CHAPTER III

DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS

A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies of a

nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead, must, by

his nature, follow the national methods on his road to power.

His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction of

the national energies, and must merge with their main current at an

imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who deliberately plan

success that they will not leave themselves amenable to such influences,

and it is the most frequent cause of their failure. Thus such men as

arrive at great heights of power are most often observed to succeed by

a kind of fatality, which is nothing more than the course of natures

vigorous and original, but, at the same time, yielding unconsciously to

an environment with which they sympathise, or to which they were born.

It is not difficult to determine the accidents of action, temperament,

and locality which predispose to success in one’s own society. It is less

easy to appreciate what corresponds to them under foreign conditions.

It was seen in the first chapter that Paris sums up in herself those

conditions in the case of the French nation; and it was seen also (a

point of peculiar importance) that Paris at the close of the eighteenth

century was ill at ease—out of herself, demanding her place and yet

anxious as to the means by which it might be attained.

It might be imagined that this was a kind of usurpation. Such a belief

is entertained by most foreigners, and certainly it has not been lacking

among the more idealist of the French Republicans. Nevertheless, such a

view is erroneous, and the Girondists, for all their virtues, went (as we

shall discover) against the nature of things when they would have made of

Paris but one of the cities, or rather but “an aliquot voting part” of

the nation. The demand of Paris was essentially reasonable, and had to

be satisfied. Why? Because without her leadership not this thing or that

thing would have been done, but nothing would have been done. The crowds

who waited round the coaching inns in the country towns for news of the

city in the great early days of ’89, by their very attitude asked and

expected Paris to move.

Paris, then, is Danton’s gate. It is up the flood of the Parisian tide

that he floats. That tide rises much higher than even he had thought

possible, and it throws him at last on the high inaccessible place of the

10th of August. Once there, from a pinnacle he sees all France. Just as

Cromwell was the Puritan soldier till he reached power, and then became,

or desired to become, the representative of England, so Danton is the

Parisian Frondeur till from a place of responsibility and direction

he aims partly at the realisation of French ideas, but mainly at the

integrity and salvation of France itself.

Here he is, then, in the two years of active discussion that precede the

elections, by an accident of ambition, Parisian; one of a group of young

provincial lawyers, but the most successful of them all. Some months

after his marriage, in the course of 1788[33] (we are not certain of the

exact date), he moved into the house in which he lived to his death, six

angry years. It was the corner house of the Cour du Commerce and the Rue

des Cordeliers.[34] The house was better than that which he had inhabited

in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, when he bought his practice; on the

other hand, it was in a somewhat less expensive neighbourhood. We may

justly infer, however, from the greater size of his new apartments, and

from the fact that he kept his office still in the old house in the Rue

de la Tixanderie, just behind the Hotel de Ville, that he had prospered

in his profession, and the inference is sustained by our knowledge of the

importance of his cases and his clients. As to the exact situation which

he chose, it was doubtless determined by its proximity to the apartments

of his friends. Here lived Desmoulins, his chief friend, a year younger

than himself, coming (after his marriage in 1790) to live in the same

house; for then, as now, in Paris it was not the habit to take a whole

house but a flat, and Danton was on the first, Desmoulins on the second

floor. Just across the river, over the Pont Neuf, was the café on the

Quai de l’École which his father-in-law had kept, and above all, he was

here in the midst of the youth of the schools. It was the slope of the

famous hill of the University. Close by he would find the Café Procope,

of which Desmoulins had written with such enthusiasm, which had once

been illuminated with the little smile of Voltaire, which had heard

the assertion of Diderot, and which in 1788 was noisy every night with

discussion and speech and applause. All that atmosphere of debate which

comes unconsciously to young men learning rose on the sides of the Mont

Parnasse and centred in the room; and here in the winter of the year,

in a society so entirely of his own rank that the high bourgeoisie and

the noblesse knew nothing of its power, his great voice and generous

face filled the circle with their energy. But there was yet no dream

of revolution, still less of violence. France was waiting for great

things, but they were to come of themselves, or on the wave of universal

enthusiasm. The fire, however, was lit, and the group which afterwards

passed from the Montagne to the scaffold of Germinal was already formed.

To all this, however, which was but the relaxation of an abundant spirit,

must be added days of continual and serious work on the other side of

the river. If his nights were in the Latin Quarter, his days were in the

office of the Rue de la Tixanderie. A minister of the crown[35] does not

intrust his family affairs to such a wastrel as the chance memoirs of

opponents would make of Danton at this period, nor a lawyer who is never

in his chambers, but gadding about politicising, get the conduct of one

of the most important Chancery cases of his day.

There is one matter in these pre-revolutionary months which is of no very

great importance, but which is well worth noticing, though the confusion

apparent in our one account of it has lessened its value. There can be no

doubt that Barentin, apart from his business relations, was personally

intimate with Danton; and when that careful and moderate man had

succeeded Lamoignon in September 1788, there was some kind of informal

offer made to Danton of what we should call an official secretaryship

to the minister[36]—or rather we have no name for it, for the ministry

in France was not associated with legislation, but only with executive

power, and therefore positions in its gifts had not the political

importance they have with us.

As to the precise date of the offer, how far it was pressed, or how

seriously it was made, we can have no exact knowledge. But it seems to

me unwise to reject so characteristic an anecdote, and one which fits in

so well with Danton’s known position, merely on the somewhat strained

theory that documentary evidence alone should be admitted in history, and

documentary evidence sifted by the rules of a rigid cross-examination.[37]

At any rate, Danton refused it. And not only did he refuse it, but there

is no trace of an attempt to use his friend’s influence or to make a

political success at a time when nearly every man’s head was turned by

the chances of a great social change. He felt no need of politics, and it

was not till much later, after quite twelve months of action and speech,

that his oratory found foothold, and he felt the imperious appetites

of a new power. Success in his profession was without question the one

ambition which occupied him in the close of 1788, it was an ambition

closely bound up with that business sense which was a strong element in

the sane and practical mind of the Champenois lawyer.

It was upon him and his group of friends, in a Paris that every day

grew keener in its discussion and attention, that the long-expected

decree of the 27th of December fell. There were to be elections. Paris,

all pamphleteered to death, but inclining as a whole to the moderate

criticism of the more practical men, was at last called upon to act.

Many conditions must be made clear before we can understand the effect of

these elections upon the history of the next three years. In the first

place, France was suffering from a great material evil: she was going

bankrupt, her agriculture was hopelessly depressed, her industries

ruined, and thousands and thousands of men out of work were wandering

about the streets of the cities. In the second place, the class which was

going to vote for the Commons was the tax-paying class. And in the third

place, the voting was by two degrees. I name these three conditions as

qualifying a broad and often erroneous impression. I do not mean that the

ideals were not abroad; all the world knows how bright the eyes of the

young men were getting, and we are all familiar with Desmoulins, eager,

passionate, stuttering but voluble, and passing from group to group as

they discussed or dreamed. But it is too common to read the spirit of

’93 into those elections of ’89, and the error is a grievous one. As

well might you interpret the spirit of an eloquent man who is about to

defend a just and practical cause by hearing what he said later in the

day, should his opponents have taken to fists and fought him heavily for

several hours.

The immediate need was fiscal; the class called upon to meet it were the

middle class; the men they were about to elect were of professional rank.

The electoral units and all corporations were asked to state their

grievances before the gathering of the Parliament, and it is in

these “cahiers” that the spirit of the time is best discovered. The

abstractions, the phrases, the great general conceptions are found (as

we might have expected, though it comes as a new thing) mainly in the

complaints of the clergy and nobility; the peasant, the bourgeois, and

the artisan have a more material grievance.

Thus the nobility of Caen in their cahier talk of the “National

Contract,” and the clergy of Forez (after some remarks on the care and

cleansing of ponds) end up with an admirable little essay on individual

liberty, its limits and proper extension.[38] The nobility of Nantes

and of Meulan talk roundly of the “rights of man,”[39] and generally

this order calls for a Constitution—of which word they had in a very

short time supped and dined. With lesser men the demands are rather for

sublunary things, but the complaints that made Beugnot laugh give a good

picture. “To have one’s dogs killed if necessary but not hamstrung, to be

allowed to keep a cat, to be allowed to light a fire without paying dues,

to sell one’s wine when one liked;” and from the bourgeoisie, regular

trial, abolition of lettres de cachet, the old European policy that the

growth of rich corporations should be checked and much of their property

confiscated, the equalisation of taxation—such are the points upon which

(a mere redress) the great bulk of Frenchmen were determined. One might

sum up and say, “They demanded the freedom and common justice obtainable

in the modern State.” But the privileged orders, for all their phrases,

resisted when the time for reform was come, and their friction lit the

flame of the ideal, disastrously for themselves and happily for the world.

As for the cahier sent from the electoral district of Paris in which

Danton lived, it was destroyed by the Commune when they burnt the Hotel

de Ville in 1871. We know, however,[40] that it demanded “the destruction

of the Bastille,” a symbolic act ever present to the minds of Parisians,

and, for the matter of that, by several cahiers of the provincial

noblesse and clergy. There is no direct documentary evidence that Danton

helped to draw up this cahier, but I cannot believe that a man of such

influence in so small a space and among (comparatively) so few voters[41]

had nothing to do with the framing of this document, especially when we

consider the cry he gave as a boy, swimming in the river just beneath

the walls of the prison.[42] There is, however, nothing to prove it, and

he certainly took no memorable part in an action where all was tranquil

and even tedious.

The mention, however, of the districts of Paris, and especially of that

which could claim Danton, makes very necessary a view of that focus of

revolutionary energy. It was called the district of the Cordeliers. It

was small, one of the smallest of the sixty into which Paris was divided,

yet it contained the very strongest of the brains and eloquence of its

time, very few nobles, and, for the matter of that, very few of the

artisans and hardly any of the proletariat. Later, when Danton threatened

the reactionaries with the populace, it was not to the district of the

Cordeliers, but to the Faubourg St. Marceau that he appealed; for the

workmen were rare in its ancient, narrow streets, with their tall houses

and little dark courts framing each some relic of the Middle Ages. Here

were found many of the clergy, but above all a swarm of the young lawyers

and students, the class that think high and hard and breed thoughts in

others, a kind of little united clan of what was strongest in the youth

of the University and the professions; and the whole homogeneous group

centred round Danton.

