ROBESPIERRE
I desire in this additional chapter to show what place Danton filled in
the Revolution by describing the madness and the reaction that followed
his loss; and the extent to which his influence, in spite of these, was
permanent.
When Danton disappeared, one man remained the master of the terrible
machine which he had created. It remains to show what were the fortunes
of his work when death had come to complete the results of his abdication.
The genius of the dead man had foreseen a necessity, had met it with an
institution, and that institution had proved his wisdom by its immense
success. France was one within, and was beginning on her frontiers the
war whose success was not to end until it had rebuilt all Europe. This
unprecedented power dominated a country long used to centralisation, and
was strengthened by the accidents of the time, by the even play of the
government over a surface where all local obstacles had broken down, by
the tacit acquiescence of every patriotic man (for it was the thing that
saved the nation), by the very abuse of punitive measures. This power was
destined to change from a machine to a toy.
They say the children of that time had little models of the guillotine to
play with. The statement is picturesque and presumably false, but it will
serve well for a simile. A man unused to action, dreaming of a perfect
state which was but a reflection of his own intensely concentrated mind,
acquired the control of the guillotine. Unfortunately the model was of
full size.
The punishment of death had hitherto been inflicted, for the most part,
with a clear and definite, though often with an immoral, object. In the
hands of Robespierre it was used to defend a theory and a whim. The men
of the time loved their country ardently, and believed with the firmness
of a large and generous faith in those principles upon which all our
civilisation is at present based. France and the Republic were, in their
minds, one thing, and a thing which they spared no means to make survive
the most terrible struggle into which any nation has ever dared to enter.
They killed that they might be obeyed in a time which verged on anarchy,
and they desired to be obeyed because, but for obedience to government,
France and all her liberties would have perished. Such a motive for
punishment is just, and its execution is honest.
By the side of this and beyond it were the excesses, those excesses in
protest against which Danton himself had died. Execrable as were these,
infamous as will ever remain their most conspicuous actors, Hébert and
Carrier, they were prompted by a motive which is of the commonest and the
most easily understood in human affairs. They were actions of revenge.
Danton had said once and sincerely, “I can find no use for hate.” It was
the key to his successful effort, by far the most creative in a time
when all was energy, that no part of his strength was lost in personal
attack, hardly any in personal defence. This could no more be said of
his contemporaries than it can be said of the bulk of men in any nation,
even in times of order and of peace. And everywhere, in Nantes, in Lyons,
in the Vendée, in the accusation of Marie Antoinette, from the very
beginning of the Terror, this hate had surged and broken. The Girondins
were put to death on a charge full of the spirit of revenge; and as the
autumn grew into winter, in the very crisis of that oppression by which
the nation had been saved, the accusations became trivial, the process
of justice more and more of a personal act, depending in the provinces
on the temper of an emissary, in Paris upon the summary judgment of the
Committee and the Tribunal.
But all this had so far been comprehensible. With the advent of
Robespierre to full power we have to deal with a phase of history which
will hardly be understood in happier times. Danton, who saw straight, who
understood, and who, when the victories began, found leisure to pity, is
a type whose extremes are the romance, whose moderation is the groundwork
of history. We have to deal in him with an enthusiast who is also a
statesman, in whom the mind has sufficient power to know itself even in
its violence, and to return deliberately within its usual boundaries
after never so fantastic an excursion. With Hébert again we know the
type. Those are not rare in whom passions purely personal dominate all
abstract conceptions, and whose natures desire the horrible in literature
during times of peace, and satisfy their desire by action during their
moments of power.
But with Robespierre an absolutely different feature is presented: the
man who could laugh and the man who could hate, the right and the left
wing have disappeared, and there is left standing alone a personality
which had gradually become the idol of the city. He could neither laugh
nor hate; the love of country itself, which illuminates so much in the
Revolution, and which explains so many follies in the smaller men, even
that was practically absent in the mind of Robespierre. His character
would have fitted well with the absence of the human senses, and should
some further document discover to historians that he lacked the sense of
taste, that he was colour-blind, or that he could not distinguish the
notes of music, these details would do much to complete the imperfect
and troubling picture. For in the sphere that is above, but co-ordinate
with, physical life, all those avenues by which our fellow-beings touch
us more nearly than ideas were closed to him.
It is possible that he may take, centuries hence, the appearance of
majesty. He had the reserve, the dignity, the intense idealism, the
perfect belief in himself, the certitude that others were in sympathy—all
the characteristics, in fine, which distinguish the Absolutists and the
great Reformers. In his iron code of theory we seem to hear the ghost of
a Calvin, in his reiterated morals and his perpetual application of them
there is the occasional sharp reminiscence of a Hildebrand. The famous
death cry, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in
exile,” is not so far distant from “... _de mourir pour le peuple et d’en
être abhorré_.”
We are accustomed to clothe such figures with a solemn drapery, and to
lend them, at great distances of time, a certain terrible grandeur.
Robespierre is too near us, he is too well known, and his reforms failed
too utterly, for this to be now the case with him. Yet it may well happen
that some one else treading in the same path, and succeeding, will see
fit to build a legend round his name.
What then was the ideal which he pursued—this “one idea,” which stood so
perpetually before him as to exclude the sight of all human things, of
sufferings, of memories, of patriotism itself? It was the civic ideal of
Rousseau, in so far as he conformed to it, and nothing more.
The ideas of the great reformers must of their nature be
simple—unworkably simple. But Robespierre’s idea was less than simple—it
was thin. Now and again in the history of upheavals a type has been
defined with special formulæ, which in its original shape could never
have survived the conditions of active existence, but which was real
enough to receive accretions, and robust enough to bear moulding until
at length it became the living nucleus of a new society, changed,
transformed in a thousand details, yet in its main lines the ideal of the
founder. With all the great reforms of the world some such type has been
present; the Puritan, the knight of chivalry, were at first but a faint
figure realised in a few phrases.
Rousseau himself had created such a type, and it has survived; for what
permanent fortunes a century is insufficient to show. The Republican
citizen of Jean-Jacques stood in the generation which succeeded him the
centre of a new society; in a thousand shapes he really lived. Thomas
Jefferson, William Cobbett, were living men to whom this ideal stood for
model; not in its details, but in its main lines. Such noble men are to
be met to-day on every side.
But Robespierre saw reflected in his mind a figure at once more detailed
and less human, and one too sharply defined to be capable of any moulding
or of any transference into the real world. For him this ideal citizen
was nevertheless the one good thing, the one sound basis of a State. This
ideal citizen existed (did men only know it) in each individual; all men
could be made to approach the type; only a very few were opposed to its
success, and it was a sacred duty to break their criminal effort. The
figure stood ever before him, it dominated his every thought, it was the
sacred thing before which his essentially mystical mind was perpetually
at worship. But he could see nothing beyond or on either side of it;
concrete impressions faded on the unhealthy retina of his mind. For there
was a mirror held up before his eyes, and the figure on which he dwelt
was himself.
Thus intensely concentrated upon a certain individual type, it was in his
nature to forget the reactions of a community. He saw in society a few
evils prominent, authority without warrant, arbitrary rule (that hateful
thing), servility in the oppressed (the main impediment to any reform).
He was blind to the interplay, the organic quality in a State, which our
own time so ridiculously exaggerates, but which the eighteenth century as
a whole neglected. Rousseau had put admirably the metaphor of contract as
explaining the bond of society. Robespierre, interpreting him, conceived
of contract as the simple and all-sufficient machinery of a State. The
error gave his attempt a mechanical and an inhuman appearance over and
above its rigidity of dogma. Rousseau, like all the great writers, gave
continual glimpses of the insufficiency of language; he let his audience
see in a hundred phrases, in a recurrence of qualifications, that his
words were no more than the words of others, hints at realities, at the
best metaphors brought as near as possible to be the true reflection of
ideas. Robespierre read him, and has remained among the words entangled
and satisfied. Rousseau was perpetually insisting upon a point of view,
calling out, “Come and see.” He had discovered a position from which (as
he thought) the bewildering complexity of human affairs appeared in a
just and simple perspective. But Rousseau never asserts that such a view
will have the same colouring to all men; on the contrary, at his best he
denies it. He trusts to the main aspect of his theory for a main result
in the State, to an agreement among men of good-will for the harmonising
of conflicting details. Robespierre, as the high-priest of that gospel,
had come and had seen, but the perfect citizen and the perfect state of
his vision must be realised in every tittle as he had observed them.
Once again a great message was destined to be sterilised and almost lost
through the functionary of its creed.
Such was the man who had slowly supplanted Danton. A mind whose type of
aberration is common to all nations had supplanted the typical Frenchman
who had organised the defence of France, and in the place of one whom
his enemies perpetually reproach with an excess of vigour and manhood, a
theorist of hardly any but intellectual emotions was master.
What gave him his great ascendancy, his practically absolute power?
It was due, in the first place, to the popularity whose growth was
the feature of the later Revolution. That popularity was real in the
number of his followers and in the sincerity of their profession. It
must be remembered that hitherto he had stood on the side of leniency
in public action, while in words he had expressed always accurately,
sometimes nobly, the ideals upon which the nation was bent. He had, from
a constitutional incapacity for real work, been only in the background
of those crises which had left behind them an increasing crowd of
malcontents. Not he, but Danton, had made the 10th of August. No one had
connected his name with the massacres of September. The necessity of
government was not _his_ interpretation of the defeats in Belgium; the
creation of that government was another’s; its latent benefits reflect
no merit upon him now; its immediate rigours exposed him to no special
vengeance at the time. Not he, but Marat, is the obvious demagogue whom
the visionary Girondin girl marks out as the enemy. To Carnot would turn
the hatred of those whom the great conscription oppressed. The Christian
foundation of France had others than Robespierre to curse for the Masque
of Reason and for the suppression of public worship. He had stood behind
Desmoulins when the reaction of Nivose and Frimaire was at work; he had
approved and was thought the author of that trial and execution in which
Hébert had suffered the sentence already pronounced upon him by the best
of France. In fact, he had stood in nothing as the extremist or as the
tyrant till the day when he permitted the arrest of Danton. He had been
rather the voice of a strong public opinion than the arm which, when it
acts at the orders of unreason, becomes hated by its own furious master.
Thus upon the negative side there was nothing to prevent his sudden
attainment of power.
In the second place, his name had been the most present and the most
familiar from the earliest days of the Revolution. He had sat in the
Assembly of the Commons five years before, a notable though hardly a
noted figure, with some stories surrounding him, with quite a reputation
in his provincial centre; he had been, since first the Jacobin Club
became the mouthpiece of the pure Republicans, the conspicuous leader of
the Society. The force of continuity and tradition counts for little in
the history of this whirlwind, but such as it is it explains to a great
degree the ascendancy of Robespierre. He alone was never absent, he
alone remained to chant a ceaseless chorus to the action of the drama.
His name was familiar to excess; but it was hardly an epoch at which
men grew weary of hearing a politician called “the just.” Besides this
familiarity with his name, certain virtues—and those the most cherished
of the time—were in fact or by reputation his. None could accuse him of
venality; his sincerity was obvious—indeed, it was the necessary fruit of
his narrow mind. The ambition from which we cannot divorce his name was
apparent to but few of his contemporaries, and was not fully seized even
by his enemies till he had started on that short career of absolute power
which has stamped itself for ever upon the fortunes of his country. Thus
habit, the strongest of forces, was his ally.
In the third place, circumstances quite as much as his own action had
left him (as far as one can follow the mysteries of the Committee) sole
director of an exceptional executive. On account of the illusions and
necessities of the people such a position was not immediately recognised
as tyrannical. The machine was theirs, working for them and made by
them; all the better if an idol of theirs held the levers; he would
make the most trusty of servants. Robespierre was not master in theory.
Even committees were not the masters in theory. Theory was everything
to France in the year II., and in theory the Convention was master.
Nay, even the Convention was only master because—in theory again—the
sovereign, the nation, was behind it. The majority of the Convention,
and it alone, is the technical authority. Robespierre’s name was not
to be discovered at the foot of those lists of the condemned which his
monstrous policy constructed, and at the end of his four months he fell
because the theoretical master, the Convention, acted as it chose, and no
sufficient force dared to deny its right.
He starts then upon the closing act of the play, the one figure whom all
regard, and into whose hands the police, the committees, the juries, and
(by their own disorder) the majority of the Convention itself have fallen.
The new reign began on the 6th of April, exactly a year to a day since
the Committee of Public Safety had been established. It was Germinal, the
month of seeds that grow under ground, the most significant and the most
terrible of the new names. M. Zola has chosen it for the title of his
greatest work; it was the other day on the dying lips of a poor wretch in
Spain whose madness also turned upon social injustice.
The following of Robespierre did not hesitate to show at once its
tendencies and even its dogmas—for it held a religion. That same day,
the 6th of April—17th Germinal of the year II.—Couthon came from
the Committee with a proposition for the Parliament to discuss the
establishment of a national worship of God. A new note had been heard in
the clamour; soon in the clear silence of suspense it is to be the only
sound, saving the dull accompaniment of the two guillotines. This or that
occasional freak of theory or dramatised ribaldry the Terror had already
known; unlimited power defended by inexorable severity had developed many
strange decrees, dissociated from the general life and dying as they
rose—absurdities whose chief purpose would seem to be the interest they
have afforded to foreigners. But in these there had been no system. The
Mass was being said on all sides when the churches were supposed to be
closed. Even as the Feast of Reason was being held at Notre Dame, vespers
were chanted at St. Germains. One thing alone had been the purpose and
had given the motive force to nine months of agony endured—the salvation
of Revolutionary France. But when Couthon spoke it was not France, nor
common rights and liberties which were proposed as the object of the
defence—it was Robespierrian Rousseau. In two months we shall have the
worship of the Supreme Being, in three the reaction; in less than four
the high-priest of this impossible system is to fall; yet his dream and
his power will be almost enough in their fall to drag down the Republic.
Five days more saw “the rest of the factions” sacrificed to this new
personal terror. Gobel, who had always been afraid, and whose conscience
had been turned like a weathercock away from the nearest pike; the wives
of Desmoulins and of Hébert (for women, as the Terror increased, were
suspected, sometimes rightly, of being the best at plotting); Chaumette,
who had helped Hébert to put up his theatricals in Notre Dame—they
were all tried, and in this trial it is again not the Revolution, but
Robespierre pure and simple whom we hear arguing and condemning through
the mouths of the court.
One of the accused “has wished to efface the idea of the divinity.”
Another has “interfered with the worship of his fellow-citizens” (this
was said to Chaumette, who must have thought it even at that moment
something of a platitude). To a third the reproach is made of “changing
the mode of worship without authority.” We are on the highroad to those
last six weeks in which trial of any kind and definite accusation itself
was absent. The details of one man’s opinion are become the numberless
dogmas of a creed, and of a creed that kills unmercifully. And yet even
as he asserted his creed its mechanical impotence appeared in violent
contrast with the humanity that the Puritan was persecuting. For Lucille
lighted her face radiantly when she was condemned, and said, “I shall see
him in a few hours.”
