THE TERROR
From the 6th April 1793, from the act which was described at the end of
the last chapter, we have something new in the course of the Revolution.
We have at last an Institution.
It is in the nature of the French people (for reasons which might to
some extent be determined, but whose discussion has no place in this
book) that their history should present itself in a peculiarly dramatic
fashion. Their adventures, their illusions, their violence, their
despair, their achievements, seem upon a hundred occasions to centre
round particular men or certain conspicuous actions, in such a fashion
that those men and these actions fit themselves into a story, the plot
and interest of which absorb the reader. But if we attempt to connect
the whole into a series, even if we attempt to give the causes or the
meaning of a few years’ events, the dramatic aspect fails. This quality,
which has fascinated so many, has also mistaught us and confused us, and,
in the desire to “throw the limelight” upon the centre of action, one
historian after another has left in obscurity that impersonal blind force
which directs the whole.
This force in France is the Institution. Understand the character and
methods of her central power, and you find yourself possessed of this
great key to the understanding of her history, namely, that events follow
each other in the order that the Institution requires, and the nation
moves along the lines which the Institution determines. The Institution
provides a standpoint from which all falls into perspective, even the
details of personality no longer remain in confusion. You find, in a
little while, that you are dealing with an organism more simple and of
far greater vitality than any man, as truly a living, and much more truly
a permanent, force than a monarch or a great minister can be.
The consideration of half-a-dozen examples will make this clear. What
is all that marvellously dramatic action between Pepin le Bref and the
coronation of Hugh but confusion? It ceases to be so when we follow with
Fustel de Coulanges the transformation of the Imperial system. You can
make nothing of the tenth and eleventh centuries, for all their personal
interest, until you have grasped Feudalism, and it is a common-place that
the six hundred years that follow are but the development of the Capetian
method. It is not in Louis the XI., or in Mazarin, or in Louis XIV. that
we find the Force—it is in the French monarchy. Look about you at the
present day, ask yourself what has recreated the prosperity of modern
France, and you will certainly not be able to find a special man. It is
the System that has done the work.
Now it is the note of all the Revolution, as we have followed it up to
this point, that the Institution was lacking. France without it was
France without herself: she dissolved. The cause of this lack was as
follows: The monarchy, round which everything had centred, was dying, and
the social theories of the time—the great Philosophy on which France was
fed—neglected and despised the Institution, relying as it did upon the
vague force of general opinion. It was the chief—I had almost said the
only—fault of the Jeffersonians in America and the idealist Republicans
in France, that they could see neither the necessity of formulæ nor the
just power of systems. Nevertheless it was the instinct which remained
in the French mind, the “sub-conscious” sense of what the Institution
was to France, that made half the violence of the time. I do not mean
that the speeches recognised this character openly—on the contrary, the
enmities and the divisions seem to turn entirely upon personal hatreds;
but I mean that the underlying fear, unexpressed but real, was that
such and such a proposition would create a permanent tendency, and that
Girondin or Jacobin success meant the deflection of the torrent into one
or the other of two divergent channels. Here in England, living under an
order which is well established and old, we wonder at the intensity of
passion which some abstract resolution could arouse in the Convention.
We should wonder no longer were we to comprehend that in the extreme
rapidity with which all France was being remoulded, a few words agreed
upon, a mere principle, might add a quality to all the future history of
the nation.
Two men in the Revolutionary period rose higher than the flood, Mirabeau
and Danton. Each was able to perceive what the permanent character of
the nation was, and each gave all his efforts to the uniting or welding
round some stable centre the new order to which both were attached. In
a word, each understood what the Institution was to France, and desired
to lend it force and endurance. With Mirabeau it was the monarchy. Would
he have saved, recreated, and restored that declining power which had
once been the framework of the nation? We cannot tell. Had he lived, ’92
would have shown us; only we know that if the monarchy had seemed to
him at last beyond repair, he would have proposed at once some similar
power to replace it. Now Danton had survived; doubtful in 1791, “more
monarchist than you, M. de Lafayette,” he was determined in 1792 that the
crown and France were separate for ever. He overthrew the palace, but
from that very moment all his policy was directed to the construction of
a governing power. It is here that he and the Girondins, for all his
personal attempts at unity, were hopelessly divided. The Girondins were
bent upon that local autonomy and that extreme individual liberty in
which the central power disappears. With the growing danger, with his own
experience of Belgium, Danton, during the early part of 1793, becomes
set upon the idea of government and of nothing else. He gave it a weapon
before it existed, for he made the Revolutionary Tribunal, and though
Isnard first proposed it, it is known that Danton led the movement which
ended in the establishment of the Committee.
All government since that time in France has been its heir. It was
the Committee that forged the centralised system, that showed how the
administration might radiate from Paris, that gave precedent for the
conscription and for all determined action. That dictatorship so plainly
saved the country in its worst peril that under many different names the
French people have often recalled it, and rarely without success.
All the remaining year with which this chapter must deal is the story
of the Committee. The Committee explains and gives us the clue to
every action. Its changes, the men who dominated it, the reasons it
had for violence or for clemency, its main object of throwing back the
invasions—these are the central part of 1793 and 1794.
Had we an accurate account of what passed in that secret council, almost
every event could be referred to it. But such an account is lacking.
Barrère, always inconsistent, wrote a rigmarole in his old age which has
anecdotes of interest, but which is almost valueless for our purpose.
Here and there we have a disconnected anecdote or a lame confession,
but the doors of the room are as closed to us as they were to the
contemporaries who stood in the outer hall and received the official
nothings of Barrère, or later of St. Just. Nevertheless what we can
reconstruct of its spirit and action, imperfect as our effort may be,
does more to explain the time than any descriptions of the orators or of
the crowd.
* * * * *
The action of this new executive, as it touches Danton, changes rapidly
during the year. In the first Committee of nine Danton is everything.
He made it and he directs it. Towards the close, however, of its short
existence, he is beginning to feel the pressure of the Jacobins, and of
Robespierre and of St. Just, the victory of the Mountain. This loss of
power on his part ends with the dissolution of the old Committee, and
when the new one is formed—with the 10th of July—another period begins.
The members are increased to twelve; then enter the Robespierrians.
Danton, for motives which we shall discuss later, resigns, and there are
two doubtful summer months when he still maintains, from without, the
power of the Committee, but first begins to check so far as is possible
the tyranny upon which it has embarked. He retires in a kind of despair
to Arcis, and with his return a new phase is entered. The Committee
is striking furiously; the Terror has taken root; and by an action of
generosity, or perhaps of wisdom, Danton sets himself against his own
creation. These few months—the winter of 1793-1794—give us that side of
Danton which at the time was least explicable, but which best defines
him for posterity. He puts his whole weight as an orator, and, through
the genius of his friends, he puts the journals also against the Terror.
Knowing (as he must have known) how strong was the engine he had made,
he yet withstands it, and attempts by a purely personal force, without
an organisation and without executive power, to reduce the action of
the Committee. So great was he that for some weeks his success hung
in the balance. France, we must presume, was with him. Paris doubted,
but might have been won. When the violent and unscrupulous Hébertists
were executed he seemed to have succeeded, and the Terror appeared to
be closed. But the Committee had a deeper policy; in the same week that
saw the fall of Hébert, Danton was himself suddenly arrested with his
friends. How far Robespierre permitted and how far directed the action
will never be fully known. The Committee struck the one great force
opposed to it, and the Dantonists were executed on the anniversary of its
creation.