If you stood in the Cour du Commerce in Danton’s time, and looked north

to where his house made the corner of the narrow entry, you would have

seen a main street only a trifle broader than the court, and running at

right angles. Standing in the mouth of the narrow passage, you would have

seen on the other side of the main street, and a hundred yards up it, a

little fifteenth-century turret, capped with a pointed slate roof and

jutting outward on round supports.[43] This was the extreme angle of an

old convent called the Cordeliers.[44] Here the Franciscans had settled

in St. Louis’s time, five hundred years before, but the walls you would

have seen were not of the thirteenth, but rather of the early fourteenth

century, while the church which flanked the street was of the sixteenth,

and additions had been made of all periods. As you came out of the Cour

du Commerce and went up the street, you would have the convent running

all along the opposite side, from the little turret on the corner to the

church of St. Come in the Rue de la Harpe, save where it was interrupted

by private houses, and where it was broken in one place by a little

lane leading to the hall of the University College, which the convent

supported. Like so many great foundations, this rich place was in full

decay, and the vaulted hall, with its dim light and resonant echoes, was

given over to the meeting of the district, and later to the thunder of

the voice that threw back the armies of Europe. Alone of all the mediæval

buildings of the Cordeliers this hall remains to-day as the Musée

Dupuytren.

There is yet one further point to be mentioned before we can make a

complete picture of Danton’s position before these elections of 1789.

There can be no doubt that the Masonic lodges had proved a powerful

instrument in the preparation of opinion, and though our information on

their formation in Paris is scanty, we can safely affirm that Danton

belonged to the lodge of the “Nine Sisters,” which included such

members as Sieyès or Bailly on the one hand and Collot D’Herbois on the

other.[45] It would be foolish to over-estimate the influence of these

societies. The subsequent history of their members proves quite clearly

that the bond between them was slight (who can, for instance, reproach

Desmoulins with a secret support of Bailly?), and (what is much more

important) the very character of their composition disproves effectually

any secret or prearranged action. The foolish Bailly, the learned Sieyès,

the admirable, unpractical, high-minded Condorcet, the weak Garat, Collot

D’Herbois the potential Red, all members of one lodge! They can have been

little more than associations whose character of mutual help and whose

opportunities of club-life (that comfort so lacking in Paris) attracted

men. They were authorised, and were one of the very few kinds of refuge

from a society where political discussion had decayed and where combined

action was almost unknown.

This is all the importance, I think, which should be attached to them.

Where men are free, and where the suffrage is open and common, secret

societies may very justly be dreaded; their action will be at all

times separate from that of society in general, and may be in a hidden

antagonism to the will of the nation. But in a society where reunion,

discussion, and all that is the blood of civic political life has been

exhausted, then, like a special drug which cures, they have an excellent

use. They may, in such societies, just keep alive the habit of political

conversation and expectancy, and they may develop in some at least that

organising spirit without which a political movement degenerates into

anarchy.

This, then (to recapitulate), is Danton’s position just before the

Parisian elections. He is in the midst of what are to be his group of

young Revolutionary friends on the outskirts of the Latin quarter; his

daily occupation is the conducting in his office on the north bank

and at the Palace in the Cité of those important pleas in the highest

court, which bring him into contact with the ministers, with the great

corporations, and especially with the various organs of government of the

old regime—for it was in cases for and against these that the Conseil

du Roi came into play. His income is sufficient for his needs and for

a slow but methodical payment of the price of his practice. It amounted

(we may presume) to something in the neighbourhood of 25,000 francs,

possibly a little less, but not much, for it was drawn from one of the

most important Chancery cases of his day, and his clientele, to judge by

the names which alone have reached us, was wealthy and of influence. He

was thoroughly well read; he was not expecting nor planning a political

career, as were so many of his friends (for instance, Desmoulins),

but certain characters which he was rapidly developing, or rather

discovering, in himself were preparing that career of necessity. He

was learning in discussion and laughter, first that he was an orator,

and secondly that his energy sufficed for a whole group of men, and

that he could avoid leadership only at the expense of entire seclusion.

In a time of innumerable pamphlets, he never put pen to paper outside

his profession; and in days that were producing the ardent similes of

Camille, and that were just beginning to feel the ravings of Marat, he

wrote nothing but three grave, learned, concise, and dull opinions, which

were admirable in argument, clear in exposition, and tolerable only to

elderly lawyers.

As for his politics, he was centred wholly on the outward thing. He

seems to have lacked almost entirely the metaphysic. Here was France all

ruined and every day approaching more nearly to disaster; let her be

turned into a place where men should be happy, should have enough to eat

and drink, should be good citizens to the extent of making the nation

homogeneous and strong. Reform should be practical: in part it would

require discussion, not too much of it. In part, however, its lines were

laid down for it. Economics taught certain truths; let them be applied.

He had read in Adam Smith certain indubitable principles of this science;

let them be used. Science had in such and such matters definite remedies

to offer; let them be applied. Such were his over-simple aims. He was of

the Encyclopædists. Had he no beliefs, then, in his politics? Undoubtedly

he had; no man could desire “the good” without feeling it. But, like

all minds of his type, he refused to analyse. His dogmas were all the

more dogmas because he took them so entirely for granted that he refused

even to define them. At a time when all men had their first principles

ready-made in words, his was rather that confused instinct which is,

after all, nearest to the truth. Patriotism, good-fellowship, freedom

for his activities, the satisfaction of the thirst for knowledge—all

these he desired in himself and for the State. And that is why you will

find his great body at the head of mobs and daring criminal things

when it is a question of saving the nation, or later of breaking an

inquisitorial idea. It is this simplicity which makes him daring, and

this concentration on a few obvious points which makes him judicious,

unscrupulous, and successful in the choice of means and of phrases.

On the 24th of January 1789, the Primaries were convened. It was the

opportunity for movement, in Paris especially, since it was the first

definite action after so much discussion, attention, and fever. The

district of the Cordeliers met in the hall of which so much mention

has been made above. But there does not seem to have been anything

of importance transacted, unless we call this important; I mean the

beginnings of the habit of reunion and of open discussion. For three

months the place seems to have had its doors open to the first comer of

the quarter. The cahier was drawn up here, and the rough foundations

of what was to be the famous permanent survival of the “République des

Cordeliers” were laid. But of Danton’s part in all this we have, as I

have said above, no trace. We can only conjecture and infer.

It was on April 21 that the elections were finally held. The voters all

met together in the central halls of their districts (churches for the

most part) and elected the electors, who in their turn were to nominate

the deputies for Paris. Of Danton’s rôle in this important action, again

we know nothing. M. Bougeart[46] has taken it for granted that he was at

least “president of the district,” chairman (as we should say) of the

electoral meeting; but he is either in error, or else he is relying on

some verbal evidence which he has not given us. We have no document to

prove it, and we know that three months later Timbergue and Achimbault,

two barristers of the district, were successively presidents, not

Danton.[47] What we do know of importance is that the Cordeliers were

among those districts which did not disperse after the elections, but

maintained themselves as a permanent club. This action by the districts

was of the very first importance in the history of the Revolution. It

created the municipal movement in July, it made Paris an organisation,

gave the town a method and a voice, and more than any other accident it

placed the ladder for Danton’s feet.

The elections of Paris once completed, the gates of the Revolution are

passed, and the States-General, whose Commons formulated its first

principles, are definitely formed; for Paris completed its voting much

later than the provinces. The Parliament meets at Versailles, and that

town presents for the next six months the centre of official interest.

But since Paris is going to be, by its destiny, the heart of the reform,

and since Danton is the tribune of Paris, we must, for the purposes of

this biography, mention the assembly only in its relation to what passed

in the capital.

The tone of Paris during the first two months of the Parliament was, as

has been expressed earlier in this chapter, essentially one of ill-ease

and watching. But this anxiety of the town took long to find a formula

and to recognise its own nature. What Paris needed was the leadership;

but to hear the confused murmur of the thousand voices, you would

have thought that all her demands were for a number of more or less

conflicting ideals. And yet there was no appearance of Party. One may

say, by a just paradox, that her very cliques made for solidarity. The

higher bourgeoisie could afford at first to ignore the group of the Latin

Quarter, thinking the young lawyers and students to be merely foolish

demagogues, not even dangerous. The ears of these last were closed to

the confused demands of the populace, and the orators could honestly

believe that ideas rather than hunger were to be the goad of change. By

great good fortune their position was never wholly abandoned, and the

Revolution from first to last mastered Materialism and its attendant

Anarchy. Finally, the poor—the out-of-work, the starving labourers of

the economic crisis—standing apart from both these leading classes,

could convince themselves that the great phrases meant bread, and that a

constitution was allied in some vague way to a lowering of prices. They

were right in that instinct, but, with the picturesque inexactitude of

mobs, they fearfully under-estimated the length of the connecting links.

The place where the average of these different views could best be found

was the Palais Royal. Here a great popular forum gathered in the gardens

which the Duke of Orleans had thrown open to the people. It was not a bad

thing that the debts of this debauchee and adventurer had led him to let

out the ground-floor of the wide quadrangle, for the cafés and shops that

surrounded it made it a more permanent resort than the squares or gardens

could have been, and there could be a perpetual mob-parliament held from

day to day. Its orators were the Dantonist group; its instigators, I

fear, the unprincipled men who surrounded D’Orleans, its committee-room

and centre (as it were) the Café Foy. Still, by the action of the main

virtue of revolutions, the general sense of the meeting was stronger than

any demagogue; for in such times society is not only turbulent but fluid,

and while it will support a leader who can swim, no mortal force can give

it any direction other than that which it desires.

In this great daily crowd Danton was a prominent but not a principal

figure; undoubtedly (though we cannot prove it by any record) he had

begun to speak in his district, and we may presume that his voice had

been heard in the Palais Royal before July; for just after the fall of

the Bastille his name is mentioned familiarly. But even had he desired to

identify himself with the place, which is doubtful, his profession would

not have permitted it. He was not briefless, unmarried, and free, like

Desmoulins, but a man of three years’ standing in the highest branch of

his profession; doubtless, however, he was present daily when the crowd

was thickest—I mean on the holidays and during the summer evenings.

