THE YOUTH OF DANTON
I shall attempt in the following chapter to tell all that is known of
the first thirty years of Danton’s life. Our knowledge of this period in
his career is extremely slight. It is based upon a minute research, but
a research undertaken only in the latter half of this century; and it is
to be feared that the scanty materials will never be seriously augmented.
Every year makes the task more difficult, and a century has rendered
impassable the gulf which Michelet, Bougeart, and even Dr. Robinet, have
been able to bridge with living voices.
He was born at Arcis-sur-Aube,[9] a lesser town of the Champagne
Pouilleuse, that great flat which stretches out from the mountain of
Rheims beyond the twin peaks, till it loses itself in the uplands of
the river-partings. Here, though it is cold in winter, there are still
vineyards making their last bastion on the covered slopes of the hills
that form the northern boundary of the plain.
The day of his birth was the 26th of October 1759;[10] the date gives
us his relation to the drama in which he was to be a chief actor. Five
months older than Desmoulins, born some months before De Séchelles,
eight years older than St. Just, he was the junior of Robespierre by one
and a half, of Mirabeau by ten years; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette
were respectively five and four years his seniors. He was sixteen years
old when their predecessor died in ignominy and in dirt. Born six weeks
after the fall of Quebec, he received the lasting impressions of early
youth during the rapid decline of the French monarchy—the end of a slow
decay which threatened to be that of the nation itself. But just then
Rousseau was writing the _Contrat Social_, to be published in two years;
Voltaire was still in the full vigour of his attack, with nineteen years
of life before him; it was the year of Candide; Diderot was founding the
Encyclopædia.
The time of his birth coincided with the rising of a certain sun which
has not yet set upon Europe, but the boy’s eyes turned to more immediate
things, and saw in a little provincial place the break-up of a wretched,
experimental reign.
This point must be insisted upon, that a country town was the best
possible place for noting the collapse of misgovernment. The country
manors were more wretched, the provincial capitals more loud and able in
their expressions of opinion; but few places could show the fatal process
of disintegration more clearly than these little provincial centres, the
sub-prefectures of to-day. The confusion of power, the excess and the
ill-working of privilege, the complexity and weakness of government,
were there apparent upon every occasion. The wealth of the nation was
diminished most especially by the interference with exchange. This
(though ultimately a source of their penury) was less directly evident to
the villagers, while the large town with its varied production could (in
another form) disguise the evil; but to the small borough the experience
was direct and terrible.
Again, the practical equality of educated men was there more apparent and
more sinned against than in the wider societies of the large towns. In
a place like Arcis-sur-Aube, isolated specimens of classes technically
distinct were continually in contact. The less the number of their caste
and order (and the less their importance), the more do the noblesse,
to this day, put on their pride; and yet the more necessary is it, in
the life of a small town, that they should associate with those whose
conversation and abilities are precisely their own. In Paris or in Lyons,
where large cliques were occupied in general interests, such differences
were often neglected; in the forgotten towns of the provinces never.
On the other hand, the blind and dumb anger of the peasantry would hardly
reach Arcis. All over France the town misunderstood the countryside, and
in the early Revolution actually fought against it. This will appear
strange to an English reader, who sees scarcely any contrast between
a country market and an overgrown village. In England the distinction
hardly exists, but in France the borough is very separate from the
peasant society outside, and, though often smaller than some large
neighbouring village, it keeps to this day the Roman traditions of a city.
We see, then, that Danton’s birthplace in great part accounts for the
peculiar bent of his future politics: practical, of legal effect,
inspired by no hatred, though strongly influenced by a personal
experience of misgovernment. But his parentage will show us still more
clearly how the conditions of his origin affected his career.
He was of the lawyers. His father was _procureur_ in the bailiwick of
Arcis. It is difficult to explain the functions of his office at this
date and to an English reader, for it belongs to that “Administration”
which is so essentially Latin, and which we are but just beginning to
experience in England. Let it suffice to describe him as the _official_
whose duty it was to supply that which in England the _institution_ of
the grand jury still in theory provides, as it did once in reality. It
was his business to “present” the cases and the accused to the local
criminal court—local, because in France the circuit of assize is
unknown. Added to this were many duties and privileges of registration,
of stamping and so forth; and the position required an accurate, and even
a minute knowledge of the royal law and provincial usage, the complicated
customary system of the old regime.
It is perhaps of still more importance to appreciate the social position
of Jacques Danton. Belonging to the lower branches of the legal
profession, and placed in a lesser borough of Champagne, the father of
Danton held something of the same rank as would a small country solicitor
in one of our market-towns, with whatever additions of dignity might
follow from a permanent office in the municipality of the place.
