Chapter V: The Republic (1)

AUGUST 10, 1792—APRIL 5, 1793

The 10th of August is not, in the history of the Revolution, a turning-point or a new departure merely; it is rather a cataclysm, the conditions before and after which are absolutely different. You may compare it to the rush of the Atlantic, which “in one dreadful day and night” swept away the old civilisation in the legend. It is like one of the geological “faults” which form the great inland escarpments, and to read or to write of it is like standing on the edge of Auvergne. You have just passed through a volcanic plateau, rising slowly, more and more desolate: you find yourself looking down thousands of feet on to the great plain of Limagne.

There is no better test of what the monarchy was than the comparison of that which came before with that which succeeded its overthrow. There is no continuity. On the far side of the insurrection, up to the 9th of August itself, you have armies (notably that of the centre) contented with monarchy; you have a strong garrison at the Tuilleries, the ministers, the departments, the mayor of Paris (even) consulting with the crown. The King and the Girondins are opposed, but they are balanced; Paris is angry and expectant, but it has expressed nothing—it is one of many powers. The moderate men, the Rolands and the rest, are the radical wing. It is a triumph for the Revolution that the Girondins should be again in nominal control. Pétion is an idol. The acute friction is between a government of idealists standing at the head of a group of professional bourgeois, and a crown supported by a resurrected nobility, expecting succour and strong enough to hazard a pitched battle.

Look around you on the 11th of August and see what has happened. Between the two opponents a third has been intervened—Paris and its insurrectionary Commune have suddenly arisen. The Girondins are almost a reactionary party. The Crown and all its scaffolding have suddenly disappeared. The Assembly seems something small, the ministry has fallen back, and there appears above it one man only—Danton, called Minister of Justice, but practically the executive itself. A crowd of names which had stood for discussion, for the Jacobins, for persistent ineffective opposition, appear as masters. In a word, France had for the moment a new and terrible pretender to the vacant throne, a pretender that usurped it at last—the Commune.

The nine months with which this chapter will deal formed the Republic; it is they that are the introduction to the Terror and to the great wars, and from the imprisonment of the King to the fall of the Girondins the rapid course of France is set in a narrowing channel directly for the Mountain. The Commune, the body that conquered in August, is destined to capture every position, and, as one guarantee after another breaks down, it will attain, with its extreme doctrines and their concomitant persecution, to absolute power.

What was Danton’s attitude during this period? It may be summed up as follows: Now that the Revolution was finally established, to keep France safe in the inevitable danger. He put the nation first; he did not subordinate the theory of the Revolution; he dismissed it. The Revolution had conquered: it was there; but France, which had made it and which proposed to extend the principles of self-government to the whole world, was herself in the greatest peril. When discussion had been the method of the Revolution, Danton had been an extremist. He was Parisian and Frondeur in 1790 and 1791; it was precisely in that time that he failed. The tangible thing, the objective to which all his mind leaned, appeared with the national danger; then he had something to do, and his way of doing it, his work in the trade to which he was born, showed him to be of a totally different kind from the men above whom he showed. I do not believe one could point to a single act of his in these three-quarters of a year which was not aimed at the national defence.

It is a point of special moment in the appreciation of his politics that Danton was alone in this position. He was the only man who acted as one of the innumerable peasantry of France would have acted, could fate have endowed such a peasant with genius and with knowledge. The others to the left and right were soldiers, poets, or pedants every one. Heroic pedants and poets who were never afraid, but not one of them could forget his theories or his vision and take hold of the ropes. Such diplomacy as there is is Danton’s; it is Danton who attempts compromise, and it is Danton who persistently recalls the debates from personalities to work. It is he who warns the Girondins, and it is he who, in the anarchy that followed defeat, produced the necessary dictatorship of the Committee. Finally, when the Committee is formed, you glance at the names, the actions, and the reports, and you see Danton moving as a man who can see moves among the blind. He had been once “in himself the Cordeliers”—it had no great effect, for there was nothing to do but propose rights; now, after the insurrection, he became “in himself the executive,” and later “in himself the Committee.” So much is he the first man in France during these few months of his activity, that only by following his actions can you find the unity of this confused and anarchic period.