All this pamphleteering, discussion, violence, salonising, oratory, and

anxious criticism, even the mob violence which hunger and bad laws had

inflamed, found a head in the three famous days that followed July 12,

1789. All the world knows the story, and even were it unfamiliar it would

be impossible to treat of it at any length in this book, for Danton’s

name hardly touches it, and our only interest here, in connection with

his life, is to discover if he took part in the street fighting; for

the event itself, one of the most decisive in history, a few words must

suffice.

Paris, and especially the Palais Royal, had been watching the struggle

at Versailles with gathering anger. There, twelve miles off, every

purpose for which the Parliament had met, and every good thing which

the elections had seemed to ensure, lay in jeopardy. Step after step the

Commons had in fact, though not in their phrases, been beaten, and the

promises of six months before seemed in danger, not through any known or

calculable enemy, but from the sudden appearance of an opposition which

the nation, and especially Paris, had ignored. The King had retreated

from his position of the last December, and the privileged orders were

sympathising with a growing reaction. How far all this was due to the

unconstitutional and unprecedented action of the Commons in insisting

on a General Assembly cannot be discussed here. Suffice it to say that,

in the opinion of the nation, the new departure of the Commons was in

thorough accordance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the

recent decrees; the King was held to have broken his word, and the

privileged orders to have abandoned their declarations in the face of

facts. The symbol, though a poor one, of the constitutional position

was the personality of Necker. Conceited, foreign, and common-place,

the father of an authoress whom neither Napoleon nor posterity could

tolerate, Genevese and bourgeois to the backbone, this mass of impotence

yet stood, by one of the ironies of history, in the place of an idol.

He, the banker, was the imagined champion for the moment of that other

man from Geneva, who had died of persecution ten years before, the

tender-eyed, wandering, unfortunate Rousseau, between whom and him was

the distance between a financier and an apostle.

While the king was changing his advisers, and even while the foreign

troops—fatal error—were being massed in wretched insufficiency on the

Champ de Mars (not three miles from the Palais Royal) Necker still

stood like a wooden idol, a kind of fetish safeguard against force. He

just prevented the growing belief in the dissolution from becoming a

certitude, and on account of his attitude Paris waited. These things

being so, the king began his great programme of working out the good of

his people alone. Relying on the three thousand foreigners, a regiment

of home troops, and practically no guns wherewith to hold in check a

tortuous city of close on a million souls, the king on Saturday, July 11,

dismissed Necker.

Desmoulins first brought the news, running. It was the morrow, Sunday,

and the Palais Royal was crowded. He forgot his stammer and hesitancy,

and shouted to the great holiday crowd in the gardens to strip the

trees for emblems, led them as they marched to the Place Louis Quinze,

saw the French troops defend their fellow-citizens against the mounted

mercenaries, and heard during a night of terror and of civil war the

first shots of Revolution.

All the next day, Monday, July 13, 1789, Paris organised and prepared.

Thanks to the permanence of the assemblies in certain districts, a

rough machinery was ready, and on the 14th, a Tuesday, two great mobs

determined upon arms. The time is not untainted, for St. Huruge was there

promising and leading, but if D’Orleans was trying to make the most of

the adventure, he no more created the uprising than a miller makes the

tide. One stream of men seized the arsenal at the Invalides on the west

side of the town, the other going east in a smaller band demanded arms of

the governor of the Bastille, a place impossible to take by assault. The

demand was refused.

A body of men, however, were permitted to enter the courtyard, for which

purpose the drawbridge had been lowered: once in that trap, De Launay

fired upon them and shot them down. There is no evidence, nor ever will

be, as to the motives of that extraordinary act; but to the general

people who were gathering and gathering all about in the narrow streets,

it was an act of deliberate treason, part of that spirit with which our

own time is not unfamiliar, and which has ruined a hundred reforms,—I

mean the sentiment that there is no honour to be kept between government

and insurrection. The misfortune or crime of De Launay struck a clear

note in the crowd; if after that they failed, the blow that was being

struck for the Parliament would fail also. Thus it was that, under a

dull grey sky, the whole of Paris, as it were, ran up together to the

siege of the fortress. Curés were there gathering up their soutanes and

joining the multitude, notably the man who had once been Danton’s parish

priest, the vicar of St. Germains, with his flock at his heels, like the

good Curé of Bazeilles in later times, or the humorous Bishop of Beauvais

six centuries before. Lawyers, students, shopkeepers, merchants, the big

brewer of the quarter, the pedants, the clerks in the offices, soldiers

and their officers, the young nobles even—there was nothing in Paris that

did not catch the fever. The castle fell at last, because its garrison

sympathised with the mob (of itself it was impregnable); the old governor

made a futile attempt to blow up his stronghold and his command; some few

who still obeyed him (probably the twenty Swiss) fired on the mob just

after the white flag had been hoisted on the Bazinière tower, and a great

tide of men mad with a double treason swirled up the fortress. Second on

the wall was a man with whom this book will have to deal again—Hérault de

Séchelles, young, beautiful, and of great family, beloved at the court

and even pampered with special privilege, the friend and companion of

Danton, and destined five years later to stand in the cart with him when

they all went up to the scaffold together on a clear April evening in the

best time of their youth.

The Cordeliers were in the attack, and presumably Danton also, since

all the world was there. But his only allusion to the scene is a phrase

of his circular to the courts when he took the Ministry of Justice in

1792, and he mentions his district only without including his own name.

One anecdote, and only one, connects him with the days of July. It seems

that in the night of the morrow, the early morning of the 16th, he was

at the head of a patrol in that sudden levy of which mention will be

made in this chapter. He thought it his duty to pass into the court of

the Bastille, probably in order to gather some detached portion of his

command; but he was met by Soulès, whom the informal meeting at the Hotel

de Ville had named governor. Full of new-fangled importance, Soulès

pompously forbad him to enter, and showed his commission. Danton did a

characteristic thing, part and parcel of that intense sectionalism upon

which he based all his action until Paris was at last in possession

of herself: for him power was from below, and the armed district had

a right of passage: he called the informal commission a rag, arrested

Soulès, and shut him up in the guardroom at the Cordeliers; then, with

a rather larger force, he marched him back through the streets and

gave him into the custody of the Hotel de Ville, whose authority for

judgment he admitted. The matter would be of no importance were it not

for the fact that, in the very natural and on the whole just censure

which the informal municipality passed on Danton’s action, Lafayette

showed an especial bitterness.[48] It was the first clash between two

men one of whom was to conquer and drive out the other; and it was a

typical quarrel, for Danton stood in the matter for the independence of

the electoral unit and for the power of Paris over itself: Lafayette

represented the principle of a strong municipality based on moderate

ideas and on a limited suffrage; in other words, the compromise which was

planned for the very purpose of muzzling the capital.

I have spoken of an armed force and a patrol: it is in this connection

that the meaning of the days of July—for Danton and for the

Revolution—must be considered. They form above all a municipal reform.

Those towns of which I have spoken as being the bond of France harked

back suddenly to their primitive institutions, and were organising

communal government. Paris of course was the leader. Even before the

taking of the Bastille, the districts had in some cases maintained their

electoral colleges as a permanent committee, and these electoral colleges

met at the Hotel de Ville, forming a rough government for the two nights

of the revolt, and finally directing the whole movement. Such a body was

of necessity too large to work. But its plans were rapidly formed. They

named a committee, which was formed of electors with one citizen (not

an elector) added. They invited and obtained the aid of the permanent

officers of what had once been the old dying and corrupt corporation,

and they thus had formed an irregular but sufficient organ of government

for the city. It was not confirmed from above, nor had it, for days, any

authority from the King, but it reposed on a force which was admitted in

the theory of those times to be the source of power, for it was composed

of men elected by the new suffrage. They had been elected for another

purpose, but they were the only popular representatives present at all in

Paris.

Their weakness, however, lay in this quality of theirs. Reposing

merely upon power from the districts, they could not act with central

authority, nor had they an armed force of their own. They could, indeed,

prevent the success of the rough anarchy which threatened the Hotel

de Ville itself in the early morning of July 14, before the attack on

the Bastille, but they could not prevent the lynching of those against

whom the popular rage had arisen—De Launey, De Méray, De Persan. As for

force, they organised a huge levy of 1200 men from each of the sixty

districts, a force which, with certain additions, rose to 78,000. It was

in this suddenly armed militia that Danton was elected a captain (for

the moment), and in connection with its duties of police on the nights

following the taking of the Bastille that his quarrel with Soulès had

occurred. They named Bailly their first mayor. They gave the command of

the new national guard to Lafayette; on the 16th they ordered, with a

pomp of trumpets in the Place de Grève, the destruction of the Bastille,

in which their new governor was installed. But through all this vigorous

action there is one cardinal fact to be remembered: the whole of their

power was from below, not only in theory but in fact. We may construct a

metaphor to express the future effect of this, and say that, at the very

origin of the Revolution, the body of government in Paris was tainted

by an organic weakness which no structural changes could remove, and to

whose character all subsequent events for three years can be traced.

It was essentially _federal_; feeble at the centre, continually asking

leave, morally a servant and not a master; lacking above all things the

supreme force of conviction, it acted without power because it did not

believe in itself.

The history, then, of its struggle with the extremists is the history

of a body attempting by compromise and ruse to attain a position whose

theory it openly denies, whose moral right it will not affirm, and whose

very existence is made dependent upon those whom it would coerce against

their will. The municipality tried to be a strong government while it

openly approved of voluntaryism, to be powerful in its acts and weak in

its structure. Ultimately the centre of compromise is captured by ardent

revolutionaries whom it has attempted to check, and _then_ we get a true

despotism in Paris—the terrible commune of the second period of the

Republic and of the Terror.

But if the character of the new municipal government (a character which

became specially prominent after the legislation of the whole system

later in the year) is the special feature of the movement, its general

motive is of course more important. We have called it the Reform; what

occurred in the next few days was without any question the origin of the

active Revolution, and a little examination of facts will show that the

taking of the Bastille was not merely a dramatic incident, still less the

exaggerated _bagarre_ that certain modern special pleaders would make it,

but, on the contrary, the foundation of everything. The contemporaries

are proved to have been right in their view of this matter, as of so many

others.

