THE REPUBLIC
AUGUST 10, 1792—APRIL 5, 1793
The 10th of August is not, in the history of the Revolution, a
turning-point or a new departure merely; it is rather a cataclysm, the
conditions before and after which are absolutely different. You may
compare it to the rush of the Atlantic, which “in one dreadful day and
night” swept away the old civilisation in the legend. It is like one of
the geological “faults” which form the great inland escarpments, and to
read or to write of it is like standing on the edge of Auvergne. You have
just passed through a volcanic plateau, rising slowly, more and more
desolate: you find yourself looking down thousands of feet on to the
great plain of Limagne.
There is no better test of what the monarchy was than the comparison of
that which came before with that which succeeded its overthrow. There
is no continuity. On the far side of the insurrection, up to the 9th of
August itself, you have armies (notably that of the centre) contented
with monarchy; you have a strong garrison at the Tuilleries, the
ministers, the departments, the mayor of Paris (even) consulting with the
crown. The King and the Girondins are opposed, but they are balanced;
Paris is angry and expectant, but it has expressed nothing—it is one of
many powers. The moderate men, the Rolands and the rest, are the radical
wing. It is a triumph for the Revolution that the Girondins should be
again in nominal control. Pétion is an idol. The acute friction is
between a government of idealists standing at the head of a group of
professional bourgeois, and a crown supported by a resurrected nobility,
expecting succour and strong enough to hazard a pitched battle.
Look around you on the 11th of August and see what has happened.
Between the two opponents a third has been intervened—Paris and its
insurrectionary Commune have suddenly arisen. The Girondins are almost
a reactionary party. The Crown and all its scaffolding have suddenly
disappeared. The Assembly seems something small, the ministry has fallen
back, and there appears above it one man only—Danton, called Minister of
Justice, but practically the executive itself. A crowd of names which
had stood for discussion, for the Jacobins, for persistent ineffective
opposition, appear as masters. In a word, France had for the moment a new
and terrible pretender to the vacant throne, a pretender that usurped it
at last—the Commune.
The nine months with which this chapter will deal formed the Republic; it
is they that are the introduction to the Terror and to the great wars,
and from the imprisonment of the King to the fall of the Girondins the
rapid course of France is set in a narrowing channel directly for the
Mountain. The Commune, the body that conquered in August, is destined
to capture every position, and, as one guarantee after another breaks
down, it will attain, with its extreme doctrines and their concomitant
persecution, to absolute power.
What was Danton’s attitude during this period? It may be summed up as
follows: Now that the Revolution was finally established, to keep France
safe in the inevitable danger. He put the nation first; he did not
subordinate the theory of the Revolution; he dismissed it. The Revolution
had conquered: it was there; but France, which had made it and which
proposed to extend the principles of self-government to the whole world,
was herself in the greatest peril. When discussion had been the method
of the Revolution, Danton had been an extremist. He was Parisian and
Frondeur in 1790 and 1791; it was precisely in that time that he failed.
The tangible thing, the objective to which all his mind leaned, appeared
with the national danger; then he had something to do, and his way of
doing it, his work in the trade to which he was born, showed him to be
of a totally different kind from the men above whom he showed. I do not
believe one could point to a single act of his in these three-quarters of
a year which was not aimed at the national defence.
It is a point of special moment in the appreciation of his politics that
Danton was alone in this position. He was the only man who acted as one
of the innumerable peasantry of France would have acted, could fate have
endowed such a peasant with genius and with knowledge. The others to the
left and right were soldiers, poets, or pedants every one. Heroic pedants
and poets who were never afraid, but not one of them could forget his
theories or his vision and take hold of the ropes. Such diplomacy as
there is is Danton’s; it is Danton who attempts compromise, and it is
Danton who persistently recalls the debates from personalities to work.
It is he who warns the Girondins, and it is he who, in the anarchy that
followed defeat, produced the necessary dictatorship of the Committee.
Finally, when the Committee is formed, you glance at the names, the
actions, and the reports, and you see Danton moving as a man who can see
moves among the blind. He had been once “in himself the Cordeliers”—it
had no great effect, for there was nothing to do but propose rights; now,
after the insurrection, he became “in himself the executive,” and later
“in himself the Committee.” So much is he the first man in France during
these few months of his activity, that only by following his actions can
you find the unity of this confused and anarchic period.
It falls into four very distinct divisions, both from the point of view
of general history and from that of Danton’s own life. The first includes
the six weeks intervening between the 10th of August and the meeting of
the Convention; it is a time almost without authority; it moves round the
terrible centre of the massacres. During this brief time the executive,
barely existent, without courts or arms, had him in the Ministry of
Justice as their one power—a power unfortunately checked by the anarchy
in Paris.
The second division stretches from the meeting of the Convention to
the death of the King. It covers exactly four months, from the 20th of
September 1792 to the 21st of January 1793. It is the time in which the
danger of invasion seems lifted, and in which Danton in the Convention is
working publicly to reconcile the two parties, and secretly to prevent,
if possible, the spread of the coalition against France.
The third opens with the universal war that follows the death of Louis,
and continues to a date which you may fix at the rising of the 10th of
March, or at the defeat of Neerwinden on the 19th. Danton is absent
with the army during the greater part of these six weeks; he returns
at their close, and when things were at their worst, to create the two
great instruments which he destined to govern France—the Tribunal and the
Committee.
Finally, for two months, from the establishment of these to the expulsion
of the Girondins on the 2nd of June, he is being gradually driven from
the attempt at conciliation to the necessities of the insurrection. He
is organising and directing the new Government of the Public Safety,
and in launching that new body, in imposing that necessary dictator, we
shall see him sacrificing one by one every minor point in his policy,
till at last his most persistent attempt—I mean his attempt to save
the Girondins—fails in its turn. Having so secured an irresistible
government, and having created the armies, the chief moment of his life
was past. It remained to him to retire, to criticise the excesses of his
own creation, and to be killed by it.
* * * * *
Immediately after the insurrection, a week after he had taken the oath
and made the short vigorous speech to the Assembly,[113] Danton sent out
his first and almost his only act as Minister of Justice, the circular of
the 18th of August,[114] which was posted to all the tribunals in France.
It is peculiar rather than important; it is the attempt to convince
the magistracy and all the courts of the justice and necessity of the
insurrection, and at the same time to leave upon record a declaration of
his own intentions now that he had reached power. In the first attempt
he necessarily fails. The old judicature, appointed by the Crown and by
the moderate ministers, largely re-elected by the people, wealthy for the
most part, conservative by origin and tradition, would in any case have
rejected such leadership; but the matter is unimportant; this passive
body, upon which the reaction had counted not a little, and which De Cicé
had planned to use against the Revolution, was destined to disappear
at the first demand of the new popular powers. France for weeks was
practically without courts of law.
Those passages, on the other hand, in which Danton makes his own apology
are full of interest. They contain in a few sentences the outline of all
his domestic policy, and we find in them Danton’s memories, his fears of
what his past reputation might do to hurt him.
“I came in through the breach of the Tuilleries, and you can only find
in me the same man who was president of the Cordeliers.... The only
object of my thoughts has been political and individual liberty, ... the
maintenance of the laws, ... the strict union of all the Departments, ...
the splendour of the State, and the equality, not of fortune, for that is
impossible, but of rights and of well-being.”