* * * * *
The first part of the story of the Committee in its relation to Danton is
the period between April the 6th and July the 10th 1793. It is the period
of the fall of the Girondins; and to make clear the importance of the new
power I shall adopt this method:—
To give first in their order the events that led to the attack on the
Parliament and the expulsion of the twenty-two; to show in what confusion
the whole story lies, and how difficult (or impossible) it is to follow
the motives of the deputies, or to say why they acted as they did. Then
to give, as a parallel account, the position and action of the Committee,
and to show how fully (in my opinion) its motive determines the history
of the time; to look at the insurrection of June 2 from the room where
the nine members debated in secret, and to point out how, from that
standpoint (which was Danton’s own), the confusion falls into order.
First, then, what was the exterior history of the movement that destroyed
the Gironde? It will be remembered that when the Convention first met
in September, the great majority of its numbers inclined to a certain
spirit. That spirit was best represented by a small group of men,
idealists and orators—and of these a number, the most powerful perhaps,
had come from the vineyards of the peaceable southern river. The warmth,
the calm, the fruitfulness of the Valley of the Gironde, appeared in
Vergniaud’s accents. To this devoted band of men, whose whole career was
justice and virtue, no one has dared to be contemptuous, and history on
every side has left them heroes. They were own brothers to the immortal
group that framed the American Constitution, the true heirs of Rousseau,
and worthy to defend and at last to give their lives for the Republican
idea. They hated the shedding of blood; they tested every action by the
purest standard of their creed; and from the first speeches in which
they demanded the war, to the day when they sang the Marseillaise on the
scaffold, they did not swerve an inch from the path which they had set
before themselves.
What led such men into conflict with Paris, and perhaps with France? This
fault: that the pure theory which they justly maintained to be the one
right government could not meet Europe in arms. What a few millions lost
on the littoral of the American continent could do, without frontiers and
without memories, that France could not do with civil war raging, and
with the world invading her frontiers. A modification was imperative,
a compromise with necessary evil. The men who felt reality knew that
well. Danton had forced on a dictatorship, and gave it the method of
the Terror. But the Girondins, though they had been compelled to give
up so much, yet refused to follow the necessary path. They refused the
conscription; a volunteer army was the only one tolerable to free men.
They refused diplomacy; it involved a secret method, and was of its
nature based on compromise. They refused the requisitions to the armies,
the forced taxes, the hegemony of Paris, the preponderance of talent or
genius in the committees—in a word, they refused to sanction anything,
however necessary, in that crisis, which they would not have sanctioned
in a time of order and of a pure republic.
The result of this sublime obstinacy was the ruin of France and of
themselves. The Royalists saw it, and called themselves “Girondins;” the
great name became a label for every reaction, and in every new disaster
Paris saw with increasing clearness the restraining hand of the Gironde.
For it was Paris and its Commune that took the leadership in the attempt
to depose or expel the men who led the Parliament. Already before the
Committee had been formed, the Commune on April the 2nd had begun to
correspond with the municipalities of France—the fatal step that had so
often preceded insurrection. To Paris as a centre, to Paris radical, and
especially to Paris violent and unreasoning, the Girondins had grown
detestable. Paris for a thousand years had stood for unity—the Girondins
were autonomist and federal. Paris was passionate—the Girondins as calm
as light. To all this enmity the Gironde answered by no force, but only
by an assertion of their inviolable right. All April and May is consumed
in the tale of great disasters without, and of the acute battle between
the Right and the deputation from Paris within.
It is when we turn to this struggle within the Convention that the
confusion arises which can only be made clear by considering the
Committee. Especially is this the case with regard to Danton’s action.
Thus, on the 10th of April, he opposes the prosecution of those who sent
a petition from the Halle aux Blés for the resignation of Roland; on the
13th there is the famous speech in favour of diplomatic action as opposed
to the violence of the Mountain. Yet the day before he also opposed in
a formal and well-reasoned speech the arrest and trial of Marat. When
that madman, with whom his name had been so often linked, came back in
triumph from his acquittal, Danton took a yet more inexplicable attitude.
While all the Mountain were shouting for joy, and while Paris welcomed
the verdict as the first wound of the Gironde (which, indeed, it was),
Danton merely said, “Paris, we see, so loves the Convention as to applaud
the acquittal of one of its members”—a very transparent speech. On the
1st of May Danton is the only man to speak with sobriety and good sense
against the petition of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which attacked the
rights of property; yet on the 10th he turns against Isnard, that is,
against the Gironde and the Moderates, and causes the proposal of what
was practically a popular referendum on the constitution to be rejected.
We see, therefore, even when we look at the action of Danton alone, the
apparent confusion that was indicated above. Were we to turn to almost
any other of the Committee the same would be apparent. Barrère, the chief
spokesman, seems to take now one side, now the other. At one moment he
attacks the Girondins purposely; at another the petitions from Paris; at
every point, in the action of every prominent speaker outside the two
opposing groups, there appears this inextricable tangle.
With the 10th of May the battle between Paris and the Gironde entered
into its last phase. It was upon this date that the Convention began to
sit permanently in the little theatre of the Tuilleries, where they had
first met. The news that met them was the death of Dampierre and the
taking of Thouars by the Vendeans. Every rumour of disaster (and the
rumours were being confirmed with fatal rapidity) was like oil spilt
from the lamp of the Gironde. Their own followers were shaken, the great
mass of the Convention who put their trust in these pure doctrines grew
afraid and doubtful. Within a week (on the 17th) the Commune took a
further step; they made their own law, and put Boulanger at the head
of the armed force of the town—a force that was not theirs to govern.
Later they gave Henriot the place. The Convention answered by electing
Isnard their president; and Guadet, the headstrong, proposed to break the
Commune, and to call the “suppliants” to Bourges. By this proposal a
kind of Parliament in reserve would have existed to take up the work if
the Parliament in Paris should be mutilated. Had the motion passed, the
civil war, which was muttering in Lyons and had broken into open flame in
Vendée, would have embraced all France.
But at this juncture Danton’s Committee comes in again with its curiously
mixed action. By the mouth of Barrère it pleads against the motion, and
proposes instead the appointment of twelve members, as Girondin as they
pleased, to judge the Commune, to “inquire.” The commission was named,
and acted on thorough principle and with haste, and without judgment, as
any one might have foretold; for such was the Girondin weakness. Against
the army that the Commune was gathering, all it could propose was to
double the sergeant’s guard at the Tuilleries, while it exasperated its
enemy by ordering the arrest of Hébert.
Hébert was the one man in the Revolution of whom the truth has certainly
been told by enemies. There was something of the pickpocket in Hébert,
but not of the pickpocket only. He was also a blasphemer, an atheist,
a man delighting in the foulest words, and in the most cowardly or
ferocious of actions. His prominence was due to two things. First, he
was the pamphleteer of the time, the “Père Duchesne.” France had not
yet discovered the danger of a free press. Secondly, in the Parisian
exasperation against “the Moderates,” the most extreme and the least
rational became of necessity a kind of symbol, an accentuated type, and
was thrust forward as a defiance. It is not too much to say that the
Girondins themselves, by their lack of all measure, pushed Hébert to the
front.