Why was this? Because, first, in taking the Bastille, after having sacked

the Invalides, the people of Paris (for it was not a particular mob, but

a gathering of every possible class) held all the cannon in the city, and

were thoroughly provided with small arms. They were suddenly become the

masters of that insufficient camp in the Champ de Mars on which the King

had relied. In open country and without artillery these seventy thousand

civilians would, of course, have been so many sheep, but in the town and

with a number of old artillerymen (officers and men) to work their guns,

it was another matter. On and after July 14, 1789, Paris had found that

possession of herself which we postulated as her first great appetite in

the Revolution.

Secondly, by this sudden stroke Paris forced the Court to capitulate.

At Versailles the King went bareheaded to the Assembly, gave permission

for the reunion of the three orders, for a discussion of grievances

before supply, for the title of National Assembly, for the formation of a

constitution before the voting of fiscal measures—in a word, for all that

the Commons had demanded, and for the fulfilment of all the promises from

which he had attempted to recede.

Thirdly, the victory, or rather the act of Paris, changed and weakened

the opposition. From openly gathering troops, and boasting an approaching

attack on the Parliament, they are reduced to intrigue and to the

difficult business of arming in the dark. Many of the heads of the

reaction (notably the Comte d’Artois) leave France in the “first

emigration,” and the whole action of the uncompromising party is made

weaker, and clearly unnational.

Fourthly (and perhaps this is the most important point), that municipal

movement, of which mention has been made above, took its rise directly

from the 14th of July. The towns hear of Necker’s dismissal and of the

Parisian rising by the same courier, and in a week or ten days the

story is repeated all over France. Rouen, Lyons, Valence, Montpellier,

Nîmes, Tours, Amiens (to cite but a few of the more prominent examples),

organise a new town government. Sometimes the old hereditary or appointed

body is deposed, more often it is enlarged by the addition of the

electoral college of the city; occasionally it takes upon itself the

task of adding to itself representatives of the three orders. Again, the

towns arm themselves as Paris did; and finally, by what a contemporary

called “spontaneous anarchy,” the whole network of cities has received

the pulse and vibration of Paris; the National Guards are being drilled

in thousands; the rusty, confused, and broken machinery of the _ancien

régime_ is replaced by a simple if rough system of local government.

Moreover, since all this has been done by the people themselves, and

without a command or a centralised effort, since it is natural and not

artificial, it has entered into the body of the Revolution and cannot be

undone.

You see, then, that the days of July gave Paris the first word, and

made the spirit of sectionalism and local autonomy based upon a highly

democratic theory. All these things are the conditions of Danton’s rise;

they make possible, and even necessary, the society of which he is to be

the guide. After the 14th of July the Cordeliers meet daily; the bell

was rung above the church at nine in the morning, and an assembly of the

district was held.[49] It was not yet in name the famous “club”; but when

we consider the action of the popular societies in Paris, we must always

remember that this, even before it regularly assumed its final name and

functions, was a society organised for debate and action, and that it was

the first to be established.

From its origin, this famous meeting is sharply marked in its spirit—the

spirit that will later divide it not only from the moderate clubs,

such as the Feuillants, but from the Jacobins themselves. In the first

place, it is Parisian; it attempts no provincial propaganda; it confines

itself to action in Paris, and even to its own immediate neighbourhood.

In the second place, it is purely popular. But (it may be asked) were

not the Jacobins in their later stage a purely popular club? No, not

in the same sense. The Jacobins, as will be seen later in this book,

were an organised body; the public was admitted to their galleries;

but, even in the most feverish time of the Revolution, they are

distinguished by a close bond from the general people. Their membership

is almost exclusively confined to the politicians, and their business is

inquisitorial. They preach certain political dogmas, and make it their

affair to canalise the Revolutionary current; they desire to establish

in France a Republican religion, as it were, and we shall see later in

Robespierre their high priest and dictator.

The Cordeliers had nothing of all this. If the Royalist writers begin

calling them from the outset the “République des Cordeliers,” it is

because they show the general spirit which Danton surely gave to,

rather than received from, his district. Freedom of opinion, the value

of varied discussion, open doors, and even an intermingling with the

street—such were their methods. The men who sat on the benches would vary

from one hundred to three,[50] according to the interest of the debate

or the value of the occasion. The number inscribed on the registers of

the society were simply the whole voting strength of the district; under

the limited suffrage of the time it would fluctuate round the figure six

hundred; and hence we may observe that those who were so strongly touched

by the contemporary movement as to add meeting and debating to their mere

votes numbered a good half of the electorate. Standing grouped, or moving

in and out of the far end of the hall, would be the chance-comers, the

disfranchised multitude of the district—those even who had no residence

in the quarter, but whom anger, interest, or curiosity might attract.

It was composed of every kind of man—the pedantic but accurate Sieyès;

the fastidious radical and poet D’Eglantine; the coarse, brutal, and

atheistic Hébert; Desmoulins, ardent and admirably polished, linked by

his style to the classics of his own country and of Rome; Legendre, the

master-butcher, no great politician, but an honest friend; and, added to

all these, the lawyers. There was a preponderance of the young men, the

students and barristers in their thirtieth year; but take it all in all,

it was the most representative, the most general of the meetings.

The society, then, from which Danton rises is marked by these characters:

it tends always to defend the presence in politics of the whole people;

it is unitarian, designing above all things a common ground where

Frenchmen may found the new order in harmony; and finally, it possesses

nothing of the metaphysical spirit abroad at the time. It is all for

action along the lines of common sentiments—the defence of the new

individual liberty, the destruction as soon as may be of whatever relics

of the old machinery might be spared by the fear or inertia of certain

reformers.

I cannot leave what has already grown to an over-lengthy description

of their political attitude without touching upon a quality of theirs,

which was not indeed a principle, but which was a method of action

necessarily flowing from the ideas they held. The Cordeliers are

essentially “Frondeurs.” They are rebellious and in opposition so long

as the Revolution remains incomplete. They do things deliberately

illegal, but which they justly consider to be in the spirit of the

reform and calculated to aid its rapid development. Why was this?

Because the day after Paris had captured the position, in the very

moment when the city had forced reaction into subterranean channels,

her power was bridled. The King came to Paris on the 17th of July and

confirmed the revolutionary appointments. Bailly is mayor, and Lafayette

is commissioned head of the National Guard. In those two names you

have the forces, or rather the resistances, against which Danton and

the Cordeliers made it their business to fight. Both of them were

amiable, both weak, and both sincere; but they belonged, the one to the

high bourgeoisie, the other to the noblesse; they were both full of

an intense class-prejudice; both thought rather of the restraints to

be imposed than of the great change in the midst of which they lived.

The little movements that Bailly might have mistaken for an enthusiasm

would arise at the sight of his telescope; the undoubted excitability of

Lafayette was aroused by the public mention of his own name. Under these

weaknesses their external sign was pomposity, their political action an

attempt to confine the Revolution to the middle class. Thus, later, the

sixty districts are replaced by the forty-eight sections in order to

jerrymander the Parisian radicals; thus Bailly tries to oppose Parisian

appeals to the Parliament; and thus Lafayette not only attempts to

convert the National Guard into a political army, but makes it impossible

for the poor to join it.

Against all this the Cordeliers set their face. Such a partial conception

of the State was the enemy of that ideal by which they lived and which

has formed the Republic in France and the Jeffersonian democracy in

America. Only four days after the King had worn his tricolour cockade,

smiling on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, they issue and print

a resolution to use the armed force of their district at its own

discretion; they do not (of course) claim to act further, but they

determine to be themselves the police which shall conduct prisoners to

the tribunals.[51] At the close of 1789, and especially in the succeeding

year, we shall find them in the affair of Marat, of Danton’s election,

of the _Mandat Imperatif_, and of the Châtelet continually acting in the

spirit of local autonomy, and refusing to admit any central authority

save that of the whole people—bowing after every revolt to the Assembly,

but refusing to admit the bourgeois power.

The end of July was the destruction of the feudality in France. When the

towns had fallen with a shock into the new conditions, the great dust

of villages rose of itself into a storm, and there passed over all the

countrysides that strange panic, “The Great Fear,” whose legend alone of

Revolutionary memories remains among the peasantry to-day.

The woods were full of terrors; ploughmen started out at night by bands

to meet invisible armies; an unsubstantial enemy threatened the thousands

of little lonely villages that lie undefended on the skirts of forests

or lost on the leagues and leagues of plains. In that mysterious panic

the Jacquerie arose; the cowed and the oppressed, who had forgotten the

generous anger which makes men brave, rose under the lash of fear. They

had heard of the promises of reform, they had seen the cahiers drawn up

that they might become free men, and yet the town close by had risen and

armed because something had gone wrong; the King, whom they loved, was

not allowed to help his people; some one was delaying or destroying their

hopes, and the brigands were coming down the road. Not with committees,

organisation, and battalions, as the intelligence of the towns had just

done, but instinctively and with the anarchy of the torch they destroyed

the skeleton idol of the old regime. Like their fathers of four hundred

years before, they were out to destroy the records of their servitude,

and where the records were defended the country-houses burned. But this

time no vengeance followed: the wild beast was dead. When in the noisy

night of the 4th of August the privileged men scattered away their

rights, then that last largesse of the nobles, the “Orgy,” as Mirabeau

called it, was but a gift of things already taken. After Paris, after

the cities, the peasantry had suddenly stiffened the phrases by an act;

perhaps it was their formless and vague energy that laid the heaviest

of the foundation-stones, for we are told that in twenty years an exile

returning thought that France had been re-peopled with a new kind of men.

It is not wonderful that, with such a fire just smouldering down, and

with the spirit of renunciation abroad as well, a regular stream of

emigration should set out. But it did not leave the opposition powerless

though it deprived it of chiefs. If we consider the Court, the capital,

and the Assembly in the months of August and September, the next great

step (and the first in connection with which the name of Danton is

directly connected) becomes clear.