If we except the puerilities of the new great seal, the Hercules with
eighty-four stars (to represent the union of the Departments), replaced
by the conventional Liberty and fasces, there is practically nothing
more from Danton as Minister of Justice. But as the one active man in
the Cabinet he is the pivot of the whole time. Those qualities in him
which had so disgusted the men of letters were the exterior of a spirit
imperatively demanded in Paris at the time. His heavy, rapid walk,
the coarseness and harshness of his voice, his brutality in command,
exercised a physical pressure upon the old man Roland, the mathematician
Monge, and the virtuous journalists who accompanied them. I know of but
one character in that set which could have prevented Danton’s ascendancy,
and have met his ugly strength by a force as determined and more refined.
Roland’s wife might have done it, but though she was the soul of the
ministry, she was hardly a minister, and being a woman, she was confined
to secondary and indirect methods. Her hatred of Danton increased to
bitterness as she saw him succeed, but she could not intervene, and
France was saved from the beauty and the ideals which might have been the
syrens of her shipwreck.
The three weeks following the 10th of August were filled with the news of
the invasion. The King of Prussia had hesitated to march. France, full of
herself, never understood that such a thing was possible. The kings were
on the march, the great and simple ideas, so long in opposition, had met
in battle. All France thought that 1792 was already 1793. Perhaps there
were only two men in the country who saw the immaturity, the complexity,
and the chances of the situation—I mean Danton and Dumouriez: Dumouriez,
because he was by nature a schemer who had seen and was to see the
matter from close at hand; Danton, because, from the first moment of his
entrance into the ministry, he had gathered up the threads of negotiation
into his hand.
The King of Prussia had hesitated, so had Brunswick. It was the success
of the insurrection that decided them. They made the error that the
foreigner always makes, the error that led the most enlightened Frenchmen
to exaggerate the liberal forces in England, the error of seeing
ourselves in others. They imagined that “the sane body of the nation,”
the Frenchmen that thought like Prussians, would rise in defence of the
monarchy and in aid of the invasion. They had no conception of how small
in number, how hesitating, and how vile were the anti-national party.
On Sunday the 19th the frontier was crossed; on the Thursday Longwy
capitulated, and a German garrison held the rocky plateau that overlooks
the plain of Luxembourg. A week later, Thursday the 30th, Verdun was
surrounded.
From the hills above the town, the same hills which make of Verdun the
fifth great entrenched camp of modern France, the Prussian batteries
bombarded with a plunging fire. There may have been food and ammunition
for two or three more days, but fire had broken out in several quarters,
and the town council was imploring Beaurepaire to surrender. Brunswick
proposed a truce and terms of capitulation. On the Saturday, the 1st of
September, after a violent discussion, the terms were rejected, but
Beaurepaire knew that nothing could save the town, and in the night he
shot himself. On the next day, Sunday the second, Verdun yielded and the
road to Paris lay open.
Meanwhile, in the capital itself, a vortex was opening, and the poor
remnants of public authority and of public order were being drawn down
into it. The 10th of August had been a victory into which there entered
three very dangerous elements. First, it was not final; it had been won
against a small local garrison under the menace of an invasion, and this
invasion was proving itself irresistible. Secondly, it had left behind
it terrors accentuated by success; I mean whatever fears of vengeance or
of the destruction of Paris existed before the insurrection were doubled
when so much greater cause had been given for the “execution” that
Brunswick had threatened. Finally, the success of the insurrection had of
itself destroyed the last shadow of executive power, for all such power,
weak and perishing though it was, had centred in the King.
But besides these clear conditions which the 10th of August had produced,
there was something deeper and more dangerous—the fear which fed upon
itself and became panic, and which ran supported by anger growing into
madness. There was no news but made it worse, no sight in the streets and
no rumour but increased the intolerable pressure. Trade almost ceased,
and the whole course of exchange, which is the blood of a great city,
seemed to have run to the heart. Over the front of the Hotel de Ville
hung that enormous black flag with the letters “Danger” staring from it
in white, and in the heavy winds another blew out straight and rattled
from the towers of Notre Dame. Every action savoured of nightmare, and
suffered from a spirit grotesque, exaggerated, and horrible. The very
day after the fight a great net had been cast over Paris and drawn in
full of royalists. The gates had been shut suddenly, and every suspect
arrested by order of the Commune. The prisons were full of members of the
great conspiracy, for in civil war the vanquished appear as traitors.
Then there arose a violent demand for the trial and punishment of those
who had called in the foreigner, and a demand as violent, touching on
miracle, for innumerable volunteers. In every project there ran this
spirit of madness mixed with inspiration.
If Paris lost its head, so did the Assembly and the Moderates, but in
another fashion. Paris was pale with the intensity of anger, Roland
from a sudden paralysis. The fear of Paris was an angry panic; with the
Girondins it was the sudden sickness that takes some men at the sight
of blood. Paris had clamoured for an excess when it demanded the trial
of the Swiss, who had done nothing beyond their mercenary duty; but the
executive met it by an excess of weakness when it produced its court of
ridiculous and just pedants, afraid to condemn, afraid to decide. Already
the people had learned the secret payments of the old civil list,[115]
the salaries paid to the emigrants, the subsidised press. Golier’s report
had appeared but a day before the invasion.
The news of Longwy was already known. Verdun stood in peril, when the
acquittal of Montmorin on Friday the 31st seemed to be the deciding
weakness of the government that pushed the populace to their extreme of
violence.
He had been governor of Fontainebleau, openly and patently a conspirator
on the side of the Tuilleries; he was not acquitted of this. It was
admitted that he had “planned civil war;” he was released by that
heroic but fatal fault of the Girondins, the fault that later sent them
to the guillotine, and that now inspired their tribunal—they would
not bend an inch to compromise with necessity; rather than do so they
would deliberately aggravate the worst conditions by inclining against
the passions of the moment. They seemed to say, “You clamour for mere
reprisals; we will show, on the contrary, that we are just, and we will
even irritate you with mercy.” Yet they knew that Montmorin deserved
death.
After that decision, and when Osselin the judge took with great courage
the prisoner’s arm in his own and led him away, a voice in the court
cried out, “You acquit him now, and in a fortnight his friends will march
into Paris.” The massacres were certain from that moment; the thing
had been said which made the small band of murderers start out, which
made Paris look on immovable, and which kept the National Guard silent,
refusing to stop the carnage. “We will go to the frontier, but we will
not leave enemies behind us. If the law will not execute them, the people
will.” The damnable spirit which runs in colonies and wild places had
invaded civilised Europe, and the lynching was determined.
When the Assembly had yielded to the Commune, when it was certain that
the insurrectionary Commune would have its own way, and when it was known
that Longwy had fallen, that Verdun was surrounded, there took place
one of those scenes that stand out like pictures in the mind, and that
interpret the characters of history for us better than any accumulation
of detail.
In the garden of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at its end, and away
from the house, and under the low foliage, the six ministers were met in
an informal gathering—rapid, half-silent, a council not predetermined,
suited to the time; a few hurried words, whose description has come
down to us by no minute, but by the accident of Fabre’s presence. Fabre
d’Eglantine, the uncertain poet, Danton’s protégé, and dangerous,
ill-balanced friend,[116] stood watching at a little distance.