As to fortune, we do not accurately know the amount of the family income
during Danton’s boyhood, but we know that the office which was afterwards
purchased for him was worth some three to four thousand pounds; that the
money was found largely upon the credit of his father’s legacy,[11] and
that the house in which the family lived was their own—a useful rule
existing throughout provincial France. It is a substantial building,
among the best of the little town, standing in the market-place, with the
principal rooms giving upon the public square. What with the probable
capital and the known emoluments of his position, we may regard Jacques
Danton as a man disposing of an income of about four to five hundred
pounds a year.
His mother was of a somewhat lower rank. She was the daughter of a
builder from the Champagne, and her brother was a master-carpenter of the
town. Of her two sisters, one had married a postmaster and the other a
shopkeeper, both in Troyes; her brother was the priest of Barberey, near
Arcis.
The father died when the boy was two and a half years old, leaving four
children. We must presume, though we are not certain, that Danton had one
brother: and we know he had two sisters, one of whom married in Troyes;
the other died a nun at the same place in the middle of this century.[12]
On both sides of his family, through the connections and marriages of
his relations, their employment, their dwellings, their descendants, we
see the origin of Danton absolutely separate from the lower and from the
higher ranks of the old regime. Only by an effort of imagination could he
later understand the workman or the peasant; only by daily conversation
could he appreciate the strange nobles of 1790, with their absence of
national pride.
In fine, Danton came out of that middle class which has made the modern
world, and which still insecurely sustains it. “Respectability and its
gig” is an epigram that would exactly suit the dull and provincial
surroundings of his first home; but the converse of such provincialism
is sanity, order, and strength, and out of fuel so solid and so cold the
bourgeoisie has time and again built a consuming fire.
From his father’s death, before he was three years old, till his ninth
year, the child was with his mother in the house at Arcis, for she had
from the little fortune just enough revenue to keep the family together
and to educate the children. The little boy was taught his Latin elements
in the town, and then sent to the “Lower Seminary” at Troyes.[13]
It was the intention of his uncle at Barberey to make him a priest, and
in that case he would have passed through the regular stages, taking the
higher forms in the Upper Seminary, and finally being admitted to orders
a year or two after finishing his “Philosophie.” However, this programme
was never completed, and the Church lost in him the material for a
vigorous, charitable, and obscure country vicar.
The decision was probably the result of one of those family meetings,
such as were habitually held in France to decide the career of an orphan
child, and which the Revolution raised to the dignity of an institution
with legal form. Some biographers have read the politics of a man of
thirty into the action of a little child, and have made this step a
precocious protest against clericalism. These biographers have no
children.
The uncle consented to the change, and, with Madame Danton’s two married
sisters, agreed upon the bar as his future profession. He was sent to
Troyes and placed with the Oratorians, a religious order which has
had the honour of training so many of the great reformers. In their
College he went through that training which no amount of social change
or new theories in pedagogy has been able to uproot from the secondary
education of France. Little Greek, much Latin, two years all employed in
the literature of the late Roman republic and early empire—a groundwork
in the elements which gives the educated French an almost mediæval
familiarity with Roman thought; such was the course which the bourgeois
did and does go through in the French schools. A system founded upon
the humanities of the sixteenth, but developed in the classicism of the
seventeenth century, it has lost the Hellenism, the subtlety, and the
breadth of the former, while it has preserved the rigidity, the strength,
and the clearness which the latter owes to the influence of the Jesuits.
It fails to develop that initiative coupled with originality to which we
in England attach so much importance; it achieves, upon the other hand, a
strength in the convictions, and above all a soundness in the judgment,
which our public schools often fail to produce.
From just such a curriculum came the exaggerated classicism of
Robespierre, the more brilliant but equally Latin style of Desmoulins,
though it must be admitted that the first is a reminiscence of Cornelius
Nepos, while the second is at times well modelled upon Tacitus himself.
The error of such imitation, however, never marred the speech of Danton
in his later life; he owed this singular freedom from the spirit of his
age to travel, to his vivid interest in surrounding things and men, and
to his intimacy with English and Italian.[14]
Yet in a famous speech upon public education he makes a just reference to
the influence of this schooling upon the mind of his contemporaries, and
notes truly its tendency to turn men republican.[15]
Unfortunately he did not remain at such a school long enough to receive
its last and most beneficial impressions. The head form at a French
school is called “Philosophie,” and the last year is spent largely in
reading the sociology and the metaphysics of the old world. Danton left
at the age of sixteen, when he had just completed “Rhétorique,” but what
he lost in polishing he gained in being left to his own development for
one more year of his life than were his fellows.