It falls into four very distinct divisions, both from the point of view of general history and from that of Danton’s own life. The first includes the six weeks intervening between the 10th of August and the meeting of the Convention; it is a time almost without authority; it moves round the terrible centre of the massacres. During this brief time the executive, barely existent, without courts or arms, had him in the Ministry of Justice as their one power—a power unfortunately checked by the anarchy in Paris.

The second division stretches from the meeting of the Convention to the death of the King. It covers exactly four months, from the 20th of September 1792 to the 21st of January 1793. It is the time in which the danger of invasion seems lifted, and in which Danton in the Convention is working publicly to reconcile the two parties, and secretly to prevent, if possible, the spread of the coalition against France.

The third opens with the universal war that follows the death of Louis, and continues to a date which you may fix at the rising of the 10th of March, or at the defeat of Neerwinden on the 19th. Danton is absent with the army during the greater part of these six weeks; he returns at their close, and when things were at their worst, to create the two great instruments which he destined to govern France—the Tribunal and the Committee.

Finally, for two months, from the establishment of these to the expulsion of the Girondins on the 2nd of June, he is being gradually driven from the attempt at conciliation to the necessities of the insurrection. He is organising and directing the new Government of the Public Safety, and in launching that new body, in imposing that necessary dictator, we shall see him sacrificing one by one every minor point in his policy, till at last his most persistent attempt—I mean his attempt to save the Girondins—fails in its turn. Having so secured an irresistible government, and having created the armies, the chief moment of his life was past. It remained to him to retire, to criticise the excesses of his own creation, and to be killed by it.

* * * * *

Immediately after the insurrection, a week after he had taken the oath and made the short vigorous speech to the Assembly,[113] Danton sent out his first and almost his only act as Minister of Justice, the circular of the 18th of August,[114] which was posted to all the tribunals in France. It is peculiar rather than important; it is the attempt to convince the magistracy and all the courts of the justice and necessity of the insurrection, and at the same time to leave upon record a declaration of his own intentions now that he had reached power. In the first attempt he necessarily fails. The old judicature, appointed by the Crown and by the moderate ministers, largely re-elected by the people, wealthy for the most part, conservative by origin and tradition, would in any case have rejected such leadership; but the matter is unimportant; this passive body, upon which the reaction had counted not a little, and which De Cicé had planned to use against the Revolution, was destined to disappear at the first demand of the new popular powers. France for weeks was practically without courts of law.

Those passages, on the other hand, in which Danton makes his own apology are full of interest. They contain in a few sentences the outline of all his domestic policy, and we find in them Danton’s memories, his fears of what his past reputation might do to hurt him.

“I came in through the breach of the Tuilleries, and you can only find in me the same man who was president of the Cordeliers.... The only object of my thoughts has been political and individual liberty, ... the maintenance of the laws, ... the strict union of all the Departments, ... the splendour of the State, and the equality, not of fortune, for that is impossible, but of rights and of well-being.”

If we except the puerilities of the new great seal, the Hercules with eighty-four stars (to represent the union of the Departments), replaced by the conventional Liberty and fasces, there is practically nothing more from Danton as Minister of Justice. But as the one active man in the Cabinet he is the pivot of the whole time. Those qualities in him which had so disgusted the men of letters were the exterior of a spirit imperatively demanded in Paris at the time. His heavy, rapid walk, the coarseness and harshness of his voice, his brutality in command, exercised a physical pressure upon the old man Roland, the mathematician Monge, and the virtuous journalists who accompanied them. I know of but one character in that set which could have prevented Danton’s ascendancy, and have met his ugly strength by a force as determined and more refined. Roland’s wife might have done it, but though she was the soul of the ministry, she was hardly a minister, and being a woman, she was confined to secondary and indirect methods. Her hatred of Danton increased to bitterness as she saw him succeed, but she could not intervene, and France was saved from the beauty and the ideals which might have been the syrens of her shipwreck.