Roland spoke for all his friends. He was very pale and broken-down;
he leaned his head against a tree—“We must leave Paris.” Danton spoke
louder, “Where do you mean to go?” “We must go to Blois. We must take
with us the King and the treasure.” So said Servan; so said Clavière.
Kersaint, whom Danton had known at the old Commune in 1791, and who
was something of Danton’s kind, added his word: “I have just come from
Sedan, and I know there is nothing else to be done. Brunswick will be
here in Paris within the fortnight as surely as the wedge enters when
you strike.” Danton stopped six waverers by a phrase, a phrase of just
such a character, exaggerated, violent, as his good sense made use of
so often in the tribune. “My mother is seventy years old, and I have
brought her to Paris; I brought my children yesterday. If the Prussians
are to come in, I hope it may be into a Paris burnt down with torches.”
Then he turned round to Roland in person and threw out a fatal sentence,
necessary, perhaps, but one of many that dug the great gulf between him
and the Girondins. “Take care, Roland, and do not talk too much about
flight; the people might hear you.”[117]
I know of no anecdote that tells more about Danton, or explains with
greater clearness his attitude during the crisis that brought on the
massacres. For these over-vigorous words, full of excess, were uttered
by a man whose character was all for material results—results obtained,
as a rule, by compromise. This same Danton, who talked of “torches” and
“Paris en cendres,” was the only man in France who had the self-control
to negotiate for the retreat of the Prussians after Valmy. His “mother of
seventy years” had indeed been brought to Paris, but from Arcis, which
every one knew to be right in the track of the invasion. What we have to
discover in this speech, as in every phrase he uttered, is the motive;
for with any other of the great Revolutionaries words were the whole of
the idea, and sometimes more than the idea, but with Danton alone words
were the means to a tangible end.
He desired to prevent that fatal breach with Paris which he had foreseen
to be a risk from the beginning, and which Mirabeau in his time had
thought so near as to be necessary. He was determined to keep this
shadow—the national executive—in reach of the one thing that was alive
and vigorous and defending the nation. It is of the greatest importance
in appreciating his attitude to know that he dreaded the Commune. Later,
no one of the deputies of Paris in the Convention saw as he saw the
necessity of amalgamation with the Departments. Marat he thoroughly
despised. Most of the men of the Commune had sat in one room with
him; Panis and Sergent had even desks under him. He knew them, and he
contemned them all. He did not know to what crimes they were about to
commit themselves, or perhaps he would have interfered, but he knew they
were worthless.
Behind them, however, he saw Paris, and in Paris he ardently believed,
in its position and in its necessity. He was entirely right. Once let
the ministers leave the city, and civil war would begin—a civil war
waged within ten days’ march of the enemy, and between what forces? An
imbecile, a man like one of our moderns, who thinks in maps and numbers,
would have said, “Between eighty-three departments and one.” But Danton
knew better. He had that appreciation which is common to all the masters;
he knew the meaning of potential and of the word ‘quality.’ It would have
been a fight between the members and the brain, and the brain would have
died fighting, leaving a body dead because the brain had died.
Thus while the Assembly and the Commune fight their sharp battle of
the last days of August, while the Parliament commands new municipal
elections, breaks the municipality, then flatters it, then yields and
permits it to be practically reinforced under the form of a fresh vote
from the Sections,[118] Danton acts as though both Parliament and Commune
had dropped from the world. There are two speeches of his, one of the
28th of August, one of the 2nd of September, and between them they mark
his attitude and form also the origins of that full year of action and
rhetoric which define him in history.
In the first, he proposes and carries the measure which has been made an
excuse for laying upon his shoulders the responsibility of the massacres.
The speech was made for a very different purpose. He authorised the
domiciliary visits, but his object was to obtain arms. One thought only
occupied him: to counteract the intense individualism of the Moderates,
to force despotic measures through a Parliament that hated them, and to
force these measures because without them the situation was lost. He
got his arms, and just afterwards his mass of volunteers, but the other
measure which he had introduced to pacify the Commune, the domiciliary
visits, have marked more deeply in the memories of the time, because in
the troubled days that followed these visits seemed to be a beginning.
It was Sunday morning, the 2nd of September. Verdun (though no one knew
it yet in Paris) had just fallen; Beaurepaire was dead. The “Comité de
Surveillance” of the Commune had admitted Marat illegally,[119] and
for a sinister reason. For three days the prisons had been marked, and
those whom the Comité wished to save had been withdrawn; and though
the movement was spontaneous, though the most of the Sections spoke
before Marat,[120] yet there was an executive and a directory, and that
madman was its chief. The moment that the massacres were beginning at
the Carmes, Danton was making the last effort to turn the anger of the
moment into an enthusiasm for the Champ de Mars and for the volunteers.
If ever there was an attempt to influence by rhetoric a popular emotion
which could not be checked, and to direct energy from a destructive to
a fruitful object, it is to be found in this his most famous speech—the
speech that even the children know to-day in France, the closing words
of which are engraved upon his pedestal. For the only time in his life
he turned and leant upon the mere power of words: there is something in
their extraordinary force which savours of despair, and they rise at the
close to an untranslatable phrase in which you hear rhythm for the first
and last time in his appeals: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours
de l’audace—et la France est sauvée.”[121]
He did not wholly fail. When he had rung the great bell of the Hotel
de Ville and had gone to the Champ de Mars, he looked over a great and
growing crowd of young men running to the enlistment. But for four
days—days in which he doggedly turned his back to the Commune which
called him—the killing went on in the prisons. He and his volunteers,
his silence, were most like this: a man in a mutiny on ship-board, in a
storm at night, keeping the helm, saving what could be saved and careless
whether the morning should make him seem a traitor on the one hand or
a mutineer upon the other. For the tragedy of those five days—the days
of Sedan—always seems to be passing in a thick night. We read records of
action at this or that hour in the daylight, but we cannot believe the
sun shone. Maillard, tall and pale in his close black serge and belt, is
a figure for candles on the Abbaye table and for torches in the cloisters
and the vaults. There never was a horror more germane to darkness.
But why did Danton not save the prisoners? I know that question is
usually answered by saying that he was indifferent. So much (it seems
to me) survives of a legend. For history no longer pretends that he
organised or directed the crime. Indeed, history finds it daily more
difficult, as the details accumulate, to fix it upon any one man. But
the fact that he persistently defended the extremists in the following
month, that he made himself (for the purposes of reunion) an advocate for
many men who were blameworthy, and tried to reconcile the pure minds of
the Girondins with such terrible memories—in a word, the fact that for
months he sacrificed himself in the Convention, that he demanded union,
has condemned him to every suspicion. _Que mon nom soit flétri et que la
France soit libre._
He might, indeed, have spoken. Popular, the one vigorous and healthy
personality in the face of Paris, he might have bent his energy to the
single aim of preventing an outbreak. I will not deny that in his mind,
over which we have seen passionate anger falling suddenly in October
1789 and in June 1792, there may have arisen some such feeling as that
which restrained the vast mass of the Parisians from interfering with
the little band of murderers—a feeling of violent hatred, a memory of
the manifesto and a disgust which made the partisans of Brunswick seem
like vermin. There is something of that deplorable temper in the anecdote
which Madame Roland gives of him, striding through the rooms on the
second day and saying that the prisoners “could save themselves.” But
this anecdote is not history; it is an accusation, and one made by a
partisan and an enemy.[122] There is another and better reason for his
action, which must, I think, have made the greater part of his motive. To
have spoken would have been to play a very heavy stake. If he spoke and
failed to prevent the rising, he ceased to be Danton. His influence fell,
he became a Moderate, and himself, the one man left to direct affairs,
entered the confused ranks of opposition—un-Parisian, rejected of either
party, while France beneath him fell into mere anarchy.