Three days more—the 17th of April—and the machinery was further
centralised. St. Just demanded that the political prisoners should be
taken from every part of France to be judged in Paris. The popular
commissions—mere gatherings to denounce without proofs and without
forms—were actively used all over the Republic. In Paris the commission
was to be the feeler for the central machine. And such was the incapacity
of the Dreamer, “who had not wits enough to cook an egg,” that this new
feature in the machinery was not even organised: it was a government
of mere rigid absolutism resting on bases that were rapidly becoming
mere anarchy. But even as the system, such as it was, developed, as the
central power grew more rigid, and the thing to be governed more decayed,
Danton, who had been killed that it might exist, pursued it. It was due
to his work that the wrestling on the frontier was showing a definite
issue. The advance had begun.
With his death the diplomacy of France had ceased. The phrase of
Robespierre’s, which he had so successfully combated, had reappeared
in vigour: the “nation would not treat with her enemies.” But the
organisation of her armies, the levies, the rigid discipline, the
arms were telling. That aspect of the national energy had grown more
healthy as the central brain grew more diseased and vain. Robespierre
was threatening Carnot vaguely in the Committee, but Carnot was at work
and was saving France. St. Just himself, when he is upon the frontier,
appears in a capacity worthy of admiration, for he has there to deal with
a thing in action. His energy is as fierce as ever, but its object is
victory over a national enemy, and not the triumph of a jejune idea. He
had better have remained with the soldiers.
In Paris the Commune had been seized. The enemy whom all had feared,
whom even Danton had to the last conciliated, was fearlessly grasped.
The mayor was broken simply, and replaced by a servant of the rulers;
the Sections protested with the last of their vitality, but the Club
denounced them, and they disappeared—even an attempt at martyrdom is to
give the idol yet more gilt. Then the news of Turcoing came to Paris.
It was little more than a happy rumour, a battle whose importance
seems greater to us now than it did to contemporaries. But Pichegru,
the peasant, had prepared a good road for Jourdan, and Fleurus was the
direct result of Turcoing. Barrère long after called these victories “the
Furies,” which swept upon and destroyed the fanatic in power.
With every point of good news the Terror was less necessary, yet
Robespierre’s action grew as the national danger disappeared. Even Lord
Howe’s great victory of the 1st of June did little to check the sentiment
of relief. The _Vengeur_ went down and left a force of many ships to the
French navy for ever. The food reached port, and the eyes of Frenchmen
were not directed to the sea, whose command they knew themselves to
have gained and lost before then with but little resulting change; they
turned, as they have always and will ever turn, to the frontier of the
north-east, the wrestling-ring upon whose fair level was to be decided
the fate of all their sacrifice and of all their ideals, and Paris every
day grew more hopeful of the result, Robespierre more blind to everything
except his vision. On the 8th of June—the 20th Prairial—he capped the
edifice of his national religion with the Feast of the Supreme Being; on
the 10th he forged the last piece of the machinery which was to make that
religion the moral order of the new era by force.
In the connection of these dates we see the whole man and the time.
Three weeks pass from the first definite victory against the allies to
the law of the 22nd Prairial. That short time widened the breach between
the armies and the government till it became an impassable gulf. The
fruit of that schism was to appear much later, but already its elements
were clear. Of the two parts of Danton’s work one had become national,
healthy, representative; the other, which had been designed for similar
action, had finally become a thing of personalities and of theories. The
armies were in full success, the Terror was menaced, and was doomed.
In this feast of the Almighty, Robespierre was insanely himself. He wore
his bright-blue coat, perhaps to typify the bright sky which we have all
worshipped for so many thousand years. In his little white hand, that
never had been nor could be put to a man’s work, he held the typical
offerings of fruit and corn. His head was bent forward a little, and he
looked at the ground. The men who stood up boldly in the attitudes of
Mirabeau and of the Tribunes were dead or in the armies.
Remove the scene by hundreds of years, and tell it of a primitive people
in some mountain valley, it assumes a simplicity and a grandeur as
legend. Their old traditions (let us say) have been lost or stolen from
them. They are casting about for a lawgiver and for a starting-point. A
pure idealist is found, draconian in his method, but ascetic and sincere
in his life, laying down as necessary for the state a clear and simple
morality, basing all ethics on the recognition and the worship of God. If
we make that picture we have some idea of what passed through the mind
of the little clique which still surrounded Robespierre, some conception
of the picture which still half-fascinated the crowd. For Robespierre
himself it was intensely true; he lived æons and myriads of leagues away
in time and space from humanity, intent upon his dream.
But in sight of the mummery stood Notre Dame. Not a man there but had
been baptized in the Christian faith; a history more complex and more
eventful than that of perhaps any other nation was the inheritance and
the future of that crowd. And even as the game was being played, the real
France on the Sambre and in the plains of Valenciennes was carrying out
the oldest of struggles in defence of the first of rights. The scene has
been laughed at and despised sufficiently by aliens within and without
the French nation; let it suffice for this book to insist upon its
unreality, and to assert that its principal actor was genuine because he
lived in the unreal.
The law of the 22nd of Prairial followed this feast. It was the
establishment of a pure despotism, arbitrary, absolute, personal. Already
the trials were centralised in Paris since the demand of St. Just had
been made. The Commune had been captured, the popular commissions used,
even the Presidency of the Convention had become the appanage of one
man and his associates. This new law proposed the final step. After it
was passed the trials were to be conducted without proofs, and without
witness or pleading, for they were to be nothing more than a formal
process. The Committee once satisfied of guilt, the tribunal was merely
to condemn. To be upon the lists was virtually to be dead. It was the
end of civil government, the declaration of a state of siege. And that
at the moment when the armies sent every day better and better news. The
Convention debated with Robespierre in the chair; it hesitated and it
nearly condemned the proposal. There was a conflict in the minds of some
between the admiration—almost the adoration—of a man; in the minds of
others, between fear and the necessity apparent to all of relaxing the
machinery which only the national danger had called into being.
Robespierre came down from the chair and spoke. The even, certain
voice which carried away his admirers, which terrified his opponents,
succeeded, and the law was passed. Those who find it easy to judge
the time, who think it may all be explained by the baseness or the
pusillanimity of the Parliament, should note the appeal which he made to
the _Moderates_ even then—an appeal which had always been successful,
which, when his death drew near, he made at last (and for the first time)
in vain.
For the Moderates, the Plain, the “Marsh,” saw in him a kind of saviour,
the just man, the slayer of the Mountain, the master who would be
terrible only for a little time, and would soon restore peace when he had
established a dogma of moral order. Were Moderates ever slow to give full
power for the sake of order?
The next day some one saw that the new law touched the Parliament itself.
Self-defence, the most sacred, perhaps the only, right of a prince,
occurred to them, and they protested. They passed a resolution that no
member could be taken before the Revolutionary Tribunal without their
consent. The following day Robespierre again appears, again appeals to
the “Marsh.” The men of order saw at once that no danger applied to them,
that the disorderly fellows up on the benches of the Left alone were in
danger. The resolution was repealed. On that day, the 24th of Prairial of
the year II.—12th of June 1794—the whole of France was at his feet, save
the armies.
The France which had made the Revolution, and which Danton had loved,
defended, and saved, was in the Ardennes and before Ypres. There were
two main bodies. One, on the left, in the plains by the frontier towns,
was opposed to a united force of English and Austrians; the other, on
the right, in the woods and deep ravines of the Ardennes, was opposed
to a strong series of Austrian posts. These armies were not separated,
but the enemy held the angle between them. Away on the extreme right
Jourdan held the Moselle valley. Pichegru had come back to the army
of the left, which in his absence had won Turcoing, and at whose head
Soudham, Moreau, and Macdonald had fought and succeeded. On the right St.
Just was throwing into the attack upon the Sambre all the energy which
had saved, before this, the army of Alsace. Five times the attempt had
been made to pierce the Austrian lines, and five times it had failed.
Coburg lay on both sides of the river; Charleroy, on the right bank, was
his strong place. The Deputies on mission, St. Just and Lebas, the same
whom we shall see standing by Robespierre at the end, were present at
the last decisive check before Charleroy itself. With the Sambre thus
held, the southern army was immobilised; the successes of the army of the
north seemed almost valueless, for Coburg held the angle between the two.
Nevertheless, Turcoing bore great fruit, for it convinced the Austrians
that reinforcements were needed to meet the French advance in the north.
The allies were like a man fighting with a sword in each hand against
two opponents. Wounded in the right hand, he must cross rapidly with the
sword in his left, and so expose his left side. Thus Coburg left the
Sambre a little more exposed in order to provide temporary reinforcements
against the army that had just won Turcoing. St. Just and Carnot were
enemies; the young Robespierrian was planned to replace the organiser
whom Danton had recognised; nevertheless, they agreed at this supreme
moment upon the necessary action. St. Just from the army, Carnot from the
Ministry of War at Paris, called up Jourdan from the Moselle with over
forty thousand men.
They are wrong who imagine that Napoleon invented the attack by
concentration on the weakest point; so far as the large lines of a
campaign go he inherited it from the early Republican generals. Leaving
strong places unoccupied, careless of holding (for example) this position
on the Moselle, the hurried march northward was determined on, and a
supreme effort against the Austrian lines.
By this junction was formed that “Army of the Sambre-et-Meuse” which
to this day gives a theme for one of the noblest marching-songs of the
French soldiery. Under Jourdan were men whose names alone have something
of the quality of bugle-calls. Ney, and Kleber, and Marceau were
leading them. There ran through this new army a kind of prescience, the
foreknowledge of victory, an unaccustomed feeling of expansion and of
hope. Soult speaks of it as his awakening; and there is a fine phrase in
the memoir of a contemporary which gives us some echo of its enthusiasm:
“We always seemed to be marching into the dawn;” they felt in every rank
that the balance was turning, and that France was to be saved.
A sixth attempt was for a sixth time foiled. The seventh succeeded. The
Austrian line was broken and Charleroy surrounded; in a week it fell. The
capitulation was hardly achieved when the army of Coburg appeared to the
north-east upon the heights that command the left bank of the river, a
plateau called that of Fleurus.
It was upon the 25th of June that the armies met and fought with blazing
hay about them and ripe harvest that had caught fire. Kleber recovered
the left wing, as Cromwell at Naseby, after it had given way. Marceau
obstinately held the right in front of Fleurus, as Davoust did at
Austerlitz ten years later. And towards evening the watchers in the
balloon above the French ranks saw in regular and stiff retreat the
last army of the old world. By the end of Messidor the English were in
Holland, the Austrians upon the Rhine, the whole of Belgium was in the
hands of the Republic.
The sun which set upon the death of Danton had risen again.
So in Robespierre’s own country his fall was prepared by circumstances.
At Arras, his birthplace, one could almost hear the guns of Fleurus;
he and his thin soul belonged to those plains of the north where the
Norman and the Burgundian, and the Provençal and the Gascon, born in more
generous places, were driving the enemy before them.
St. Just came back from the front. He at least had seen on what
Revolutionary France was really bent, and in what she was vigorous. With
the superb courage that belonged to his energy and his youth he had led
the charges. Living with the soldiers, he had seen more closely, and with
more accuracy than is common in visionaries, the needs of an army. Why
did he come back to continue the insane drama whose seven weeks of action
count more with the enemies of France than all her centuries?
Because the armies and their victories, though affording proof of what
the nation was and of what it required, could afford that proof only to a
just and even mind. The soldiers themselves did not express a political
opinion; their whole mind was bent upon the breaking of the line, the
attempt in which they had succeeded. Of Paris, Revolutionary in the
last few months, they knew little. They judged it as our contemporaries
do—on hearsay; and it seemed to them that there stood in the capital a
powerful Committee full of patriots, who had by an intense, an almost
furious energy, saved them—the soldiers. Men who risk their lives every
day and see death constantly are not likely to be horror-stricken at an
excess of rigour in government. In their eyes a number of men had fallen,
places had changed, the central power was surrounded by a tumult, but
_they_ had been clothed and fed almost by a miracle—their battles had
been made possible. The year since the great conscription had drawn them
from their homes had been for them a struggle of continual promise,
ending in a great achievement. Already the soldier was half-professional;
the eager volunteer of 1792, full of his politics, had given place to a
type which the wanton policy of the old regime was forging to its own
destruction. For it was forging the veterans who cared more and more for
the Revolutionary thing, and less and less for the discussions and the
theories, till at last they produced the Empire.
St. Just therefore could not warn Robespierre. St. Just himself had
learnt no lesson. His ideal was still in his eyes the salvation of
France, and even of the world; the victory of Fleurus only made it the
more possible to carry his ideal out in action. He had seen the emigrants
who were taken in that battle spared for the first time by the French
soldiery, but he did not recognise the tremendous import of this, nor
appreciate what our own time has thoroughly learnt, that it is the
success or the failure of the national defence which rules the temper of
a nation.
When the news of Fleurus became known in Paris the law of Prairial had
been in action for nearly three weeks. By the time the victory and its
meaning had fully sunk into the mind of the capital half the short period
of Robespierre had expired. How much was due to fear upon his part, how
much to mere blindness, we cannot tell, but the very moment when the
necessity for the Terror patently disappeared was the moment chosen by
him for the aggravation of his system.
He attacked the Mountain.
It will be remembered that the Convention had feared for itself when it
gave the full power into his hands. On the 11th of June Bourdon from the
Oise had carried a motion which would have defended the deputies, but
which Robespierre had caused to be cancelled upon the following day.
With an attack, however, appearing as a reality instead of remaining as a
threat, even the “Marsh” grew afraid. He put into his speech an excellent
maxim, that “not success of armies abroad or on the frontier are the
greatness of a nation, but the virtue of its private citizens within”
(21st Messidor)—a truth appearing perhaps at the very worst moment, for
it translated itself at once in the minds of his audience into “the
victories mean nothing to me; the guillotine is for the defence not of
the nation but of my dogmas.” And his faith went on sacrificing its
innumerable victims.
Another and a final element was added to the forces against him. The
Committee began to refuse his leadership. It must be remembered that
Robespierre was not absolute master in the sense in which (for example)
an English general would be master of an Indian province after the
suppression of a mutiny. Circumstances, immense popularity, above all
the kind of men who composed the great Committee, are the explanation
of his power. His power was a fact, but a fact based on no theoretical
right, and therefore possessed of no elements of endurance. Even the
Committee was in the eyes of all the governed, and of some of its
own members, only the servant of the national welfare. Two men upon
it were Robespierrians—Couthon and St. Just; one was a turncoat by
nature—Barrère; two more were men of the Hébertian type, most unreliable
for an idealist to deal with—Billaud and Collot. Finally there remains
Carnot, the worker, and four others—the two Prieurs, Lindet and St. André.