The three weeks following the 10th of August were filled with the news of the invasion. The King of Prussia had hesitated to march. France, full of herself, never understood that such a thing was possible. The kings were on the march, the great and simple ideas, so long in opposition, had met in battle. All France thought that 1792 was already 1793. Perhaps there were only two men in the country who saw the immaturity, the complexity, and the chances of the situation—I mean Danton and Dumouriez: Dumouriez, because he was by nature a schemer who had seen and was to see the matter from close at hand; Danton, because, from the first moment of his entrance into the ministry, he had gathered up the threads of negotiation into his hand.

The King of Prussia had hesitated, so had Brunswick. It was the success of the insurrection that decided them. They made the error that the foreigner always makes, the error that led the most enlightened Frenchmen to exaggerate the liberal forces in England, the error of seeing ourselves in others. They imagined that “the sane body of the nation,” the Frenchmen that thought like Prussians, would rise in defence of the monarchy and in aid of the invasion. They had no conception of how small in number, how hesitating, and how vile were the anti-national party.

On Sunday the 19th the frontier was crossed; on the Thursday Longwy capitulated, and a German garrison held the rocky plateau that overlooks the plain of Luxembourg. A week later, Thursday the 30th, Verdun was surrounded.

From the hills above the town, the same hills which make of Verdun the fifth great entrenched camp of modern France, the Prussian batteries bombarded with a plunging fire. There may have been food and ammunition for two or three more days, but fire had broken out in several quarters, and the town council was imploring Beaurepaire to surrender. Brunswick proposed a truce and terms of capitulation. On the Saturday, the 1st of September, after a violent discussion, the terms were rejected, but Beaurepaire knew that nothing could save the town, and in the night he shot himself. On the next day, Sunday the second, Verdun yielded and the road to Paris lay open.

Meanwhile, in the capital itself, a vortex was opening, and the poor remnants of public authority and of public order were being drawn down into it. The 10th of August had been a victory into which there entered three very dangerous elements. First, it was not final; it had been won against a small local garrison under the menace of an invasion, and this invasion was proving itself irresistible. Secondly, it had left behind it terrors accentuated by success; I mean whatever fears of vengeance or of the destruction of Paris existed before the insurrection were doubled when so much greater cause had been given for the “execution” that Brunswick had threatened. Finally, the success of the insurrection had of itself destroyed the last shadow of executive power, for all such power, weak and perishing though it was, had centred in the King.

But besides these clear conditions which the 10th of August had produced, there was something deeper and more dangerous—the fear which fed upon itself and became panic, and which ran supported by anger growing into madness. There was no news but made it worse, no sight in the streets and no rumour but increased the intolerable pressure. Trade almost ceased, and the whole course of exchange, which is the blood of a great city, seemed to have run to the heart. Over the front of the Hotel de Ville hung that enormous black flag with the letters “Danger” staring from it in white, and in the heavy winds another blew out straight and rattled from the towers of Notre Dame. Every action savoured of nightmare, and suffered from a spirit grotesque, exaggerated, and horrible. The very day after the fight a great net had been cast over Paris and drawn in full of royalists. The gates had been shut suddenly, and every suspect arrested by order of the Commune. The prisons were full of members of the great conspiracy, for in civil war the vanquished appear as traitors. Then there arose a violent demand for the trial and punishment of those who had called in the foreigner, and a demand as violent, touching on miracle, for innumerable volunteers. In every project there ran this spirit of madness mixed with inspiration.

If Paris lost its head, so did the Assembly and the Moderates, but in another fashion. Paris was pale with the intensity of anger, Roland from a sudden paralysis. The fear of Paris was an angry panic; with the Girondins it was the sudden sickness that takes some men at the sight of blood. Paris had clamoured for an excess when it demanded the trial of the Swiss, who had done nothing beyond their mercenary duty; but the executive met it by an excess of weakness when it produced its court of ridiculous and just pedants, afraid to condemn, afraid to decide. Already the people had learned the secret payments of the old civil list,[115] the salaries paid to the emigrants, the subsidised press. Golier’s report had appeared but a day before the invasion.