At Versailles all the first part of August is taken up in voting the

famous decree which consecrated the debate of the 4th. The Parliament

abolished feudal dues, declaring all rights in service at an end, and

establishing a period for the national purchase and subsequent abolition

of the rest of the feudal dues. All the second part of August and the

whole of September were occupied in drawing up the declaration of the

rights of man and in decreeing the fundamental articles of the new

Constitution. The National Assembly, then, as a whole, is thoroughly

the organ of France. It is not yet so divided as to arouse definite

party feeling in the capital, nor to prevent on important occasions

a practically unanimous vote. But there is another factor. The Court

(especially the Queen) has a definite party formed; it has its

correspondence with the emigrés, and they with the personalities, if

not with the official organs of foreign governments. It was without any

question the object of this very small and very powerful group to arrest

the Revolution, and if possible to wipe out the last six months. Between

and above these stands the King. Louis (we are too apt to forget it in

our knowledge of what follows) still possessed far more power even than

the National Assembly; not only by the political decrees of the time,

but by that immeasurable force of custom, by the affection which he

personally had inspired in the great bulk of men, he was a powerful king.

What was his attitude? He was patriotic; he greatly sympathised with the

ideas at the root of the reform; he was sensible, and saw the practical

value of casting away what is broken and worn out. On the other hand, he

was not brave (especially in the face of the unknown); new developments

irritated him; he was (by the inevitable result of his training)

determined to preserve in his own hands the bulk of power, and sometimes

he was panic-stricken at a phrase or a debate which seemed to put it in

jeopardy. Finally—a matter of the utmost importance with a character of

such well-balanced mediocrity—the people with whom he hunted, dined, and

conversed were almost all of them members of a powerful, bitter, and

skilful faction, headed by the most determined and able of all—his wife,

for whom he had latterly developed a marked tenderness and even respect.

This ring of courtiers, who were Louis’s evil fates, had a certain

quality that gave them great power in spite of their small numbers.

It must be remembered that they were of the high cosmopolitan type,

those who, a generation earlier, delighted in the wit of Voltaire, who,

a generation later, smiled at merely hearing the name of Talleyrand.

Perhaps there was never a body better fitted to influence an isolated man

by phrases, continual conversation, and intrigue.

What is the effect? That the King, always honestly intending the

reform, always hesitates a little too long, with doubts that are often

intellectual in origin and sometimes wise in their nature, but foolish at

the moment. He hesitates to sign the decree of the 4th of August;[52] he

hesitates about this and that expression in the Declaration of rights.

He has a very strong reluctance to forego the absolute veto; all through

September you can hear the machinery creaking, and it gets worse as the

autumn advances.

Meanwhile in Paris two forces are at work to aid this crisis at

Versailles. First, the popular societies, notably that meeting in the

Palais Royal, which now is almost a Parliament, where every prominent

Parisian name is heard, and whence those curious documents, parodies of

the old-fashioned decrees, emanate,[53] not unfrequently with the power

to cause insurrection. Secondly, the price of food, especially of flour,

is rising rapidly. We have explained in the first chapter how largely the

lack of food in the towns was due to vicious interference with exchange:

when such is the prime cause of economic trouble, the least disturbance

aggravates it to a high degree; thus it was that while the harvest was

being gathered in the north, and in the south had been already stored,

the supply of cereals in the capital was all but exhausted.

Thus curiously side by side (and partly overlapping) the intense

political interest of the voting class and the growing misery of the

populace ran fatally towards the days of October. At the Cordeliers,

innocent of pedants, practical, alert, debating with open doors, there

met the two revolutionary interests, those of the politicians and of the

poor; and this is why they are heard so loudly in September, and why

Danton and his district become famous just before the march on Versailles.

It will be remembered that the assembly of electors at the Hotel de

Ville had guided Paris through the great storm of July 13-17; their

powers were vague and unconstitutional, for they had been elected at

first merely to choose Deputies for Paris, nevertheless it was they who

had made Bailly mayor, who had nominated Lafayette, who had formed the

National Guard, and who had been confirmed by the King in their functions

of a provisional municipality. It was acting on this decree which gave

them a right to take political initiative, that on Thursday, July 23,

they had sent a circular to the sixty districts asking each to name two

members. The hundred and twenty so elected were to draw up a plan for a

new municipality; they met, did so, and the result of their labours was

the issue on August 30th of a scheme for a new municipal system, upon

which the primaries in every districts were asked to debate. Somewhat

illogically, however, the complicated document was accompanied by a writ

demanding the immediate election in each district of five members to form

the new corporation. In other words, the primaries were asked to form a

new municipality, to give it full powers, and then to debate academically

upon what they had done.

It may have been only a blunder, but the Cordeliers took alarm at what

certainly seemed to be a plot on the part of the Moderates. The project

and the writ had reached them on _Sunday_ August 30th; by Thursday,

September 3rd, they had arrived at a decision to refuse the writ. They

argued that it was absurd to ask the districts to debate on a project

_after_ its most essential part had been realised, namely, the election

of deputies. On that election, its methods, the powers of the members,

and so forth, the greater part of the discussions would turn, and by

the time the districts had arrived at such and such conclusions, or had

modified the powers of their deputies in such and such a fashion, those

deputies would already have been sitting for some time as a municipal

council, would be helping to frame or to modify the new municipal system

on their own account. It would have been not only confusion but an

encroachment on the principle by which (nominally) the districts had

been consulted, viz., that the electors themselves in their districts

should thrash out the new system. The Cordeliers named commissioners

who examined the whole matter, and, on Saturday, the 12th, definitely

rejected the writ. Nevertheless, as the other districts had all obeyed

and had elected their five members each, the Cordeliers elected their

five under protest[54] on the following Monday, the 14th, and sent them,

bound by a strict oath, to the Hotel de Ville.

This little incident merits a very considerable degree of attention,

although it has been somewhat neglected by the historians, and even by

Danton’s biographers. It was the first skirmish in that decisive struggle

between the democratic idea, headed by the Cordeliers, and the limited

suffrage of the first municipality—a struggle which is at the root of

all the action of Paris. It is the first act of Danton in an official

position; in much that the Cordeliers had done he was evidently the

leader, but in this document we learn that he is elected president of

the district, and see his name signed.[55] And finally, there appears

here, for the first time in the Revolution, the _Mandat Imperatif_, the

brutal and decisive weapon of the democrats, the binding by an oath of

all delegates, the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had

pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution vainly attempted to

exclude in its principal election, and which must in the near future

be the method of our final reforms. It had been raised, and Danton had

raised it; for these five deputies, before being permitted to attend at

the Hotel de Ville, swore to a definite plan of action whose terms were

dictated at the general meeting of the district.

The struggle as it continues becomes of greater importance, until, within

four months, it faces Danton himself in the Hotel de Ville; but we cannot

describe its further steps until we have mentioned the next action with

which the Cordeliers are associated, and in which their decisive rôle is

largely determined by the Revolutionary championship which this brush

with authority had given them.

We have described above the various forces that were fatally converging

to form the whirlpool of October—the hesitancy of the King, the desperate

intrigues of the Court, the intense political excitement of the Palais

Royal and of the electors in Paris, the growing misery of the populace.

We have pointed out how the Cordeliers, with their popular audience and

popular sympathies, were at once the only great debating place in Paris

and the only spot where the forces of voters and non-voters could join

hands. Add to this the effect of the protest described above and of the

position such a struggle gave them in the democratic movement, and their

importance in the days of October becomes evident.

It was at the close of September that all these tendencies came together.

Again, after three months of silence, the reaction found its voice, and

the King’s uncertainty, the Court faction’s plotting, culminated in the

arrival at Versailles of military reinforcements. The body-guards were

doubled, and there marched in the Regiment of Flanders—a body (by the

way) to whose name clings something of comedy, and whose raggedness has

passed into a marching legend. This book is not the place to describe

at any length what followed, save in its connection with Danton and the

Club. On Thursday, October the 1st, a famous dinner was given by the

body-guard to the newly arrived regiment. The Court dealt with excellent

material, and with the wine and the night the admirable feelings of

loyalty arose: the poor King assumed the halo of a leader to these men

whose regimental traditions were knit up with the monarchy; soldiers,

they appreciated his defeat, and, being comrades, they were angry at

his loneliness. They greeted him with a passionate song, destroyed the

three-coloured cockades, and pinned on the white ribbons; for the first

time in a year enthusiasm was with the beleaguered, though it lasted but

a few hours and stretched to but a few hundred of men. To Paris, hearing

of it on the next day, Friday, it was a challenge, discussed, oddly

enough, with some contradictions and confusions. Men talked of Bouillé,

the courtier, and his frontier command at Metz; people were afraid that

he would protect the King in some flight to the provinces; there ran a

vague uneasiness and a fear of anarchy with the King’s disappearance;

above all, in the minds of the politicians a fear of armed reaction, and

in the minds of the starving a terror that the reforms which were so

material to them were in jeopardy. Still, all Saturday the waters only

moved at the surface, and you might have thought that Paris was incapable

of any combined action.

But if the reaction contained a powerful integrating force in the Court

party, Paris also possessed it in a small meeting and in one supremely

energetic man. On the morning of Sunday, a day when there was leisure

to read, the walls were placarded with the manifesto of the Cordeliers.

It demanded an insurrection, and was signed with Danton’s name. On

Monday morning they rang the tocsin at the belfry of the convent, and

the battalion of the district was drawn up and armed. De Crèvecœur,

their commander, prevented them marching in a body, but a number of the

district determined to merge with the crowd. Meanwhile, the mob gathered

from every quarter, especially the Place de Grève—a true mob this time,

and accompanied, as all the world knows, by a crowd of women, poured up

the Versailles road. They made a hideous night in the great space before

the palace. Lafayette followed tardily with his organised volunteers,

the National Guard; but on the Tuesday the palace was forced, and some

of its defenders killed. The royal family came in their heavy coach down

the twelve miles of falling road into Paris, and, not without some state,

they entered the Tuilleries. The National Assembly followed the King into

the capital.

