what led to the wars and the Terror.

In the first place, the causes of the Revolutionary movement in France.

They were two: First, the immediate material necessity for reform which

coincided with the Revolutionary period; secondly, the philosophy which

had permeated society for a generation, and which, when once a change was

undertaken, guided and controlled the development of that change.

As for the material circumstances that led to so urgent a necessity for

reform, they may be stated as follows:—The governmental machinery, which

had been growing more and more inefficient, had finally broken down; and

this failure had been accelerated by a series of natural accidents, the

most prominent among them being two successive years of scarcity.

Now why was France alone in such a deplorable condition? Why was she all

but bankrupt, her navy in rapid decay, her armies ill-clothed, ill-fed,

in arrears of pay? Why could Arthur Young, observant, honest, and inept,

make his tour through France (in which the mass of accurate detail is

balanced by so astounding a misconception of French society[4]), and in

that book describe the land going out of cultivation, the peasant living

on grass, the houses falling down, the roads impassable? The answer is

discovered in the very causes that led to the past greatness of the

country. Because France alone in Europe was a vast centralised body—a

quality which had made the reign of Louis XIV.; because centralisation

could not continue to work under the old regime—a condition which led to

the abrupt wreck of 1788 and 1789.

The government of France, in the century preceding the Revolution, might

be compared to a great machine made with admirable skill out of the

disjointed parts of smaller engines; a machine whose designer had kept

but a single end in view—the control of all the works by one lever in

the hand of one man. But (to continue the metaphor) the materials to

which his effort had been confined forbade simplicity; the parts would

be repaired with difficulty, or sometimes not at all; the cleaning and

oiling of the bearings was neglected, of necessity, on account of their

position; and after two generations of work the machine had ceased its

functions. It was clogged upon every side and rusty—still dependent upon

one lever, but incapable of movement.

France had become a despotism, but a despotism which lacked organisation;

all centred in the king, with the result that none could act but he, and

yet, when he strove to act, the organs of action were useless. All had

been made dependent upon one fountain-head, yet every channel was stopped

up.

It is of the utmost importance in studying the Revolution to appreciate

this fact: that nearly every part of the national life was sound, with

the exception of the one supreme function of government. I do not mean

that France and the world needed no new ideas, nor that a material change

in the form of the executive would have sufficed for society. But I mean

that, more than is usually the case in a time of crisis, a _political_

act was the supreme need of the moment.

Capital was not well distributed, but at least it was not centralised as

it is in our modern industrial societies. All men owned; the peasant was

miserable beyond words, but his misery was not the result of an “Economic

Law;” it was due to that much more tangible thing, misgovernment. The

citizen was apathetic, but potentially he was vigorous and alert. If

he knew nothing of the jury or of public discussion, it was the system

oppressing the man, not the man creating, or even permitting, the system.

In a word, the vices or the misfortunes of France were not to be traced

to the character of the social system or of the national temper. They

were to be found in an artificial centre, the Government.

Now of all governments a pure despotism can most quickly establish

reforms. In Russia the serfs were freed, the Jews expelled, by a stroke

of the pen; in India you may see great financial experiments, great

military groups, come into being almost simultaneously with the decision

that creates them. Why could not the central government have saved

France? Because on every side its action was deadened by dead things,

which it pretended were alive; because throughout the provinces and towns

there lay thick the corpses of what had once been local institutions, and

because so far from the Crown removing these, it had left to them the

privileges which at one time were the salaries of their activity, but

which had now become a kind of bribe to continue inactive.

How had this come about? How had a government been developed whose note

was centralisation and despotism, and which yet carefully preserved the

fossils of local administration?

To answer that question it is necessary to consider the original matter

of which French society was composed and the influences that modified

without destroying this matter in the course of the Middle Ages. The

French, like every other national group in Western Europe, may be said to

have differentiated from the mere ruins of the Empire in that dark period

which follows the death of Charlemagne; until that epoch some shadow of

unity remained, and certainly the forces working against unity had not

yet begun to be national. The order of Rome, which had remained as an

accepted ideal for five hundred years, takes under Charlemagne a certain

substance and reality, as mystical and as strange, as full of approaching

doom and yet as actual as a momentary resurrection from the dead. It

ceases with the close of his reign, and what Dr. Stubbs has well called

“the darkness of the ninth century” comes down.

The northern pirates fall on the north and west, and cut off the islands

from the mainland, giving us in England the barrier of the Danish

invasions, beyond which Anglo-Saxon history grows dim; they crush out

the customs, and even the religion, of the coasts of the Continent. The

Hungarian certainly, the heathen Slavs of the Baltic presumably, cut in

streams through the Germanic tribes. The Saracens held the Mediterranean.

Society fell back upon its ultimate units; in all that mechanical

disintegration the molecules of which it is composed remained. The

village community, self-sufficing, self-contained, alone preserved an

organisation and a life.

For more than a century it hung upon a thread whether the Roman tradition

should survive, or whether our civilisation should fall into the savagery

which has apparently been elsewhere the fate of systems almost as strong.