The news of Longwy was already known. Verdun stood in peril, when the acquittal of Montmorin on Friday the 31st seemed to be the deciding weakness of the government that pushed the populace to their extreme of violence.

He had been governor of Fontainebleau, openly and patently a conspirator on the side of the Tuilleries; he was not acquitted of this. It was admitted that he had “planned civil war;” he was released by that heroic but fatal fault of the Girondins, the fault that later sent them to the guillotine, and that now inspired their tribunal—they would not bend an inch to compromise with necessity; rather than do so they would deliberately aggravate the worst conditions by inclining against the passions of the moment. They seemed to say, “You clamour for mere reprisals; we will show, on the contrary, that we are just, and we will even irritate you with mercy.” Yet they knew that Montmorin deserved death.

After that decision, and when Osselin the judge took with great courage the prisoner’s arm in his own and led him away, a voice in the court cried out, “You acquit him now, and in a fortnight his friends will march into Paris.” The massacres were certain from that moment; the thing had been said which made the small band of murderers start out, which made Paris look on immovable, and which kept the National Guard silent, refusing to stop the carnage. “We will go to the frontier, but we will not leave enemies behind us. If the law will not execute them, the people will.” The damnable spirit which runs in colonies and wild places had invaded civilised Europe, and the lynching was determined.

When the Assembly had yielded to the Commune, when it was certain that the insurrectionary Commune would have its own way, and when it was known that Longwy had fallen, that Verdun was surrounded, there took place one of those scenes that stand out like pictures in the mind, and that interpret the characters of history for us better than any accumulation of detail.

In the garden of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at its end, and away from the house, and under the low foliage, the six ministers were met in an informal gathering—rapid, half-silent, a council not predetermined, suited to the time; a few hurried words, whose description has come down to us by no minute, but by the accident of Fabre’s presence. Fabre d’Eglantine, the uncertain poet, Danton’s protégé, and dangerous, ill-balanced friend,[116] stood watching at a little distance.

Roland spoke for all his friends. He was very pale and broken-down; he leaned his head against a tree—“We must leave Paris.” Danton spoke louder, “Where do you mean to go?” “We must go to Blois. We must take with us the King and the treasure.” So said Servan; so said Clavière. Kersaint, whom Danton had known at the old Commune in 1791, and who was something of Danton’s kind, added his word: “I have just come from Sedan, and I know there is nothing else to be done. Brunswick will be here in Paris within the fortnight as surely as the wedge enters when you strike.” Danton stopped six waverers by a phrase, a phrase of just such a character, exaggerated, violent, as his good sense made use of so often in the tribune. “My mother is seventy years old, and I have brought her to Paris; I brought my children yesterday. If the Prussians are to come in, I hope it may be into a Paris burnt down with torches.” Then he turned round to Roland in person and threw out a fatal sentence, necessary, perhaps, but one of many that dug the great gulf between him and the Girondins. “Take care, Roland, and do not talk too much about flight; the people might hear you.”[117]

I know of no anecdote that tells more about Danton, or explains with greater clearness his attitude during the crisis that brought on the massacres. For these over-vigorous words, full of excess, were uttered by a man whose character was all for material results—results obtained, as a rule, by compromise. This same Danton, who talked of “torches” and “Paris en cendres,” was the only man in France who had the self-control to negotiate for the retreat of the Prussians after Valmy. His “mother of seventy years” had indeed been brought to Paris, but from Arcis, which every one knew to be right in the track of the invasion. What we have to discover in this speech, as in every phrase he uttered, is the motive; for with any other of the great Revolutionaries words were the whole of the idea, and sometimes more than the idea, but with Danton alone words were the means to a tangible end.