Robespierre could be virtually a master, but a master only on the
tolerance of superior though latent force. He could inspire terror by the
common knowledge that the machinery was in his hands, that its terrible
punishment was practically his to inflict at pleasure. But something put
it into his hand, and something could take it away. It cannot be too
often repeated, if we wish to understand the Revolution, that from the
fall of Lafayette to the 13th of October 1795 there was no disciplined
armed force at the service of the Government, there was nobody better
armed or better drilled than the man in the street—not even gunners, the
first necessity of modern masters, for the very artillery was amateur;
above all, there was no armed body whose members obeyed without question,
who were, as a good army must be, a rigid instrument of government framed
upon a device which multiplies a hundredfold the strength of each man in
the public service. The “strong men” of history, whom our reactionaries
delight to honour, have always had such an instrument at their
disposition, but when there is no one to fire at a command, your strong
man is like any other, save that he is a little weaker for shouting.
What then was the ultimate master which permitted Robespierre to rule? It
was composed of several forces, and in its division is to be found the
secret of its inertia.
Firstly, the Convention, mutilated as it was, was granted by all to be
the nearest representative of the nation. What the majority voted was
done. It exercised a very great moral influence, and if it had shown that
influence so slightly, it was because its organisation was contemptible—a
mass of individuals, with no traditions of action or of grouping, a crowd
in which the fear of each that another might be his enemy caused the
sum of its individual cries to be anything but the integrate expression
of its corporate will. Well, this crowd had had one formidable enemy.
The _right_ of the Convention had been combated by the _force_ of the
well-organised Commune. The Commune used to be a mirror of at least half
of Paris; it had lost this character. It was nothing now but a group of
Robespierrians, and the Convention was the stronger for the change.
Secondly, there was the material force—the populace of Paris. They had
not risen hitherto save for one or two motives—the establishment of the
national defence, the prevention of a political reaction; and they had
been more turbulent and more dangerous where the first than where the
second was their cause for action.
Thirdly, the regular initiative was in the hands of a majority of the
Committee of Public Safety.
The moment therefore that the majority of the Committee refused to
follow Robespierre’s lead, he would have had to ascend the tribune of
the Convention, and in one of those speeches which carried to some such
genuine conviction, but to many others such still more genuine fear, he
would have had to obtain a majority for the reconstruction of the great
Committee.
Now a deliberative Assembly which is not strictly organised upon
party lines, which has no aristocratic quality and no great (because
traditional) corporate pride, is very strongly influenced by what we call
“Public Opinion.” It hears reports from the whole nation, is composed of
every kind of man, regards itself moreover as in duty bound to listen to
the voices outside, meets in its lobbies and during its recesses every
species of expression.
Such a jury is therefore the very worst before which a popular idol
could present itself when some strong adverse action had just shown his
reputation to be falling. Outvoted in Committee, condemned in Parliament,
the man who had but just now been supreme would have to turn to whatever
he could find of physical force to support him.
But that physical force in the case of Robespierre was only the populace
of Paris, and a populace moreover whose one organising centre—the
Commune—had been weakened by himself. Once suppose him forced to depend
upon a rising of the people, and the weakness of his position is
apparent; even were he still the politician of the majority, it would
be a long step from approving of his policy to risking one’s life in a
civil tumult, conscious that one was attacking every form of constituted
authority, and presumably the opinion of the whole nation, for no
principle, from no necessity, but to save a man. As we shall see, the
rising to defend him comprised but a small knot of men, and totally
failed.
The man who had not the wits to cook an egg prepared his own ruin.
Carnot, whose one idea was to work and save the frontier, he openly
menaced. Robespierre meditated the inconceivable folly of replacing
Carnot’s science by the blind activity of St. Just. In alienating Carnot
and losing that possible ally, Robespierre lost five of his colleagues
on the Committee. The end of Messidor saw him in a kind of voluntary
isolation, letting the fatal machine work on, while he stood off from the
levers.
He seems to have just felt two doubts disturbing the serenity of his
fanatical complacency. First, whether after all he was going down to
posterity as he saw himself to be—the maker of a new France, “the
terror of oppressors and the refuge of the oppressed.” (One day his
eyes filled when the noise of the tumbrils reached him, and he said, “I
shall be remembered only as a slayer of men.” So wrapped up in himself,
he had not yet heard an echo of what all men were saying.) Secondly,
he wondered whether his perfect state was so near as he had thought.
The killing went on, and he got no nearer. The “anti-patriots,” the
“anti-revolutionaries,” the “anti-Robespierres” (though he did not think
of them so) passed perpetually eastward and westward daily from the
prisons to the two guillotines.
By the irony of whatever rules and laughs at men, events caused the
first mutterings to rise among the Extremists. The Terror was too
mild, and above all the men with hearts of beasts—the remainder of the
Hébertists—hated a policy which included, however fantastically, the
ideal and the worship of God. They hated his half-alliance with whatever
was Christian in the Convention, and his perpetual appeals to the
Moderates.
The Lower Committee had a partially independent life. It was known to be
the policy of Robespierre to submit this body, as he had submitted all
the other organs of government, to the great Committee of Public Safety.
Hence it was in this Lower Committee of General Security—menaced as a
function and as individuals, thoroughly in touch, by its position, with
the police—that the conspiracy arose. The majority of its members joined
it, and from the Higher Committee Billaud and Collot adhered. On the 7th
of Thermidor (25th of July 1794) the storm burst. Barrère read his report
to the Convention, and it was an open menace to Robespierre.
The origins of that report merit a certain discussion. We have seen that
from the first the reports, directed by the Committee, were usually
written by Barrère, and were read to the Convention by him. On the other
hand, we can discover usually in the style, and always in the opinions of
the reports, the action of whoever led in the councils of the Committee.
Thus, in the document of this nature of which so much mention is made in
chapter vi., the spirit, and evidently many of the actual phrases, are
the work of Danton.
Who drew up Barrère’s report, whether (possibly) it was his own work,
when he saw opinion shifting away from Robespierre, or whether, as is
more probable, it was inspired by Billaud and Collot, and permitted
by the five neutrals, we cannot tell. The main fact is this, that the
Committee had at least permitted to be made in its name a public
declaration hostile to the man who, through the Committee, had ruled
France.
The report repudiated in detail the policy of the past seven weeks; it
insisted on the importance of the victories, on the iniquity of further
lists of victims. For the first time in four months the Convention acted
freely; it ordered the report to be printed and to be sent to all the
Communes of France.
On the next day Robespierre came for the last time into his accustomed
place. He gave his last speech to the Parliament. He was to appear once
more, but never again as the orator and the leader. Reading, as was
his wont, not declaiming, in the slow even voice that had compelled
such attention, such enthusiasm, and such fear, he made the last of his
declarations. This speech, if no other, should be read to understand
the man. Here a theory stated with power and with precision; there a
description of those without whose condemnation the theory could not be
realised. A noble ideal based upon the scaffold; a dogma and a detailed
persecution side by side. He read it slowly from end to end, proving
to himself, and, as he thought, to his audience, the perfection of
his ideal, and the necessity of the terrible road towards it. But his
audience heard nothing of the ideal; they heard only the description of
themselves.
Men of all kinds, the mere demagogues, were in that summary, the personal
enemies, the financiers. It seems that on the manuscript from which he
read even Cambon’s name was written. But in this extreme crisis, when he
was denouncing the first men in order to save his own position, he was
no longer Robespierre. It made no difference to his fate, yet we judge
him with more accuracy when we know that he omitted the name of Cambon,
and that he did not pronounce that of Carnot, whom he had threatened in
private. It was an attempt at compromise.
The Convention heard him and his threat. Of his theories they had heard
enough for years. Yet such was the power of his slow clear utterance,
of the reverence which his following commanded, and of the idea which
he expressed so well, and in which all at heart believed, that they
voted the printing and the dissemination of the speech. Cambon and
Billaud-Varennes rose to demand the repeal of the vote. The great
unwieldy assembly, or rather its great unwieldy neutral faction,
hesitated, conferred, and yielded to the demand. Then Robespierre was
doomed.
As he was reading, as the distribution of the speech and then its repeal
were being voted, there hung above his head and that of the Parliament
the flags taken in the new victories from the English and Austrians
at Turcoing, at Landrecies, at Quesnoy, at Condé, at Valenciennes, at
Fleurus, and it was they that turned the scale.
When the evening came the Club met, the little society of the Jacobins,
which was still the most independent and the most vital force in Paris.
It had dared to elect a president for its debates whose whole policy was
antagonistic to Robespierre; yet now it heard him and remembered its old
idol. He re-read, in the same tone, but in a more familiar surrounding
and with ampler diction, the speech of the morning, and his hearers
grew wild with enthusiasm. They hissed and they turned out Billaud and
Collot, who had dared to be present; they cried out to Robespierre that
they would follow him always towards the perfect Republic; and David, an
excellent artist and a bad man, cried to him from the back, “I will drink
the hemlock with you!” but he was afraid even to acknowledge his master
when Robespierre came to die.
The Jacobins that night were ready to rise for Robespierre. As so
many minorities have been in that city of convictions and of intense
enthusiasms, they were ready to impose themselves and their creed upon
the capital and upon France; but they did not know to what a handful
they had been reduced in the last seven weeks. All night the conspiracy
against Robespierre worked hard. Boissy D’Anglas, the leader of the
“Marsh,” was brought over. To him and his followers Robespierre was
pointed out as the tyrant; to what was left of the Mountain he was
denounced as the moderate and the compromiser. But, above all, he was, to
the great bulk of the Convention, the enemy who had destroyed all civil
order in pursuit of his mad theories, and who had even held the victories
of no account.
The Parliament met the next morning, on the 9th of Thermidor (27th of
July). It was a year to a day since Robespierre had joined the great
Committee; but it was for the condemnation of Robespierre that they
met. The great hall waited for a coming tumult. First into the tribune
went St. Just, with his beautiful face and strong bearing, determined
in oratory as in the battles to strike at once and lead a charge. He
was eloquent, for he was trying to save his friend; he boldly attempted
argument, a compromise, anything; called it “saving the Republic.” “Let
us end his domination if you will, but let the government still be that
of the Revolution, and let us draw up such rules as shall save us from
arbitrary power without destroying the motive force of the national
demand.” The sentiment was precisely that of the Convention, but the
speaker was known to be merely the young bodyguard of their enemy.
Tallien called out from the right, “Pull back the curtain,” and, though
the fellow was an actor, he had struck the right note. St. Just could
never defend Robespierre; it would have been a cloak for continuing the
Terror. The Convention applauded, and from applause turned to crying down
St. Just in a public roar of fear and hatred.
Then twice Robespierre tried to speak; the hubbub silenced him. During
a lull in the storm they voted the arrest of Henriot. It meant the
transference of such pitiful armed force as he commanded from the hand of
a friend to that of an enemy. Robespierre made a last effort to rescind
that order. He was not heard.
Tallien was given the tribune by the Speaker (Collot was Speaker that
day, and Collot had been turned out by the Jacobins the night before).
Tallien spoke theatrically, as he always did, but to the point.
Robespierre, he said, had plotted to destroy the assembly for his
purposes; he quoted the speech of the day before. While Barrère, the
turncoat, stood looking this way and that, not knowing how things would
turn. Once more Robespierre attempted a reply; he only raised a storm
that drowned his voice.
When he saw that full speech was denied him, he turned from the place
where he stood towards the “Marsh,” the Moderates, and said, “I appeal to
you who are just and who are not conspiring with these assassins;” but
the “Marsh” was lost to him—they also cried him down.
A little silence followed. They saw Robespierre attempting for a fifth
time to speak, but the agony of the night and the fearful struggle of the
morning had overcome him at last: his voice could not be heard though he
tried to articulate. Garnier of the Aube called to him across the floor
of the hall, “The blood of Danton chokes you.” It was the truest thing
said in that wild meeting.
Before the silence was broken, Louchet, an unknown man, rose and
proposed the arrest, saying openly what all thought: “No one will deny
that Robespierre has played the master; let us vote his arrest.” Then
Robespierre found his voice. He went up four steps above his usual seat,
to a place where, high up and from the left, from the summit of what
had been the Mountain in the old days, he could see the whole of that
multitudinous assembly, with whose aid he had hoped to regenerate France
and to save mankind. Beneath him as a host, like the dim pictures of
Martin’s Milton, rank on rank, he saw so many heads that it must have
seemed to him a nation. He remembered all his dreams of a perfect state,
of men living in equality, with no one oppressed and no one oppressing,
of a government based upon the clear will of all, and upon the civic
virtues which he had preached, till there should rise the perfect
Republic, an exemplar for all the nations. He saw that he was doomed,
and with him all his dreams. Perhaps, also, he saw the armed despotism
which he had twice prophesied coming in his place. To the last he did not
understand his folly, and he replied to the demand of Louchet, “Vote for
my death.”
Le Bas, who had been with St. Just in the Ardennes, who had helped to
make the great army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and Robespierre the younger,
another honest man, came and did what David failed to do—they said they
would die with him, and took his hands in theirs. The Committee passed to
the vote, and the three were taken away with St. Just and with Couthon.
The scene that follows is the end of the Revolution in Paris.
Twice at least in the course of the preceding five years Paris had risen
against the law and had removed an obstacle or a man for the sake of the
Revolution. The random Municipality of 1789 (which for all its disorder
was the parent of the puissant modern system of Communes) is an example
in point; the 2nd of June is another. Ultimately the people of Paris were
the only force on which government rested, and it was to them that the
final appeal was made.
The Commune possessed the initiative in this matter—it was the sole
centre of Paris in theory; and now that the clubs were all in decay
(save the Jacobins), now that the great orators were exiled or dead, and
that the Sections themselves did not meet, the Commune was also the only
centre in fact. But the Commune, it will be remembered, had become a
Robespierrian thing. It determined to rise against the Convention.
The Convention had ordered the arrest of Henriot, who was commander of
the armed force (such as it was) of the town. It sent his successor,
Hesmart to do the work. But the head of a number of pikes and guns would
not submit to a man who represented only the law, and instead of Hesmart
arresting Henriot, it was Henriot who arrested Hesmart.
Meanwhile the other officers of the Commune displayed the same energy,
the same rapidity of execution and design which under better leaders
and for a better cause had hitherto succeeded. Lescot-Payot (the
Robespierrian mayor who had been put into the place of Pache on the
21st of Floréal), and Payan the national agent, were at the head of
the movement. They sent orders to the prisons to refuse the arrested
deputies, they gave Henriot the formal order to employ his full force and
act. They raised the Jacobins. They formed a committee of nine who were
to take over the government; they ordered the arrest of their principal
enemies in the Convention, and most important of all, they convened the
Sections.
They had only a night to work in—the 9th Thermidor to the 10th—and
_their_ work had the energy of a fever; but the greatest factor of
all was lacking—the fever did not spread. The inertia of the people,
even their disapproval, was evident as they proceeded; the majority of
such Sections as did meet stood aloof from or condemned the cause of
Robespierre.