A new thing arose in Europe, destined more than any other factor to

deflect the current of its Latin tradition. There was found, when the

light began to grow upon this darkness, in nearly every village a little

king. Whichever men had in the old times been possessed of power, local

officials, large owners of land, leaders in the great armies, emerge

from the cataclysm welded into one new class—the nobles; and with the

appearance of this caste, with the personal emotions and the strong local

feeling that their system developed, Europe becomes a feudal society. But

that society contained another element, which was destined to control

and at last to destroy the feudality. For strangely enough, this period,

which had thrown Europe into such anarchy, had produced an idea the very

opposite of such a character. The nationalities begin to arise. The

kings—weak shadows—nobles, often of small power, but no longer the mere

leaders of armies, become symbols of a local unit, separated from the

Empire. They stood for the nation round which the patriotism that you

will discover in the old epics was to gather.

France, more perhaps than any of the new divisions, illustrates all this.

A small weak king, one Capet, was elected from among the nobles at the

end of the tenth century, and the family which ultimately toppled over

from the immensity of its burden, descended from him in direct line from

father to son through more than eight hundred years.

In the early years of that crusading century which is the vigorous

opening of the life that was to produce our Europe, a discovery was made

which was destined to help this new kingship to take a very different

shape. In the loot of Amalfi, in a petty war, the Roman Code of Law was

rediscovered.

It had the effect which might be imagined in a barbarous society which

the Normans and Hildebrand had at last aroused. It suddenly gave a text

and an accurate guide to those splendid but vague memories of Imperial

order and civilisation.

Everywhere the Universities arise; from Bologna come out the corporation

of the lawyers, the students of the code, the men whose decisions were

final, who led mediæval society as the scientists lead ours to-day;

and everywhere they tended to the two bases of the Roman idea—absolute

sovereignty in the case of the State, absolute ownership in the case of

the Individual.

The logical end of such a movement should have been the Empire—citizens

all equal before the law, the feudal system destroyed, the Church

dominated by the State, the will of the prince supreme. But Europe

contained a hundred elements beside the lawyers, though these were the

most permanent and active force of her civilisation. The Manorial unit

was strong; there are places where it survives to-day.[5] The aristocracy

was strong. In Poland and England it ended by conquering the Crown and

the Roman law. The Church, affected as it was by the new ideas, still had

a host of anomalous habits and institutions, grown up since the fall of

the Empire.

In the anarchy of the dark ages the framework of intense local

differences had been constructed; the village, the guild, the chapter,

each had their special customs born of isolation. Finally, the spirit of

secondary nationalities was powerful in many places; notably among the

Germans it conquered every other tendency.

Now France was especially favourable to the growth of the influences of

this law; she was very Roman by tradition, and by tradition Imperial.

Charlemagne had left his clothes to Germany, but his spirit to Gaul.

The sub-nationalities, Provence, Normandy, the Gascons, had, in spite

of their local patriotism, epics in which they harped on “Doulce

France Terre Majeure.” But though the national forces on the whole

inclined towards the lawyers and the Crown, the path by which absolute

centralisation could be reached was tortuous and had to be well chosen.

The nobles are slowly bereft of political power, but their privilege

remains; the peasant gradually acquires the land, but many feudal dues

lie on a tenure which has lost all its feudal meaning. The Church becomes

the king’s, but it remains in administration of its vast possessions: to

the last the Crown works through (or attempts to work through) the local

organisation that was once supreme and is fast dying.

You may compare the progress of the Capetians towards absolute power to

the action of a gentleman who obtains an estate at the cost of perpetual

bribery, and finds himself crippled when he has at last succeeded.

Finally, the lawyers themselves become sterilised in the general decay

which their policy has created. Even the Crown is half-allied to the

privileged bodies in practice, and altogether allied in sentiment; the

government which had for centuries created and sustained the people now

found itself remote from them and the source of its power cut off.

I will give but a couple of examples to illustrate the centralisation

and the hopeless confusion that accompanied it. The first is from De

Tocqueville. A village near Paris wished to raise a small local rate to

mend the steeple of the church. They could not do so without appealing to

Versailles. The leave was granted after two years, but the steeple had

broken down. The second is from the records of the election of ’89. In

a bailiwick of Champagne it was discovered that no one accurately knew

the boundaries of the district, that the next bailiwick was similarly

ignorant, and finally an arbitrary line was drawn. This is one out of

dozens of cases. The population of Paris was not known; the number of

electors in every division was uncertain.

Such was the France in which reform was necessary. The land, by a

continual and misdirected interference with exchange, was going out of

cultivation—or rather (for even in the worst cases of depression this

symptom is rare) it was yielding less and less as time went on.

The classes into which society was divided had become separated by an

etiquette as rigorous as a religion, and though the thing has gone, the

phrases that described it are vigorous to this day, and lead continually

to the gravest misconception. A France where one Frenchman has grown so

like another still lets its literature run upon some of the old lines.

Five great divisions should especially be noticed in connection with

the Revolution—the peasants, the artisans, the middle class, the

professionals, the noblesse; and side by side with these, a separate

thing, the Church, sharply divided into the higher and lower clergy.

Let me, at the risk of some digression, enter into the details of these

various groups.

The peasants were the majority of the nation, as they are to-day. At

a rough guess, out of some five million heads of families, three and

a half at least were of this class. What were they? They were more

ignorant, more fearful, and more unhappy than ever the inhabitants of

French soil had been before. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that

the worst of the barbarian invasions had not produced among them such

special and intense misery as had the running down of the governmental

machine in the eighteenth century. Their songs had ceased. Search

the folk-lore of France, and you will find a kind of gap after the

centralisation was complete, and after the lords had left them—after the

seventeenth century. It is as though that oldest sign of communal life,

the traditions and the stories of the little circle of the village, had

died just before the death of the village itself. As to religion, with

which all this natural and fertile love of legend is so closely knit,

it lingered, but it lingered hardly. The priest still survived, but his

action was cut off by penury; in places the extreme physical needs of the

peasantry, whose lot he shared, entered into his life to an intolerable

degree, and a half-paganism resulted. Twenty, thirty pounds a year is not

enough for the celibate who holds the sacramental power in the village.