He desired to prevent that fatal breach with Paris which he had foreseen to be a risk from the beginning, and which Mirabeau in his time had thought so near as to be necessary. He was determined to keep this shadow—the national executive—in reach of the one thing that was alive and vigorous and defending the nation. It is of the greatest importance in appreciating his attitude to know that he dreaded the Commune. Later, no one of the deputies of Paris in the Convention saw as he saw the necessity of amalgamation with the Departments. Marat he thoroughly despised. Most of the men of the Commune had sat in one room with him; Panis and Sergent had even desks under him. He knew them, and he contemned them all. He did not know to what crimes they were about to commit themselves, or perhaps he would have interfered, but he knew they were worthless.

Behind them, however, he saw Paris, and in Paris he ardently believed, in its position and in its necessity. He was entirely right. Once let the ministers leave the city, and civil war would begin—a civil war waged within ten days’ march of the enemy, and between what forces? An imbecile, a man like one of our moderns, who thinks in maps and numbers, would have said, “Between eighty-three departments and one.” But Danton knew better. He had that appreciation which is common to all the masters; he knew the meaning of potential and of the word ‘quality.’ It would have been a fight between the members and the brain, and the brain would have died fighting, leaving a body dead because the brain had died.

Thus while the Assembly and the Commune fight their sharp battle of the last days of August, while the Parliament commands new municipal elections, breaks the municipality, then flatters it, then yields and permits it to be practically reinforced under the form of a fresh vote from the Sections,[118] Danton acts as though both Parliament and Commune had dropped from the world. There are two speeches of his, one of the 28th of August, one of the 2nd of September, and between them they mark his attitude and form also the origins of that full year of action and rhetoric which define him in history.

In the first, he proposes and carries the measure which has been made an excuse for laying upon his shoulders the responsibility of the massacres. The speech was made for a very different purpose. He authorised the domiciliary visits, but his object was to obtain arms. One thought only occupied him: to counteract the intense individualism of the Moderates, to force despotic measures through a Parliament that hated them, and to force these measures because without them the situation was lost. He got his arms, and just afterwards his mass of volunteers, but the other measure which he had introduced to pacify the Commune, the domiciliary visits, have marked more deeply in the memories of the time, because in the troubled days that followed these visits seemed to be a beginning.

It was Sunday morning, the 2nd of September. Verdun (though no one knew it yet in Paris) had just fallen; Beaurepaire was dead. The “Comité de Surveillance” of the Commune had admitted Marat illegally,[119] and for a sinister reason. For three days the prisons had been marked, and those whom the Comité wished to save had been withdrawn; and though the movement was spontaneous, though the most of the Sections spoke before Marat,[120] yet there was an executive and a directory, and that madman was its chief. The moment that the massacres were beginning at the Carmes, Danton was making the last effort to turn the anger of the moment into an enthusiasm for the Champ de Mars and for the volunteers. If ever there was an attempt to influence by rhetoric a popular emotion which could not be checked, and to direct energy from a destructive to a fruitful object, it is to be found in this his most famous speech—the speech that even the children know to-day in France, the closing words of which are engraved upon his pedestal. For the only time in his life he turned and leant upon the mere power of words: there is something in their extraordinary force which savours of despair, and they rise at the close to an untranslatable phrase in which you hear rhythm for the first and last time in his appeals: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace—et la France est sauvée.”[121]

He did not wholly fail. When he had rung the great bell of the Hotel de Ville and had gone to the Champ de Mars, he looked over a great and growing crowd of young men running to the enlistment. But for four days—days in which he doggedly turned his back to the Commune which called him—the killing went on in the prisons. He and his volunteers, his silence, were most like this: a man in a mutiny on ship-board, in a storm at night, keeping the helm, saving what could be saved and careless whether the morning should make him seem a traitor on the one hand or a mutineer upon the other. For the tragedy of those five days—the days of Sedan—always seems to be passing in a thick night. We read records of action at this or that hour in the daylight, but we cannot believe the sun shone. Maillard, tall and pale in his close black serge and belt, is a figure for candles on the Abbaye table and for torches in the cloisters and the vaults. There never was a horror more germane to darkness.