It would have been gambling with all that he most desired: the English
neutrality, the union of the coming Parliament, the rapid organisation
of the armies, all this staked to win something that was not precious to
him at all—the lives of a mass of men the bulk of whom had demanded the
success of the invasion.
Why did he not act? Because nobody could act. Remember the phrase which
he delivered while Louis was being executed four months later: “Nulle
puissance humaine.”[123] We are so accustomed to an aristocratic and
orderly society that a title of office implies power. The Home Secretary
or some other man “does this,” but the man who really does it—does it
with his hands—is the policeman or the soldier. Now these did not exist
at the moment in Paris. It explains a hundred things in the Revolution
to remember that every successive step reduced society to powder, to
a mere number of men. Rousseau had said that this compact, this thing
based on voluntary union, was not made for the cities. Paris gave us
in September an awful proof. Roland, a man whom Marat had put upon his
list and whom Danton had saved, talked on the Monday of the “just anger
of the people.” Yet Roland was a just man, and brave in matters that
affected himself alone, and the massacres chiefly concerned him. He was
Minister of the Interior, that is, responsible for order, but there was
nothing with which to work. On the Tuesday he sent to Santerre and said,
“Call out the National Guard.” Santerre answered that he could not gather
them. He was right. Again, Pétion was an honest man, a Moderate, the
mayor of Paris; all he could do was to sit at a useless committee of the
Sections and talk of the “National Defence;” that utter disintegration
which the theories of the Revolution had produced—that purely voluntary
condition of the soldier, the official, the police (a mere anarchy)—was
irresistible when there was spontaneity of action; it was useless where
the conditions demanded organisation and initiative. It withstood the
cannonade at Valmy, it stormed the height of Jemappes, but it fled in
rout when the spring had melted enthusiasm. So here police, the function
that most requires discipline, was lacking in the State. And the whole
situation is summed up in the sharp picture we have of Manuel pushing
his way though the crowd with “two policemen” who had “volunteered,” and
trying in vain to stop the lynching at the Carmes. It was to this anarchy
that Danton, after six months of struggle, succeeded in giving government
during 1793.
Danton himself, after four months of vain effort to reconcile his
enemies, put the whole matter in the last phrase of his defence: “No
human power” could have stopped the massacres;[124] all that could
be done was to work, from that moment forward, against the extreme
theories of a voluntary state, and towards the establishment of a strong
government.[125]
When, on the Thursday, September 6, the wave receded, and when on the
morrow Pétion was able to interfere, the people and the Assembly looked
round them and saw that a thing had happened which was to hurt the future
of the Revolution more than all the armies. It was like the breaking of
day after that moral night, a daybreak in which the wind goes down and
you see the wreckage.
Paris was very silent; the accusations had not yet begun; the Assembly
was dying. The electoral council of Paris had met during the very days
of the massacre, and had proceeded to choose the members who were to
represent the capital in the Convention that was about to meet. It also
voted in silence, and sat in the mingled panic and remorse that oppressed
the whole city. The names came out in the balloting. On the 5th (the
murderers were still growling in the streets) Robespierre was elected in
a small meeting of 525; on the 6th Danton was elected second, but with a
much larger attendance and with a much greater majority—638 votes out of
an attendance of 700, a curious result. Danton’s name forced itself upon
them, was acclaimed beyond any other; yet his attitude of conciliation,
his attempt to have all Paris represented, was set aside. The man and his
reputation succeeded, his policy failed. They elected also Marat, Panis,
Sergent—those who had directed the crime. Danton and Manuel alone of all
the twenty-four had any touch of the Moderate about them. The long list
ends with the name of Egalité, elected by a majority of one.[126]
There came, therefore, into the Convention an apparently united body of
men from Paris—the Mountain. Up on the benches of the extreme left, in
the grey, dark theatre of the Tuilleries, there were to sit, in a compact
group, these extremists; and across the floor the Departments, the pure
Republicans of the south, who despised the city and them, who feared them
terribly, and who hated with the force of a religion, were to single them
out as tyrants. And in this Mountain, this body of Reds, Danton was to
find himself imbedded, bound up, falsified. He had determined to prevent
such parties. He had tried hard to make Paris elect not only Robespierre
but Pétion also as a mark of unity: he had failed.
When the country members came up to the capital, September had grown
to be an awful legend. The number of those killed was multiplied ten
times,[127] twenty times—number lost meaning. Paris seemed a city of
blood. Guides volunteered story after story. “Here, in the Abbaye, the
blood had risen so high”—they made a mark in the wall; “there, under
that tree, the massacres were planned by such and such a one”—any name
suited, sometimes it was Robespierre, sometimes Danton. The deputies came
from their little towns and from the fields, over seven hundred—pilgrims
from places where the pure enthusiasms of 1790 still lingered, where
even 1792 had brought no passion. They came, many of them for the first
time, bewildered in the enormous city; its noise confused them, its
crowds, its anger—“Yes; that was where the massacres were committed a
fortnight ago—we can believe it.” The Convention from its first day
seemed a battlefield—Paris defiant in the Mountain, and the Departments
silent with an angry fear in the plain and on the benches of the right.
And when the newcomers asked to be shown the group of deputies for Paris,
as men would ask to be shown lurking enemies or wild beasts, they would
have their gaze directed to that high place on the left where sat the
names that had terrified and fascinated them in the prints of their
country-sides.
There were no windows; the skylight, high above that deep well of a
room, sent an insufficient light downwards upon the foreheads, making
the features sharp and yet lending them a false gloom. That man with
the small squat body and the frog’s face was Marat; you could just see
his great vain mouth in the dim light. Those small, keen features, well
barbered and set up, the high forehead, the pointed bones of the cheek
and chin, stood for Robespierre. The light fell chiefly on the white of
his careful wig; his thin smile was in shadow. And who was that huge
figure, made larger by the darkness and carrying a head like Mirabeau?
They saw it moving when the others were fixed. He would speak to his
neighbours with heavy, sweeping gestures. They grew accustomed to the
half-light, and they could distinguish his face—the strong jaw, the
powerful movement of the lips, torn and misshapen though they were; the
rough, pitted skin, the small, direct, and deep-set eyes. Who was he? He
seemed to them the very incarnation of all the bloodshed and unreason
which they hated in Paris, a master of anarchy. It was Danton.
Against that impression all policy and wisdom broke. He demanded unity;
he checked the growing attack on the rich; he said things that were like
France speaking. But the voice was harsh and loud; they heard it in their
minds at the head of mobs; they fled from him to the Girondins; they
forced him back upon the Mountain, and he had to do his work alone in
spite of those orators whom he would have befriended and whose genius he
loved—in spite of those madmen who surrounded him, and who later killed
him and the Republic with one axe.