Active, often rebellious, full of laughter, he showed his intelligence in
the final examinations, his vigour in an escapade that endeared him to at
least one of his school-fellows,[16] who has given us, with Rousselin,
the only notes we possess as to this period of his life. He ran off in
his last year to Rheims, seventy odd miles away, that he might see the
crowning of Louis XVI. Going and returning on foot, he satisfied the
desire which he had expressed to his school-fellows of “seeing how they
made a king.” So as a boy he went to look at the making of a king, and
afterwards, when he grew older, Danton himself unmade him.
In 1780—his twenty-first year[17]—he entered the office of a solicitor
at Paris named Vinot. Apprenticed as a clerk in order to read law, and
above all to watch the procedure of the courts, he spent the next four
years in preparing for the bar. If we are to depend on a chance phrase
dropped just before his death, he was at that time entirely dependent
on his master and his pen.[18] We know, at any rate, that he received
no salary, but lodged and boarded with his employer; nor is it probable
that he received any money from home, for his mother had married again,
and a short time after this second husband (a certain Recordain) was so
deeply involved that Danton was begged to hand over the most part of his
inheritance to save the family. He did so, and remained with some five
or six hundred pounds only as his share of the family fortune. It was
invested in land near Arcis, and he kept it for his ultimate purpose of
buying a barrister’s practice in one of the higher courts.
He was called to the bar (a process in the same form as taking a degree)
in 1785,[19] choosing, with provincial patriotism, Rheims as the place in
which formally to join the profession; but he intended to practise in the
capital, and returned thither at once.
It is not easy to render to an English public the meaning of the various
courts before 1789. Even in France (so completely has the new order
supplanted the old anarchy) their forms have been forgotten, and research
purely antiquarian cannot give us more than disjointed particulars
as to their procedure.[20] There was a division corresponding to the
English between Common Law and Equity. This was to be discovered in every
country of the West, and had arisen of necessity from the imposition of
the king’s power and the Canon Law over those local customs, mixed with
reminiscences of Rome, which had once been the whole life of the early
Middle Ages.
To the body of lawyers who in Paris (or in any of the great centres)
formed the courts for all ordinary pleas, the name of “Parliament” was
given. But that it comprised more persons, that it never went upon
circuit, and that it included many barristers as well as judges, the
Parliament of Paris corresponded more or less to what the English Bench
would be were our judges to form a kind of permanent council for advising
the Crown and registering its decrees, as well as for trying the cases
brought before them. To plead at their bar was no difficult matter. It
required but the taking of one’s degree in law, and the fees of entrance
were slight. Danton determined to adopt this branch of the profession,
and to use it as a stepping-stone towards the higher court, which he soon
reached.
This higher court, “Court of Appeal,” as we should call it, or “Cour de
Cassation,” as it is named in the modern French system, bore a title
significant of the intense conservatism of old France. It was called
the “Court of the King’s Councils”—very much what we should have to-day
in England had we preserved in fact the theory that the king in his
council is the final authority. But though it bore a name drawn from the
Curia Regis of the thirteenth century, it had of course lost all its old
simplicity. It was a Bench like any other, but there pleaded at its bar
an order of lawyers strictly limited in number and highly privileged.[21]
It dealt, as did its parallel in the English system, mainly with disputed
inheritances, especially in matters of land, and, as we shall see, it
showed the true mark of a court of Chancery, in that it took more than a
hundred and thirty years to make up its mind. To plead before this court,
with its monopoly of valuable causes, was to have at once an assured
income and prestige; therefore its vacancies were prizes to be bought
and sold. Danton determined to plead so long at the common law courts as
might assure him, with economy, a substantial addition to the few hundred
pounds that formed his whole capital, and then to seek a loan that might
eke out these savings and place him at the Chancery bar.
Young, eloquent, eminently capable of seeing a real issue, he was well
fitted for the lower practice, and he succeeded. Within two years he
had a sum to offer as part payment, which was at once a proof of his
business habits and of his talents. His family, therefore, especially
those members of it who had urged him to go to the bar, were willing to
advance the necessary sums in addition to his own savings and his little
patrimony. The purchase-money was delivered, and a bond to the amount of
£3000 (a sum which he could not then have furnished) was signed by his
aunts and uncles at Troyes. It was in March 1787[22] that this step was
taken, and this date was in some sense his entry into public life, for it
brought him into direct contact with the wealthy—that is, with the ruling
class.