But why did Danton not save the prisoners? I know that question is usually answered by saying that he was indifferent. So much (it seems to me) survives of a legend. For history no longer pretends that he organised or directed the crime. Indeed, history finds it daily more difficult, as the details accumulate, to fix it upon any one man. But the fact that he persistently defended the extremists in the following month, that he made himself (for the purposes of reunion) an advocate for many men who were blameworthy, and tried to reconcile the pure minds of the Girondins with such terrible memories—in a word, the fact that for months he sacrificed himself in the Convention, that he demanded union, has condemned him to every suspicion. _Que mon nom soit flétri et que la France soit libre._

He might, indeed, have spoken. Popular, the one vigorous and healthy personality in the face of Paris, he might have bent his energy to the single aim of preventing an outbreak. I will not deny that in his mind, over which we have seen passionate anger falling suddenly in October 1789 and in June 1792, there may have arisen some such feeling as that which restrained the vast mass of the Parisians from interfering with the little band of murderers—a feeling of violent hatred, a memory of the manifesto and a disgust which made the partisans of Brunswick seem like vermin. There is something of that deplorable temper in the anecdote which Madame Roland gives of him, striding through the rooms on the second day and saying that the prisoners “could save themselves.” But this anecdote is not history; it is an accusation, and one made by a partisan and an enemy.[122] There is another and better reason for his action, which must, I think, have made the greater part of his motive. To have spoken would have been to play a very heavy stake. If he spoke and failed to prevent the rising, he ceased to be Danton. His influence fell, he became a Moderate, and himself, the one man left to direct affairs, entered the confused ranks of opposition—un-Parisian, rejected of either party, while France beneath him fell into mere anarchy.

It would have been gambling with all that he most desired: the English neutrality, the union of the coming Parliament, the rapid organisation of the armies, all this staked to win something that was not precious to him at all—the lives of a mass of men the bulk of whom had demanded the success of the invasion.

Why did he not act? Because nobody could act. Remember the phrase which he delivered while Louis was being executed four months later: “Nulle puissance humaine.”[123] We are so accustomed to an aristocratic and orderly society that a title of office implies power. The Home Secretary or some other man “does this,” but the man who really does it—does it with his hands—is the policeman or the soldier. Now these did not exist at the moment in Paris. It explains a hundred things in the Revolution to remember that every successive step reduced society to powder, to a mere number of men. Rousseau had said that this compact, this thing based on voluntary union, was not made for the cities. Paris gave us in September an awful proof. Roland, a man whom Marat had put upon his list and whom Danton had saved, talked on the Monday of the “just anger of the people.” Yet Roland was a just man, and brave in matters that affected himself alone, and the massacres chiefly concerned him. He was Minister of the Interior, that is, responsible for order, but there was nothing with which to work. On the Tuesday he sent to Santerre and said, “Call out the National Guard.” Santerre answered that he could not gather them. He was right. Again, Pétion was an honest man, a Moderate, the mayor of Paris; all he could do was to sit at a useless committee of the Sections and talk of the “National Defence;” that utter disintegration which the theories of the Revolution had produced—that purely voluntary condition of the soldier, the official, the police (a mere anarchy)—was irresistible when there was spontaneity of action; it was useless where the conditions demanded organisation and initiative. It withstood the cannonade at Valmy, it stormed the height of Jemappes, but it fled in rout when the spring had melted enthusiasm. So here police, the function that most requires discipline, was lacking in the State. And the whole situation is summed up in the sharp picture we have of Manuel pushing his way though the crowd with “two policemen” who had “volunteered,” and trying in vain to stop the lynching at the Carmes. It was to this anarchy that Danton, after six months of struggle, succeeded in giving government during 1793.