Thus the second milestone of the Revolution was passed. Of all the

revolutionary days, these were the most purely anarchic. The action was

that of men hardly possessing ideas, but fixed upon a practical thing—the

presence of the King in Paris. It had for its main object good, and for

its method mad anger. Nevertheless, the instinct of the mob had hit the

mark. Like all sudden actions, it had made issues definite which had

till then been confused. It put an end once and for all to the idea of

crushing the reform at its outset by force; it gave Paris a mastery over

every subsequent action; of the many ways the Court party might have

tried it reduced them to one only, namely, an organised secret diplomacy

with the object of raising Europe against France.

As for Louis, we may honestly believe that his capture was not entirely

distasteful to him: as he was less acute, so he had certainly more

common-sense than his wife. If he was jealous of his dignity, which

had been grievously offended, yet he was very French, patriotic, and

not unwilling to see himself the object of a violent demand. Everybody

saw—the King must have seen it too—that the whole uprising was monarchic.

There was not any class more monarchic in France than the poor. The King

as their father was an idea bred in them for centuries, and he knew that

they made of him a kind of providence who could give them food; that

they rose not to make him less powerful, but to make a faction impotent.

And there was nothing distasteful to him in being a King of the French,

seated in the midst of his great capital, and on the summit, as it were,

of a new order. October did not threaten to make him less, but more of a

King. It was later, in questions that affected the heart, especially in

matters of religion, that the gulf opened between Louis and his people.

With the King, then, at the Tuilleries, with the Assembly some three

hundreds yards off down the gardens in the riding-school of the

palace,[56] we enter the long avenue by which Paris obtains the

initiative in every subsequent reform. Let us turn, then, to follow once

more the action of the society and the man who, between them, determine

the direction of Paris for the next three years.

The quarrel which was sketched earlier in this chapter, the assault of

the district upon the Moderates, continued throughout the autumn and

winter. Four times running Danton is elected President,[57] and it is

under his guidance that the affair proceeds. While the Assembly are

making a new France at the Manège, organising the departments,[58] fixing

the restricted suffrage,[59] creating the communes over all France,[60]

the Cordeliers are making the spirit of a new Paris on the hill over

the river; this spirit will conquer and transform the debaters in the

Parliament.

On the 22nd of October they follow up their previous action. Already

before the revolt they had come into collision with the municipality:

in this new resolution they protest against a demand of Lafayette for

regular courts-martial in the National Guard. The protest had a meaning,

for Lafayette was raising an armed bourgeois power, but the motive of

the Cordeliers was mainly the desire to harass the Moderates. A week

later the Municipal Council gave its reply to these various encroachments

on the part of the Cordeliers in a decree of the 29th of October: it

condemned the action of the district in three definite points: first,

its habit of passing resolutions like a small municipal body; secondly,

its habit of asking the fifty-nine other districts to pass spontaneous

resolutions on important matters; thirdly (and most important), its

revolutionary action in demanding an oath from its delegates. In this

last point the purely democratic idea on the one hand, and the senatorial

theories of the Moderates on the other, came face to face, and on that

point the issue turned. On the 2nd of November the district replied by a

resolution denying the right of the elected to control the electors, and

especially condemning the interference of the Hotel de Ville with debates

in the districts. On the 12th, ten days later, they came out into the

open with a resolution that was like a declaration of war against Bailly

and Lafayette; they drew up a form of oath which their five deputies

were to swear, and this oath bound the members of the district not only

to obey the district in all its resolutions, but also to admit that they

could be dismissed after being called upon three times to resign by a

majority of the district. It was the full doctrine of delegacy and of the

corporate will.

Only two of the five members took the oath, the rest resigned and were

promptly replaced by others, and these presented themselves at the Hotel

de Ville on November 16th. Condorcet was President of the municipal body,

and practically everybody there was furious against the Cordeliers. They

demanded a recital of the causes which had led to the dismissal of the

three members, and then they insisted on hearing the terms of the famous

oath that bound the five deputies. Of the two who had consented to take

the oath in the first instance, one (Peyrilhe) muttered excuses, but the

other (Croharé), who seems to have been more of a true Cordelier, was

very proud of the position he held, and would have explained the true

doctrine at great length, had not the meeting cut him short by a vigorous

vote, declaring all such oaths inadmissible, sending away the three

new members, and recalling those who had resigned. On the next day the

municipality broke the law. It turned Croharé out, but by a very small

vote, in which many abstained.[61] Of course such an action was not to

be tolerated, for it would have made the majority of the municipality

able to end all opposition or debate, and the mistake of Condorcet was

Danton’s opportunity.

Every character he possesses is apparent in the struggle that follows.

He carries it on with something of the diplomacy that later was matched

against all Europe: he secures his allies and isolates his enemies: he

pleads to convince and to obtain official support, not (as do so many of

his contemporaries) in order to follow a line of thought. In a word, he

is _habile_, and practically he succeeds.

Observe the quality of this action. When the district meets on the 17th

(while the Commune was dismissing Croharé), Danton sees the importance of

keeping its debate in bounds. That gathering, which is so enamoured of

abstract rights, is suddenly bound down by the superior ability of its

chairman: the discussion is made to follow points of legal technicality,

and Danton imposes upon the Cordeliers so strict a discipline for one

day, that two points alone emerge from the speeches, and they are

precisely the two which could be used as arguments. (1.) That the Commune

was _provisional_, and its _raison d’être_ was the formation of a new

municipal system: in such cases (say the Cordeliers) the subjects of the

experiment must remain masters, and it would be absurd to take away the

power of control, that later would have to be readmitted when the new

municipal constitution should be sent to the districts for acceptance

or rejection: in a word, they argued on the _vice de raisonnement_—the

want of logic—in the Commune’s action. (2.) They appealed to the

Assembly—that is, they recognised and submitted to the centre of national

power.[62] The Assembly was in a dilemma. It was in full sympathy with

the Moderates with Bailly and with Lafayette; on the other hand, it

could not, without a great loss of prestige, deny the very principles

upon which its own power rested. Their committee on the subject desired a

complete admission of the Cordeliers’ claim; the Assembly rejected this,

and tried to compromise by saying that both parties should go back to

“the state of things of November 10th”—that is, to the state of things

before the oath and before the whole trouble. The compromise would not

hold. The deputies thus legally reinstated all resigned (except Croharé)

on account of the feeling in their district, and the Cordeliers then,

with full legality, re-elected their popular champions of the _Mandat

Imperatif_.

The Commune took its defeat ill. They tried to prove that the old members

had not really resigned. They sent a committee to interview them, but the

committee came back with proof that the resignation was voluntary, and

finally, on November 28, the little company of democrats were sworn in to

a very ungracious and unwilling Assembly, and Danton had won.

My readers must excuse so detailed an account of an event which is empty

of picturesque detail and which is so small a part of that fertile

winter. From the point of view of general history it is the first

appearance of the _Mandat Imperatif_ in action; and from the point of

view of Danton’s rôle in the Revolution it is of the utmost importance,

though it is so insignificant a catalogue of quarrels. It was Danton’s

first victory, and it was decisive. It put a wedge, as it were, into

the gate that he was forcing open by persistent effort; and though his

final position in the administration of Paris is won after many further

failures, it is a direct consequence of this success in 1789. At the same

time it showed that a young, loud-voiced lawyer of the middle class could

have that one necessary quality of skill lying under the coarse exterior;

he could play the game with the subtlety of appreciation which was so

necessary in the terrible year of invasion, the keen aptitude of the mind

which the visionaries were too unpractised, the demagogues too brutal to

attain. That aptitude had appeared in Danton’s pleading, and was to make

him during the war a man necessary to France.

It was a month or six weeks after these events, on some date in January

which we can only fix by indirect evidence, that Danton was himself

elected to represent the district. The restless society had caused a

further resignation, and five new members came to the Hotel de Ville.[63]

He came unimportant, effaced, known merely as a demagogue, into that

municipal assembly which contained the most dignified, the most learned,

and the most representative of the noblesse and higher bourgeoisie, to

sit under the frowns and endure the silence, and at first the contempt,

of Condorcet, of D’Espagnac, of the academicians Laharpe and Suard, the

astronomer De Cassini, Lavoisier, De Moreton-Chabrillant captain of the

guard, Bailly and Lafayette themselves. And in the very first hours of

his presence, before he had taken the oath, an incident occurred which

clinched, as it were, the disfavour in which he was regarded, and which

for a year put him in the background of a council which he was destined

ultimately to master. I refer to what is known as the incident of Marat.

Marat was more of a gentleman than Danton; it is also fair to say that

he was nearly mad. No two men could have been more different than the

learned, irritable, visionary physician and the young, healthy country

lawyer who was for a moment his champion. The one has met continually the

ruling class, and has suffered from its insolence and privilege; the

other has known professional friends indeed of the first rank, but has

passed his life with the trading middle class, and has entered perhaps

during all his career in Paris not one salon, nor met perhaps one of the

brilliant women of his time.

Marat presented from the outset the first problem to be faced by a people

who are testing liberty. He was a journalist and pamphleteer of unbridled

license, one of those who cannot find in themselves that control which,

when it is absent in public writers, can only be supplanted by the

cumbersome, dangerous, and necessary machinery of the Censor. Not for

money, of course, nor for any unworthy motive, but for the excellent end

of attaining freedom, this morbid mind poured out the wildest, the most

sensational, and the most dangerous appeals.

Now the courts were in process of transition; rapidly as the reform had

marched since the summer, much of the old judicial procedure necessarily

remained, and among the rest a body known as the Châtelet, whose removal

was already planned, but which had to be maintained until the new system

could be put in working order. It was very typical of the old regime.

A body of privileged lawyers, many of them young and ignorant, holding

their places by inheritance or purchase, and charged with what we may

call the police of the capital. They had formerly possessed (and it had

not yet been abolished in detail) the power of arbitrary arrest. They

drew their name from the heavy fortress which had once defended the Pont

au Change when Paris was confined to the island of the Cité; some of

its walls dated at latest from the Norman siege of the tenth century,

and beneath it were cellars which had for centuries been the prisons of

those arrested in Paris by the city guard. It stood gloomy and strong

on the site of the modern place that bears its name, dominating the

close streets of the Boucherie, and possessing in its associations and

its waning power all the qualities that had made the Bastille odious to

the people. It may be imagined how the jurisdiction which it contained

was bound to attract the chief efforts of the reformers; it could not,

however, cease to exercise its functions until there was some more

liberal institution to supply its place, and it came of necessity into

violent collision with that spirit which was determined to break down by

force what the resolutions of the Assembly had abolished in theory, but

had not yet supplanted in fact.