It was on the 25th of September, a Thursday, that the Convention met
in the Tuilleries; on the Friday, in the same place, with doors shut
and with the galleries empty, they declared the Republic, and moved
off to the Manège, where their predecessors had sat. In those two days
the violent quarrel between Paris and France was hushed for a moment.
Danton, in the lull, said all he could to define his own position and
to prevent that quarrel from ever reaching a head. He went out to meet
the Moderates. He declared, with the common sense of the peasant, that
property must first be declared inviolable; and it is curious that the
Convention, the majority that misunderstood him and broke with him, was
yet less moderate than he; it passed the resolution, but in the form,
“property is under the safeguard of the nation.” In order to calm opinion
he resigned the Ministry of Justice on the spot;[128] he did everything
to make his position clear and true, and to save the unity of the
Parliament.
But the attack came from the others. Within a week Lasource had proposed
a guard for the Convention, “drawn from the departments;” and in the face
of this proposition, that was almost civil war, Danton found himself
able to speak once more for unity. The Girondins had elected one of
themselves for president, and had chosen from among their own members the
secretaries of the Assembly; they had wittingly ostracised the left, and
they desired to make it dumb. Danton still attempted union. “I myself
come from the Departments, from a place to which I always turn my eyes.
But Paris is made of the Departments, and we are not here as members of
this place or that, but as members for France.” He continually presented
the idea of France united; the Girondins as continually rejected it. He
knew that they thought him a shield for Marat; he rejected Marat openly
from the tribune. But all this intense and personal action had but an
effect upon individuals. Two especially it moved—Vergniaud, the young
orator, sincere and brave beyond all his colleagues, and more far-seeing
than any of the dreamers around him; Condorcet, to whom a year before
Danton had seemed so repulsive, but whose calm and just mind had arrived
at the truth; who had said, “Danton has that rare faculty of neither
hating nor envying genius in others;” who had voted and spoken for his
appointment as Minister of Justice, and who, up to the catastrophe of the
following June, continued to understand and to support him.
But, for the mass of the Girondins, he remained an outcast. He used words
that one could not use before Roland’s wife, and the great group that
surrounded her (men over-full of utopias, but heroic, men whom Danton
himself regretted bitterly) made him an outcast. He replied often with
passion, and once with insult, but as we shall see he did not abandon
them entirely till the insurrection destroyed them in ’93.
Meanwhile, while they voted the Republic in Paris, under Argonne
a battle among the most curious in history was making a momentary
security—that is, a momentary union of good feeling throughout France,
and even in Paris itself. The Prussian army had been checked on the
little rise of Valmy. As you stand upon the field in that same season
of the year to-day, in the mist of the early morning, as the volunteers
and the battered remnants of the line stood then; as you look from
that standpoint at the open road, at the great plain of Champagne, so
well suited to maintain an army; as you see to the east the long wall
of the Argonne, and remember that Dumouriez had been outflanked in
his Thermopylæ, a confusion seizes the mind. Why on earth was Valmy
so important a victory? It is a common-place to say that Valmy was a
cannonade, but what was a cannonade in 1792? If indeed to-day a line
of guns were drawn up and served, as I have seen them served in the
manœuvres within sight of these same hills, and if a force should be
discovered capable of withstanding the shrapnel of twelve batteries
of artillery, sure of their range, turning the mark into a ploughed
field—then that force would merit peculiar names, for it would be
immortal. But in the eighteenth century guns were not the arbiters of
battles. Infantry could charge the batteries then. France, which was
crushed yesterday and will succeed to-morrow solely through artillery,
had not a hundred years ago to dread the random solid shot of smooth
bores; what she had to dread was the bayonet charge of that superb
infantry which the great Frederick had trained, and on which the
monstrous scaffolding of Prussia still reposes. All we can say of Valmy
is this, that men quite ignorant of warfare, badly held together, managed
to stand firm under an ill-directed, at times a desultory and distant
cannon fire.
Valmy was not a victory. The results of Valmy have changed the world, but
no one could have seen it then. Goethe, in the course of a long life,
discovered it, and put it beautifully into his own mouth over one of the
bivouac fires: “We entered on a new world then;” but there were better
prophets than Goethe, and not one perceived it. For days the Prussian
army hesitated. Dumouriez did not dare to meet them. A pitched battle in
the last days of September might have changed all history.
Why then did the King of Prussia retreat? No force compelled, but two
arguments convinced him. The peasantry, and Danton, the man who through
the whole year is, as it were, a peasant trained and illumined. The
resistance of the peasantry had taught the King that to reach Paris it
required not a war of the dynasties, such as had filled the eighteenth
century—wars in which armies passed like visiting caravans; the invasion
of France would need a crusade. He was no crusader. He had undertaken the
war with only half a heart, and at this slight check he hesitated. The
second argument came from Danton. He bargained like a peasant secretly
for the purchasable and obvious good, while the Parliament was talking as
might talk a conqueror who was something of a poet and well read in the
classics. When there was a talk of negotiations just after the battle, it
launched the great words, “That the Republic does not discuss till its
territory is evacuated.” That was on Tuesday; the Republic was young to
discuss anything—it was four days old. On Wednesday night, Westermann,
Danton’s man of the 10th of August, and his companion at the scaffold,
started off secretly to diplomatise. That foolish man D’Eglantine
followed him, but his folly was swallowed up in the wisdom of Danton, who
sent him, a secretary and a mouthpiece, to do that which, had he done
it himself, would have produced some violent and ill-considered vote.
Between them this clique settled the matter, and the invaders passed
back through the Argonne heavily, in wet roads and through drenched
woods, with Kellermann following, impatient, above the valleys, but
bound by Danton’s policy not to harass the retreat; till at last, more
than a month after Valmy,[129] he fired the salute from Longwy, and the
territory was free.
Did Danton know, as he was pursuing these plans, why Dumouriez helped
him? Did he understand thoroughly that vain, talented, and unprincipled
soldier? I think it certain. It is among those things which cannot be
proved; one does not base such convictions upon documents, but rather
on the general appreciation of character. Thus Danton undoubtedly
helped and used Talleyrand at another time in England, and Talleyrand
was patently false. But Talleyrand was, as patently, the cleverest
diplomatist he could find. Dumouriez wished the King of Prussia to be
left unmolested for a number of very mixed reasons, in which patriotism
played a small part; Danton wished it for the sake of France, and for
that only; but if Dumouriez at the head of an army was to hand, so much
the better. Danton supported Dumouriez, his policy, even his retreats
up to the disaster of March. To say “he sympathised with a traitor”
is one of those follies which men can only make when they forget that
contemporaries cannot have known what we know. With all his time-serving
and his separate plans, no one dreamt that in six months the general
would join the Austrians; it was a sudden blow even to those who sat in
his tent.
October was a month of reconciliation. When the man broad awake succeeds,
the dreamer is ready to build a new dream on that result. The Gironde was
almost silent, the Mountain was afraid. In the short visit that Dumouriez
paid, between a victory and a victory, to Paris, Danton appears for a
moment a partner in the mental ease, the brilliant expression, and the
Republican faith of the Girondins. He might perhaps have ended there,
and with his great arms and shoulders have held apart the men whose
mutual hatred killed the Republic. In his success—and every one bore him
gratitude after Valmy—that which he most desired almost happened, and
the alliance between the opposing Girondist and the Mountain was half
realised.