Danton himself, after four months of vain effort to reconcile his enemies, put the whole matter in the last phrase of his defence: “No human power” could have stopped the massacres;[124] all that could be done was to work, from that moment forward, against the extreme theories of a voluntary state, and towards the establishment of a strong government.[125]

When, on the Thursday, September 6, the wave receded, and when on the morrow Pétion was able to interfere, the people and the Assembly looked round them and saw that a thing had happened which was to hurt the future of the Revolution more than all the armies. It was like the breaking of day after that moral night, a daybreak in which the wind goes down and you see the wreckage.

Paris was very silent; the accusations had not yet begun; the Assembly was dying. The electoral council of Paris had met during the very days of the massacre, and had proceeded to choose the members who were to represent the capital in the Convention that was about to meet. It also voted in silence, and sat in the mingled panic and remorse that oppressed the whole city. The names came out in the balloting. On the 5th (the murderers were still growling in the streets) Robespierre was elected in a small meeting of 525; on the 6th Danton was elected second, but with a much larger attendance and with a much greater majority—638 votes out of an attendance of 700, a curious result. Danton’s name forced itself upon them, was acclaimed beyond any other; yet his attitude of conciliation, his attempt to have all Paris represented, was set aside. The man and his reputation succeeded, his policy failed. They elected also Marat, Panis, Sergent—those who had directed the crime. Danton and Manuel alone of all the twenty-four had any touch of the Moderate about them. The long list ends with the name of Egalité, elected by a majority of one.[126]

There came, therefore, into the Convention an apparently united body of men from Paris—the Mountain. Up on the benches of the extreme left, in the grey, dark theatre of the Tuilleries, there were to sit, in a compact group, these extremists; and across the floor the Departments, the pure Republicans of the south, who despised the city and them, who feared them terribly, and who hated with the force of a religion, were to single them out as tyrants. And in this Mountain, this body of Reds, Danton was to find himself imbedded, bound up, falsified. He had determined to prevent such parties. He had tried hard to make Paris elect not only Robespierre but Pétion also as a mark of unity: he had failed.

When the country members came up to the capital, September had grown to be an awful legend. The number of those killed was multiplied ten times,[127] twenty times—number lost meaning. Paris seemed a city of blood. Guides volunteered story after story. “Here, in the Abbaye, the blood had risen so high”—they made a mark in the wall; “there, under that tree, the massacres were planned by such and such a one”—any name suited, sometimes it was Robespierre, sometimes Danton. The deputies came from their little towns and from the fields, over seven hundred—pilgrims from places where the pure enthusiasms of 1790 still lingered, where even 1792 had brought no passion. They came, many of them for the first time, bewildered in the enormous city; its noise confused them, its crowds, its anger—“Yes; that was where the massacres were committed a fortnight ago—we can believe it.” The Convention from its first day seemed a battlefield—Paris defiant in the Mountain, and the Departments silent with an angry fear in the plain and on the benches of the right. And when the newcomers asked to be shown the group of deputies for Paris, as men would ask to be shown lurking enemies or wild beasts, they would have their gaze directed to that high place on the left where sat the names that had terrified and fascinated them in the prints of their country-sides.

There were no windows; the skylight, high above that deep well of a room, sent an insufficient light downwards upon the foreheads, making the features sharp and yet lending them a false gloom. That man with the small squat body and the frog’s face was Marat; you could just see his great vain mouth in the dim light. Those small, keen features, well barbered and set up, the high forehead, the pointed bones of the cheek and chin, stood for Robespierre. The light fell chiefly on the white of his careful wig; his thin smile was in shadow. And who was that huge figure, made larger by the darkness and carrying a head like Mirabeau? They saw it moving when the others were fixed. He would speak to his neighbours with heavy, sweeping gestures. They grew accustomed to the half-light, and they could distinguish his face—the strong jaw, the powerful movement of the lips, torn and misshapen though they were; the rough, pitted skin, the small, direct, and deep-set eyes. Who was he? He seemed to them the very incarnation of all the bloodshed and unreason which they hated in Paris, a master of anarchy. It was Danton.