We have on this date a vivid anecdote surviving. A Latin oration had
to be delivered off-hand to the assembled college on the reception of
a candidate to the order. The subject set for Danton when he entered
the hall was “The Moral and Political Situation of the Country in their
relations with the Administration of Justice.” A fine theme for 1787!
Such a quaint scene the old regime delighted in, and its older members
delighted also in catching here and there a phrase of quotation which
they could understand. The genius and the memory of their candidate seem
on this occasion to have furnished something new, to have given them
less platitude than was expected. He mentioned reform; he spoke of the
struggle in which the Parliament was engaged against the ministers—a
struggle of which he wisely said, “They are fighting for the sacred
centres of civic liberty, but present no positive reform by which that
liberty may be brought into existence.” “Sacred centres” was, of course,
_aris et focis_. The speech was necessarily in a large measure a series
of _clichés_, a stringing together of the well-worn Latin mottoes. It
even contained _salus populi suprema lex_, but its argument was Danton’s
own. There is to be marked also this phrase, for it is the note of all
his future work: “Let the government feel the gravity of the situation
sufficiently to remedy it in the simple and in the natural way downwards
from its own authority.”
The young men understood and applauded; the old men were assured that, if
they had not quite followed an unconventional harangue, it was due to the
originality of the speaker. Presumably their souls were softened by _aris
et focis_, and _salus populi suprema lex_.
For the next two years his forensic reputation is continually rising. No
longer the Common Law pleader, with pathetic and oratorical appeals for
a shepherd against his lord, he had shown how large a part intellect had
to do with his power of commanding attention. On the intricacies of his
Chancery practice and the clearness and ability of his analysis we have
an excellent witness in one of the most learned of the modern Parisian
bar,[23] and three of his opinions, on the Amelinau, Dubonis, and De
Montbarey cases, have come down to us, and have received the favourable
criticism of an opponent.
The last case (that of De Montbarey) shows us Danton defending the claims
of an old house and at work in the rustiest of all the legal grooves. It
had been on the stocks since 1657, and Danton, in attempting to give the
quietus to this intolerable longevity, uses a phrase which shows us the
feeling that spared one grave at least when the mob sacked St. Denis:
“Jeanne d’Albret[24] is a name dear to all Frenchmen, for it recalls the
memory of that other Jeanne d’Albret who was the mother of Henri IV.”
There came to be his clients, among others De Barentin, the minister of
justice, and De Brienne,[25] comptroller-general; it is on his intimacy
with the former that his first recorded opinions on public affairs turn.
They will be dealt with in the next chapter.
It is, of course, difficult to give an exact proof of a man’s private
income at any moment, but we are certain that Danton’s cannot have fallen
far short at this date of a thousand pounds a year. His immediate success
at the bar, the monopoly and privilege of the body to which he now
belonged (the work certain to come to the most inept was worth a lump sum
of 60,000 francs, to which talent would add indefinitely), his eloquence
and proved ability, the name of his clients, their importance and their
wealth—everything leads to this as a certain conclusion. Immense fortunes
were not then made in the profession; his position was not an obscure one.
He married, on attaining this status, the daughter of a man who kept one
of the students’ restaurants, Charpentier by name. It was a café (Café
des Écoles) very much frequented by the University and the younger men at
the bar, and still one of the few remaining cafés of the last century.
Danton himself was a regular customer, and there is an interesting
picture, drawn by a friend, of the avocats in their special costumes at
this place. It occupied the site of what is now the south-western corner
of the Place de l’École,[26] nor has any change been made in it save the
raising of the road level. Looking on the river, and just over the river
from the Palais, it was the natural rendezvous for the young barristers
in the mid-day adjournment and after the court rose.
Charpentier, the “limonadier” of Mdme. Roland, was a man worth from five
to six thousand pounds, part only invested in his business;[27] he had,
moreover, a little post under the Taxes, requiring a slight amount of
work and bringing in only a hundred pounds a year. When he married his
daughter to Danton, she was given 20,000 francs.[28]
As will be seen later, it is of the first moment in proving Danton’s
position to know accurately the capital amount of which he disposed when
the Revolution broke out; for in the case of generous men in a democracy,
the accusation of venality is the most common and the hardest to rebut.
Passionately fond of his wife, and successful in his profession, on the
threshold of a great career, I would apply to him a phrase which one of
his worst enemies has given us to describe a far lesser man, “Actif et
sain, robuste et glorieux, il aima sa femme et la parure.”