Such measures as those which “the twelve” had decreed were but fuel for
the insurrectionary flame. Once more Danton appears, this time against
the Gironde. To the demand for a large guard drawn from the Departments
he said, “You are decreeing that you are afraid!” Whereupon a voice from
the right cried with some humour, “I am.” Danton had his way, the guard
was not formed, and on the following day (the 25th of May) Isnard’s
imprudence brought on the catastrophe.
It was in the matter of the petition for the release of Hébert. Isnard
rose in the chair, lifted his hand, and pronounced in his hollow voice
the words that have enriched history at the expense of his country: “If
such a thing should happen as an attempt upon the representatives of the
nation, I say to you, in the name of all France, that very soon men would
search upon the banks of the Seine for proofs that Paris had once been
there.” Danton intervened, but he could do nothing. The glove had been
thrown down. He asked for the withdrawal of those words; the Girondin
majority reaffirmed them. Two days later he obtained the freedom of
Hébert; but though for a moment he was promised the dissolution of the
“Commission of the Twelve,” his effort failed, for they were immediately
reinstated. In the night between the 30th and the 31st of May the
Sections named a new and insurrectionary Commune; for one day the danger
was warded off, and you may see Danton, still so difficult to understand,
urging the Committee, while Barrère is proposing the conciliatory message
to France, a document which blamed neither the Girondins nor Paris, and
the twelve were dissolved. But the final blow was not to be avoided.
On the 2nd of June the news of the counter-revolution in Lyons reached
Paris. The Convention was surrounded; Henriot, at the head of the city
militia, guarded its approaches, lined the corridors. Even in that
moment, when Isnard proposed to retire, and made his superb apology, the
Gironde, as a whole, stood firm. The inflexible Jansenist, Lanjuinais,
proposed, with heroic folly, “a decree dissolving the authorities of
Paris,” at a moment when these very authorities were holding the doors
with fixed bayonets; but in spite of Barrère’s demand for Henriot’s
condemnation, in spite of Danton’s demand for “a signal punishment,” the
Convention yielded, voted the arrest not only of the twenty-two, whom
the Commune had demanded, but of twenty-nine, and Vergniaud, Barbaroux,
Guadet; Le Brun, and Clavière (who were nominally ministers); Roland (who
had fled, and whose wife was imprisoned by the Commune)—in fine, the
whole body of those great orators who had made the Republic—were thrust
out of the Assembly, some to be held in the honourable confinement of
their own houses, some to fly and raise civil war in the Departments.
The Commune offered hostages in equal number, but they were refused; and
before the day was over the Parliament was mutilated, and the obstacle to
the dictatorship and to the Terror had been swept away.
Such is a rapid summary of the fall of the Girondins—a story of
contradictions and of inextricable cross-purposes, in which for two
months men seem (especially the men of the new Committee) to change
sides, to hesitate, and to falter, in which the majority passes over to
the Jacobins with a startling rapidity, and in which (apparently) the
only two fixed points are the immovable figures of the Gironde and their
opponents of the Commune.
I know that this confusion has commonly led writers to adopt an equal
confusion in their explanation of the insurrection and of its motives. To
disentangle such a skein it was apparently necessary to make Robespierre
a prophet, Isnard for once a coward, Barrère a skilful diplomatist,
Danton a vacillator. Such a method appears to me false. If, to explain
a difficult passage in history, we make men behave in a way which
contradicts all their lives, we must (it seems to me) be in error. These
special theories are mechanical, and do not satisfy the mind.
The question is this: Somewhere a power existed; why was not that power
in evidence either on one side or on the other? And why do we not see it
acting? I believe the answer is as follows:—
The power was in the Committee. The Committee believed it necessary to be
rid of the Girondins. But the Committee was part of the Convention—the
existence and the authority of the Convention was necessary to it. It
saw on the one hand a set of Parliamentary leaders who would not permit
it to act with vigour, on the other it noted the angry spirit of Paris.
The Committee permitted that spirit to act, but gave it its measure and
its direction unknown to itself, desiring to eliminate the Moderates,
but anxious to avoid their proscription, exile, or death. With this clue
the maze seems to me resolved. It was the Committee that expelled the
Gironde, using Paris for its arm.
Now to prove this certain steps are necessary. In the first place, why
can we say that the Committee was the centre of power? Because it alone
had access to a complete knowledge of France, it alone debated in secret,
and it alone existed for the express purpose of dictatorship. When once
the generals, the deputies in mission, and the police became familiar
with the new organ, they referred to the Committee as naturally as the
corresponding men to-day would refer to a cabinet or to a monarch. If
the reader will glance at any portion of the document which is printed
as Appendix XI. of this book, and to which I shall continually refer in
this passage, he will at once perceive that the men who drew it up had
in their hands every lever of public machinery. I would not maintain
that this power sprang at once into existence on the 6th of April,
but the two months that produced such a report was ample time to have
developed a corresponding grasp upon the armies, upon the diplomacy, and
upon the internal resources of Revolutionary France. Where else will
you find such a document in all the offices of the time? Compared with
it the decisions of the ministry are vague abstractions, the reports
of the Commune puerilities or ravings. Revolutionary France, until the
formation of the Committee, may be compared to a marsh in which the water
tends to flow to no one centre; the information, the revenue, the public
forces stood incoherent and stagnant. The creation of this secret body
may be compared to a pit dug in its centre, to which the waters would
immediately flow. It may be objected that they had not the control of
finance. No; but they had Cambon. In an assembly of men new to government
this very difficult province fell of itself into the hands of a man whose
genius all admitted, and whose probity no one of his enemies would deny.
Long before the insurrection took place, any man with information, with
authority, or with a special duty to perform, had learnt to regard the
Committee as his chief, for the simple reason that no other centre of
authority existed. Add to this the incalculable force of secrecy, the
power by which the most glaring failures of our cabinets can be hidden
by merely saying, “We know what all the rest ignore,” and it will appear
reasonable to say that by June the Committee could almost, had it wished,
have summoned an army to Paris. The Committee then held the power.
In the second place, we must establish, as far as is possible, the aims
of the Committee and their method of guiding the insurrection. As was
said earlier in this chapter, those aims and methods can only be arrived
at by inference; the very nature of a body that deliberates in secret
makes this method of inquiry necessary. There is no direct evidence,
unless the contradictory anecdotes of a much later period can be given
that name. Now we can infer with some accuracy what went on in their
deliberations. There should be noted at the outset the document to which
I have already referred, and which, if I am not mistaken, is printed
for the first time in this book. It was the first of those general
Rapports which were delivered by Barrère to the Convention for the next
sixteen months, and which so profoundly affected the course of the
Revolution. It sums up the result of two months of astonishing labour;
everything—all the weakness of France—has been noted with the accuracy
of a topographical survey. It gives the equipment, the provisioning,
the local difficulties of each army, the detailed condition of the
fleet (a most deplorable picture), the result of what is evidently
an elaborate spy-system in the department of foreign intrigue, and
everywhere the indictment is obvious—“whatever has governed France
hitherto has hopelessly failed.” There are, indeed, polite references to
the ineptitude of the old regime, but side by side with these there is a
direct attack on the Girondin Ministers of War, and on the diplomatic,
or rather non-diplomatic, methods which had been pursued abroad; indeed,
many parts of this report would not be out of place had they appeared
in a Compte Rendu drawn up by the victorious insurrection, instead of
preceding, as they did, the fall of the Gironde.