While it was still just light, between eight and nine in the evening,
Robespierre, whom the keepers of the Luxemburg prison had refused, was
brought to the Mairie, and there one after the other all the arrested
deputies came, profiting by the official routine; for the Mairie was the
“right place” officially for prisoners when a difficulty arose as to
imprisonment within Paris. But official routine had a strange bedfellow
that night, for while the officials took the prisoners there, the small
band of rebels, who knew of no place more friendly, brought there also
those whom they had delivered by force. Robespierre was again with
the strongest of his friends—his brother, St. Just, Couthon; he was
surrounded by an organised and legal body, the Commune, which had risen
in his defence; they passed to the Hotel de Ville, and outside, on the
Place de Grève, there gathered between ten o’clock and eleven a fairly
large group of the National Guard. But there was no order among them, nor
any accurate knowledge among their officers as to what was to be done.
From the windows of the room where Robespierre and his companions sat,
there could be dimly seen a moving crowd of mingled citizens and guards,
discussing rather than preparing for action.
Robespierre refused to put himself at the head of the movement; at least
it is only thus that we can explain the delay and the confusion. He was
to the last the strange mixture of lawyer and pedant and idealist. He
would not act without the legal right, for his pedantry forbade it, nor
move with an armed minority, because, judged by his theories, it would
have been a crime. Perhaps at the very last he decided to move: there
exists a document authorising a march on the Convention, and at its base
the first three letters of his name—the signature unfinished, interrupted.
Meanwhile the Convention had found a new energy and a power of corporate
action to which it had been long a stranger—each man there was defending
his life. Legendre, with a small force, went and closed the Jacobins.
Barras was given the command of such armed men as could be gathered; the
two committees sent emissaries who appealed with success to the Sections.
The Convention was the law which had always meant so much to the people;
it was the authority of the constitution. Its majority, obeyed when it
was in lethargy, could not but be successful when it awoke. All Paris
defended it.
At midnight one of the sudden thunder-showers which are common in the
Seine valley at that season cleared what was left of the crowd before
the Hotel de Ville. They had discussed both sides, and they had not
decided—hardly an army for rebellion; they had doubted what business they
had there, and with the rain they went home. Yet it was not till two
hours after, in the early morning, that the little band of the Convention
came into the square. They found it almost empty, with here and there a
small group standing on the wet cobble-stones, sleepy but curious.
Bourdon and a few policemen went into the Hotel de Ville and found no
defenders. They went up to the room where the conspirators sat.
Robespierre was on the ground with his jaw broken by a pistol-shot.
At half-past seven in the evening of that day (the 10th Thermidor)
twenty-two of the Robespierrians were taken in three carts to the
guillotine. Robespierre himself, half-unconscious from his wound, stood
propped against the side of the cart, his head bandaged, his arms bound,
his chin upon his breast. Ropes also bound his body to the sides of the
tumbril. He passed the house where Duplay had sheltered him, and where
he had hidden himself, so as not to hear the noise of the executioners’
carts. Now beneath him the heavy wheels were making the same sound on the
ruts of the Rue St. Honoré. At a cross-street the cart stopped to let
pass the funeral of Madame Aigué, who had killed herself the day before
from fear of Robespierre.
As they neared the Place of the Revolution, where Louis and Danton had
suffered, probably at the turning of the Rue St. Honoré, where the
guillotine came in sight and where Danton had sung his song, a woman came
forward from the crowd—doubtless some one whom his tyranny had directly
bereaved—and struck Robespierre a blow. For sixteen hours he had not
spoken nor made a sign, but when he felt through this blow the popular
hatred, he made a gesture of contempt and of despair; he shrugged his
shoulders, but kept his innumerable thoughts within the bandages. “_De
mourir pour le peuple et d’en être abhorré_.”
* * * * *
Then—so the greatest of French historians tell us—France marched down a
broad road to the tomb where she has left two millions of men.
But the armies of the great twenty years cannot be stated in the terms
of one man’s ambition, nor summed up in any of the simple formulæ which
a just hatred of Cæsarism has framed to explain them. At the root of
every battle of the Empire was the organisation and the enthusiasm of
1793. The tactics of Austerlitz and of Jena were learned in Flanders; the
enthusiasm of the Guard itself came in clear descent from the exaltation
of the Sambre-et-Meuse.
In this book we have attempted to judge the first man of a great crisis
in relation to his time; it is still more essential that, when we
consider the after-effects of his action, a whole nation under arms
should stand in the right historical framework, its gigantic effort part
and parcel of a supreme necessity.
We can understand, we can speak rationally, and therefore truly, of
Danton, when we show him above all loving and defending France and the
Revolutionary Thing: that same appreciation will make us follow clearly
the continuous development of his action. It is hardly too much to say
that, until Tilsit, the French had to advance or be crushed—nation,
creed, and men.
The men and the armies must be for us the men and the armies that gave
a new vigour to Europe; the details of their action should not be the
matter of our judgment, but their relation to the whole community—its
needs, its defence, its faith.
As the time grows greater between that period and our own, a just
proportion imposes itself. The flame which, close at hand, burnt in
a formless furnace is beginning to assume a certain shape. From a
standpoint so distant that no living memory bridges the gulf, we can
measure the light, the heat, and even the fuel of that flame.
As to its final meaning in our society, every day makes that clearer;
and, to change the metaphor, this much becomes more and more apparent,
that through whatever crises the Western civilisation is to pass, and
whatever form its edifice will finally take, when the noise of the
building is over, the corner-stone, with its immense strength and its
precision of line, was planned by the philosophy and was hewn by the
force of the Revolution. Civilisations die, and ours was dying before
that wind swept across Europe.
It would have been a poor excuse for leaving unremoved the rubble, the
dust, and the putrescence of the old world to have pleaded that the decay
was the action of centuries, and that old things alone were worthy of
reverence. Old things alone are worthy of reverence, but old things which
have grown old upon just and sure foundations, to which time has added
ornament and the satisfaction of harmonious colour, without destroying
the main lines, and without sapping the strength by which they live.
The new foundations alone stand at the present day. They are crude, they
satisfy nothing in us permanently, they are very far from affording
that sentiment of content which is the first requisite of a happy
civilisation. But time will do in this case, as it has always done in
every other, the work of harmony and of completion. The final society
will not be without its innumerable complexity of detail, its humour,
and its inner life. Certainly it will not long remain a stranger to the
unseen; but it will be built upon 1793.
Meanwhile the light grows on the origins. The personal bitterness which
the struggle produced has passed. It is a pious memory in this or that
family in France to give itself still the name of a Revolutionary
faction; but the hatred that has produced confusion in honest critics,
and that has furnished such ample material for false history, that hatred
is disappearing in France. The vendettas have ceased, and the grosser of
the calumnies are no longer heard. The history of the Revolution began
to be possible when Louis Blanc sat down to curse the upheaval that had
killed his father, and ended by producing the work which more than any
other exalted the extreme Revolutionary ideal.
The story of that time is now like a photographic negative, which a man
fixes, washing away the white cloud from the clean detail of the film.
Point after point, then more rapidly whole spaces, stand out precise and
true. And the certitude which he feels that the underlying picture is an
accurate reminiscence of Nature comes to us also when we make out and
fix some passage in the Revolution, cleared of its mass of hearsay, of
vituperation, of ignorance, and of mere sound.
We are beginning to see a great picture, consonant in its details, and
consecutive in its action. The necessity of reform; the light of the
ideal striking men’s minds after a long sleep, the hills first and
afterwards the plains; privilege and all the interests of the few alarmed
and militant; the menace of attack and the preparation of defence; the
opposition of extremes on either side of the frontier, growing at an
increasing speed, till at last, each opposite principle mutually exciting
the other, as armatories their magnets, from a little current of opinion
rose a force that none could resist. The governments of the whole world
were for the destruction of the French people, and the French people were
for the rooting out of everything, good and evil, which was attached,
however faintly, to the old regime.
The rhetoricians passed in the smoke of the fire, unsubstantial, full of
words that could lead and inspire, but empty of acts that could govern
the storm. From their passing, which is as vague as a vision, we hear
faintly the “Marseillaise” of the Girondins.
The men of action and of the crisis passed. They burnt in the heat
they themselves had kindled, but in that furnace the nation was run,
and forged, and made. Then came the armies: France grown cold from the
casting-pit, but bent upon action, and able to do.
Wherever France went by, the Revolutionary Thing remained the legacy of
her conviction and of her power. It remains with a kind of iron laughter
for those who judge the idea as a passing madness. The philosophers have
decided upon a new philosophy; the lawyers have clearly proved that
there has been no change; the rhetoric has been thoroughly laughed down,
enthusiasm has grown ridiculous, and the men of action are cursed. But
in the wake of the French march citizens are found who own the soil and
are judged by an equal code of laws; nationalities have been welded,
patriotism has risen at the call of the new patriotic creed; Germany,
Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy have known themselves as something more
than the delimitations of sovereigns. Nor was there any abomination of
the old decay, its tortures, its ignominies, its privileges, its licensed
insults, or its slaveries, but she utterly stamped them out. In Germany,
in Austria, in Italy, they disappeared. Only in one dark corner they
remained—the great Northern field, where France herself grew powerless
from cold, and from whence an unknown rule and the advance of relentless
things menaces Europe now.
But with the mention of that frozen place there comes a thought older
than all our theories—the mourning for the dead. Danton helped to make
us, and was killed: his effort has succeeded, but the tragedy remains.
The army at whose source he stood, the captain who inherited his action,
were worn out in forging a new world. And I will end this book by that
last duty of mourning, as we who hold to immortality yet break our hearts
for the dead.
There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain sombre,
mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that passed away to
Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him move along their snows
through the long mysterious twilights of the northern autumn in silence,
with the head bent and the reins in the left hand loose, following some
enduring purpose, reaching towards an ancient solitude and repose. They
say it was Napoleon. After him there trailed for days the shadows of the
soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It
was as though the cannon-smoke of Waterloo, borne on the light west wind
of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of combat,
and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over the
endless plains.
But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the Guard
and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was
extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the army was of
ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence which we can never
pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bivouac round the
most splendid of human swords.
APPENDIX
I
NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS
The spot once occupied by the Cordeliers is among the most interesting
in Paris, and it is of some importance to sketch its history and to
reconstruct its appearance at greater length than was possible in the
text.
All the land from St. Germains des Près up northwards along the hillside
had belonged to that abbey since its foundation, when the first dynasty
of Frankish kings had endowed the foundation with a great estate carved
out of what had once been the Roman fiscal lands on the south bank. Round
the abbey itself a few houses had gathered, forming the “Faubourg” (or
suburb) of “St. Germains”; but the greater part of the estate was open
field and meadow. When Philip Augustus built his great wall round Paris
it cut through the estate, leaving the Church and Abbey of St. Germains
outside the city, but enclosing a small part of the fields within its
boundary.
You may trace the line of the wall at this day by noting the street “Rue
de Monsieur le Prince,” once called “Rue des Fossés Monsieur le Prince,”
and running on the line of the outer ditch. The wall ran not twenty yards
east of the modern street and exactly parallel to it. A portion of it
may yet be seen in that neighbourhood, a great hollow round built into
the wall of one of the houses, a cobbler’s shop in the Cour du Commerce;
it is one (the last, I believe) of the half-towers which flanked Philip
Augustus’s wall.
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, very shortly after the
death of St. Francis, the first preachers of the new Order which he
had founded came to Paris. It was the moment when the University was
climbing up the hill, building its colleges, having possessed its
charter for some years, and already a strong, organised, wealthy,
and therefore conservative body. This order of preachers, wandering,
intensely new, and founded by a mystic whose place in Christendom was
not yet finally determined, were bound to come into collision with the
spirit of the place. It must be remembered that the thirteenth century
was not transitional, but, on the contrary, a time of settled order.
For a century it had known the Roman law; it had everywhere the Gothic
architecture; it had systemised and made legal the rough accidents of
feudal custom; it was wealthy, proud, and successful. On it there falls
one of those creations which are only possible in a time of energy, and
yet which almost invariably quarrel with the period that has produced
them. An Order devoted to simplicity, making of holy poverty the
foundation of the inner life, specially created for the poor (whom the
growing differentiation of society was beginning to debase), the early
Franciscans were essentially revolutionary, because they built on the
great foundations of all active and permanent reform—I mean the appetite
for primitive conditions, and the determination to break through the net
of complexity which the long growths of time weave about a conservative
society.
The rich Abbey of St. Germains gave them asylum. It was proud to possess
dependants, it was great enough to afford benevolent experiments, and it
took pleasure in offending the University, which was an upstart in its
eyes, and was beginning to show as a powerful rival in the affairs of the
south side of Paris. The Franciscans, therefore—whom the populace already
called the “Cordeliers” from the girdle of rope about their habit—were
permitted to settle in that little corner of their estate which had been
cut off by the building of the town wall, and they occupied a triangle of
which the wall formed the south-western, a lane (afterwards called “Rue
des Cordeliers”) the northern, and an irregular line bounding one of the
University estates the south-eastern side.
This was in 1230. St. Louis was still a boy of fifteen. The little
foundation was, for the University, nothing but an unwelcome neighbour
whom it could not oust, and for the Abbey of St. Germains nothing but a
guest. Their provisional tenure did not permit them a peal of bells nor a
public cemetery.
St. Louis, however, grew into a manhood which, for all its piety, had
a wonderful grasp of the society around it. The saint who was never
clerical, and the Capetian who in all things was rather for the spirit
than the letter, became their principal support. The Papacy, having once
(though reluctantly) recognised the Franciscan movement in the interview
between Innocent III. and its founder, continued in the succeeding
generation to protect it. From a distance, where the quarrels of the
University affected it little, the Holy See decided more than one dispute
in favour of the new-comers, and the Franciscans of Paris flourished
exceedingly. By 1240 the full privileges of an independent foundation
were granted. They have their public service, their cemetery, and their
bells. St. Louis helps them to build a new chapel by giving them, in
1267, part of the great fine which he levied on Enguerrand de Coucy. They
succeed at last in obtaining the recognition of the University; they are
permitted to teach; they number among their lecturers Duns Scotus and St.
Bonaventure; and they become one of the most famous of the colleges.
During the Middle Ages (apart from certain minor structures and a few
private houses which had been permitted to rise on their land, and which
were technically known as the “dépendances”), three principal groups of
buildings marked the foundations. First, the monastery itself, a somewhat
irregular mass, running (as a whole) north and south, and separated from
the Rue des Cordeliers by a little court or garden. Secondly, running
from the northern end of this convent, and forming, as it were, a letter
L with the main building, was the chapel, lying, of course, east and
west, and forming the southern side of the Rue des Cordeliers, upon
which was the principal porch. Thirdly, running also east and west, but
separated from the other buildings by a short space, was the hall.
This famous monument, the only part of the college that has been
preserved, stood well back from the street, and in the middle of the
convent grounds. It was on the eastern side of the monastery, and hence
in the ground plan balanced (so to speak) the church, which lay to the
west of that main building; this was so designed that its western end
faced about the middle of the college.
I have called it a hall because its use exactly corresponded to that of
our college halls in the English universities. I mean, it was at once a
refectory and lecture-room. It was approached by a little lane running up
through the grounds under the side of the convent, later hemmed in with
houses.