I will show you in the rural communes of France church after church part

of whose buildings are very old, part very new: and what is the reason?

That in all these places the church fell into ruins till the new State

came to rebuild it. You may discover many cases of restoration in the

eighteenth century where a great cathedral or a famous church or abbey

is renewed: it is the work of the upper clergy, and the dole out of

their vast fortunes. In the villages such cases are rare and eccentric.

The Revolution, for all its antagonism, gave to the Faith a new life.

There are to-day more monasteries and convents, more of the clergy, both

regular and secular, by far more missionaries, than there were in 1789,

but there are fewer bishops.

The peasant owned land, his roof and a few acres beside; he had been

buying for generations, and the drift of the law when it turned feudal

tenant-right into ownership was in his favour. But this ownership of

the land, the foundation of his future citizenship, was for the moment

his curse. It made him an independent man, while he still had to pay

the dues of his feudal dependence. And independence works both ways. He

stood, ignorant and extremely poor, face to face with the all-powerful

State. His natural support and guide had left the village for the court;

the lord was nothing more than a name for endless annoyance and local

exaction. The symptom that comes just before death showed itself in the

ploughman and the labourer in the vineyard. He lost heart; he was too

tired and too beaten to work; the great burden of the State, its taxes,

its follies, had accumulated on his shoulders, and had bent them so low

that he could no longer stir the earth with vigour into harvests.

Such men did not make the Revolution; they were the inert mass upon which

it worked. They did not sing the war-songs; they did not understand the

meaning of the invasions. No peasant marked the assemblies with the sense

or cunning of the fields, the sound of patois was lacking in the great

chorus, and as you read the Revolution you feel continually the lack of

something closely in touch with Nature, because the most French of all

Frenchmen had forgotten how to speak.

The Revolution has made them; and to this day the heirs of the Republic

wonder at the peasant in his resurrection. From him come the humour, the

gaiety, the manhood; it is his presence in the suffrage that criticises

and tones down the crudities of political formulæ. He has re-created a

host of songs, he has turned all France into a kind of walled garden;

underneath the politicians, and in spite of them, he is working out

the necessary thing which shall put flesh on to the dry bones of the

Revolution,—I mean the reconciliation of the Republic and the Church.

As to the artisans, they play in the story of the movement a subsidiary

but an interesting part. The artisans (in the sense in which I use the

term) were found only in the great towns. At least the artisans outside

these centres must be reckoned as part of the peasantry, for their spirit

was that of the village. These craftsmen of the towns did not form a

large percentage of the nation. Perhaps half-a-million families—perhaps

a trifle more. But their concentration, the fact that they could come in

hundreds and hear the orators, the fact that they alone, by the accidents

of their position, could form _mobs_, these were the causes of their

peculiar effect upon the Revolutionary movement.

Like the peasant, the ouvrier gives hardly any type to politics. If we

except Hébert, on the strength of his being a vagabond ticket-collector,

there is hardly any one of prominence who comes from the labourers in

the towns. But the combined effort of the class was great and was as

follows:—It furnished for the party of revolt an angry and ready army of

the streets; it was capable of follies and of violence almost unlimited;

it was capable also of concentration and common action. It filled the

tribunes of the clubs, and more than once terrorised the Parliament. It

was patriotic, but wofully suspicious; and in all it did the main fault

was a lack, or rather a dislike, of delay, of self-criticism, and of

self-control: the ruling passion anger, and the motive of this anger the

partial information, the extreme false idea, of the political movement,

which it was willing to read into every speech delivered.

I will attempt to say why this character, the worst and the most

dangerous of the period, was developed in the labour of the towns. In

the first place, the industrial system is of itself fatal to the French

character. It is not in the traditions of the nation; it is opposed to

the tendencies which the most superficial observer can discover in

them. The Frenchman saves and invests in small parcels, loves to work

with his own tools, is impatient of a superior unless it be in some

domestic relation, is attached to the home life, and above all is no good

specialist: “Il veut rester homme.” You will find too many artists, too

few machines in a crowd of them.

It may be that a cheap distribution of power, or that some other economic

change, will reinstate the small capitalist; till then, for all his

industry, the French workman will be at a disadvantage. In the great

towns, in the manufactory, under a central control which has no political

basis of right, cut off from the fields for which the peasant in him

always yearns, he is like good wine turned sour.

In the second place, the system of the old regime had produced an

aristocracy of labour such as many reformers demand in England to-day.

Mediæval restrictions, which had once applied to all workers, and had

been designed to limit competition between men all of whom were employed,

survived in 1789 as guilds and companies strictly protected by law, with

fixed hours of labour, fixed wages—every kind of barrier to exclude the

less fortunate artisans. A system that under St. Louis had made life more

secure for all, had, under his descendants, separated the workmen into

two classes of the over- and the under-paid, and these last increased.

In the third place, the recent treaty of commerce with England had worked

most disadvantageously for French manufacture, and in all the great

towns, especially in Paris, thousands of men were out of work.