Michelet gives us two pictures[130] which, like the revelation of
lightning, show us that rapid drama standing still. In the first it
is Madame Roland, in the second Marat, who makes the tragedy. In the
first Dumouriez and Danton sat in the same box at the theatre, and
Vergniaud was coming in with the soul of the Girondins. The door opened
and promised this spectacle: Danton and the general and the orator of
the pure Republicans, and the woman most identified with the Right.
It would have been such a picture for all the people there as Danton
would have prayed or paid for. The door was ajar, and, as she came
near, Madame Roland saw Danton sitting in the box; she put out her hand
from Vergniaud’s arm and shut the door. There is in her memoirs a kind
of apology,“des femmes de mauvaise tournure.” Utter nonsense; it was
Roland’s box, and his wife was expected. Danton and Dumouriez were not
of the gutter. No, it was the narrow feminine hatred, so closely allied
to her intense devotion, that made Madame Roland thrust Danton at arm’s
length. The same spirit that made her vilify the Left like a fury made
her the calm saint of the Girondins. For she lived entirely in the Idea.
The second scene is a reception. I will not repeat Michelet’s
description; its spirit is contained in an admirable phrase: “France
civilised appealed therein against France political.” Danton was
surrounded with those whom he would have taught, as he taught all who
ever knew him closely, to respect or to love him. Marat heard that he
was there—Marat, whom he had repudiated in public a few days before. He
heard that Danton was there, surrounded by the soldiers, and the women,
and the orators. He called at the door, and shouted in the hall, “I want
to see Danton,” and at the sound of his voice everybody grew troubled,
and Danton was left alone. On the 29th of October Danton attempted openly
to break with Marat: “I declare to you and to France,” he said in the
Convention, “that I have tried Marat’s temperament, and I am no friend of
his.” But the attempt came too late.
The discussions broke out again in November. On the 10th, the victory of
Jemappes was heard in Paris. This book, dealing only with a man, cannot
detail those famous charges; it was a victory won by men singing the
new songs; it is the inspiration of “La victoire en chantant.” But the
security it gave only went further to destroy what was left of union.
Danton found himself more and more alone. He who had been named on a
committee with Thomas Paine, with Condorcet, with Pétion, on the very day
after his election to the presidency of the Jacobins,[131] who had in
his own temporary success seemed to realise his policy of union, found
himself after a month once more pushed back towards the Mountain. The
growing sense of security had destroyed the chances of union. He remained
silent. One would say that the time passed him by untouched, because
the one thing he cared for had failed, and because the inevitable civil
dissensions of the next spring covered his mind with clouds. France was
irretrievably divided. The arraignment of the King, the discovery of
the secret papers, all the movement of November leaves him, as it were,
stranded, waiting his mission to Belgium.
There belongs to this period only one considerable speech. It is the
only thing in all his public acts in which you can discover beauty. You
may find in this speech the pity and the tenderness which his intimates
loved, the memory which they for sixty years defended, but which no
document or letter remains to perpetuate.
Cambon, careless of anything but his exchequer, had thought the new era
come. That cold and inflexible head determined, seeing the steep fall
towards bankruptcy that France was making, to save a hundred millions,
but to save it at an expense. He proposed to separate the State from what
was left of the Church, to break the vow of 1790. In almost the last
speech before he went off to the armies, Danton opposed him and gave this
passage—a passage better fitted to the defence of an older and stronger
thing than the wretched constitutional priesthood:—
“... It is treason against the nation to take away its dreams. For my
part, I admit I have known but one God. The God of all the world and of
justice. The man in the fields adds to this conception that of a man who
works, whom he makes sacred because his youth, his manhood, and his old
age owe to the priest then: little moments of happiness. When a man is
poor and wretched, his soul grows tender, and he clings especially to
whatever seems majestic: leave him his illusions—teach him if you will
... but do not let the poor fear that they may lose the one thing that
binds them to earth, since wealth cannot bind them.”
Before he left on the mission to the armies there occurred a scene which
has always been, since Michelet described it, the most striking passage
of his relations with the Girondins. He, the man who saw safety for
France only in diplomacy, had, for the sake of unity, held his tongue
when the Girondins passed the decree of the 19th November, which was to
sustain a revolutionary crusade against Europe. I say that November is
full of Danton’s attempt to maintain the unity of the Parliament. After
all these efforts he was worsted, because the Girondins were possessed by
a dream which admitted of no compromise and of no realities.
The scene of his last attempt was this:—He made a rendezvous with their
party. They were to meet secretly at night and away from Paris in a
house in the woods of Sceaux at the very end of November. The whole life
of this man was a tragedy, and we see in this sad journey that kind of
dramatic presentiment of his death and of theirs, the “foreknowledge”
with which the tragedies of the world are filled.
He went through the desolate bare woods of November, under the hurrying
sky, that recalls to our minds in France to-day the charges of Jemappes.
The night was as wild as the time, and as dark as his forebodings, when
he came on to the little group of men in the candlelight, and argued
with them, and against them, and alone. Michelet gives to Danton’s mind
a sentiment of coercion. He shows us Danton dragged by necessity. But I
can see no necessity except the supreme desire to unite the parties and
make the government real. They would not receive his alliance, and he
went away from that meeting at midnight, pushed back upon Paris, thrown
into the comradeship of violence. Guadet rejected him with an especial
fervour. Danton as he left turned upon him with this phrase: “Guadet,
Guadet, you cannot understand and you do not know how to forgive; you are
headstrong, and it will be your doom.” The next day he started on his
mission to the army.
During the arraignment and during the trial of the King the opinions that
divided the Left and the Right fought it out in his absence.[132] He was
not there to attempt such a movement as his character demanded. No one
in all the Assembly dared hold out a hand as he would have done and see
whether after all Vergniaud might not perhaps be right on the one hand,
and the Mountain perhaps be patriots on the other.
There was in this debate upon one man’s life an element to which Danton’s
nature was well suited. There had to be kept in view for the French
nation the effect upon Europe which would follow from the determination
as to the death or life of the King, and Danton’s great voice has so
strongly and so rightly affected the historians of the period that he
thrusts his personality forward into their narrative, and in at least one
notable place Danton appears, in history, and in one of the greatest
pages of history, by no right, and figures upon scenes which do not
possess the advantage of his voice. He has been made to defend Louis’s
life, to plead for a respite, and then by a violent change to vote for
his death.
Let me now explain how this error passed into the mind of Michelet and of
other men. Danton returned from Belgium on the night of the 14th January.
On that same day a certain Dannon, apparently an honest man,[133]
rose late in the evening and demanded respite for Louis. When Gallois
reprinted the _Moniteur_, he saw this obscure name coupled with a politic
demand; he read it again, and said, “This Dannon must be a misprint for
Danton.” He corrected it so. On this chance venture there fell the eye
of Michelet, the eye that from a glance or a word could bring back the
colours and the movements of living men. In him also the tragedy of
Danton powerfully worked; he moulded a figure from these few words in the
_Moniteur_, and made of them an admirable anti-climax. Here was Danton
(Dannon) hot from the armies, knowing in what peril France stood, having
seen with his own eyes how momentary had been the effects of Jemappes.