Here not only were the voices of the great scholars heard and the
subtleties of the fourteenth century, but also Etienne Marcel called the
States General of 1357. From hence that Danton of the mediæval invasion
sent out his messengers to the Feudality. Here the District gathered for
the elections of 1789; here the Club met in 1791 and urged the debate
that finally produced the Republic of the next year. It was here also
that the three watchwords of the Republic were devised; here Hérbert
veiled the Declaration; and here the last few words of 1794 were spoken.
Here the century, which owes more perhaps to that site than to any place
in France, has collected a museum of surgery, where you may see anomalies
preserved in spirits, skeletons hung on wires, and other objects,
interesting rather than sublime.
As for the college and its estate, they continued for some three
hundred years—that is, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries—to increase in importance. It is a matter of common knowledge
how soon the pure ideals of St. Francis had to compromise with the world.
This Order, like all others, became wealthy, rooted, and traditional. The
Cordeliers, as Paris grew, found themselves possessed of a most valuable
plot, whose ground-value continually increased. They reserved the garden
to the west, but for the rest—and especially around the buildings and
along the lanes—houses were built. When the wall of Philip Augustus
was first embedded by the growth of the city, and afterwards in part
destroyed, the Cordeliers bought an extension to their estate, so that
it stretched a little beyond the new street of “the Fossés,” which had
been built on the site of the ditch. In 1580 their old thirteenth-century
chapel (which must have been one of the best bits of early Gothic in
Paris) was burnt down, and a larger one in the style of the time was
put up by the piety of Henry IV. Throughout the seventeenth century the
house seems to have suffered from a decay which continued throughout
the succeeding hundred years, and culminated in the disasters of the
Revolutionary period. They permitted the alienation of a strip to the
west of their grounds, through which the municipality drove in 1673
the new street which, in compliment to the Order, they called “Rue de
l’Observance,” after the name of their rule.
With this exception no important change occurred to change the aspect of
the quarter until the Revolutionary period with which we have to deal.
* * * * *
We are, after this general description, in a position to recognise the
site of the Cordeliers in modern Paris. As you go down the Boulevard St.
Germains, just before you reach the Boulevard St. Michel (going east),
you see a street leading off at a slight angle to the right. It is the
Rue de l’École de Médecine, the college after which it is named facing
both on this street and on the Boulevard. This street is merely the Rue
des Cordeliers broadened and modernised. As you go a few yards up this
street, you see on your left the great court of the college, and if you
stand at its gate and look at the opposite side of the street, at the new
buildings which are now the lecture-rooms and theatres of the Faculty,
you are looking at the site of the old church, which has disappeared
during this century. The street has been broadened by taking down the
southern side, so that the church would actually have overlapped the
modern street. Continuing, you pass on your right the open yard leading
up to what was the hall of the Cordeliers, and is now the museum of
surgery (the Musée Dupuytren), and a few yards farther brings you into
the Boulevard St. Michel. Following this very broad avenue for twenty
yards at the most, you may note a new street, the “Rue Racine,” turning
off to the right. This did not exist in Danton’s time, but it lies
_nearly_ on the line that separated the Cordeliers from the Collège
d’Harcourt (at present the Lycée St. Louis). As a fact, the line was a
trifle to the south of the Rue Racine, and of course more irregular.
The Rue Racine in its turn leads you into that old street the “Rue de
Monsieur le Prince.” If you turn again to the right and go down this some
hundred yards, you are still following the boundary of the Cordeliers,
till you reach the “Rue Antoine Dubois.” This is identical with the
old “Rue de l’Observance,” spoken of above, and a few steps down this
short street leads you to the starting-point in the “Rue de l’École de
Médecine.” Such a modern itinerary would describe as nearly as is now
possible the circumference of the college and estate of the Cordeliers.
The quadrilateral comprised by these four streets, the Rue de l’École de
Médecine, the Rue Racine, the Rue M. de le Prince, and the Rue Antoine
Dubois, is the site of the famous convent and its grounds.
To reproduce the quarter in 1788 we have to imagine the following
changes:—The Rue de l’École de Médecine, very narrow, flanked for the
greater part of its southern side with the church and old wall of the
convent. It leads into a little narrow street called the “Rue de la
Harpe,” which went right up the hill, and would correspond to a strip
taken in the exact centre of the present Boulevard St. Michel. The
first few buildings here, notably the Church of St. Come, were still
on the Cordeliers’ estate. Just above them, however, began the grounds
and buildings of the “College d’Harcourt.” As we have observed, the
Rue Racine did not exist, nor anything corresponding to it. To follow
the boundaries of the estate you would have had to let yourself in by
a side-door, and then you might have followed a long, irregular wall
which separated their land from the College d’Harcourt. This wall, after
passing through a great garden, came out on the Rue Monsieur le Prince,
and the rest of one’s circuit would be much what it is to-day.
Finally, to see the building as Danton saw it, you must imagine a
half-deserted place, rich, but somewhat unfrequented, like certain old
legal Inns that once stood in London, old walls appearing here and there
from between houses of a century’s date; a mass of irregular buildings,
of garden and of private house hopelessly intermingled; while up a narrow
and dark passage stood the Hall, which was still the best preserved part
of the college, and with which alone his name is associated.
II
NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK
It may be of interest to those who desire to study with some
particularity the personal history of Danton to know where are to be
found in modern Paris the places with which we have found him personally
connected in this book.
His first offices were in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles. This street has
disappeared in the improvements which included the prolongation of the
Rue de Rivoli. This office in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles occupied
almost exactly the same spot, which can be recognised to-day in the
following manner. As you go along the northern side of the Rue de Rivoli
going east, you come to a point 500 yards or so from the Louvre, from
whence you begin to see the Tour St. Jacques just peering round the
southern side of the street. The shops which are then upon your left
hand and the pavement upon which you stand correspond to the position of
the old mansard house in which Danton served his apprenticeship. It was
here that he had his first offices; it was from this that he bought the
business of Monsieur M. de Paisy in the Rue de la Tissanderie.
Concerning the position of these offices in the Rue de la Tissanderie,
which he moved into, I have been able to learn nothing. There is a
curious little record in the police archives of Paris—Danton complaining
that he could not work on account of the noise that a saddle-maker made
in the exercise of his trade in the same house. In this little document,
which is quoted by Monsieur Clarétie in his “Life of Camille Desmoulins,”
the house is mentioned as being “just opposite the Rue des Deux Portes”;
but as an inference to be drawn from the same record is that he left
immediately after for some other lodging in the same street, this does
not help us much.
I have said in the text that Danton lived, during the six years which
were those of his active political life, in a house of the Passage du
Commerce. I have also mentioned in the text the fact that Dr. Robinet
mentions a short residence in the Rue des Fossés Saint Germains. I have
given, moreover, in the same passage my reasons for following M. Aulard
in rejecting this first address. It seems proved that, after he left
the Rue de la Tissanderie, he moved with his wife to the corner house
of the Passage du Commerce. This was his home during the whole of the
Revolution, and it is worth while to describe its position and character
with some care.
In the first place, it has disappeared; the construction of the Boulevard
St. Germains destroyed all that end of the Cour du Commerce. If you
are going along the Boulevard St. Germains from the west towards the
University, you pass on the right the statue of Danton. It is erected on
an open triangle of ground, formed by the junction of the Boulevard and
of the Rue de l’École de Médecine. The apex of this triangle, not twenty
yards from the statue, marks the site of the old house in which Danton
and Desmoulins lived, and in which they were arrested before their trial.
The old quarter was a network of narrow streets, and where the Boulevard
St. Germain now stands, an intricate block of houses, with courtyards and
passages, not unlike the similar intricate masses which you will find in
the City of London, formed the northern side of the Rue des Cordeliers
(that is to say, the modern Rue de l’École de Médecine). A narrow alley,
known as the Cour de Commerce, joined this Rue des Cordeliers by a still
narrower passage. Danton’s house was the corner house, as is proved by
the mention in the inventory that some rooms looked upon this passage and
some upon the Rue des Cordeliers.
Of course he did not occupy the whole of it, but, in the Parisian custom,
which had already obtained for more than a century, he took a flat, and
two rooms (used as a lumber and as a servant’s bedroom) were added from
the entresole below. This flat was just such an apartment as a similar
bourgeois householder would have in Paris to-day: a dining-room, two
bedrooms, a study, a little library, a drawing-room, a kitchen, and
offices, built round the staircase and courtyard or well of the house.
I have been unable to find any mention of the rental which was paid, but
a guess at something like £150 a year in that quarter at that time for
such a flat would, I think, not be extravagant. The corresponding flat
above, Desmoulins took after his romantic marriage in December 1790,
but he did not begin to occupy the house until the early part of 1791.
It was here that his little Horace was born; it was here that his wife
and Danton’s passed the terrible night of the 10th of August, and it
was here, in the great bedroom overlooking the Rue des Cordeliers, that
Danton’s wife died in February 1793.
As to the furniture of the little apartment, it may be described as
follows:—The drawing-room was not very large, but there had been spent
upon it the most considerable sum in the furnishing of the house. It
figures for very nearly a third in the valuation, which may be read in
Appendix VII. The white furniture, which was the mark of the eighteenth
century, was its principal note; it is also worth observing that the
household was sufficiently cramped for room to use the cupboards in the
drawing-room as wardrobes. The principal bedroom was well furnished, but,
as you will find to be the case in such houses in Paris, the study, the
dining-room, and the spare room to the side of the study were very bare.
It is also remarkable that the lumber-room held nothing but two trunks
and an old double bedstead. It was the household of a man who made every
effort to maintain his position before his wife’s friends, but who was
not wealthy, and who had evidently arranged the scale of his expenditure
considerably below the probable receipts which an office such as his
would have brought in. I should much doubt whether as much as £500 a year
would go out on such an establishment, though he was certainly receiving
£1000. We know the reason of this; he had to pay off by every means in
his power the debt which he had incurred in buying the practice. While
he lived in this house, and until the office was suppressed in 1790, he
continued to keep his business rooms in the Rue de la Tissanderie. It may
be worthy of mention that he kept two servants, and that his apartment
was on the first, whilst that of Desmoulins was on the second floor of
the house.
As to the Cordeliers, on which the preceding note is written, the hall in
which their meetings were first held still exists (as we have said in the
text) under the title of Musée Dupuytren. The Church of the Cordeliers,
into which they afterwards moved, has disappeared, but the last locale
of the club (when the Municipality had turned them out of the church in
1791) still remains, and is to be discovered at No. 105 Rue Thionville.
Danton’s father-in-law had been master of a café on the Quai de l’École.
This house still remains. If I am not mistaken, it was altered slightly
during the restorations of the Second Empire. It is the house which now
stands at the south-western corner of the Place de l’École, and which
faces the quai on one side and the square on the other. The street and
quay outside M. Charpentier’s café was, however, somewhat oblique to
the modern street, and ran less east than west, more south-east than
north-west, than it does to-day.
The quay has been raised and the old fountain in the Place de l’École
destroyed. Otherwise the quarter is much the same. The café became famous
later for its draught players, a reputation that still continues.
III
NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON
I will not go in this note into any of the general considerations which
have led the greater part of modern historians to reject the legend of
Danton’s venality. These general considerations are by far the strongest
arguments upon which we can rely in this matter, but I trust that the
character which I have attempted to draw in the text of the book will
furnish them in sufficiency.
Neither do I desire to insist in this note upon the unquestionable value
of the two principal modern authorities in England and in France (Mr.
Morse Stephens and M. Aulard), who both of them regard the question as
finally settled in Danton’s favour. I have insisted sufficiently upon
this in the text. What I shall attempt to do is to quote the contemporary
accusations, to determine how much reliance can be placed upon them, to
show their character, and to describe in what way and to what extent they
are explained by documents which have since come to light.
* * * * *
First of all, a list of those contemporaries who took his venality for
certain. It is very formidable.
Mirabeau (letter to Lamarck, Thursday, 10th March 1791).—... “Montmorin
has told me ... of particular schemes ... for instance, that Beaumetz and
... D’Andrée dined yesterday alone and got Danton’s confidence ... and
then proposed to demolish Vincennes in order to make themselves popular.
Danton got 30,000 livres yesterday, and I have the proof that Danton
inspired the last number of Desmoulins’ paper.... If it is possible I
intend to risk 6000 livres, but at any rate they will be more innocently
distributed than the 30,000 livres of Danton.” Here is a categorical
statement in which a man says what the court had often said (and Mirabeau
was then an agent of the court), “I have managed Danton at such and such
a price,” and the passage gives us indirectly the name of Montmorin. The
date should be noted.
Bertrand de Molleville, a far less practical and a far less careful
man than Mirabeau, also a singularly untrustworthy authority, has the
following:—Memoirs Particuliers, i. 354.—“By the hands of this man
Durand, under the ministry of De Montmorin, Danton received more than
50,000 francs to propose certain motions of the Jacobins. He was fairly
faithful in keeping this contract, but stipulated that he should be left
free as to the means he employed.” ... Again ... “In the first debates
upon the king’s trial the infamous Danton, whose services had been so
dearly paid _out of the Civil List_, was one of those who displayed the
greatest violence. I was the more alarmed as this scoundrel was at the
moment (Autumn 1792) a most powerful and dangerous man in the Assembly.
The ardent zeal which I felt for the safety of the king, and which would
have made me think all means legitimate, suggested this means against
Danton to neutralise the rage of the monster; and though the method I
took required a lie, I did not hesitate to employ it without the least
scruple. I wrote to him on the 11th December:—‘I must not leave you
ignorant, Sir, of the fact that I have found in the papers of the late
Monsieur Montmorin notes of the dates of the sums which have been paid
out of the secret service money, including a receipt in your handwriting.
Hitherto I have made no use of this document, but I warn you that I have
enclosed them in a letter which I am writing to the President of the
Convention, and I will have them printed and placarded on the corners
of the streets if you do not conduct yourself well in the trial of the
king.’ As a fact, Montmorin had shown me these papers a year before,
though he had not given them to me. But Danton knew they existed, and
knew how intimate had been my relations with Montmorin. He did not reply
to the letter, but I saw in the published prints that he had got himself
named deputy in a mission to the army of the North. He only returned at
the end of the king’s trial, and contented himself with voting for death
without giving any opinion.” (Particular Memoirs, ii. 288-291.) I would
have the reader to specially mark this extract, to which I shall return
at the end of my note, as it can be easily proved by internal evidence to
be a falsehood. It is, indeed, of more value to any one who desires to
write a life of Bertrand himself, than it is to one who is writing the
life of Danton.
Thirdly, Lafayette says (Memoirs, iii. 83-85): “Danton, whose receipt
for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin, asked for Lafayette’s
head; that was running a great risk, but he depended on the discretion of
Lafayette and on his keeping a secret. For Lafayette to have spoken would
have been to have signed the death-warrant of Montmorin, who had paid
Danton in order to moderate his anarchic fury.” And again (iv. 328-330),
he says of Danton: “He was a vulgar tribune and incapable of turning
the masses from evil by persuasion or by respect, but he knew how to
flatter their passions, &c. &c.... I knew him from the first week of the
Revolution in the district of Cordeliers, whither I had been attracted.