Again, there is the date of its appearance. It was not by a coincidence
that Barrère was given it to read on the 29th of May. Note this sequence.
Isnard made his fatal speech on Saturday the 25th. Monday the 27th was
the date of Danton’s attempt to dissolve “the twelve;” and his failure
followed on Tuesday the 28th, when, by the blindness or firmness of the
Gironde, they were reinstated. It is on Wednesday the 29th that Barrère
rises at the end of a long and stormy discussion, and, late in the
afternoon, presents his report. The vague phrases on the importance of
unity which it contains have made some imagine that it was an attempt at
conciliation, rapidly devised and thrown out at that critical moment.
That opinion is surely erroneous. It is long (some 17,000 words) and
carefully prepared; it must have taken some time to draw up, and it has
all the appearance of a weapon framed at leisure and held in reserve;
it comes at that moment with some such force as this, saying from the
Committee, from Danton, to the Gironde—“You have refused to do what
France absolutely needed. You have rejected my attempts to save you, the
avenues which I opened for your escape; you were given the commission of
twelve; you have fatally abused the gift. Will you be convinced at the
last moment by this picture of the terrible straits to which you have
brought the nation?”
Finally, we can draw a fairly conclusive set of proofs from our knowledge
of the men in the Committee and of the public action they took. Of
all the nine, Danton was the one commanding personality. Cambon was
a specialist, and but for him and Lindet, honest but not an orator,
there were Danton and his men only. Barrère, it may be urged, was not
a Dantonist; but he was pliant to a degree; his pliancy is notorious,
and has ignorantly been given a still worse name. Moreover, Barrère was
closeted with Danton day after day; they undertook the same department in
the Committee (that of foreign affairs), and they follow exactly the same
course in the tribune. In the Department of War was Delacroix, Danton’s
friend and right hand. Of the report itself, all the last part, and
possibly some paragraphs in the middle, were drawn up by Danton. Later we
shall see that his preponderance was notorious and a danger to him.
Well, Danton and the Committee being so nearly identical, can we make a
description of the motive that urged him? I think we can. Desmoulin’s
“Histoire des Brissottins” was certainly not of Danton’s inspiration.
Camille wrote that deadly pamphlet under the eye of Robespierre. But
Fabre d’Eglantine at the Jacobins, on May the 1st, calling on the
Girondins “to go, and return when all is settled,” is almost using
Danton’s own phrase—“Qu’ils s’en aillent, et qu’ils revennent profiter
de notre victoire.” All that he and Barrère say, from then to the day of
June the 2nd, seems to fall under this formula. He permits the attack of
the Commune, while he does everything to moderate its force. He speaks
continually for the defence, but he and his Committee refuse to act, and
if ever he has spoken a little too strongly, has given the Girondins
a little too much power, he retreats somewhat towards the Commune. He
resembles a man who is opening a sluice in a dyke of the fen country:
behind him is the sea; he admits and plays with its power, but unless his
calculation is just it may rush in and overwhelm him. He permitted Paris
to strike, and he created a tyranny; both the mob of the capital and the
dictatorship were destined to break from his hands.
These are, as I read them, the causes of the fall of the Girondins. I
have dealt with them at this length because the passage from the 31st of
May to the 2nd of June 1793 is not only one of the most fiercely debated,
but also one of the most important in the history of the Revolution. I
have not given it too much space, for upon the understanding of what led
to and what permitted the insurrection depends, without any question, our
final judgment on Danton’s position.
Here, then, the Committee, even in its infancy, furnishes the clue to
a difficult passage in the Revolution. It is becoming more and more
necessary as research progresses to refer the mysteries of the period
to that central body; and, as it seems to me, we have in its first
general report the first explanation of that most complex movement, the
insurrection of the 2nd of June.
The Gironde having disappeared, there was left before Danton a task of
extreme difficulty. He was about to attempt the management of men whom
he deliberately permitted to engage in battle. It is of the very first
importance in our study of his career to appreciate the conditions of
this task. Consider for a moment what he has done. He has by arguments,
by threats, and finally by the use of the mob, made the Revolutionary
Government a reality. It is in this last ally that we find the cause
of his future failure. Hitherto he has been battling with particular
men, preventing a small group of politicians from obstructing the
Revolutionary measures, cajoling on the other hand the extreme members
of the Convention by calculated outbursts of sympathy. Such a task no
one would find impossible, did he possess at once a clear object and the
genius to approach it. But after the 2nd of June it was another matter.
He had let loose the storm, and with the pride of a man who felt his
strength inwards and outwards (for scheming and for haranguing), he had
determined deliberately to ride it. It was a miscalculation. Something
resembling a natural force, something like an earthquake or a lava
stream, opposed itself to his mere individual will; and Danton, who among
the politicians had been like a man among boys, became in the presence of
these new forces like a lonely traveller struggling at evening against
a growing tempest in the mountains. From this moment we shall see him
using in vain against the passions of 1793 the ability, the ruse, the
eloquence, the energy which had so long succeeded among the statesmen.
They will be swept down like driftwood upon the current of popular
madness which he himself has let loose. The Committee will be formed of
new members, the Terror will grow from day to day, the Revolution will
begin to take on that character of fanaticism which was directly opposed
to Danton’s plan, and he will retire disappointed and beaten. He will
return frankly out of sympathy with the excesses, and in expiation of
that fault of sanity he will die.
The months in which he fights this losing battle are the hot months
of 1793. I will not deny that during this summer his name is more
conspicuous than at any period of his life. I will admit that if we deal
with history as a spectacle, the climax of 1793 should be distinguished
by his voice and presence. But it is this fascination of the picturesque
which has made his life inexplicable, and a biographer dares not leave
it so. Although June, July, and August are full of his speeches, his
warning, and even his energy, yet I say that he was day after day losing
his hold and slipping. He is conspicuous because in the face of such
disaster he redoubled his energy; but even that redoubled energy is
dwarfed in the face of the spirit that animated the Terror.
First with regard to June: it was still a period of hope, and he still
thought himself the master. He had added to the Committee, not thinking
them dangerous, but as a kind of sop, five members of the Mountain. Among
them were two who were to prove the ruin of his whole system—Couthon and
St. Just. Perhaps to temper their action, perhaps merely because he was a
friend, he included Hérault de Séchelles. The names were typical of what
was to happen in 1794, when, by the power of St. Just, Hérault was to be
thrust out of the Committee and sent to die with Danton himself.
Unconscious of what this addition would lead to, unconscious also of what
echoes the 2nd of June might arouse in the provinces, Danton pursued
his path as though the insurrection had been but one event of many. The
minister Le Brun was brought by his guards day after day to aid in the
discussions, and taken back to the custody of his own house. One might
have thought that the “moral insurrection” of which Robespierre had
talked had led only to a “moral suppression” of the Girondins. Moreover,
the whole of these days of June are full of Danton’s yet remaining
supremacy. He goes on with his two principal methods, namely, a strong
secret government and moderation in the application of its tyranny, as
though the situation was his to mould at his will. Thus, on the 8th, he
says with regard to the decree against foreigners: “I will show you such
and such an alien established in France who is much more of a patriot
than many Frenchmen. I say to you, therefore, that while the principle
of watching foreigners is good, you should send this proposal to the
Committee and let it be discussed there.” Again, two days later, he
refuses to admit the violent attitude of the Mountain towards Bordeaux.