In the fourth place, the general scarcity of agricultural produce struck

the ouvrier, even if he were employed at good wages, in the heaviest

fashion.

Between the cornfield and the city came the taxes, the feudal dues, the

provincial frontier duties, and finally the octroi paid at the city

gates. So inept a method of continually harassing exchange could not but

react upon production, and even when the harvest was plentiful bread was

dear in the great cities. Even when these internal taxes did not diminish

the output, they raised the price in the towns.

Finally, the Church, which, as we have seen, had none too firm a hold on

the villagers, had lost all power over the townsmen. To what was this

due? Presumably to the apathy which had overtaken the rich higher clergy,

a class which naturally congregated in the towns, especially in Paris,

and whose example influenced all the surrounding priests. Add to this the

destruction of the old unit of the _parish_ in the city. The industrial

system had broken up the neighbourliness of the capital. Men rarely

lived in their own houses, often changed their lodgings to follow their

work. There is no worse enemy to the parochial and domestic character

of our religion than the economic change from which we suffer. Now with

the Church was associated all the morality of their traditions; without

it they were lost. They had not read the philosophers; Rousseau had not

permeated so deep. For the matter of that, they would have cared little

for him or for Seneca; and, deprived of any code, they were at the mercy

of every passion and of all unreason. Only this much remained: that they

honestly hated injustice; that egotism had very little to do with their

anger; that they were capable of admirable enthusiasms. They had not the

little qualities of the rich, and they also escaped their vices. One

great virtue attached to them: they did nothing at the expense of the

country’s honour; no reactionary or foreigner bought them; they were

patriotic through all their errors.

To these characters, which they brought into the Revolution, a further

accident must be added. They became disfranchised. As we shall see

later, the constitution of 1790, based upon the very sound principle

of representing those only who supported the State, gave no provision

(as it should have done) for making that support fall upon the shoulders

of all. It enfranchised the great bulk of Frenchmen—over four million

entered the ranks of the “Active Citizens”—but it disfranchised the very

class which sat in the galleries of the Parliament or ran to the Place de

Grève. The workman, living in lodgings or flats sublet, often changing

his residence, rarely paid any direct tax; he alone, therefore, lost the

vote to which practically every peasant was entitled. This accident (it

was not planned) worked in two ways. It added to the discontent of the

Parisian workman, but it also forbade his movements to take political

shape. To the very last the initiative was in the hands of others.

These others were the three remaining divisions—the middle class, the

professionals, and the nobles.

It would be an error to make too hard and fast the barriers between these

classes. In the cart that took the Dantonists to the guillotine all three

were to be found. Nevertheless it aids a history of the Revolutionary

period to distinguish each from each.

The bourgeoisie meant almost anything from a small shopkeeper to a

successful lawyer. It was not so much the man’s occupation as his

breeding and domestic surroundings that made him of this rank. Let me

explain what I mean. Suppose the family of a linendraper (such as was

Priestley’s family or Johnson’s in England) possessed of several thousand

pounds. Let them put a son to the bar, and let the son succeed at the

profession; well, the man and his son, so different in their pursuits,

would yet remain in the class I desire to define, unless by some accident

they got “in with” one of the literary coteries with which the noblesse

mingled. And this separation would be something much more definite than

in the parallel case in England. This class of the bourgeoisie stood

like a great phalanx in the Revolution. Not one in ten of the class I am

attempting to describe had entered the salons; there was not (as there

is in an aristocratic state) any great desire to know the noblesse. An

accident of surroundings, of eminence, or of friendship might lift a man

from this class, but he would leave it with regret.

Of this class were Robespierre, Marat (in spite of his aristocratic

milieu), Bonaparte,[6] Danton himself, Santerre, Legendre, Carnot,

Couthon, Barrère—dozens of all the best-known names in the second period

of the Revolution.

Brewers, builders, large shopkeepers, a host of provincial lawyers—these

all over France, to the number of at least a million voters, formed a

true middle class such as we lack in England. Note also that they might

rise to a very considerable position without leaving this rank. A man

might be physician to the first houses, a king’s counsel, a judge,

anything almost except the colonel of a regiment, and yet be a bourgeois,

and his son after him. In the memoirs of the last century you will find

continually a kind of disgust expressed by the upper class against a set

just below them; it is the class feeling against the bourgeoisie, their

choice of words, their restrictions of fortune, their unfashionable

virtues. These men were often learned; among the lawyers they were the

pick of France; they had a high culture, good manners, in the case of

individuals wit, and sometimes genius, but they were not gentlefolk, and

had no desire to be thought so.

Of those, however, who were technically bourgeois, possessing no coat

of arms nor receiving feudal dues, some had practically passed by an

accident of association into the upper class of all. They met constantly

in some salon, library, or scientific body members of the privileged

order; their dress, manners, and conceptions were those of the liberal

noblesse. To such men, very small in number and very influential, I

would give the name of Professionals. The class is complete if you

add to it the many noble names who stood prominent in the sciences or

the arts. It was recruited from legal families of long standing, from

financiers. It was polite, wealthy, often singularly narrow. Of such a

type were the Marquis de Condorcet, Bailly, Sieyès; even Roland might be

counted, though he hardly stood so high. These were the theorisers of the

Revolution, with no practical grievance, ignorant of the mob, despising

and misunderstanding the bourgeoisie (save in their political speeches);

they were the orators of the new regime, and died with the Girondins.