We leave him, then, at the summit of a laborious and perhaps of an
arduous youth. He is twenty-eight years old, in the best of his vigour
and of his intelligence—the age at which Jefferson ten years before
had drafted his immortal paragraph; the age at which Napoleon, with his
moving island of men, was ten years later to break five armies of the
Austrians from Lodi to Campo Formio.
What picture shall we make of him to carry with us in the scenes in which
he is to be the principal actor?
He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full of
gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon the thick
neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and determined. With wide
eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick glance which betrays the habit
of appealing to an audience. His upper lip was injured, and so was his
nose,[29] and he had further been disfigured by the small-pox, with which
disease that forerunner of his, Mirabeau, had also been disfigured. His
lip had been torn by a bull when he was a child, and his nose crushed in
a second adventure, they say, with the same animal. In this the Romans
would perhaps have seen a portent; but he, the idol of our Positivists,
found only a chance to repeat Mirabeau’s expression that his “boar’s head
frightened men.”
In his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with extreme
vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside oneself; but it
was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the minor conventions Danton
always bowed, because he was a man, and because he was eminently sane.
More than did the run of men at that time, he understood that you cut
down no tree by lopping at the leaves, nor break up a society by throwing
away a wig.[30] The decent self-respect which goes with conscious power
was never absent from his costume, though it often left his language in
moments of crisis, or even of irritation.
I will not insist too much upon his great character of energy, because it
has been so over-emphasised as to give a false impression of him. He was
admirably sustained in his action, and his political arguments were as
direct as his physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of
fury which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty,
whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at work
upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum.
Save when he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had
no violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close reasoner,
and one who put his points with ability and with eloquence rather than
with thunder. But in whatever he undertook, vigour appeared as the taste
of salt in a dish. He could not quite hide this vigour: his convictions,
his determination, his vision all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he
has in hand.
He possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood.
In this he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom
revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke
English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings were
dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal. He had
no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely oligarchy had
framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the Revolution that he
desired to the last an alliance, or at least peace, with this country.
Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign policy, Danton was more than a
sane—he was a just, and even a diplomatic man.
He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of the philosophers; it
ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his own tongue, from Adam
Smith to the “Essay on Civil Government” in that of strangers; and of
the Encyclopædia he possessed all the numbers steadily accumulated. When
we consider the time, his fortune, and the obvious personal interest in
so small and individual a collection, few shelves will be found more
interesting than those which Danton delighted to fill.[31]
In his politics he desired above all actual, practical, and apparent
reforms; changes for the better expressed in material results. He
differed from many of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his
political countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of
something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of the
race, something which made him save and invest in land as does the French
peasant,[32] and love, as the French peasant loves, good government,
order, security, and well-being.
There is to be discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
conversations before the bursting of the storm, and still more clearly in
his demand for a _centre_ when the invasion and the rebellion threatened
the Republic, a certain conviction that the revolutionary thing rather
than the revolutionary idea should be produced: not an inspiring creed,
but a goal to be reached, sustained him. Like all active minds, his
mission was rather to realise than to plan, and his energies were
determined upon seeing the result of theories which he unconsciously
admitted, but which he was too impatient to analyse.
His voice was loud even when his expressions were subdued. He talked no
man down, but he made many opponents sound weak and piping after his
utterance. It was of the kind that fills great halls, and whose deep
note suggests hard phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to
what his words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others,
and such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was not;
he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and if there
are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos, it is probably
because in the studious leisure of vast endowments they have never felt
the former in themselves, nor have been compelled to control the latter
in their surroundings.
As to his private life, affection dominated him. Upon the faith of some
who did not know him he acquired the character of a debauchee. For
the support of this view there is not a tittle of direct evidence. He
certainly loved those pleasures of the senses which Robespierre refused,
and which Roland was unable to enjoy; but that his good dinners were
orgies or of any illegitimate loves (once he had married the woman to
whom he was so devotedly attached) there is no shadow of proof. His
friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul, he
loved France. His faults—and they were many—his vices (and a severe
critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two sources: first,
he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed in the immediate
thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil effects that abundant
energy may produce—the habit of oaths, the rhetoric of sudden diatribes,
violent and overstrained action, with its subsequent demand for repose.
Weighted with these conditions he enters the arena, supported by
not quite thirty fruitful years, by a happy marriage, by an intense
conviction, and by the talents of a man who has not yet tasted defeat.
I repeat the sentence applied to another: “Active and sane, robust and
ready for glory, the things he loved were his wife and the circumstance
of power.”