He comes from his travelling coach to the Assembly, and with the mud of
the road yet upon him, gives his expression as an ally to the Girondins
and to the Moderates. Then some rebuff, some unrecorded insult throws
him back again as he had been so often thrown back into the arms of the
Extremists. On the next day, the 15th of January, we are asked to watch
him sitting by the side of his dying wife, sullen and despairing. On the
16th he comes back furious, and votes for the death of the King.
There are those for whom detail in history is pedantic, yet here upon
three letters and their order hangs the interpretation not only of an
individual character but of a policy whose effects we are still feeling.
Michelet’s great picture is false from beginning to end. Danton had
returned on the 14th, and came jaded with his journey to the bedside
of her who had been his young wife of five years, who was now near to
childbirth and to death. He had his own drama as well as that of the
historian’s, and our own dramas are acted upon a stage where the results
are real. All that night of the 14th and all the 15th he was watching in
his flat of the Passage du Commerce a fate which was coming upon him, and
certainly for whose thirty-six hours the Revolution was a little thing
to him. He came back wearily to his position and to his duties on the
16th; he remembered there was such a thing as the Revolution—that Louis
was after all on trial, and descended from his home into the hall of the
Parliament to give the short angry sentence in which we seem to read less
moderation and less of diplomacy than was his by nature. The scene in the
home had made him not only bitter but weak, for there is surely weakness
in saying, “I am not a statesman,” in borrowing, that is, the vulgar
acrimony of Marat, or in talking of “the tyrant,” and in repeating the
phrases of the Mountain.
But in the days that followed Michelet finds a good excuse. Certainly one
would say, if one knew nothing about him except his action of January
1793, that Danton was the Mountain and nothing else. This error would be
supported by the unreasoning vehemence, the almost brutal anger, into
which he allows himself to fall.
They asked whether the King could be condemned to death by a mere
majority, and whether that majority was decisive. Danton threw back at
them: “You decided the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole
history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you think the life of
one man too great for a mere majority; you say such a vote could not be
decisive enough to make blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood
flowed decisively enough.”
So naturally was he at that moment the Danton of unreason, so much had
his character yielded to its persistent temptation of violent words, that
there could be heard a voice once calling out to him as he rushed to the
tribune without leave from the Speaker, “You are not a king yet, Danton.”
And yet this was the man who had saved France from any folly of defiance
after Valmy, who was determined upon saving her in the future by keeping
upon the helm a quiet and unswerving hand. Vergniaud’s great simile,
“That France might become, if she did not take care, like the statues of
Egypt; they astonish by their greatness, and yet are enigmas to all who
see them, because the living spirit that made them has died,” passed him
by without effect. He was one of those who voted in the fatal majority,
and he threw down as gage of battle the head of a king.[134]
* * * * *
The word had become reality, and Louis had stood at mid-day trying to be
heard beyond the ring of soldiers, had cried out that he was innocent,
and had died in the noon of that cold January day. This act was destined
to produce the one thing that Danton had most ardently desired to
avoid—it put an end once and for all to the neutrality of England.
Another people, then in their infancy, now old, whom Louis had been
persuaded to help against his will, received the death of Louis like
a kind of blow in the face. The people of the United States in their
simplicity had imagined the French king to be their saviour; they did
not know Louis’s phrase, “I was dragged into that unhappy affair of
America; advantage was taken of my youth.” They regarded his crown with
a certain superstition, as they still regard what is left of baubles
in Europe; and when the axe fell upon him, France lost not only the
calculating hypocrisy of Pitt, but the genuine sympathy of the American
people.
In the days that followed (they were only ten) between the 21st of
January and the end of the month, it is still plain that the shock which
most affected Danton’s vigorous and independent judgment was that return
after seven weeks to the wife whom he had passionately loved, and whom
this ugly Orpheus felt slipping from his arms back into the shades. After
her death, as we shall see, he did not reel so heavily, but in that
fortnight of January, which was of such supreme importance, he permitted
misfortune to rouse mere passion in his mind; and he who might have led
the Moderates, who might have played with the life of Louis like a card,
chose to remember his rebuff in the winter and threw his trump away.
Many have tried to explain Vergniaud’s vote. Is it not probable that he
was drawn by the example of a man whom he did not understand, and whose
opinion attracted an orator not unappreciative of energy? Vergniaud has
always before history a doubting and a hesitating face, and it seems more
than possible that the wrath of Danton carried him and many others into
the vote for death.
Ever since the 10th of August had thrust him into unexpected power,
Danton had held in one way or another the threads of a certain diplomacy.
It was as follows:—To rely upon all the elements in Europe which admired
or were indifferent to the Revolution, and to combine them in a kind of
resistant body; to use, as it were, their inertia against those who were
setting out as crusaders against France. On this account the foolish war
of propaganda was most distasteful to him. On this account England’s
neutrality haunted his mind. He knew that in this country there existed
a body strong in its influence though not in its numbers, a body which
would have supported the French. Priestley had written to him before his
exile. Talleyrand was working for him at the moment, and opposing as an
informal Dantonist the Girondin acerbity of Chauvelin.[135] Danton was
even willing to use Dumouriez, mainly because Dumouriez was about to
compromise with England. To this policy of observation, a policy which
took advantage of England as the lover of individual liberty and of
England as the merchant, the death of the King put a sudden stop. It was
Danton that killed his own intrigue.
Before he left on his second mission to the armies on the 31st January
1793, he shows that new face in which he attempts to retrieve, as far as
possible, the errors of which he had been largely the author. In a speech
which shows once again all his old power of party political action,
he demands the annexation of Belgium. He has seen that general war is
inevitable, and harking back again to that unique French conception
of which he was the heir, the _raison d’état_, he determines to save
the State, and to do it by an action which opposed every theory of the
Revolution. He asked “everything of their reason, nothing of their
enthusiasm,” and he demanded the annexation of Belgium with France. It
was pure opportunism—the determination to get hold of a revenue by force
of arms; and the next day, after having painfully come back to his old
policy of the real and objective, burdened by a past error, and having
broken with all that he valued in French opinion, he went off again
to the army. While his chaise was yet rolling on the flat roads of
Flanders, Chauvelin returned with Pitt’s scrawl in his hand, and France
was at war with the whole world.
This next voyage to Belgium occupied but a very short time. He did not
get there until the 3rd February, and he started to come back on the
15th. But the moment, which is necessarily a silent one in his biography,
would be one of capital importance to us had he remained in Paris to
speak, and to leave us by his speeches some clue as to the revolution
through which his mind had passed.
Consider these contrasting pictures: Danton, up to the death of the
King, seems uniquely occupied in pursuing the threads of a very careful
diplomacy, and in welding as far as possible the opposing factions of
the Parliament. Of course, his general theories in politics remain
unaltered, but something has happened which makes him, on returning from
Belgium for the second time, pursue this different policy: the immediate
construction of a strong central government, and the providing of it
with exceptional and terrible machinery. He works this as absolutely the
unique policy. He seems to have forgotten all questions of diplomacy,
nearly to have despaired of settling the quarrel between Paris and
the Girondins. In fine, Danton, when first in power, had been a man
so representative of France as to have many different objects, and to
attempt their co-ordination. We see him the brief fortnight of Louis’s
execution violent, angry, unreasoning; we see him again in less than a
month transformed into a man with a single object, pursued and succeeded
in with the tenacity common to minds much narrower than his own.