He even praises that city at a time when it was practically in rebellion,
to defend its proscribed members. Within the same week he continues to
talk of La Vendée as the only centre of insurrection. He continues to
be the Danton of old, although the Girondins are raising the standard
of civil war on every side, and he maintains that continuous effort and
compromise which had saved so much in the autumn of 1792, and which could
do so little now.
Within the Committee they framed the Constitution of 1793—that great
monument of democracy, which never took its place in history, nor ever
affected the lives of men. It stands like an idol of great beauty which
travellers find in a desert place; its religion has disappeared from
the earth; no ruins surround it; in the day when it was put up the
men who raised it were driven from what should have been the centre
of their adoration. That Danton was still in power when the result
was debated in the Parliament during the third week of the month is
evident from two things: first, that the Constitution, with its broad
guarantees of individual liberty and of local autonomy, with its liberal
spirit, so nearly approaching the great dream of Condorcet, so opposed
to the narrow fanaticism of the Jacobins, was definitely intended to
appease the growing passions of civil war. Two-thirds of France, of the
country-sides at least, was arming because Paris had dared to touch
the representatives of the nation. The Constitution was thrown like a
hostage; the men who saw the necessity for a dictatorship said virtually,
“The violence that offends you is only for a moment. Here is what we
desire with the return of peace.” And the document so responded to the
heart of France that it succeeded.
The second proof that Danton had still hold of the reins is to be found
in this: that the advice which he gives during the discussions on the
Constitution is not that of violence, nor of flattery, but of moderate
common-sense; and of such advice which the Convention accepts the best
example is to be found in the speech on the power of making war. It was a
difficult thing to convince the Assembly, in those days of abstractions,
that the nation, as a whole, could not exercise such a right without
hopeless confusion. Yet Danton had his way. This month of June, then,
which was so full of terrible internal danger, during which Buzot had
raised a Girondin army sixty miles from Paris, during which Normandy was
in full revolt, during which Lyons had attacked the Republic, and during
which the counter-Revolution seemed on the point of breaking out—this
month was still Danton’s own. He was secure in his public position, for
the very conquerors of the 2nd of June, the violent extremists, could not
prevent him from exercising his diplomacy abroad and his pacificatory
compromise in domestic affairs.
He was also secure in that which mattered so much more to him—I mean in
his home. His mind had sufficiently steadied after the shock that had
maddened him in February for him to follow the advice which his dead wife
had left him. On the 17th of June he re-married. The woman was not suited
to Danton. She did not love him, nor probably did he love her. There were
two young children, whom, in the winter, his first wife, finding herself
to be dying, felt she was leaving orphans. The eldest was only three
years old. This good woman, Catholic and devout, knowing her husband, and
the sheer necessity for a home which his character had shown, determined
on a religious education for her sons, and determined on a Catholic woman
to be about her husband. She urged him to marry her younger friend,
Mdlle. Gély. An incident, which is doubtful, but which, on the whole,
I accept, does not seem to me to prove the violence of an uncontrolled
affection, but, on the contrary, to show a kind of indifference, as
though Danton said to himself, “The thing must be done, and had better be
done so as to offend the family as little as possible.” I mean the story
of his marriage before a non-juring priest. At any rate, that marriage
shows an element of determination and security. He was still master of
his fortunes and of himself.
But he had called up a spirit too strong for him. July was to prove it.
June, which had seen the rise of the Girondin insurrection, had also seen
its partial appeasement and suppression. It was, as we have said, the
Constitution, hurriedly improvised for this purpose, that had been the
main cause of such a success, but there remained for July, more dangerous
than ever, the foreign invasion and the three outstanding strongholds of
the civil war—Lyons, Toulon, and La Vendée. It was against them and their
growing success, against the rebels and the invaders, that the Terror was
serviceable, and it was on account of their continual progress that the
Terror assumed such fearful proportions.
I said earlier in this chapter that Danton inaugurating and strengthening
the dictatorship of the Revolutionary Government was like a man
deliberately opening a sluice behind which was the whole sea. There
was an element of uncertainty upon the chances of which he had staked
the success of his effort, and, with the reverses, he soon discovered
that the forces which he had let loose were going beyond him. It may be
that he thought the results of the 2nd of June would be more immediate
than they were. As a fact, it took many months to recover the position
which the supineness of the Girondins had lost. In those months the
Revolutionary Government crystallised, as it were, became permanent, and
fell into the hands of the extremists.
On the very day that the Norman insurrection was crushed at Vernon, a
Norman girl stabbed Marat. It is not within the scope of this book to
deal at any great length with the fate of the man whom Danton had called
“l’individu.” That most striking and picturesque episode concerns us
only in this matter, that it was a powerful impetus to the system of
the Terror, and such an one as Danton, with all his judgment, could not
possibly have foreseen. Moreover, on the very day that Marat was killed,
the allied forces entered Warsaw, and there can be no doubt that the
success of this infamy gave them a freer hand morally, at least upon the
French frontier. Mayence fell, and its fall cost the life of Josephine’s
first husband. The Allies had crossed the Rhine. Five days later, on the
28th of July, Valenciennes fell. At the same moment the Spaniards were
pouring in east and west of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese had crossed
the Alps. From a little press in Newcastle (the family of the printer
yet remain to tell the tale), Pitt was drawing the thousands of forged
assignats to ruin the Republic. Five foreign armies were occupying the
territory of France, and late in the following month the Spanish and
English fleets were admitted to the harbour and arsenal of Toulon. Let
it then be granted that, with the possible exception of the Roman power
after Cannæ, no power in history was ever so near destruction as was
Revolutionary France in that summer.
Let us see how the misfortunes of the country reacted upon the
position of Danton. Already, with early July, he felt himself pressed
and constrained by the growing power of the Jacobin doctrine and of
its high priest. His system of conciliation, his attempts (in large
part successful) to coax rather than to defeat the insurrection, were
violently criticised in the debate of the 4th. The anger against the
Girondins, which the death of Marat was to increase to so violent a
degree, produced the report of St. Just upon the 8th of July, which,
though history has called it moderate, yet mentions the accusation of
Vergniaud and of Gaudet, and to this Danton was forced reluctantly to put
his name. Two days afterwards the old Committee to which he had belonged
was dissolved and a new one was elected.
It would be an error to regard this as a mere resignation on the part of
Danton; it would be equally an error to regard it as a violent censure
on the part of the Convention. It is certain that he chose to withdraw
because the fatal necessity of things was giving power to men of whom
he had no opinion. Thus Robespierre joined the Committee on the 27th of
July—Robespierre, of whom Danton could say in private, “The man has not
wits enough to cook an egg.” Yet this was the man who was so worshipped
by the crowd, that, once within the Committee, he was destined to become
the master of France. It may be remarked in passing that something fatal
seemed to attach to the date on which a man entered and began to lead
the Committee. On the day that Danton entered in ’93, on that day was he
guillotined in ’94. On the day that Robespierre entered in ’93, on that
day in ’94 he fell.