As to the noblesse (who partly overlapped these last, and yet as a class

were so distinct), they formed a body with which this book will hardly

deal, and upon which I will touch but lightly. In very great numbers, the

bulk of them by no means rich (though some, of course, were the greatest

millionaires of their day), they were defined by a legal status rather

than an especial manner.

He was noble whom the king had ennobled or who could prove an ancestry

from the feudal lords of the manors.[7] The family name was never

heard, only the territorial name preceded by the “de.” They had also

this in common, that the whole great swarm of families, thousands and

thousands, had a cousinship with that higher stratum which made the

court. This cousinship was acknowledged; it put them in the army; it

gave them the right to be spitted in a duel, and, above all, it exempted

them from taxes. It made them, wherever they went, a particular class,

to be revered by fools, and able to irritate their enemies merely by

existing—a privilege of some value. They held together in the heat of the

reform, and it was only from the higher part of the noblesse that the

deserters came—Mirabeau, Lafayette, and De Séchelles. The great bulk of

them were poor, and consequently determined in the matter of privilege

and feudal right that gave them their pittance. The class was richer than

the bourgeoisie, but numerous families in it had not the capital of a

bourgeois household, and many a poor lady boasts to-day of family estates

lost in the Revolution, whose ancestry had no estates at all, but only a

few tithes and a chance in the spoil to be had at court.

Now to all these, without exception, reform seemed necessary; it was only

when the Revolution was in full swing that the opposition of particular

bodies appeared. The peasant was in misery; the artisan was angry; the

middle class, possessed of that feeling which Sieyès expressed in a

phrase: “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?—Rien;” and they were determined to

work upon the sequel: “Que doit-il être?—Tout.” To this general chorus

of demand the professionals added a strong conviction (in the abstract)

of the good of self-government and of the necessity for removing State

interference. The noblesse, as a class, expected nothing in particular

to happen, but they were not unwilling for a Parliament to meet; they

also suffered from the extreme complexity, or rather anarchy, into which

things had fallen. Talent saw itself wrecked by court intrigue; piety was

offended by the sight of a starving priest side by side with a careless,

wealthy, often irreligious member of the higher clergy. Moreover, there

ran through the nobility this curious feeling—an error which you will

always find in the more generous of a privileged class—namely, that in

some mysterious way their special rights might be abolished and they not

suffer for it—as though there were some vast sum in reserve, into which

the State had but to put its hand and relieve the poor without taxing

the rich. On the moral as on the material side this error obtained, and

Lafayette, a man created by privilege, thought that when privilege was

abolished his native virtues would lift him into the first rank.

To all this attitude of expectancy, and to this instant demand for

reform, was added the insurmountable thing that made the Parliament

necessary. The great symptom of decay had shown itself—the revenue could

no longer be raised. Luckily for France, there existed in the last

century no such international finance as exists at present, and the fatal

temptation of external debt was not offered. With a population not quite

two-thirds what it is to-day, the country failed to raise one-twentieth

of what it now pays with ease. The debt was increasing with a terrifying

rapidity, and since all the methods of centralised routine had failed,

it was necessary to turn to the last resource, and the nation was asked

to vote a tax. With promises of redress, with an understanding that

the Assembly was to reform upon all sides, with a special demand for a

statement of grievances, but especially for the necessities of revenue,

the States General were summoned for the first time in a hundred and

seventy-five years.

Such was the condition that preceded the Revolution. We have seen the

attitude of the various social classes and the material necessity that

prepared the reform. Now what were the ideas that were about to guide it?

What theory was moving the men who met at Versailles? What form would the

national character give to the changes which were in preparation?

It will be necessary here to propose a paradox. The French character,

which has been blamed so frequently since the Revolution (and so justly)

for an excess of idealism, possesses at the same time a passion for the

positive, the objective, and the certain. In the same man you will

continually find some idea which pushes him to extremes, and in the

ordinary affairs of life a most exact sense of reality, even sometimes

an exasperating accuracy of detail. They are not alone in discovering an

antithesis in the national character; in England, Germany, or Northern

Italy it would be equally possible to show two apparently opposite

characteristics united in the same civic type. But perhaps the nearest

parallel we have at home to the contrasts of the French is to be seen in

the Scotch people; like the French, a nation of independents, thrifty,

investing continually in small sums, zealous of pence; like the French,

on the other hand, they delight in the abstract problem; they will attach

themselves to some idea, and hold it to the point of martyrdom.

What was the result of these two tendencies? In some characters they

balanced each other. Condorcet comes to the mind as an example. But,

as with other nations, the two aspects of France appeared (in much

the greater number of her citizens) exalted to a violent degree that

corresponded with the extreme danger and the extreme hopes of a moment of

crisis.

I do not mean that you would have found in France two factions, the one

of visionaries, the other of practical men; I mean that throughout the

Revolution the goal and the method of attaining it reflected this double

nature. Consider the decrees and their effects. At the sight of what the

Assemblies from 1789 to 1795 are trying to do you would say, “A set of

men attempting to build a city of dreams;” there is hardly anything so

unnatural but that they will attempt it; they are ready to reconstruct

from the foundation. The most violent period, that of 1794, is nothing

but an effort to make all men conform to civic virtue and believe the

necessary things; the most sane, that of 1791, is yet an attempt to

realise in the State an equality and a justice that can only exist in the

soul.

But if you turn to their methods and to the measure of their success,

then you have a very different idea. They succeeded beyond all hope.