After the 6th October he took money from Montmorin, whom he caused in
consequence to be assassinated on the 2nd September. In connection with
this secret he said to me once, ‘General, I know you do not know me, I am
more of a Monarchist than you.’... I have learnt since from the person
to whom Madame Elizabeth told it that he had received, about the 10th
August, a considerable sum to give the movement a direction in the king’s
favour, and, indeed, he got the royal family sent to the Temple. He said
to a friend of the king, ‘It is I who will save him or kill him.’”
Fourthly, there is Brissot (iv. 193-194). “Among the stipendiaries of
Orleans was ... Danton. I have seen the receipt for 500,000 francs which
were paid him by Montmorin. He was sold to the court in order to thrust
the Revolution into the excesses which would make it odious to the great
bulk of Frenchmen.”
Fifthly, Madame Roland (who has so much to say against a character
so profoundly antipathetic to her) has this special passage on his
corruption (Dauban’s edition, 1864, pp. 254-255): “He went to Belgium to
augment his wealth, and dared to admit a fortune of 1,400,000 francs, to
assume luxury,” &c. &c.
Sixthly (if it is worth quoting), among the papers that Robespierre
left, in the notes that formed the basis of St. Just’s report, are the
words—“Danton owed an obligation to Mirabeau; it was Mirabeau who got him
repaid the price of his practice. It has even been said that he was paid
twice. I heard him admit to Fabre certain thefts of shoes belonging to
the army.”
Such are the contemporary accusations. There are the following points to
be noted with regard to them. No one says that he himself paid money;
the sums of money are very various. They are paid, according to some,
on a few definite occasions; according to others, upon all occasions.
Finally, every accusation that has any definite basis at all pivots round
the name of Montmorin. “Montmorin held the receipt,” “Montmorin told me,”
and so forth. Now, if we remember that Montmorin held the receipt for a
legitimate and open reimbursement (see Appendix VI.), and then compare
the accusations with what we know of the men and of the time, if we then
proceed to check these merely general conclusions by matters of absolute
knowledge drawn from the valuations upon Danton’s estate at various
moments of his life, we shall agree with the more modern authorities who
have worked with the documents before them, that Danton is innocent of
actions to the charge of which his uncertain temper and his lack of solid
social surroundings laid him open.
In the first place, let us consider the words of the accusations which
appear above, and which include all those of any importance.
That of Mirabeau is what you would expect from such a man; it is quiet,
contemptuous, treating of Danton as something on the very last level
of the time. But if we take the specific accusation and separate it
from all general points of view, we find this much: that Montmorin has
been talking to him with regard to what “those fellows” were doing. “In
connection with this,” says Mirabeau, “Danton got 30,000 yesterday” to
work such and such a political move. The grave feature in the quotation
is the way in which Mirabeau, who understood men and who had a good grasp
of Paris, treats Danton’s venality as being something well known, gives
a particular example of it, and passes at once to other things. But the
specific accusation is hearsay from Montmorin, and, as I have said, it is
always Montmorin’s name which crops up when this gossip is on foot.
I would, therefore, sum up the value of Mirabeau’s accusation somewhat
as follows:—If we could prove that Danton was a spendthrift, and that
large sums of money passed through his hands for his personal pleasures,
then Mirabeau’s chance remark, while it would be worthless in a court
of law, ought to have some small weight before history. Mirabeau was (on
a higher plane) a _bon viveur_ such as Danton was reputed to be, and the
circles in which the men moved touched each other especially in the point
of their good living; but if we can find that Danton did not, as a fact,
spend nor invest great sums of money, then the accusation is simply a
common error based upon a remark of Montmorin’s, suited to the current
impression of Danton’s character, but disproved by the known facts of
Danton’s life.
Bertrand de Molleville’s accusation is of particular value to any one who
is concerned, as I am, in attempting to get to the truth in this matter.
It is the only one which is perfectly categorical and detailed. In
proportion as it is categorical and detailed it is untrue. If you wish to
know whether a man has committed a certain crime, and you hear a number
of witnesses against him, one of whom only gives careful evidence with
dates, details, and so forth, and if you can then prove that this witness
has lied upon all the points which supported his principal accusation,
you are in a fair way to winning your case.
De Molleville begins by making the sum 500,000 francs. It seems enormous.
It is a sum which no man could receive and spend in a few days’ debauch
without attracting the attention of the whole city, which no man could
invest without leaving some obvious accession of property, and he puts
the receipt of this sum as coming under Montmorin’s ministry—that is, at
a time when public order was secured, when the course of the registries,
the transmission of property and so forth, were in the fullest light.
He gives the name of the man who handed him the sum, and calls him
Durand. On this point it is impossible to say yes or no, but we can
say with absolute certitude that the incident of the letter upon which
Bertrand de Molleville makes the whole matter turn, is an untruth added
to an untruth. In the first place, he makes Danton “violent in his
demands against the king.” This accusation is absolutely false.
When the trial of the king was mooted, Danton did speak (notably on
the 6th of September), with some decision in favour of the king’s
being brought to trial upon particular points. He expressed himself in
that speech with very great energy upon this particular feature of the
trial, that the king merited condemnation because he had obviously and
openly betrayed the nation,—a thing which nobody doubted, which nobody
denied, and which Louis himself and his advisers would simply have met
by saying (at a later epoch of course), “We called in the foreigner as a
necessary police in the time of anarchy; we desired to save France by its
betrayal.” So far, however, from Danton being a leader of the attack on
Louis or of the demand for his trial, that attack and that demand were
as spontaneous as anything the Convention ever did; and Danton followed
rather than led, as a glance at the _Moniteur_ can prove.
In the much more important debates wherein the life of Louis was first
implicitly and then explicitly at stake, Danton was absent, and in the
days of November there is no question at all but that Danton’s one
preoccupation was to reconcile the Mountain with the Girondins.
De Molleville goes on to give his letter a date—such things are done
on purpose, as a rule, in order to give a special character of legal
evidence to one’s accusations. He says that he wrote the letter on the
11th of December, that Danton on receiving the letter was frightened, and
without replying to it got himself put upon the mission to the army of
the North.
Now Danton left for the army of the North on the 1st of December, and if
the letter was written at all (which I doubt), it was written at a time
when Danton, being absent, could not possibly have acted as De Molleville
said he did. He could not have “asked” to go on a mission (he did not
ask, but was sent), and have started on the 1st in consequence of a
letter written on the 11th.
Finally, De Molleville says he came back to vote on the punishment of the
king, but had been coerced by the letter into merely voting for death
without giving his opinion. This again is a lie. If there is anything
remarkable to the historian in the vote Danton gave on the 16th January
1793, and in the speech which he made before his vote, it is that he,
by nature so wary, should have discovered in this crisis a violent
manifestation of opinion and motive. I have amply shown in the text that
we could only reconcile those abnormal days in Danton’s life by some
extreme shock to the emotions. Some represent him as suffering a violent
rebuff from his political opponents; some consider the scene of misery
and impending death which he found in his home on returning from his long
journey. He demanded a simple majority vote; he spoke violently against
the appeal to the people; and when he voted for the death of the king
he turned to the Right and said, “I am not a statesman; I am not one of
those who are ignorant of the duty of not compromising with tyrants, and
who do not know that kings can only be struck on the head, who do not
know that we can expect nothing from the kings of Europe save by force
and by arms. I vote for the death of the tyrant.”
If these are the words, and if that is the action of a man terrorised by
a letter into a silent and furtive vote, then evidence has no meaning.
De Molleville, I think, can in this, as in nearly all his historical
evidence (with the exception of that which turns upon the personal habits
of the king, where he has the details of a valet), be dismissed.
With Lafayette, again, we have that half-truth and half-lie which runs
through all his accusations. “The receipt for 100,000 francs was in the
hands of Montmorin.” This was true. The sum was not quite 100,000, it was
61,000 (Appendix VI.); but the receipt did exist, and to any one who did
not know that all the men occupying positions on the Council had been
reimbursed, it might look like a receipt for a bribe, or might be twisted
into meaning such. It is impossible for us to discover whether Lafayette
meant to tell an untruth, as we can prove De Molleville did; he may in
this matter have been perfectly loyal, for there was a note found among
his papers after his death (Memoirs, iii. 84-85), saying that “a position
on the Councils was only worth 10,000, and had been reimbursed at 100,000
as a bribe.” We now know from the discovery of so many receipts that from
60,000 to 80,000 was the regular price of reimbursements, but Lafayette
might easily have been ignorant of this, and have jumped to a false
conclusion.
As to his mention of Madame Elizabeth’s having told the man who told him
that Danton had been paid before the 10th August, the old man’s memory is
certainly turning to the remark which many witnesses heard from the lips
of that saintly woman just before the attack on the Tuilleries, when she
said with simplicity (she knew nothing at all of the characters of the
Revolution save what she might hear from the courtiers), “Well, we can
count on Danton; he has been paid.” That is not evidence. If Danton was
paid to make the 10th of August turn in favour of the monarchy, and if,
as Lafayette hints, he had attempted to make it so turn, he certainly
took the most extraordinary way of defending his employers. One might as
well say that Lord Chatham’s principal object in the taking of Quebec
was the defence of the French power in Canada. For the 10th of August
was openly and directly an attack upon the ancient crown of France, to
overthrow it and to substitute in its place a new regime, and Danton
worked at it as indefatigably as a general before a battle would work.
The remark, “General, I am more monarchist than you,” reads to me like
truth; it is exactly what Danton would have said. He despised Lafayette
as much as any one man can despise another. He believed right up to the
moment of the war that the existing fact of the monarchy was worth all
the theories in the world as a nucleus for the new regime, and he saw
the emptiness of Lafayette’s vanity. He may quite probably have met
it upon some occasion as direct as that which Lafayette has given us,
and Lafayette, in the abundance of his folly, may quite easily have
misunderstood the meaning of his criticism.
Brissot is an admirable example of how the false rumours arose. He says:
“I have myself seen the receipts which Montmorin held from Danton.”
Now, as we have seen, that receipt (to any one who did not know the
details of the transaction) might quite honestly appear a damning piece
of evidence, and it is without question the document round which the
great mass of accusations have been built.
As to Madame Roland, I cannot imagine what flight of feminine inaccuracy
made her put down a fortune of £60,000 to her enemy’s name. If a witness
in any other circumstances than revolution should tell one that a young
lawyer and politician had secretly and suddenly become possessed of this
sum, he would be reputed mad. In such a time, however, anything seems
possible to an enemy, and we must rely upon the simple fact that Danton
can be definitely proved neither to have spent, invested, nor left a
tenth of such a sum. It seems to me that this accusation of Madame
Roland’s is on a par with that other extreme remark that she had known
“the Dantons living on 16s. a week, which they borrowed regularly from
their father-in-law,” and this “at the opening of the Revolution,” a time
when we know him positively to have been defending cases involving half
a million pounds in the issue of the trial, and when we know him to have
had for clients some of the richest men in France.
Now, the papers that prove Danton’s financial position are quite simple.
He was cut off suddenly; they were all seized, and they all remain.
Unless he spent huge sums in debauch (sums like those of Orleans), or
unless he buried the money, he cannot have received much more than
what openly appears. He entered his married life with a debt of £2500
secured on his office. He enjoyed a good practice for four years; he was
reimbursed to somewhat less than the value of his office, and on his
death the sum sequestrated by the State, and later refunded to his sons,
tallies with this small fortune.
IV
NOTE ON DANTON’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER
The arguments for and against Danton’s responsibility in this matter must
necessarily be of a more general order than those which can be advanced
for and against his character in regard to money matters. There are but
one or two really definite facts upon either side, and, as the purport
of these notes is to deal with actualities, I will treat of these known
facts only.
In the first place, it must be clearly understood that Danton did not
shrink from, and was not unsympathetic with, the extreme measures of
the Revolution. His position with regard to them is perfectly clear
in history, and is simply this—his violence was persuaded that an
exceptional time required, almost as a method of government, the most
exceptional terrors.
But, on the other hand, Danton was a man to whom not only a useless
massacre but a useless anything was detestable. Death in itself, the
infliction of death on others, even the death to which he himself was
led, never seemed to him a matter of vast moment. It is a common fault
in courageous men to have this disregard for the life of others and of
oneself, but I deny that you will ever discover Danton causing the death
of a single human being unless it is in the furtherance of his policy.
In the second place, consider what is actually known to have proceeded
from his mouth. (1) Quite early in the Revolution (in June 1791) he
demanded the head of Lafayette, and he probably meant it; (2) he boasted
of, or confessed to, being the author of Mandat’s death; (3) in the
course of speeches which led up to the establishment of the Revolutionary
tribunal he speaks in favour of the extreme penalties and of the terror
that they would inspire, always as a means to an end, and as a means
to be employed without hesitation. Let me quote but one sentence from
the speech of the 10th March 1793 to illustrate what I mean:—“I feel to
what a degree it is necessary to take judicial measures by which we may
punish the counter-revolutionaries. This tribunal should be erected in
order to replace for them the supreme tribunal of popular vengeance. It
is very difficult to define a political crime, but if a man of the common
people for his sort of misdeed gets punished at once, is it not necessary
that extreme laws, something out of the common running of our social
machinery, should be passed to terrify rebels and to strike the guilty?
In this matter the safety of the people demands from you extreme methods
and the measures of terror.”
Finally, we know that Danton was, on the whole, the guide of that earlier
part of the Terror between May and August 1793, in which (as he thought)
the system was doing necessary work without which the nation could not
have been saved.
Now, let us set against these what we definitely know of Danton’s
character which would lead us to a conclusion that he would not have
countenanced massacre.
No one questions the fact that the leading motive in Danton’s mind was
the establishment of a strong government around or in the place of a
weak monarchy. He was a true descendant of the lawyers of the Code.
The massacres of September took place at a moment when he was using
the whole of his personal energy in trying as well as may be to supply
that Government. He guides the ministry in Paris; he dominates Roland
as a man might dominate a woman. It was of supreme importance to such a
scheme that the thin ice between government and anarchy in the days that
preceded Valmy should not be broken. The massacre of September broke it;
there was a week of anarchy in Paris. There is the first great argument
against Danton’s complicity with the massacres.
It must, however, be remembered that a theory exists, by no means
untenable, which would make Danton argue something in this fashion:
“Once let the popular fury have full rein against what it regards as the
internal enemy, and I shall have the disappearance of that disturbing
factor of royalist reaction in Paris, while on the part of the mob I
shall have the lassitude and shame that follow excess; they are not
difficult to govern.” It is only a personal opinion, but it seems to me
that in a mind of Danton’s type, downright and practical to excess, such
a far-reaching and subtle idea as the last would hardly occur, and that
the massacres must have produced on him an especial annoyance, because
they were the breakdown of a system the support of which occupied his
every effort.
Secondly, Danton’s allusions to the massacres of September were always of
a more definite and more reasonable nature than those of his colleagues.
The attitude which he adopts with regard to them after their occurrence
is this: “There was no public force, none of that disciplined government
which I postulate as the first necessity of the Revolution; nothing on
earth could prevent them, and they occurred in spite of every governing
power.” So much for generalities.