Danton remained, for a little longer than a month, more and more separate
from the management of affairs, more and more out of sympathy with the
men who were conducting the government. Nevertheless, he stands almost
as an adviser and certainly with pure disinterestedness throughout the
month of August. He was alone. Desmoulins was more with Robespierre
than with him at that moment. Westermann, his great friend and ally on
the 10th of August 1792, was under censure for his defeat in Vendée.
But standing thus untrammelled, Danton for the moment appears with an
especial brilliancy. Indeed there is no act of his public life so clear,
so typical of his method, or so successful as his great speech on the
1st of August. It was as though, divorced from the pre-occupations
of political intrigue and free from the responsibility of executive
power, he was able for the first time in his whole life to speak his
mind fully and clearly. The speech is a précis, as it were, of all his
pronouncements on the necessity for a dictatorship and the methods it
should employ. It turns round this sentence, “I demand that the Committee
of Public Safety should be erected into a Provisional Government.” He
said openly that while he asked for absolute powers for the Committee,
he refused ever to join it again. He pointed out to them the necessity
of uniting all power in the hands of one body, of making a unique
command for a nation at war. To men who had been lost for so long in the
discussion of constitutional checks and guarantees, he talked of the
necessities as a general would to his staff. If you will read this speech
through, you will find it to be the clearest exposition in existence
of the causes and of the methods of the action of France in all her
dangers from that day to our own. This speech, which is the climax of his
career, and which stands at the fountain-head of so much in the modern
nation, was followed throughout the month by many a piece of practical
and detailed advice. He talks always quietly, and always with a specific
object in view, on the educational proposals, on the great conscription
(14th of August), on the enforcement of an absolute military discipline
(15th of August), and so forth. But while he is still in this position,
of which the brilliancy and success have deceived some into thinking that
it was the centre of his career, two things were at work which were to
lead to the strange crisis in which he lost his life. First, the Terror
was beginning to be used for purposes other than those of the National
Defence. Secondly, there was coming upon him lethargy and illness. He
seems to have remained for a whole month, from the middle of September
till the middle of October, without debating. There had come a sudden
necessity for repose into his life, and until it was satisfied he gave an
impression of weakness and of breaking down.
This was emphasised by a kind of despair, as he saw the diplomatic
methods abandoned in dealing with foreign nations and the personal
aims of the mystics, the private vengeance of the bloodthirsty, or the
ravings of the rank madmen capturing the absolute system which he had
designed and forged at the expense of his titanic powers. It was during
this period that Garat saw him, and has left us the picture of his great
body bowed by illness, and his small deep eyes filled with tears, as he
spoke of the fate that was following the Girondins, and of how he could
not save them. It was then also that, walking slowly with Desmoulins at
sunset by the Seine, he said with a shudder that had never taken him
before, “The river is running blood.”
With October the Terror weighed on all France by the decree of the month
before. The suspects were arrested right and left, and the country had
entered into one of those periods which blacken history and leave gaps
which many men dare not bridge by reading. He broke down and fled for
quiet to his native place. From thence the Great Mother, of whom in all
the Revolution he had been the truest son, sent him back to fulfil the
mercy and the sanity of Nature as he had up till then fulfilled her
energies.
This book is the life of a man, and a man is his mind. Danton, who has
left no memoirs, no letters even—of whose life we know so little outside
the field of politics—can only be interpreted, like any other man, by
the mind. We must seek the origin, though we have but a phrase or two
to guide us. What was that meditation at Arcis out of which proceeded
the forlorn hope of the “Vieux Cordelier” and of the “Committee of
Indulgence”?
He was ill already; the great energies which had been poured out
recklessly in a torrent had suddenly run dry. Garat saw him weak,
uncertain, refusing to leave his study, troubled in the eyes. The reins
were out of his hands; all that he thought, or rather knew, to be fatal
to the Republic was succeeding, and every just conception, all balance,
was in danger. This, though it was not the cause of his weariness,
coincided with it, and made his sadness take on something of despair.
There had always been in his spirit a recurrent desire for the fields
and rivers; it is common to all those whom Nature has blessed with her
supreme gift of energy. He had at this moment a hunger for his native
place, for the Champagne after the harvest, and for the autumn mists upon
the Aube. It was in this attitude, weary, despairing, ill, and needing
the country as a parched man needs water, that he asked and obtained
permission to leave the Convention. It was upon the 12th of October, just
as the worst phase of the Terror was beginning, that he left the violence
and noise of the city and turned his face eastward to the cool valley of
the Marne.
Starting from this point, his weariness and his longing for home, we
can trace the movement of his mind during the six weeks of his repose.
He recovered health with the rapidity that so often characterises men
of his stamp; he found about him the peaceable affection, the cessation
of argument and of self-defence which his soul had not known since the
first days of 1789. His old mother was with him, and his children also,
the memories of his own childhood. The place refreshed him like sleep;
he became again the active and merry companion of four years before,
sitting long at his meals, laughing with his friends. The window of the
ground-floor room opened on to the Grande Place, and there are still
stories of him in Arcis making that window a kind of little rendezvous
for men passing and repassing whom he knew, his chatting and his
questions, his interests on every point except that political turmoil
in which the giant had worn himself out. The garden was a great care
of his, and he was concerned for the farm in which he had invested the
reimbursement of his pre-revolutionary office. He delighted to meet
his father’s old friends, the mayor, the functionaries of the place.
This man, whom we find so typical of his fellow-countrymen, is never
more French than in his home. The little provincial town, the _amour
du clocher_, the prospect of retirement in the province where one was
born—the whole scene is one that repeats itself upon every side to-day in
the class from which Danton sprang.
Moreover, as quiet took back its old place in his soul, he saw, no
longer troubled, but with calmness and certainty, the course that lay
before the Republic. The necessity of restraint, which had irritated and
pursued him in his days of fever in Paris, was growing into a settled
and deliberate policy; he began to study the position of France like a
map; no noise nor calumny was present to confuse him, and his method of
action on his return developed itself with the clearness that had marked
his first attitude in the elections of Paris. How rapidly his mind was
working even his friends could not tell. One of them thought to bring him
good news, and told him of the death of the Girondins. Danton was in his
garden talking of local affairs, and when this was told him, the vague
reputation which he bore, the “terrible Danton,” and the fear he had
inspired, led them to expect some praise. He turned as though he had been
stabbed, and cried sharply, “Say nothing. Do you call that good news? It
is a terrible misfortune.... It menaces us all.” And no one understood
what was passing in his mind. It was the note that Garat had heard, and
later Desmoulins: “I did my best to save them; I wish to God I could have
saved them!”
Whatever other news reached Arcis in those terrible months served only
to confirm him more strongly in his new attitude. Had he been tinged in
the slightest degree with the mysticism that was common to so many in
that time he would have felt a mission. But he was a Champenois, the very
opposite of a mystic, and he only saw a task, a thing to be planned and
executed by the reason. Perhaps if he had had more of the exaltation of
the men he was about to oppose he might have succeeded.
It was upon the 21st of November that he returned to Paris. His
health had come back, his full vigour, and with the first days of his
reappearance in politics the demand for which the whole nation was
waiting is heard. And what had not the fanatics done during the weeks
of his silence! Lyons, the Queen, the Girondins, Roland’s wife—the very
terms of politics had run mad, and he returned to wrestle with furies.