The principal object of Marat’s tirades was the moderate town council,

and especially Bailly. Moreover, the worthy astronomer was an admirable

butt. He assumed a livery, and put a fine coat-of-arms on his carriage,

and, while he weakly opposed the rising democracy of Paris, he was

very strong in the matter of pomposity. Marat was called to the bar of

the Commune to answer for these attacks upon the mayor on the 28th of

September. A warrant for his arrest was made out by the Châtelet on the

6th of October, but the day was too critical for an action of police

against an individual. On the 8th another warrant was sent out, and Marat

fled to a hiding-place up on Montmartre, from which, like a mad prophet

on a hill-top, he pamphleteered the city at his feet. His quarrels,

therefore (though very different in kind) were contemporaneous with the

important struggle between the Cordeliers and the Municipality which are

detailed above. The two attacks began to merge in December.

Marat, on the 12th of that month, was hunted out of his retreat, and

brought before a lower court, but so confused were the powers of the

Châtelet in this period of its reform and extinction that the prosecution

was dropped. Emboldened by this failure on the part of his opponents,

he came to live and print his sheet openly in the Rue des Fossés St.

Germains—that is, in the midst of the district of the Cordeliers. What

followed is well known. At a moment when the struggle between the

district and the Hotel de Ville is at its height, just after the scene in

which Danton’s deputation had protested against the mayor’s commission

to the militia officers, while the insulting irony of the term “my lord”

was still ringing in Bailly’s ears, and when Danton himself had been

actually elected for the district, and was present in the Municipality

on the point of taking the oath—when all these causes of quarrel were,

so to speak, met in one date, the Moderates determined to strike. Marat

was pouring out his impossible diatribes from the territory of the

rebellious district, and no opportunity could be more favourable. The

Châtelet issued once more the warrant for his arrest, and this time it

was supported by Lafayette, who promised to lend four thousand of the

National Guard.

Now note the importance of what follows. Neither side in the struggle of

the autumn had definitely won. The National Assembly had temporised, the

advantage of the Cordeliers in the matter of the disputed elections had

been achieved by a trick, and in the dead-lock between two principles,

the central power of the Municipality and the local autonomy of the

district, neither of the two theories was based upon tradition, neither

even (in the confusion of rapid reforms) could justify itself by a

definite pronouncement of the law. On the one side was the theory of

a highly restricted suffrage, government by a class socially refined

and lying with the nobility rather than with the people; this side was

determined to form an army to support their politics, and it was they

who, when they did act at last, achieved—but much too late—the sharp and

sanguinary reaction of July 1791. On the other side was the desire for

a wide, later for a universal, suffrage; a determination to emphasise

in the development of the Revolutionary theory, equality and the

general will, rather than order and the practical working of new laws;

a political attitude which was to lead the Revolution into the intense

idealism of 1792, and to end by declaring the Republic. And all this

was represented in the demand which, of its nature, is the expression

of extreme democracy—I mean the demand for local autonomy, the idea

that an act of government is most just when it emanates not even from

representatives, but from the lips of the governed themselves.

Such were the two forces opposed to one another in the affair of

Marat—forces which, if not in all France, were in Paris at least the two

great camps of the Revolution. Already the district had declared its

intention to protect the liberty of the press within its boundaries,[64]

and had been wise enough to specially condemn Marat’s violence; already

had it named a committee of five to see that no arbitrary arrest should

take place in its territory,[65] when Lafayette sent his militia, cavalry

and infantry, on the 22nd of January to help the arrest of Marat. Not

content with the 3000 men thus employed, he clinched the matter with

cannon, placing a couple of pieces at the end of the Rue des Fossés St.

Germains.[66] He was determined to settle things by force, and beat the

extremists with their own weapons. His effort did not find force opposed

to it, as he had hoped; it broke itself in the most unexpected manner

upon the legal ability of Danton.

The district might have raised, all told, 1500 men, and it possessed two

pieces of artillery; but Danton was far too wise to use them in such

a cause as that of defending Marat. A street fight, and one in which

the Cordeliers would have been infallibly beaten, would have ruined

the future chances of their politics. He armed no one, and did not add

a single man to the small guard which each district kept permanently

drilled, but he assigned them as their guard-room for the week the

ground-floor of Marat’s house. Then he went there himself with his four

companions on the newly elected committee, and awaited developments.

The great body of the National Guard were massed in their blue and white

at the end of the street, their two pieces sweeping it, and there was

opposed to them nothing but a small crowd and few arguments. Through

their ranks, and accompanied by a small detachment, came the two officers

or policemen of the Châtelet.[67] They presented their writ, and

Plainville, the commander of the little detachment that accompanied them,

asked to be allowed to place sentries at the door. The commissioners

gave them leave with the greatest pleasure in the world, but when the

officers presented their warrant, the opportunity which Danton had been

waiting for with some anxiety presented itself. With a slovenliness that

was part and parcel of the old regime, the Châtelet had not made out a

new warrant, but had issued the old one which had done duty on the 8th of

October.

Now, since that date the Assembly had passed several important changes in

the criminal law, notably one in the same month October which declared

that “no warrant for arrest can be issued against a householder save in

case of those charges which, if proved, would lead to imprisonment.”[68]

A very obvious principle; but in France of the old regime to seize a man,

hold him, and even to let him go without trial, merely for some purpose

of the police, was permitted, and the Châtelet may have acted upon this

tradition. Add to this the fact that the Assembly had created elective

councils in each district to watch the interest of every inhabitant

arrested in criminal cases,[69] and it is easily apparent that the

Châtelet had committed a great blunder, the value of which a man trained

in the courts and quick to seize an error in procedure immediately

recognised.

Danton affirmed that the writ was illegal, offered to prove it, and

led the officers of the Châtelet to the hall of the district. There he

had the new procedure read to them, compared it with the date of their

warrant, and so confused the minds of those simple men that they signed

a _procès-verbal_ which declared that, after hearing such reasons, they

doubted how they should act. They came back escorted by Fabre d’Eglantine

through an angry crowd, and were received by the officers of the National

Guard with some heat. They stood firm, however, and refused to pursue the

arrest until they could consult with those who sent them, and finally the

difficulty was removed by Danton’s promising to appeal to the National

Assembly and to abide by its decision. The terms were accepted, the

sentries left Marat’s door, and the troops withdrew.

All this debate and turmoil had taken up the morning and the

luncheon-hour, the Rue des Fossés St. Germains was evacuated in the early

afternoon, and by four o’clock of that day, 22nd of January 1790, Danton

and his companions were pleading their cause at the bar of the House.

It was the old policy of resorting to the National Assembly as the last

place of appeal, and of using this principal result of the Revolutionary

movement as a weapon against the Parisian Moderates. The Assembly found

itself in the old dilemma, and adopted the old compromise. By its theory

it was democratic; all its phrases and many of its decrees were based

on the “Contrat Social,” but by its personnel and its connections it

was naturally allied to the high professional class, to the Baillys and

the Lafayettes. It instructed Target (the President of the fortnight)

to write to the district; he condemned the attitude of the Cordeliers,

but Parliament “relied upon their patriotism to execute the will of the

Assembly.” The district, true to its policy, at once submitted. They

sent Legendre and Testulat to tell the commander of the forces (who had

re-entered the Rue des Fossés) that they had no longer the right to

prevent the arrest; whereupon he sent in the police and awaited Marat

in the street below. The house was empty, and Marat was on his way to

England, a country with which he was not unfamiliar, and the vices of

whose constitution had already furnished a theme for his too facile pen.

Such are the details of the story of the famous Friday in the district

of the Cordeliers, events which put Danton’s name into some prominence,

but which also showed him to the most educated of his time, and therefore

to posterity, in something of a false light. He appears as the friend of

Marat, a man for whom he felt no sympathy, to whom he was immeasurably

superior, and whom he had supported only because Marat’s quarrel was a

tactical opportunity against the Moderates. To have been from the outset

admitted by the cultured would have been difficult to him—it would have

needed tact, self-effacement, and silence. For he showed by nature

just those rough gestures and loud, ill-chosen phrases which should be

the sign of a foolish and dangerous man; of what underlay it, of his

learning, his patriotism, and his common-sense he was to give plenty of

proof; but so violent were the prejudices he had raised that only great

length of time has effaced the false impression of his first appearance

on the scene of politics. _We_ can see the statesman clearly, but his

contemporaries never quite pierced the medium that had gathered round

him; here and there a just and noble man, as was Condorcet, would admit

his own misconception, but to the bulk of the gentlemen in power he was

and remained the demagogue.

Two years of careful action fail to clear him, because, being already one

of those whose superficial qualities repel the close attention necessary

to a just opinion, he had also the misfortune to enter the arena from

the wrong door. Those who were most with him adored him, the great bulk

of his district-voters signed a fervent declaration in his favour, and

later his immediate friends are willing to die with him. But the class

with which at heart he had most in common held aloof; he had succeeded

twice in a pitched battle with them; they apologise for his acquaintance,

vilify him in their letters, and if his name has emerged from all this

error, if he has been given his statue in a time of social order and

reconstruction, it is because this man, who never wrote, who left only

a confused legend of his personality, saved his country when it was at

war with the whole world, and such actions compel history to inquiry and

restitution.

On the 23rd, the day after the trouble, he was sworn in to the reluctant

Commune, and there follow two long years[70] of patient attempt to gain

the place for which he feels himself fitted, but years (on the whole)

of disappointment, and in which his real position in Paris (I mean the

prominence he held in the thoughts of men) contrasts curiously with the

little part he played.

* * * * *

1790 contains so great a portion of the Revolution, and sows the seed

of so much future division and civil war, that it seems ridiculous to

confine oneself to the description of the restricted action of one man

who had not yet even attained power. It will be necessary, however, to

make a survey of this restricted action in order that we may comprehend

the greater rôle of Danton in the two years that follow.

Danton came, then, with Legendre and the three others into a city Council

very much opposed to him and to the district whose spirit he had formed.