Now let us turn to one or two points which have been made the basis of a
definite accusation against Danton in this matter.
Firstly: that he knew that the massacres were coming, and withdrew from
prison more than one of his friends on the eve of the uprising. This I
take to be true, or rather I am certain of it; but one would have to
be very ignorant of the time not to know that all Paris expected the
massacres, and that those who were at all in touch with the Commune knew
two or three days before that anything illegal might be done. To have
worked to prevent them, in which Danton might have employed his energy,
would, as I have said in the text, have been to risk that which he most
desired, and to risk it for the sake of saving the prisoners. Certainly
he did not desire to save them as passionately as he desired to remain at
the helm and build up a government; he preferred to keep his influence
over the city. That accusation is just.
Secondly, it is affirmed with justice that Danton, from the peculiar
position of the ministry which he occupied, filled the prisons,
which were afterwards gutted. It is true that on Danton, as Minister
of Justice, and above all as a general power in the Cabinet, the
responsibility of arresting the prisoners rests; but was this action
taken with a knowledge of what the consequences would be nearly a month
later? Certainly not. It would show a complete ignorance of what happened
in the last fortnight of August to say that an action taken just after
the 10th was taken with a view to something that would occur on the 2nd
of September. The state of public feeling in those four weeks went
through a most violent crisis, and one might say that the intensity of
the feeling against the Royalists and the foreigners was not only a
hundred-fold greater when Verdun was actually falling than it had been
just after the success against the Tuilleries, but different in quality
as well.
Thirdly, there is one detailed accusation—the circular which Marat
sent out to the Departments. If it can be proved that this circular
was approved of, that its distribution was aided by Danton, then we
shall have a definite piece of evidence which cannot be overridden. Now
let me describe what that circular was, and see how far we must blame
circumstances, how far the carelessness, and how far the deliberate act
of the minister. All the accounts are much the same. Madame Roland says,
“Sent out above the signature of the Minister of Justice.” Bertrand de
Molleville is also perfectly definite (Memoirs, ix. 310)—“Sent by the
minister Danton.”
The examination of the documents seventy years later has given more
accurate results to history than the memoirs of contemporaries, whether
they are truthful and enthusiastic like Madame Roland, or frankly
dishonest like Bertrand de Molleville. Bougeart was at the pains of
looking up the original documents at the archives of the police.
What appears in this document (Bougeart, pp. 121-122) is a series
of signatures, Panis, Sergent, Marat, &c., that is, the Committee
of Surveillance appointed by the Commune. There is no trace of any
ministerial signature, and even the stamp which was used in the office
by the clerks for everything that passed officially through the Ministry
of Justice is not attached to the sheet. What did happen was this.
The circulars were sent out in envelopes which bore the official mark
of the Ministry. It is as though some act of a body in London, let us
say, should be distributed to the provinces in the blue envelopes of
Her Majesty’s Service. That is all, either for or against Danton, that
remains of the incident of the circular.
Now it is certain that Danton had not at that time openly broken with
Marat. Moreover, Danton had not actually quarrelled with the Commune,
though he certainly treated it with contempt. But Danton had no
conceivable object in helping Marat to distribute the circulars unless
he himself was openly on Marat’s side. A man of his character would
either have signed, or else, had he known that the circulars were going
out, he would have forbidden their distribution; he would have taken some
definite line. Why? Because the distribution of the circular was bound to
condemn him to a very definite position—here is a man who has stood aloof
from a very violent conspiracy, a conspiracy whose authors came out at
last in the open day and gloried in what they had done. They wrote the
most violent of all their manifestoes, containing such phrases as “the
ferocious prisoners have been put to death by the people;” “it was an act
of justice indispensable to our Committee,” and so forth. It would be
quite impossible to send out unwittingly such a circular as that without
knowing that one was compromising oneself and definitely entering the
most extreme party of the Parisians. It is inconceivable, therefore, that
he would have lent official envelopes for the purpose, and have said,
“So far I will help you, but I will not help you more than that.” You
might as well suppose an English official in India, of the stronger kind,
saying, “I will allow you, an unofficial personage, to send out the order
for an illegal execution from this office, but I will not put my name to
it.”
Again, how comes it that this document alone, of all those sent from
the Minister of Justice at the time, goes out in the official envelope,
but bears in itself no mark whatsoever of the Ministry of Justice?
How was it that the officials in the country towns, among the mass of
papers that they received from the Ministry in Paris, should receive
this single one without any stamp or signature, and should then discover
that it had proceeded from a body which had nothing on earth to do with
the Ministry of Justice? There are but two replies possible to this
question—either that the envelopes were taken from the Ministry by one
of the clerks (several of whom we know to have been intimately linked
with the Commune), or that Danton timidly lent envelopes but refused
to do anything further. Of these two replies, the second appears to me
absolutely at variance not only with Danton’s own character but also with
the general routine of a great office. I cannot conceive the Cabinet
Minister offering, in the very gravest conditions, a few blue envelopes,
when a whole political party desire from him a definite pronouncement on
one side or the other.
Finally, it may be asked, could these envelopes go out without his
knowledge? To that I answer that such a thing might be done from any
government office to-day. It was, moreover, a time of revolution; the
whole complicated organism had been shaken and partly transformed; there
was confusion in every department of the building, and even under these
conditions Danton was doing far more work than depended upon his office.
I think, therefore, that it is eminently possible that the circulars
should have been sent out by one of the clerks without his knowledge; and
the fact that no signature was used, and that the documents did not even
pass through one of the many hands whose duty it was to affix the formal
stamp, still further corroborates the view that the circulation of the
appeal was surreptitious.
As to the accusations such as that of Lafayette (Memoirs, iv. 139, 140),
“He commanded the massacre of September and paid the murderers, who went
all covered with blood to get their money from Roland,” I attach no
importance to them at all. Even the phrase in which Danton is supposed
to have saluted the return of the murderers from Versailles is very
doubtful. It does not occur in any contemporary account; it is not in the
_Moniteur_; it is not in the “Révolutions de Paris;” Madame Roland does
not quote it, even on hearsay; it is not one of Peltier’s inventions, and
I have some difficulty in tracing it to its origin.
I think, then, that the general position of Danton during the days of
September may be summed up as follows. He did not regard the lives of the
prisoners as being of the first importance; he did not use what would
have been to his certain knowledge a useless energy in protesting; he
did not (as he might conceivably have done) form a special and vigorous
tribunal to replace that which was on the point of acquitting L. de
Montmorin. By all those, therefore, who would regard public order and a
security for life as being more important than the success of a political
idea, or the integrity and defence of a nation, he can be accused of
a criminal negligence in the matter of the massacres of September. He
certainly cannot be accused of having designed them; he cannot be accused
on any definite proof of having approved them, and he cannot be accused
of having failed to share in the regret and misery which that terrible
blunder caused. If we may judge the attitude of his mind by comparing it
with that of contemporaries, rather than by comparing it with our own
attitude in a time of security and order, we may say that the massacres
taught him a more definite lesson than they taught to Roland, for they
caused him to pursue a policy of conciliation and to strengthen the
government; that, on the other hand, he did less to stop them than Manuel
did; and that in a comparison with men whom we know to have been honest,
such as Roland himself, or by a contrast with men whom we know to have
been evil, such as Hébert, or whom we know to have been frenzied, such as
Marat—judged in the midst of all this, Danton will appear responsible to
history for having been guilty of indifference at a moment when he might
have saved his reputation by protesting, though perhaps his protest would
not have saved a single life.
* * * * *
The object of the remainder of this Appendix is to provide for the reader
certain documents that illustrate the statements and the line of argument
in the text. Of these documents but few have been translated, because
only a few appeal to any one but a special student of the Revolution, or
are necessary to the understanding of this book.
By far the most important of the documents here printed is the last,
Barrère’s report of the 29th of May 1793. Hitherto unpublished, it
furnishes (to my mind) the most complete explanation of the somewhat
complicated manœuvres pursued by the Committee, manœuvres which permitted
the revolution of May 31st and June 2nd.
To each document a short preface has been attached for the purpose of
explaining its origin and of mentioning the authorities (if any) in which
it can be found.
V
SHORT MEMOIR BY A. R. C. DE ST. ALBIN
This memoir was published for the first time as an article in the
_Critique Française_ of the 15th of March 1864. It was so published by
the author himself, and, though appearing seventy years after Danton’s
death, is not without importance. De St. Albin, who is better known by
his first name of Rousselin, had some personal acquaintance with Danton
(though he was but a boy at the time) and he lived to a great age. He
had, moreover, an acquaintance with the family after the Revolutionary
period. These circumstances make his testimony decisive on all
non-controversial points and valuable on many others.
The criticisms to be made against his account are obvious. It is too
florid; it errs also in giving an amiable and somewhat mediocre character
to the statesman himself and to all his relatives and surroundings. We
have in it but a poor expression of the energy that was Danton’s chief
character, and which the writer’s own mind cannot reflect. It was,
moreover, written so very long after the events which it describes that
in more than one place an error of date or number has been committed;
especially in the incident of Barentin at the close of the memoir, with
which M. Aulard finds so much fault, and in the amount of his wife’s
dowry, which was not 40,000 but only 20,000 livres. On the other hand, it
is fresh, full of personal recollections, written by a trustworthy man,
and gives many interesting details on the earlier and less known part of
Danton’s life.
“La famille de Danton n’a point à se prévaloir d’une antique noblesse.
Le nom de Danton est commun dans la contrée d’Arcis-sur-Aube, il est
apparu avec un certain bruit, en 1740, dans les querelles du jansénisme.
Parmi les pièces de théâtre destinées à populariser ces discussions
théologiques, il en est une intitulée _La Banqueroute des marchands de
miracles_, qui est signée du P. Danton. On a supposé, non sans raison,
qui cet ecclésiastique était un grand-oncle du conventionnel.
“Georges-Jacques Danton naquit à Arcis-sur-Aube le 26 octobre 1759. Il
était fils de Jacques Danton, procureur au bailliage d’Arcis, qui avait
épousé, en 1754, Jeanne-Madeleine Camut. Le père mourut le 24 février
1762, âgé d’environ quarante ans, laissant sa femme enceinte et quatre
enfants en bas âge, deux filles et deux garçons, Georges-Jacques Danton
resta sous la tutelle de sa mère, femme douée de toutes les qualités qui
commandent l’estime. C’est par la sensibilité et la douceur du caractère
que la mère de Danton élevait et gouvernait sa jeune famille. Georges,
celui de ses enfants dont l’extérieur indiquait le plus de force et de
volonté, était le plus docile envers elle. Se jeune indépendance était
bien vite soumise quand sa mère parlait à son cœur. La tendresse obtenait
ce que la crainte aurait vainement tenté d’arracher. Madame veuve Danton
eut un heureux auxiliaire pour le soutien de sa maison dans son père,
entrepreneur des ponts et chaussées de la province de Champagne. Celui-ci
donna les premières leçons à son petit-fils: il voyait avec joie ses
mâles dispositions.
“Il est intéressant de noter quel fut le milieu dans lequel Danton
passa ainsi ses premières années, et nous avons trouvé, dans un auteur
contemporain, le passage suivant qui nous semble curieux:
“‘La ville d’Arcis-sur-Aube est composée d’hommes indépendants; l’air y
est vif, les hommes sont robustes; la rivière de l’Aube, qui traverse
le pays, est navigable en tout temps, le commerce maritime occupe les
natifs; quand les marins ne sont pas occupés à l’eau, ils font des bas;
ils sont laborieux, industrieux. Arcis n’est comparable à aucune partie
de la Champagne; les lois y sont observées comme si elles n’existaient
pas, par le seul sentiment de l’ordre; les seigneurs de l’ancien régime
avaient toujours rencontré des opposants dans des hommes chez qui l’amour
de la liberté est inné.’
“L’enfance de Danton n’eut rien de remarquable; il fut élevé, suivant
l’usage du pays, à peu près comme un enfant de la nature.
“Il avait été nourri par une vache, ce qui est usité en Champagne, quand
les mères ne sont pas assez fortes pour allaiter leurs enfants. La vache
nourrice de Danton fut un jour aperçue par un taureau échappé, qui se
précipita sur elle et donna au pauvre enfant un coup de corne qui lui
arracha la lèvre. C’est à cette cicatrice que tenait la difformité de sa
lèvre supérieure.
“En grandissant, Danton, comme tous les êtres doués d’une force
extraordinaire, éprouvait le besoin de l’exercer. Il voulut un jour faire
preuve de vigueur, prendre sa revanche et lutter contre un taureau. Il
était difficile qu’il sortit vainqueur de la lutte. Un coup de corne lui
écrasa le nez.
“Ces accidents auraient dû le rendre prudent, mais il n’y a guère de
prudence là où il y a grande surabondance de vie. Un jour le robuste
enfant croit pouvoir faire marcher devant lui les porcs de la ferme qui
obstruaient l’entrée de la maison. Il les attaque à coups de fouet; mais
son pied glisse, il tombe, et les porcs devenus furieux, se ruent sur lui
et lui font une terrible blessure, assez semblable à celle dont Boileau
fut victime dans son enfance, au dire d’Helvétius, qui attribuait à cette
blessure la disette de sentiment qu’il prétendait remarquer dans les
ouvrages du poète. Quel que soit le mérite de cette appréciation, elle
ne serait pas applicable à Danton. Sa virilité avait été compromise, non
perdue, et il conserva toute son énergie et toute sa hardiesse. Rien ne
l’arrêtait: chaque jour il donnait de nouvelles preuves de témérité.
A peine fut-il rétabli de ce malheureux accident, qu’entraîné par sa
passion pour la natation, il faillit se noyer et fut atteint d’une
fièvre maligne, à laquelle vint se joindre une petite vérole très grave,
accompagnée du pourpre. Tout semblait ainsi se réunir pour le défigurer.
“Pour faire contracter à son enfant quelques habitudes de discipline,
la mère de Danton le remit d’abord à la surveillance d’une maîtresse
d’école; celle-ci n’avait pas le temps ou la volonté d’user avec lui
d’indulgence. Danton trouva quelque différence dans la comparaison de
ce nouveau régime avec les tendresses de sa mère et de son aïeul: non
moins sévère que la demoiselle Lambercier de J.-J. Rousseau, la maîtresse
d’école croyait ne pouvoir se passer de verges pour diriger les enfants,
et Danton lui avait paru avoir les premiers droits à ses corrections.
Tous ses contemporains se souvenaient de l’avoir vu faire trop souvent
l’école buissonnière et employer les heures de classe à barboter dans
l’Aube. Il préférait la liberté de vivre à l’ennui de répéter les
caractères de l’alphabet. Il avait cependant d’heureuses aptitudes et
apprenait rapidement; mais toute habitude réglée était antipathique à sa
nature.
“A huit ans, il fut débarrassé de la rigoureuse maîtresse, et
_transvasé_, comme il le dit lui-même, dans une institution supérieure.