I know that events will largely account for the change. The Girondins had
repelled him; diplomacy had no further object when once the universal war
was declared; the grave perils, and later the disasters of the French
armies, which he had seen with his own eyes, called imperatively for
a dictatorship. Nevertheless events will not of themselves account for
the very great transformation in all that he says and does. I believe
that we must look to another cause—one of those causes which historians
neglect, but which in the lives of individuals are of far more importance
than their political surroundings. By nature he had great tendencies to
indolence as well as to violence. He was capable of temporising to a
dangerous extent, and this, I think, was largely the cause of his action
in the autumn. But such natures are also of the kind which disaster spurs
to action. As we have seen, the return in January to his household,
ruined by an impending fate, made him the violent and bitter speaker who
spoiled his own plans by his own speeches. But returning from Belgium in
February, not a menace but a definite disaster awoke in him a much more
useful energy.
Coming from fields in which he had seen the whole force of the early
battles breaking up in confusion and retreat, he had suddenly to meet the
news of his wife’s death. He bought a light carriage for himself in order
to travel with greater speed, and arrived at the city in time, they say,
to have her coffin taken out of the grave and opened, so that he might
look once more upon her face. The home was entirely empty. The two little
children, one of whom was in arms, the other of whom was just beginning
to talk, had been taken away to their grandmother’s. The seals were on
the furniture and on the doors. One servant only remained. The house had
been without a fire for a week when he entered. It was an opportunity
and a command for another origin in his political life. Coming and going
from these rooms, he found them intolerable; he took refuge in direct
and determined action, calling to his aid all that vast reserve of
energy which he was accustomed to expend at the cost of so much future
exhaustion.
Here was the first thing to be done—to construct at once that strong and
simple government which he had talked of so long. The report which he and
the other commissioners had prepared on the state of the army[136] was
one deliberately intended to make such a government voted. The Commune of
Paris immediately after the preparation of the report made its vigorous
appeal for a further levy, and on the 8th of March Danton made the first
of those speeches which riveted the armour all round France.[137]
In the first phrase of this speech he strikes the note upon which
depended so much of his power. He reads his own character into that of
the nation. “We have often discovered before now that this is the temper
of the French people—namely, that it needs dangers to discover all its
energy.” Then he strikes the other note, the appeal to Paris which had
marked so much of his career. “Paris, which has been given so ill a fame”
(a stroke at the Girondins), “I say is called once more to give France
the impulse which last year produced all our triumphs. We promised the
army in Belgium 30,000 men on the 1st of February. None have reached
them. And I demand that commissioners be named to raise a force in the
forty-eight Sections of Paris.”
If there was some talk at that moment of making him Minister of War after
Beurnonville’s resignation, it was because no one but Danton himself
understood how much his energy could do. He rejected the proposal, but
he had the desire to replace the ministers themselves by a power more
formidable and more direct.
In these days one disaster after another came to help his scheme. More
than one of his enemies had suspected in a vague fashion that he was
framing a new power,[138] but they could not imagine in Danton anything
higher than ambition, and they lent him the ridiculous project of
forcing a new ministry upon the Assembly. What he was really preparing,
and what he produced on the 10th of March, was the weapon which history
has called the Revolutionary Tribunal.
It was the moment when the mutterings against the Girondins seemed about
to take the form of an insurrection, when their printing presses were
broken, and when, in the vague panic that always followed any popular
movement since September, men feared a renewal of the massacres. The
proposal is put forward with ability of argument rather than with
passion; but, in the teeth of the majority and a ministry to which such
methods were detestable, in the teeth, that is, of the Girondin idealism
which was ruining the country, he affirmed the necessity of his scheme,
and he passed it.[139] He had given the Revolutionary Government its
first great weapon, a weapon that was later to be turned against himself;
his second move was to put it into vigorous hands.
This next proposition, which, combined with the establishment of the
Revolutionary Tribunal, was to change the history of France, did not
proceed from Danton alone, but it was based upon Danton’s suggestion;
it sprang largely from the vivid impression he had given of the peril
in which France lay and of the necessity of forming something central
and strong, of providing a hand which could use the dictatorship of
the Terror. The Committee of Public Safety, in a word, could not have
been declared but for the interpretation which Danton had given to the
disasters of March.
The crowning defeat of Neerwinden, which at the time must almost have
seemed the death of the Republic, gave the first impulse. The old
Committee of General Defence was renewed. But though this committee was
far too large and far too feeble, we owe it to Danton that it contained
a vigorous minority from the Left. The final blow that replaced it by an
institution round which the rest of this book will turn was the treason
of Dumouriez.
Let us consider what the situation was at this moment. The Republic had
lost every man upon whose ability she could rely in the leadership of
armies. Of all the school of generals who had grown up under the old
regime, Lafayette alone in his weak way had loved freedom, and Dumouriez
alone had remained on the side of the French. Spain, England, the German
Powers—nine allies—were threatening the territory of the Republic and the
very existence of the new regime; the civil war, which was soon to take
such gigantic proportions, had already made its successful beginning at
Machecoul. Between the Convention and immediate disaster there lay only
the personality of Dumouriez. When the news of his desertion, following
on the news of his defeat, reached Paris, the Girondins were hopelessly
discredited, and the line of their political retreat, the pursuit of
their enemies, ran in a direction that Danton’s speeches had prepared.
For several days he had himself been the object of the most violent
attacks, especially for his friendship with Dumouriez and on the question
of the Belgian accounts. For he had just returned from a third mission
to the army, and had been close to the general. On the 1st of April
practically the whole sitting was devoted to an attack upon him and to
his defence. Had you been sitting in the house that night, you would
have said that a violent demagogue, surrounded by a little group of yet
more violent friends, was resisting with some difficulty the attacks
of an honest and loyal majority. But this demagogue was so far-seeing,
was so much the greatest of all those in the hall, that when three days
afterwards the Parliament was brought face to face with the reality,
Danton’s method becomes the only solution. They hear of Dumouriez’
treason, and on the night of the 4th of April, Isnard, himself a
Girondin, proposed the creation of the Committee. Danton supported him at
midnight with a definite speech such as no Girondin would have dared to
make. He said practically, “This Committee is precisely what we want, a
hand to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”
It was Isnard that formulated the idea, but it was Danton that baptised
it “A Dictator.” It was at midnight that he spoke, and he closed his
short speech just on the turn of the morning of the 5th of April. That
very day a year later the Dictator seized him, and his own Tribunal put
him to death.
On the 5th of April, the next day, in the evening, we begin to get those
large measures and rapid which came with the new organ of power. And
Danton speaks with a kind of joy, and demands at once such measures as
only a dictatorship can produce—calling all the people to the defence,
fixing a maximum upon the price of bread, even the first mention of a
levée _en masse_. The air is full of such a spirit as you get in an army,
the certitude that with discipline and unity and authority all things
can be done. On the following day, the 6th, the Committee was chosen,
and on the 7th the names were read out, which showed that the power had
finally passed from the Girondins to those whom they had rejected at the
moment when France was forgiving everything for the sake of Jemappes. The
Convention, in need of men of action, had been forced to abandon its own
leaders and to turn to Danton.
The names that they heard read out were Barrère, Delmas, Bréard, Debry,
Morvaux, Cambon, Treilhard, Lacroix, and Danton.