He was not often heard, and there is no doubt that he deliberately tried

to purchase by silence the more just and equable judgment of such men as

he respected, but who knew him only by unfavourable report. For the bulk

of the Assembly he cannot but have felt contempt; they had no instinct

of the revolutionary tide; even when they were attempting to check the

movement that Danton represented, they were inefficient and unworthy

opponents, from whom his eye must have wandered inwards to the great

battles that were preparing.

In the eight months during which he was a member of the Provisional

Commune, that is, from January to September 1790, his name appears in

the debates but a dozen times.[71] More than half of these are mention

of committees upon which his common-sense and legal training were of

service; in one only, that of February 4, does he speak on a motion, and

that is in support of Barré to admit the public when the oath was taken:

one other (that on the 19th of March concerning the formation of a “grand

jury”) would be interesting were it not that the whole gist of the debate

was but a repetition of the much more significant discussion at the

Cordeliers. Finally, there is one little notice which is half-pathetic

and half-grotesque: he is one of the committee of twenty-four charged

with the duty of “presenting their humble thanks, with the mayor at their

head,” to the King for giving the municipality a marble bust of himself.

But every entry is petty and unimportant: Danton at the Provisional

Municipality of 1790 is deliberately silent—he can do nothing.

If we turn, however, to a field in which he was more at home, we find

him during that year more than ever the leader of the Cordeliers, which

itself becomes more than ever the leader of Paris.

There are two important features in the part he plays at the assemblies

of the district during the spring and summer in which he was a silent

member of the Commune. First, the affair of his arrest; secondly, his

campaign against what may be called “the municipal reaction.”

As to the first, it is a very minor point in the general history of the

Revolution, but it is of considerable influence upon the career of Danton

himself. When the affair of Marat was (or should have been) forgotten,

the Châtelet, with that negligence which we have seen them display in the

business of the warrant for Marat’s arrest, saw fit to launch another

warrant, this time for the arrest of Danton himself. Once more that

unpopular and moribund tribunal put itself on the wrong side of the law,

and once more it chose the most inopportune moment for its action. It was

on the 17th of March,[72] nearly two months after the affair—two months

during which Danton had been hard at work effacing its effects upon his

reputation—that the warrant was issued, and the motive of arrest given in

the parchment was of the least justifiable kind. In the district meeting

of the day, when the police officers had been taken to the hall of the

Cordeliers, and had had the changes in the law read out to them, Danton

had made use of a violent phrase: its actual words were not known;

some said that he had threatened to “call out the Faubourg St. Antoine,

and make the jaws of the guard grow white.” Other witnesses refused to

attribute those words to him, but accused him of saying, “If every one

thought as I do, we should have twenty thousand men at our back;” his

friends admitted that some angry and injudicious speech, such as he was

often guilty of, had escaped him, but they affirmed that he had added,

“God forbid that such a thing should happen; the cause is too good to be

so jeopardised.”

Whatever he said (and probably he himself could not accurately have

remembered), the place and the time were privileged. It was a test

case, but the logic of such a privilege was evident. Here you have

deliberative assemblies to which are intrusted ultimately the formation

of a government for Paris: what is said in such a constituent meeting,

however ill-advised, must in the nature of things be allowed to pass;

if not, you limit the discussion of the primary, and if you limit that

discussion you vitiate the whole theory upon which the new constitution

was being framed. It must be carefully remembered that we are not dealing

with deliberative bodies long established, possessed of the central

power, and holding privilege by tradition and by their importance in

the State; we are dealing with the elementary deliberative assemblies

in a period which, rightly or wrongly, was transforming the whole State

upon one perfectly definite political theory—namely, that these primary

assemblies were the only root and just source of power. When, therefore,

Parisian opinion rose violently in favour of the president of a district

so attacked, when three hundred voters out of five signed a petition in

Danton’s favour, when he was re-elected president of the district twelve

days after the issue of the warrant, it was because the whole body of the

electors felt a great and justifiable fear of what was left of the old

regime. The Châtelet had acted so, not from a careful appreciation of

public danger—to fend off which temporary powers had been given it—but

because it was blind with old age; because it dated from a time and was

composed of a set of men who hated all deliberative assemblies, and it

was justly thought that if such actions were justified, the whole system

of revolutionary Paris was in danger.

As though in proof of the false view that the Châtelet took of their

man, on the 19th of March, two days after the warrant was issued,

Danton was urging the replacement of the Châtelet by a Grand Jury; he

had an admiration and a knowledge of the old English system, and it was

against a man attempting so wise a reform that the last relic of the old

jurisprudence was making an attack.

An appeal was lodged with the National Assembly, and Anthoine read a

long report to the Assembly upon May 18. This report was strongly in

favour of Danton. It was drawn up by a special committee—not partisan in

any way—and after examining all the evidence it came to this conclusion

against the Châtelet. Nevertheless the House, a great body of nearly

a thousand men, to most of whom the name of Danton meant only a loud

Radical voice, hesitated. To adopt the report might have irretrievably

weakened the Châtelet, and the National Assembly was extremely nervous

on the subject of order in Paris. It ended by an adjournment. The

report remained in Danton’s favour; he was not arrested, but the affair

was unfortunate for him, and threw him back later at a very important

occasion, when he might have entered into power peaceably himself and at

a peaceable time.

But while this business was drawing to its close, during the very months

of April and May which saw his partial vindication, another and a far

more momentous business was occupying the Cordeliers—a matter in which

they directed all their energy towards a legal solution, but in which,

unfortunately for the city, they failed.

Ever since the days of October—earlier if you will—there had been arising

a strong sentiment, to which I have alluded more than once, and which,

for lack of a better name, may be called the Moderate reaction in Paris.

It is difficult to characterise this complex body of thought in one

adjective, and I cannot lengthen a chapter already too prolonged by a

detailed examination of its origin and development. Suffice it to say

that from the higher bourgeoisie (generally speaking), from those who

were in theory almost Republican, but whose lives were passed in the

artificial surroundings of wealth, and finally from the important group

of the financiers, who of all men most desired practical reform, and

who of all men most hated ideals; from these three, supported by many a

small shopkeeper or bureaucrat, came a demand, growing in vigour, for a

conservative municipal establishment—one that should be limited in its

basis, almost aristocratic in quality, and concerned very much with the

maintenance of law and order and very little with the idea of municipal

self-government.

It is a character to be noted in the French people, this timidity of the

small proprietor and his reliance upon constituted authority. It is a

matter rarely observed, and yet explaining all Parisian history, that

this sentiment does not mark off a particular body of men, but, curiously

enough, is found in the mind of nearly every Frenchman, existing side by

side with another set of feelings which, on occasion, can make them the

most arrant idealists in the world.

For the moment this intense desire for order was uppermost in the minds

of those few who were permitted to vote. In the Cordeliers it was the

other character of the Parisian that was emphasised and developed. They

were determined on democracy, like everybody else; but, unlike the rest,

they were not afraid of the dangerous road. They were inspired and led by

a man whose one great fault was a passionate contempt of danger. On this

account, though they are taxpayers and bourgeois, lawyers, physicians,

men of letters and the like, they do all they can to prevent the new

municipal system from coming into play, but they fail.

Now, consider the Assembly. That great body was justly afraid of Paris;

indeed, the man who was head and shoulders above them all—Mirabeau—was

for leaving Paris altogether. The Assembly, again, had the whole task of

re-making France in its hands, and it could not but will that Paris, in

the midst of which it sat, should be muzzled. Through all the debates of

the Provisional Commune it could easily be seen that Bailly and Lafayette

were winning, and that the Parliament would be even more Moderate than

they. Three points were the centres of the battle: first, the restricted

suffrage which was to be established;[73] secondly, the power which

was to be exercised over the new Commune by the authorities of the

Department; thirdly, the suppression of those sixty democratic clubs, the

districts, and their replacement by forty-eight sections, so framed as

specially to break up the ties of neighbourhood and association, which

the first of the Revolution had developed. It was aimed especially at the

Cordeliers.

Against the first point the Cordeliers had little to say. Oddly enough,

the idea of universal suffrage, which is so intimate a part of our ideas

on the Revolution, was hardly thought of in early 1790. Against the

second they debated, but did not decree; it was upon the third that they

took most vigorous action. The law which authorised the new municipal

scheme was passed on May the 27th, and, faithful to their policy, the

Cordeliers did not attempt to quarrel with the National Assembly, but

they fought bitterly against the application of the law by Bailly and his

party. The law was signed by the King on June the 27th, and on the same

day the mayor placarded the walls, ordering an immediate installation

of the new system. The 27th was a Saturday. Within a week the new

sections were to be organised, and on the Monday, July 5, the voting was

to begin. The very next day, the 28th, the Cordeliers protested in a

vigorous decree, in which they called on the fifty-nine other districts

to petition the National Assembly to make a special exception of the

town of Paris, to consider the great federation of July 14, which should

be allowed to pass before the elections, and finally to give the city

time to discuss so important a change. All through the week, on the

1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July, they published vigorous appeals. They were

partially successful, but in their main object—the reconstruction of the

aristocratic scheme and the arousing of public spirit against it—they

entirely failed. Bailly is elected mayor on August 2 by an enormous

majority—practically 90 per cent. The old districts disappear, and, like

every other, the famous Cordeliers are merged in the larger section of

the Théâtre Français. It may not sit in permanence; it may not (save on a

special demand of fifty citizens) meet at all; it is merely an electoral

unit, and in future some 14,000 men out of a city of nearly a million are

to govern all. The local club, directing its armed force and appealing to

its fellows, is abolished. Danton then has failed.

But, as we shall see later, the exception became the rule. No mechanical

device could check the Revolution. The demand for permanent sections is

continuous and successful. From these divisions, intended to be mere

marks upon a map, come the cannon of the 10th of August, and it is the

section of the Théâtre Français, wherein the traditions and the very

name of the Cordeliers were to have been forgotten, that first in Europe

declared and exercised the right of the whole people to govern.

If I may repeat a common-place that I have used continually in this book,

the tide of the Revolution in Paris was dammed up with a high barrier;

its rise could not be checked, and it was certain to escape at last with

the force and destructive energy of a flood.