They struck in a few months the blows that remoulded all France. The

centralisation which the practical side of the character had created

was used to transform France as rapidly as though the nation had been

a household; and not only do they find means to do this, but, when the

necessity arises, they suddenly raise armies of three hundred thousand,

of a million; they find the commissariat somewhere in a starving people,

and they succeed.

While, then, the nation was fitted for action to such a degree, what

was the theory which its idealism was about to embrace? There had

permeated throughout the noblesse and the bourgeoisie something more

than a philosophy. It was not only a set of eighteenth-century phrases,

of Reason, and Nature, and Right, but all these things turned into a

religion. The apostolic quality of Rousseau had touched the mind of

France.

It is the fashion to belittle this man. Something in him angers our

successful and eager century, and yet but for him our century would not

have taken the shape it has. It is needless to recall the movement which

had preceded and which surrounded him. He did but complete the theory of

the social contract; he hardly did more than repeat the conclusions of

the rationalists; in the matter of economics he was entirely ignorant;

he fell continually into the error of superficiality where history or

where the details of institutions were concerned. A resident in England,

he imagined that her people were represented; writing his famous work

at Nuneham Courtenay, he could not see that the squire was everything

in the little village. He had all the faults of weakness; he invited

a persecution which he had not the wit to attack nor the stamina to

sustain. What, then, made him such a prophet? In the first place, the

power of words. All his critics in this country (with the exception

of Mr. Morley perhaps) have failed to appreciate how great this power

was. See what the Jacobean translation of the Bible has done in England;

note what the pure rhetoric of Burke, proceeding solely from passion and

untouched by any movement of reason, effected in England within a year of

the fall of the Bastille: it was this that Rousseau did in France. But

not this alone. If he possessed the power of words, he also had to an

extraordinary degree that other quality which does not reside in style

but in the texture of the mind. He could write in the pure abstract,

and produce a piece of clear exposition deduced in an unbreakable chain

from some fundamental dogma. He never commits the error of supposing

his first principles to rely upon reason; he postulates a Faith. He

allows that Faith to illumine his every sentence. He is certain that

the things common to all men are the things of immeasurable importance;

he is certain that the accidents of living are secondary. He is certain

that our being part of all nature is the condition of happiness and of

good; he is certain that the complexity of living which separates us from

Nature is an evil, and to a France tortured with age he proposes this

simple water of youth: that it should return to the first conditions of a

small hamlet; where the families met together dictate the law; where each

sees himself to be a part of the whole, and where the harmony that all

men sought comes easily to an ideal democracy hidden in happy valleys. It

is idle to argue that complexity was there; that France could not have at

once the patriotism of twenty million, and the institutions of a hundred,

hearths. Every one saw that difficulty, and in the midst of ’94 the most

fervent apostles of Rousseau compromised on the chief point, for the

principle of election, which he hated, remained of necessity the chief

method in their scheme of democracy.

It is not the obstacles, but the motive force that you must examine if

you would comprehend the fervour of the Republic. And the motive force

was that passion for the conditions under which the race has passed how

many æons of its tutelage, the harking back to the prehistoric things,

the village and the tribe, all of whose spirit ran through the books that

preached simplicity with such admirable eloquence.

There remains one feature to be discussed before we turn to a brief

outline of Danton’s place in the movement—a feature which will be of

capital importance throughout this book. That feature is the hegemony

of Paris. It was the rule of Paris that made the whole course of the

Revolution. In that focus of discussion and of passion the great advances

and the great blunders of the Revolution took place. Paris alone made

the 14th of July, almost alone the 10th of August, alone and against

France the 2nd of June. Many an historian has seen in her position an

error that should have been and could have been avoided. It is an opinion

which from the time of Mirabeau to our own day has lain in the mind of

French statesmen, that Paris must be jealously watched, played, forbidden

control.

Why does Paris hold this position? Here is a city-state, eager,

concentrated, the centre in many things of our European civilisation;

that it should continually exert a moral influence over the State is

easily to be understood, but Paris did more—it conquered and dominated

the State, and France continually permitted that leadership.

There is, I believe, a point of view from which this historical fact

becomes no longer an accident but a reasonable thing; and if we take that

point of view it will be possible to understand why from the beginning

she preserved the initiative, and became and remained till Thermidor the

mistress of France.

The people of that country are, for much the greater part, the peasants

whom I have described. They have for centuries been owners of the soil,

and for at least two thousand years (perhaps far longer) they have found

all their social, all their physical, and most of their intellectual

interests in the intense but narrow life of a village community. In any

great expanse of view you see the white houses, all huddled together

without gardens, and between each group bare vast brown fields empty of

farmsteads. These peasants have in them an admirable cousinship with the

soil; their phrases and their proverbs are drawn directly from the fields

and rivers; they are as healthy as Nature herself. Such is the general

mass of France; but these innumerable villages, these vigorous swarms of

men who work in the sunlight, need a bond. Some concrete object must be

present to give true unity to many vague national impressions. Something

must be the _persona_ of these millions, and through the mouth of that

something they must hear action formulated, patriotism expressed, the

law defined. From it must come the executive, and of it are expected the

direct orders and the government by which, in times of crisis, a nation

is saved.

This brain, which is necessary to a complex organism, might have been

found in a high priest or a despot; but we in England unconsciously look

for it in an oligarchy. Seeing the squires wanting, we think there is

nothing, and we draw doleful conclusions when we note the absence in the

French villages of the forces that invigorate our own. We complain of the

centralisation that atrophies, forgetting the oligarchy that cows and

debases the inferior class; and while we despise the political apathy

of French country life, we ignore the negation of society in our great

cities.