Let me describe the confusion of parties through which Danton had to wade
in his progress towards the re-establishment of liberty and of order. As
for the Convention itself, nominally the master, it was practically of
no power. It chose to follow now one now another tendency or man; to be
influenced by fear at this moment, by policy at that, and continually
by the Revolutionary formulæ. In a word, it was led. Like every large
assembly, it lacked initiative. Above it and struggling for power were
these: First, the committees, that of Public Safety, and its servant,
that of General Security—the Government and the police. It was Danton,
as we know, who desired to make the committees supreme, who had raised
them as the institution, the central government. But by this time they
were a despotism beyond the reach of the checks which Danton had always
desired. To save so mighty an engine from the dangers of ambition, he
had resigned in July. His sacrifice or lethargy did not suffice. The
Committee which had once been Danton was now the Triumvirate—Robespierre,
Couthon, St. Just. It pursued their personal objects, it maintained
by the Terror their personal creed. Still Danton did not desire to
destroy it as a system. He wished to modify its methods and to change
its personnel, to let it merge gradually into the peaceable and orderly
government for which the Revolution and the Republic had been made. By
a strange necessity, the workers, the men who were most like Danton
in spirit, the practical organisers on the Committee, such as Carnot,
Prieur, and Lindet, could not help defending it in every particular.
They knew the necessity of staying at their post, and they feared, with
some justice, that if the Robespierrian faction was eliminated their
work might be suddenly checked. It was because they were practical and
short-sighted that they were opposed to the practical but far-sighted
policy of Danton. They feared that with the cessation of the Terror the
armies would lack recruits, the commissariat provisions, the treasury its
taxes.
Against the Committee was the Commune. Hébert at its worst; Clootz at
its most ideal; Pache at its most honest. This singular body represented
a spirit very close indeed to anarchy. It preached atheism as a kind
of dogma; it was intolerant of everything; it was as mad as Clootz, as
filthy as Hébert. It possessed a curious mixture of two rages—the rage
for the unity and defence of France, the rage for the autonomy of Paris.
In the apathy that had taken the voters this small and insane group held
command of the city. But the Committees were not what the Girondins had
been. You could not bully or proscribe Carnot, St. Just, Cambon, Jean
Bon. With the fatal pressure of the stronger wrestler the Committee was
pressing the Commune down. The Terror remained in either case. But with
the Committee supreme it was a Terror of system striking to maintain a
tyranny, a pure despotism working for definite ends. Had the Commune
succeeded, it would have meant the Terror run mad, the guillotine killing
for the sake of killing—and for ever.
The third party in the struggle was Robespierre. He also desired the
Terror, but he intended to use it, as he did every power in France,
towards a definite end—a certain perfect state, of which he had received
a revelation, and of which he was the prophet. Of his aims and character
I shall treat when I come to his action after the fall of Danton. It
suffices to point out here that of the three forces at work Robespierre
alone had personality to aid him. He had a guard, a group of defenders.
They were inside, and led the Committee itself; they were the mystics
in a moment of strong exaltation, and unreal as was the dream of their
chief, the Robespierrians were bound to succeed unless the force of the
real, the “cold water” that came with Danton’s return, should destroy
their hopes. Therefore, as a fact, though no one, though Danton himself,
did not see it, it was between him and Robespierre that the battle would
ultimately be fought out.
For what was Danton’s plan? He put into his new task the ability, the
ruse, the suppleness that he had only lost for a moment in the summer.
First, Hébert and the “enragés” must go—they were the vilest form of
the spirit that he perceived to be destroying the Republic. Then the
Committee must be very gradually weakened. In that task he hoped, vainly
enough, to make Robespierre his ally. And finally, the end of all his
scheme was the cessation of the Terror. He had created a dictatorship
for a specific purpose; that purpose was attained. Wattignies had been
won, Lyons captured; soon La Vendée was to be destroyed, and even Toulon
to fall. It was intolerable that a system abnormal and extreme, designed
to save the State, should be continued for the profit of a few theorists
or of a few madmen. How much had not his engine already done?—this
machine which, to the horror of its creator, had found a life of its own!
It had killed the Queen after a shocking trial; it had alienated what was
left of European sympathy; it had struck the Girondins, and Danton was
haunted by the inspired voice of Vergniaud singing the “Marseillaise”
upon the scaffold; it had run to massacre in the provinces. He feared
(and later his fears proved true at Nantes) that September might be
repeated with the added horror of legal forms. The Terror finally had
reopened the question that of all others might most easily destroy the
State. A handful of men had pretended to uproot Catholicism for ever,
and what Danton cursed as the “Masque Anti-Religieuse” had defiled Notre
Dame. This flood he was determined to turn back into the channels of
reason; he was going, without government or police or system, merely
by his voice and his ability, to realise the Revolution, to end the
dictatorship, and to begin the era of prosperity and of content.
The first steps taken were successful. On the very night of his return,
Robespierre was perorating at the Jacobins against atheism and on the
great idea of God, but within twelve hours, on the morrow, Danton’s
voice gave the new note. It was in the discussion upon the pension to be
paid to the priests whom the last decree had thrust out of their regular
office and of its salary. Danton spoke with the greatest decision on this
plain matter, and the Convention heard with delight the fresh phrases
to which it had so long been a stranger. He says virtually, “If you do
not pay this sum you are persecutors.” There are in this speech such
sentences as these: “You must appreciate this, that politics can only
achieve when they are accompanied by some reason.... I insist upon your
sparing the blood of men; and I beg the Convention to be, above all, just
to all men except those who are the declared and open enemies of the
Republic.” Four days later he went a little further, and the Convention
still followed him. On the question which he had most at heart he spoke
plainly. Richard complained of Tours. He said that the municipality of
that town were arresting “suspects” right and left, and had even attacked
himself. Danton said in a speech of ten lines: “It is high time the
Convention should learn the art of government. Send these complaints to
the Committee. It is chosen, or at least supposed to be chosen, from the
élite of the Convention.” Later in the same day he spoke on a ridiculous
procession such as the violence of the time had made fashionable. It was
a deputation of Hébertists bringing from a Parisian church the ornaments
of the altar. Already, it will be remembered, the Commune had ordered the
churches in Paris to be closed, and the attempt to enforce such scenes
were being copied in all the large towns of France. He said: “Let there
be no more of these mascarades in the Convention.... If people here and
there wish to prove their abjuration of Catholicism, we are not here
to prevent them ... neither are we here to defend them.... The Terror
is still necessary, the Revolutionary Government is still necessary,
but the people does not demand this indiscriminate action. We have no
business save with the conspirators and with those who are treating with
the enemy.” There was a protest from Fayan, who cried, “You have talked
of clemency!” for all the world as though such talk was blasphemy. But
Danton was getting back his old position and was leading the Convention.
His success seemed certain. On the 3rd of December (14th Frimaire) he
was violently attacked at the Jacobins, but he managed to hold his own.
Robespierre defended him in a speech which has been interpreted as a
piece of able treachery, but which may with equal justice be regarded as
an attempt to hold himself between the opposing parties; and within a
fortnight after his return Danton, who had in him a directness of purpose
and a rapidity of action that prefigured Napoleon, had gained every
strategic point in his attack.