Le chef de cette institution croyait savoir assez de latin pour en
enseigner les éléments. Quand les premiers principes de la grammaire ne
sont pas montrés avec une habile méthode aux jeunes intelligences, elle
leur offre peu d’attrait.
“Danton en avait peu-être un peu moins pour _Lhomond_ que pour le jeu
de cartes. A peine le devoir terminé, en hâte il courait avec quelques
camarades dans un coin pour faire sa partie. Des billes ou des gâteaux
étaient le bénéfice du gagnant. Souvent vainqueur, il partageait toujours
avec le vaincu. Quand il se trouvait seul, il lisait ou allait se
promener ans les bois ou dans les champs.
“Pour modifier cette humeur un peu sauvage, les parents de Danton crurent
devoir le mettre dans une maison religieuse.
“Quoiqu’il ne fût point destiné à l’état ecclésiastique, on le plaça
d’abord au petit séminaire de _Troyes_; mais la monotonie de cette
maison lui devint bientôt pénible. Pendant tout le temps qu’il y resta,
il observa la règle, mais il ne pouvait souffrir que sa récréation fût
subitement interrompue par un coup de cloche. _Cette cloche_, disait-il,
_si je suis encore forcé de l’entendre longtemps, finira par sonner mon
enterrement_.
“Un reproche mal fondé et reçu publiquement du supérieur décida Danton à
solliciter sa sortie du séminaire.
“Le fait suivant peut être raconté comme trait de caractère: La pension,
dans cette maison, était modique. Les élèves n’avaient de vin qu’en
le payant séparément à la fin de chaque année. Tous les dimanches on
distribuait des cartes, qui étaient une espèce de billet au porteur.
En présentant cette carte au distributeur, on recevait une mesure de
vin appelée _roquille_. Danton était généreux, et un de ses grands
plaisirs alors était de régaler ses camarades en leur passant des cartes
de _roquilles_, surtout à ceux qu’il savait n’avoir pas la bourse
bien garnie. Sa générosité alla si loin, que, lorsqu’on fit le compté
général et la proclamation publique de tous ceux qui avaient bu du vin,
il se trouva être celui qui avait fait une plus grande consommation de
_roquilles_. La veille du départ pour les vacances, le supérieur du
petit séminaire adressa ces paroles à Danton: _Mon ami, vous pouvez
vous flatter d’être le plus grand buveur de la communauté_. A ces
mots, tous les rires d’éclater sur lui; il ne répondit pas, mais il se
promit bien de ne plus boire de roquilles au petit séminaire. Malgré
une véritable bonté, Danton était peu endurant, et on l’avait surnommé
_l’anti-supérieur_, et même _le républicain_.
“A peine revenu à Arcis-sur-Aube, il déclara à sa mère qu’il ne
rentrerait plus au petit séminaire: “Il y a là, dit-il, des habitudes
qui ne me vont pas, et que je ne pourrai jamais comprendre.” L’année
suivante, on le mit dans une pension laïque. Ses études n’y perdirent
rien, car il eut depuis des succès qu’il n’avait pas obtenus auparavant.
Il fit ainsi sa seconde, et y remporta la presque totalité des prix....
“Nous arrivons au mois de juin 1775. On apprend que le sacre de Louis
XVI. va s’accomplir à Reims. Danton avait déjà plus d’une fois entendu
les imprécations dont toute la France couvrait la mémoire de Louis XV.
A l’âge de seize ans il en savait assez pour abhorrer l’emploi des
lettres de cachet, qui étaient si prodiguées sous ce règne scandaleux. Le
professeur avait annoncé qu’il donnerait l’événement du sacre du nouveau
monarque comme texte d’amplification: _Pour bien se pénétrer de son
sujet_, dit Danton d’un ton décidé, _il faut se servir de ses yeux. Je
suis curieux de voir comment se fait un roi_.
“Son projet n’est confié qu’à quelques fidèles camarades qui lui prêtent
de l’argent pour sa route. Il part sans prévenir son maître; il traverse
son pays d’Arcis sans voir ses parents, dans la crainte de les trouver
opposés à son pèlerinage. Après avoir franchi vingt-huit lieues sans
encombre, il arrive à Reims, se glisse partout; il suit attentivement
toutes les cérémonies du sacre, et il entend le jeune monarque, la main
sur l’Évangile, prononcer le serment _de régner par les lois et pour le
bonheur de la nation_. Que des réflexions fait naître un pareil spectacle
dans un cerveau ardent, déjà prompt à concevoir de rapprochements!
“A son retour de Reims, les amis de Danton étaient impatients de
l’entendre raconter tout ce qu’il avait vu. Cet appareil ne l’avait
pas émerveillé, la richesse des décors de la cathédrale ne l’avait pas
séduit. Il raisonnait assez déjà pour sentir que ce n’était guère plus
qu’une pompe vaine, encore dispendieuse pour la France déjà si obérée. Le
jeune voyageur s’égayait en parlant de ce nombreux essaim d’oiseaux de
toute espèce auxquels on avait donné la volée dans l’église: “_Plaisante
liberté_, disait-il, _que de voltiger entre quatre murs, sans avoir de
quoi manger ni poser son nid_!” Il comparait aussi les oiseaux babillards
aux courtisans qui entouraient déjà le nouveau roi, par continuation
de leur dévouement pour le défunt. A l’entendre débiter avec autant de
simplicité que de malice ses réflexions sur le luxe, on peut entrevoir
que l’écolier moraliste, devenu grand, ne sera pas sans quelque exigence
envers la royauté, et sans quelque sévérité envers les agents qui vivent
des abus.
“Danton, revenu à Troyes, éprouva des difficultés pour rentrer à sa
pension. Sa sortie, à l’insu du maître, avait indisposé celui-ci. Le
voyageur, soumis et repentant, proteste _qu’il na été à Reims que
pour se mettre en mesure de faire en connaissance de cause son devoir
d’amplification sur le sacre_. Il produit effectivement un morceau des
plus brillants, mais où il se défend d’introduire les observations
hardies échappées dans la familiarité de conversation, qui ne peuvent
se présenter dans une narration écrite, dont les convenances sont la
première règle. Le maître, satisfait et surpris du mérite de l’œuvre,
en fait lecture à ses élèves. Il dit _qu’il aurait donné la première
place à l’auteur s’il n’avait fait l’école buissonnière_. Les camarades
de Danton s’unissent avec enthousiasme à l’appréciation du maître; ils
admirent comment l’enfant prodigue, leur ayant fait un récit aussi
piquant, aussi jovial de son voyage, avait pu en même temps mettre dans
son style autant de réserve et de noblesse. C’est ainsi que Danton fait
admettre ses excuses, et sa grâce est devenue une espèce de triomphe.
Il reprend sa classe, dont les travaux allaient bientôt se terminer.
L’époque des compositions pour les prix annuels approchait; se fiant
à sa facilité, Danton ne semble pas se préparer au concours. Mais
dès que les sujets de composition sont donnés, il rassemble tous les
efforts de son intelligence et obtient toutes les couronnes. Il déploie
d’admirables moyens dans le discours français, la narration latine et
la poésie. Imagination, jugement, exactitude, saillie dans la pensée,
force, élégance, originalité dans l’expression, rien ne lui manque,
et le 18 août 1775 fut peut-être le plus beau jour de sa vie. Le nom
de _Danton-Camut_ (qui était celui de sa mère pour le distinguer d’un
homonyme son condisciple) fut répété au bruit des fanfares. Si le lauréat
fut heureux, ce fut surtout en apportant ses lauriers à sa mère, objet
de son culte et de son amour; cette piété filiale, dès lors le plus vif
de ses sentiments, demeurera la même dans son cœur pendant tout le cours
de sa vie, quelles qu’en soient les violences ou les distractions; plus
tard, il la montra mieux encore, et l’homme auquel il voua la haine la
plus tenace fut un misérable soupçonné d’avoir manqué de respect à Madame
Danton.
“Lorsqu’un écolier se distinguait au collège, on songeait à la carrière
que lui ouvriraient ses talents. _Il faut en faire un prêtre ou un
procureur._ Le curé de Barberey, près Troyes, désignait déjà Danton
pour qu’il lui succédât dans son presbytère; mais le moment de séjour
que Danton avait fait au séminaire ne lui avait pas inspiré la vocation
ecclésiastique. Il avait besoin de liberté, il lui fallait les franches
allures, l’indépendance. Il demandait une profession libérale, il
désirait être avocat.... Démosthènes et Cicéron, qu’il venait de
commencer à connaître n’étaient-ils pas des avocats? La famille réunie
ayant déféré au vœu de Danton, il fut décidé qu’il irait à Paris et qu’il
travaillerait chez un procureur pour y apprendre la procédure en même
temps qu’il ferait ses études de droit, pour se préparer au barreau.
“Ici vient se placer une circonstance intéressante qui fait honneur
à Danton et qui fournit une nouvelle preuve de sa tendresse pour ses
parents. Madame veuve Danton, demeurée seule avec sa nombreuse famille,
s’était remariée pour lui donner un soutien. Elle avait épousé M.
Recordin, estimable négociant, dont la bonté est restée proverbiale dans
le pays: _bon et brave comme Recordin_. Par suite de sa facilité dans ses
relations, les affaires de la maison Recordin se trouvèrent embarrassées.
Danton, loin d’exiger les comptes qu’il avait droit de demander de la
fortune qui lui revenait de son père, fut le premier à offrir des secours
à son beau-père; il mit à sa disposition tout ce qui lui appartenait;
il alla jusqu’à engager la portion du bien de ses tantes qui devait lui
échoir un jour, ne craignant pas d’aliéner son présent en son avenir.
_Il faut mettre ses affaires en règle,_ disait-il, _quand on fait un
grand voyage_.
“Tels furent les préparatifs du départ.
“Tous les témoignages de ses camarades, parents et amis, déposent de la
délicatesse de Danton sous tous les rapports; à l’exception du prêt de
quelques écus qui lui furent offerts par ses camarades pour le voyage de
Reims, il n’a jamais demandé d’argent à qui que ce soit, dans les moments
où, soit comme écolier, soit comme clerc de procureur, il a pu éprouver
de ces gênes de jeune homme qui rendent hardi aux emprunts.
“Danton arrive à Paris en 1780 dans la voiture du messager
d’Arcis-sur-Aube, qui était l’ami de sa famille, et qui voulut lui faire
la conduite gratuitement. Il se logea à l’auberge du _Cheval noir_,
tenue rue Geoffroy-Lasnier par un nommé Layron, qui était l’hôte le plus
fréquenté par les Champenois. Danton avait très peu de fonds, et il dut
se mettre immédiatement au travail: il entra chez un procureur appelé
Vinot. Ce procureur commença par lui demander un modèle de son écriture,
qu’il ne trouva pas belle. Les procureurs de ce temps-là voulaient de ces
écritures promptes et faciles, propres à produire de larges grosses, de
longues requêtes. Le jeune Champenois déclara franchement _qu’il n’était
pas venu pour être copiste_. Ce ton d’assurance imposa au procureur
Vinot. Il dit: _J’aime l’aplomb, il en faut dans notre état_.
“Danton fut admis comme clerc, avec la nourriture et le logement. Il
étudia la procédure non sans quelque dégoût; il fut chargé, comme on
dit dans le métier, _de faire le palais_. C’est la première initiation
des jeunes clercs aux affaires. Elle commence à les mettre en relation
avec les choses et les personnes du monde judiciaire, et leur donne
les éléments de la pratique par de petits plaidoyers sommaires et
des explications contradictoires qui leur ouvrent les idées et leur
apprennent à se conduire dans le labyrinthe où ils sont destinés à vivre.
“Danton remplissait sa fonction de clerc avec intelligence et exactitude;
ses récréations les plus habituelles étaient toujours l’escrime, la
paume et la natation, sa passion favorite! dont il usait fréquemment;
c’était le besoin même de son tempérament. Il était assez habile à cet
exercice pour être cité au premier rang; il y trouva un encouragement
digne de son émulation. Il sauva plusieurs fois de la mort des camarades
qui auraient péri s’il n’était venu au secours de leur imprudence et de
leur faiblesse. Quelques-uns d’entre eux ont raconté les tours de force
véritables que Danton exécutait dans les courants les plus difficiles de
la rivière. De l’endroit même où ils prenaient leurs ébats, on voyait
les tours de la Bastille, et plus d’une fois les baigneurs ont entendu
Danton, dressant sa tête comme un triton, jeter une menace du côté de la
prison d’État et s’écrier de sa voix vibrante: _Ce chateau fort suspendu
sur notre tête m’offusque et me gêne. Quand le verrons-nous abattu? Pour
moi, ca jour là, j’y donnerais un fier coup de pioche!_
“Les constitutions les plus robustes sont souvent les plus exposées,
parce que cette exubérance de force donne plus de sécurité. Danton, à la
suite d’une double partie de natation et d’escrime, fut encore atteint
d’une grave maladie. Longtemps retenu au lit, alors que son corps était
réduit à l’inaction, il ne pouvait se livrer à ses exercices habituels,
mais son imagination ne restait point inactive. Avec son infatigable
ardeur de lecture, il s’obstina à lire _l’Encyclopédie_ tout entière,
et il avait achevé ce labeur si considérable avant que la convalescence
fût terminée. Il trouvait encore le temps de lire les grands publicistes
dont les principes et la morale politique commençaient à devenir les
guides du siècle. Montesquieu qu’il devait souvent citer, fut de sa part
l’objet d’une étude tout particulière, et, après avoir lu _l’Esprit des
lois_, il disait: _Quel horizon nouveau s’ouvre devant moi! Je n’ai
qu’un regret, c’est de retrouver dans l’écrivain qui vous porte si loin
et si haut, le président d’un parlement._ De Montesquieu, Danton passa
bientôt à Voltaire, à J.-J. Rousseau, puis à Beccaria, qui apparaissait
alors. Danton ne tarda pas à savoir par cœur l’admirable petit ouvrage
de cet auteur, le traité _Des délits et des peines_, qui allait réformer
la législation criminelle du monde; afin de se préparer des couleurs de
style pour le jour où il aurait à parler aux foules, afin d’apprendre,
à revêtir les questions sociales des belles images de la nature, Danton
étudia particulièrement l’_Histoire naturelle_ de Buffon: au moyen de
sa puissante mémoire il en retenait et récitait des pages entières.
Voilà d’amples provisions d’instruction qui pourront trouver un jour un
utile emploi dans la carrière de l’homme public! Tout en dédaignant la
littérature frivole et n’ayant jamais lu de romans que les chefs-d’œuvre
consacrés qui sont des peintures de mœurs, Danton apprit en même temps
la langue italienne assez pour lire le Tasse, l’Arioste et même le Dante.
Il faisait aussi des vers avec facilité, quelques-uns même adressés, en
tout bien et tout honneur, à une personne qui n’était pas indigne de les
lui inspirer, à la femme de son procureur.
“Mais tous ces délassements littéraires étaient en dehors de la
profession qu’il voulait exercer. Ils ne lui firent point négliger
l’apprentissage de la procedure et du droit.