The truth is that no definite system can escape attendant evils, and that

if one nation does not adopt the methods that have succeeded in another

it is because those methods are connected with instinct, and instinct can

neither be taught nor adopted.

It was instinct that forbade the growth in France of oligarchic

institutions. Everything was ready for it; the feudal system would seem

its proper parent; the lords of the manors were so many seeds of what

should have been a territorial aristocracy. They were destined to fail,

and to say _why_ is impossible, because it is impossible to explain

Nature; we can only feel. Something in the genius of the nation makes

for equality with the depth and silence of a strong tide at night.

It is not the Roman law—all the nations had that. It is not even the

Church—there is a something in the Church which neglects if it does not

despise civic ideals. It is not the distribution of capital—that can be

distinctly proved to be an historical result and not a cause. No, it is

not an exterior force, but something from within which has produced this

passion, the soul (as it were) forming the body. “La France a fait la

France.”

If aristocracy were impossible, what remained? The walled towns. They are

like pins on which the lace of France is stretched; the roads unite them

and make a web which supports the rural communes. Never far apart, always

living a life intensely their own, the walled towns stood guardian over

surrounding villages. Here was the cathedral or the abbey, the judges,

the college. It would give the name to a district, it would form with

its dependent communes a kind of little state. News from the outside was

concentrated here, and if a religious or political enthusiasm ran from

the Rousillion to the Artois, it was not the villages that caught fire in

the mass, but the towns, that passed the message on like beacons.

Now as the roots of this municipal system were to be found in Rome, these

needed a little Rome to cap it. These towns being all of a kind, they of

necessity fell grouped under the largest of their class. The tendency was

well marked even before Gaul was re-united; the same force that made the

great archbishoprics makes the metropolitan civil influence. Thus Rheims,

Lyons,[8] and Toulouse stand out hierarchically the heads of provinces—a

very different kind of town from Canterbury (let us say) or Lichfield,

where once they talked of an archbishopric for Mercia.

Well, as the power of the Crown increases (which is another way of

saying, “as the nation realises its memories of unity”), there increase

with it the means of communication, and especially the strong centralised

system which, as we have seen in another part of this chapter, had become

a fatal necessity to France. Remember also that till the very end of the

seventeenth century Paris had been uniquely the king’s town, and had

so been (with one short interval) for more than a thousand years. Here

was every single organ which the executive of a centralised government

may need, and (what is more important) here was the place where each

organ had grown; they were in the fibre of the place. Even if we go back

no farther than the Capetians, we have a full seven hundred years of

development in one spot from the familiar domestic origins, the little

barbarous court in the palace on the island to the great city of nearly a

million souls, whose terms and professions and classes, and whose every

institution had developed round the throne.

When one remembers that the king had abandoned Paris but a hundred years;

that he had left in the capital by far the greater part of the central

machinery, especially the lawyers; that even from what he had taken many

relics remained, and that professional men of all classes had the family

tradition of the court in the capital—then we can understand what Paris

was, is, and must be to a France where no class is permitted to govern.

Add to this the increasing specialisation of function as the organism

develops—the concentration of the brain—and Paris of the eighteenth

century, abandoned as it is, hurt in its dignity, and a little uncertain

of its action, still fulfils the geography-books, and is the capital of

France.

She herself hardly knew how certainly power would fall into her hands,

yet from the first mention of the States General it was fated.

This, then, is the position as the States General meet. A nation in

absolute material need of reform, that must have new institutions,

especially new financial institutions, or die; classes separate from each

other, mutually ignorant of each other, yet all in some degree feeling

the position into which France had fallen: in the case of the bulk of the

people, misgovernment appearing in the form of starvation; in the case

of the upper classes and of the government itself, a conviction that the

existing system was contrary to all reason and opposed to every sound

interest.

In this society, at least in that part of it that will be called upon to

govern, is a conviction—a religion, if you will—whose basis was the faith

of Rousseau. Conditions will moderate this for a time; the necessary

compromise with what exists, the desire for peace that was uppermost in

the first two years, will make men slow to uproot and destroy what may

touch the interests of friends and of large classes. They will always

attempt a legal though a rapid reform. But, in spite of them, on account

of that passionate conviction which underlay their most moderate actions,

the Revolution will move up towards the region of unattainable things.

The reformer will give way to the Republican idealist when once the

serious opposition of the court is felt; he in his turn will give way to

the man of passion and of action when the country is in danger; and even

the man of passion and of action—the man of realities—will give way to

the mere visionary before reaction can come to sweep the floor clean in

1794.

Such will be the phases through which the form of the Revolution will

pass. As for the soul of it, France will be steadily transformed, and, in

spite of visionaries, reactions, and every political accident, a new and

a strong society will be created. So the salt water comes in through old

dykes; on its surface you will note the phases of a flood, innumerable

little streams, a torrent, a spreading lake, and ultimately calm, but

only one thing all the while is happening—where there has been land there

will be the sea.

What place did Danton take in this transformation? Of his opinions in

detail, his habit of body and mind, his convictions, the accidents of his

life, it is the purport of this biography to treat. I will attempt only

a very brief description of his position, to make clear the drift of his

Revolutionary career, and with this close a chapter whose only object has

been to describe the surroundings of a character with which the rest of

this book is concerned.