Events helped him, or rather he had foreseen them. The Vendeans, moving
more like a mob than an army, were caught at Le Mans on the 13th of
December. On the 7th of December the genius of Bonaparte had driven the
English and Spanish from Toulon. On the 26th the news came to the army
of which Hoche had just been given the command, and, as though the name
Bonaparte brought a fate with it, the lines of Wissembourg were carried,
Landau was relieved, the Austrians passed the Rhine.
All these victories were the allies of the party of indulgence. The men
who said, “The Terror has no _raison d’être_ save that of the national
defence,” found themselves expressing what all France felt. After such
successes it only remained to add, “The nation is safe; the Terror may
end.” Already Danton had called up a reserve, so to speak, in the shape
of the genius of Desmoulins. The first issue of “Vieux Cordelier” had
appeared, and the journal was read by all Paris.
That club, in which we saw the origin of Danton’s fame, was now the
Hébertists, and nothing more. The pamphlets which Camille issued under
the leadership of Danton were given a name that might recall its position
and its politics of the old days. And indeed the two men most concerned
in the new policy of clemency had been, from their house in the Cour du
Commerce, the heart of the “République des Cordeliers.” There are not
in the history of the Revolution, in all the passages of its eloquence
and genius, any words that strike us to-day as do the words of these six
pamphlets which spread over the winter of the year II. It is a proof of
Danton’s clear vision, of his strong influence, that a distant posterity,
far removed from the passions of 1793, should find its own expression in
the appeals which his friend wrote, and which form the Testament of the
Indulgents.
The first two numbers were an attack upon the Hébertists alone.
Robespierre, from his position in the Committee of Public Safety, from
the spur of his own ambition, was willing to agree. He himself corrected
the proofs. But on the 15th of December appeared the famous Numero III.,
which ran through Paris like a herald’s message, which did for reaction
something of what the great speeches had done for liberty in clubs during
the early days of the Revolution. Few men cared to vote, but every man
read the “Vieux Cordelier.” To those who had never so much as heard of
Tacitus the pen of Tacitus carried conviction. A crowd of women passed
before the Parliament crying for the brothers and husbands who filled the
prisons; the “Committee of Clemency” was within an ace of being formed;
and, coinciding with the victories and with Danton’s reappearance, the
demand of Desmoulins was dragging after it, not France only (for France
was already convinced), but even the capital. It was then that the
Committee, who alone were the government, grew afraid. Robespierre still
hesitated. He could only succeed through the committees; but Desmoulins
was his friend; there was an appeal to “the old college friend” in the
“Vieux Cordelier” that touched his heart and his vanity; they had sat
together on the benches of the Louis le Grand, and Robespierre seems to
have made an honest attempt to aid him then. A fourth number had appeared
on the 20th, a fifth (written on Christmas Day) appeared on January 8th.
The Jacobins denounced Camille, and Robespierre, the eyes of whose mind
looked as closely and were as short-sighted as the eyes of his body, grew
afraid. The men determined on rigour had warned him in the Committee;
now when he tried to defend Camille he saw the Jacobins raging: what he
did not see was France. Perhaps, had his sight been longer, he would
not have been dragged six months later to the guillotine. He attempted
a compromise and said: “We will not expel Camille, but we will burn
his journal, punishing his act but not himself.” Camille answered with
Rousseau, “_Brûler n’est pas repondre_.” He would not be defended.
The battle was closely joined. Desmoulins was pushing forward his attack
with the audacious infantry of pamphlets; Danton, from the Convention,
was giving from time to time the heavy blows of the artillery; the
advance was continuous; when there was felt a check that proved the
prelude to disaster and that showed, behind the opposing lines, the force
of the Committees. In the middle of January, just after Desmoulins’s
defence at the Jacobins, Fabre D’Eglantine, the friend and old secretary
of Danton, was arrested. It was in vain that Danton put into his defence
all the new energy which he had discovered in himself. It was in vain
even that he called for “the right of the deputy to defend himself at the
bar of the house.” Like all organised governments, the Committee could
give reasons of State for this silent action. Danton was overborne, and
the Convention for the first time since his return deserted him.
He had yet seven weeks to live. Desmoulins still attacked, but Danton
knew that the action was lost. He knew the strength of that powerful
council whose first efforts he himself had moulded, and when he saw
it arise in support of continuing the Terror, when he saw it and
Robespierre allied, he lost hope. The policy of the Committee grew more
and more definite. One member of it, (Hérault de Séchelles) was Danton’s
friend: they expelled him. Silently, but with all their strength, they
disengaged the government from either side. The Committee and Robespierre
determined to strike at once, when the occasion should arise, both those
in the Commune who desired to turn the Terror to their own ends and those
of the Convention—the Dantonists, who desired to end it altogether.
Danton still speaks in the tribune, but the attack is no longer there.
He defends modestly and well the practical propositions that appear
before the Parliament on education, on the abolition of slavery, on the
provisions for the giving of bail under the new judiciary system, and
so forth. But there is in his attitude something of expectancy. He is
waiting for a sudden attack that must come and that he cannot prevent.
He holds himself ready, but the Committee is working in the dark, and he
does not know on which side to guard himself. A last personal interview
with Robespierre failed, and there was nothing left to do but to wait and
see whether they feared him so much as to dare his arrest. It was with
Ventose, that is, with the first days of March, that the blow fell.
The Hébertists, chafing under three months of growing insults—insults
which their old ally the Committee refused to avenge—broke out into
open revolt. Carrier was back from his truly Hébertist slaughtering at
Nantes, and it was felt at the Cordeliers that the public execration
would destroy them unless they rose. In the autumn they would have had
the Committees on their side, but the strong action of the Indulgents had
broken the alliance. They determined on insurrection. The Commune this
time was, once and for all, to conquer the government. The decision was
taken at the Cordeliers on the 4th of March—within ten days they were
arrested. The Committee pushed them through the form of a trial. Less
than three weeks after the first talk of revolt, Hébert, Clootz, and the
rest were guillotined.
There were many among the Dantonists who thought this the triumph of
their policy. “The violent, the enragés are dead. It is we who did it.”
But Danton was wiser than his followers. He knew that the Committee were
waiting for such an opportunity, and that a blow to the right would
follow that blow to the left. Both oppositions were doomed. Only one
chance remained to him—they might not dare.
On the occasion of the arrest of the Hébertists he made a noble speech on
the great lines of conciliation and unity, which had been his constant
policy—a speech which was all for Paris, in spite of the faction.
But that week they determined on his arrest and that of his friends.
Panis heard of it, and sent at once to warn him. He found him in the
night of the last day of March 1794 sitting in his study with his young
nephew, moody and silent. His wife was asleep in the next room. On the
flat above him Camille and Lucille were watching late. The house was
silent. Panis entered and told him what the Committee had resolved.
“Well, what then?” said Danton. “You must resist.” “That means the
shedding of blood, and I am sick of it. I would rather be guillotined
than guillotine.” “Then,” said Panis, “you must fly, and at once.” But
Danton shook his head still moodily. “One does not take one’s country
with one on the soles of one’s boots.” But he muttered again to himself,
“They will not dare—they will not dare.” Panis left him, and he sat down
again to wait, for he knew in his heart that the terrible machine which
he himself had made, and which he had fought so heroically, could dare
what it chose. They left him silent in the dark room. From time to time
he stirred the logs of the fire; the sudden flame threw a light on the
ugly strength of his face: he bent over the warmth motionless, and with
the memories of seven years in his heart.