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.

That part of him which led to such a position was his sympathy. His

tenderness (and he had a great share of this quality) was hidden under

the energy of his rough voice, great frame, and violent gesture. His

pity he was slow to express. But the great crowd of men who were

unrepresented, the smaller but more influential class of those who felt

and knew but could not speak—these were attracted to him because he had

the instinct of the people. He was a demagogue at moments and for a

purpose, but never by profession nor for any period of time. What he was,

however, all his life and by nature, was a Tribune.

The secret workings of the soil, the power that makes all the qualities

of a nation from its wine to its heroes, these had produced him as

they produce the tree or the harvest. He is the most French, the most

national, the nearest to the mother of all the Revolutionary group. He

summed up France; and, the son of a small lawyer in Champagne, he was a

peasant, a bourgeois, almost a soldier as well. When we study him it is

like looking at a landscape of Rousseau’s or a figure of Millet’s. We

feel France.

His voice was a good symbol of his mind, for there was heard in it not

only the deep tone of a multitude, but that quality which comes from the

mingling of many parts—the noise of waters or of leaves. In his political

attitude he attained this collective quality, not by a varying point of

view which is confusion, but by an integration. His opinions erred on

the side of bluntness and of directness. They were expressed in plain

sentences of a dozen words; he abhorred the classical allusion, he was

chary of metaphor. He spoke as a crowd would speak, or an army, or a

tribe, if it had a voice.

This was Danton, the public orator and the Tribune, who for two years

was heard at the Cordeliers, who spoke always for the purely democratic

reform, who opposed the moderates, and who helped to destroy the

compromise. Never identified with Paris, he yet saw clearly the necessity

of Paris. He admitted her claim, fenced with her arrogance, but never

worshipped her idols; once or twice he even dared to blame her worst

follies. Elected to the administration of the city, he played but a

slight rôle, and until the spring of 1792 there is in him no other

quality.

The spring of 1792 produced the war with Europe, and from that date

Danton appears in another light. Had he died then, we should have known

him only by chance references, a centre of strong reforming speeches,

an obscure man in opposition. But with the outbreak of a war which he

had done nothing to bring on, and which his party thought unwise, Danton

shows that his character, in summing up his fellows, caught especially

their patriotism. France was the first thought, and if we could hear

not the debaters only, but all the voices of France when the invasion

began, it would be this immediate necessity of saving the country that

would drown all other opinions. Thence, and for a full year after, Danton

becomes the leading man of France. The ability which has led to his legal

success (now that his office is abolished and its reimbursement invested

in land) seems turned upon the political situation, and such ability

combined with such a representative quality pushes him to the front. Two

qualities appeared in him which he himself perhaps had not guessed—the

power of rapid organisation, and the power of so judging character as to

bring diplomacy to bear upon every accident as it arrived.

It was not strictly he who made the 10th of August, but he was the

leader. He saw that with the king in power the Prussians would reach

Paris, and more than any man he organised the insurrection. That was the

one act of violence in his life.

The rest of the nineteen months that fate allowed were spent in the

attempt to reconcile and harmonise all the forces he could gather for

the salvation of the nation, Perhaps it was his chief fault that in this

matter he held to no pure idea.

A Republican and an ardent reformer, he yet seems to have thought France

of so much the first importance that he compromised and trafficked with

all possible allies. He attempted to stave off the war with England; he

attempted to keep Dumouriez; he tried to prevent vengeance from following

the Girondins; when the extremists captured the great Committee, he

acquiesced, and still wrestled with the forces of disunion. He would have

hidden, if possible, those wounds which weakened France in the eyes of

the world, and he waged a futile war with the pure idealists—the men of

one dogma, who in so many separate camps were destroying each other for

their civic faith, and preparing all the evils of a persecution.

On another side of political action he appeared more resolute than any

man. It was he who saw the necessity of a strong government, he who

created the revolutionary tribunal, and he who is chiefly responsible for

the first Committee of Public Safety. He made the dictatorship, caring

nothing for the principle, caring only to throw back the foreigner. “He

stamped with his foot, and armies came out of the earth.” The violent

metaphor is just. There is a succession, a stream of great armies (they

say four millions of men!) pouring out from France for twenty years. If

you will glance at the head of that stream, and wonder when you read of

Napoleon what first called up the regiments, you may see on the Champ de

Mars in ’92, and later demanding the great levy of ’93, the presence of

Danton, the orator with the voice of command, the attitude of a charge,

the right arm thrown forward in the gesture of the sword.

Possessed of astounding vigour, but lacking ambition, a lover of

immediate but not of permanent fame, his superb energy after a year

of effort spent itself in a demand for repose. In September 1793 he

thought his work done and his position secure. He went back into his

country home, walked in the fields he loved (and of which he talked

before his death), revelled in Arcis, filling himself with the convivial

pleasure that he had always desired. He came back in November secure and

happy—ready, almost from without and as a spectator, to continue the

task of welding the nation together. It was too late. He had created a

machine too strong for his control. He had seen the Terror swallow up the

Girondins, and had cried because he could not save them.

With the winter he began his protests, his persistent demands for reason

and for common-sense; in the religious and in the political persecution

he called for a truce; always his effort turned to the old idea—a united

Republican France, strong against Europe, with exceptional powers against

treason in a time of danger, but with a margin on the side of mercy.

He failed. The extreme theorists whom he despised had captured his

dictatorship, and in April 1794 they killed him.