Against that impression all policy and wisdom broke. He demanded unity; he checked the growing attack on the rich; he said things that were like France speaking. But the voice was harsh and loud; they heard it in their minds at the head of mobs; they fled from him to the Girondins; they forced him back upon the Mountain, and he had to do his work alone in spite of those orators whom he would have befriended and whose genius he loved—in spite of those madmen who surrounded him, and who later killed him and the Republic with one axe.

It was on the 25th of September, a Thursday, that the Convention met in the Tuilleries; on the Friday, in the same place, with doors shut and with the galleries empty, they declared the Republic, and moved off to the Manège, where their predecessors had sat. In those two days the violent quarrel between Paris and France was hushed for a moment. Danton, in the lull, said all he could to define his own position and to prevent that quarrel from ever reaching a head. He went out to meet the Moderates. He declared, with the common sense of the peasant, that property must first be declared inviolable; and it is curious that the Convention, the majority that misunderstood him and broke with him, was yet less moderate than he; it passed the resolution, but in the form, “property is under the safeguard of the nation.” In order to calm opinion he resigned the Ministry of Justice on the spot;[128] he did everything to make his position clear and true, and to save the unity of the Parliament.

But the attack came from the others. Within a week Lasource had proposed a guard for the Convention, “drawn from the departments;” and in the face of this proposition, that was almost civil war, Danton found himself able to speak once more for unity. The Girondins had elected one of themselves for president, and had chosen from among their own members the secretaries of the Assembly; they had wittingly ostracised the left, and they desired to make it dumb. Danton still attempted union. “I myself come from the Departments, from a place to which I always turn my eyes. But Paris is made of the Departments, and we are not here as members of this place or that, but as members for France.” He continually presented the idea of France united; the Girondins as continually rejected it. He knew that they thought him a shield for Marat; he rejected Marat openly from the tribune. But all this intense and personal action had but an effect upon individuals. Two especially it moved—Vergniaud, the young orator, sincere and brave beyond all his colleagues, and more far-seeing than any of the dreamers around him; Condorcet, to whom a year before Danton had seemed so repulsive, but whose calm and just mind had arrived at the truth; who had said, “Danton has that rare faculty of neither hating nor envying genius in others;” who had voted and spoken for his appointment as Minister of Justice, and who, up to the catastrophe of the following June, continued to understand and to support him.

But, for the mass of the Girondins, he remained an outcast. He used words that one could not use before Roland’s wife, and the great group that surrounded her (men over-full of utopias, but heroic, men whom Danton himself regretted bitterly) made him an outcast. He replied often with passion, and once with insult, but as we shall see he did not abandon them entirely till the insurrection destroyed them in ’93.

Meanwhile, while they voted the Republic in Paris, under Argonne a battle among the most curious in history was making a momentary security—that is, a momentary union of good feeling throughout France, and even in Paris itself. The Prussian army had been checked on the little rise of Valmy. As you stand upon the field in that same season of the year to-day, in the mist of the early morning, as the volunteers and the battered remnants of the line stood then; as you look from that standpoint at the open road, at the great plain of Champagne, so well suited to maintain an army; as you see to the east the long wall of the Argonne, and remember that Dumouriez had been outflanked in his Thermopylæ, a confusion seizes the mind. Why on earth was Valmy so important a victory? It is a common-place to say that Valmy was a cannonade, but what was a cannonade in 1792? If indeed to-day a line of guns were drawn up and served, as I have seen them served in the manœuvres within sight of these same hills, and if a force should be discovered capable of withstanding the shrapnel of twelve batteries of artillery, sure of their range, turning the mark into a ploughed field—then that force would merit peculiar names, for it would be immortal. But in the eighteenth century guns were not the arbiters of battles. Infantry could charge the batteries then. France, which was crushed yesterday and will succeed to-morrow solely through artillery, had not a hundred years ago to dread the random solid shot of smooth bores; what she had to dread was the bayonet charge of that superb infantry which the great Frederick had trained, and on which the monstrous scaffolding of Prussia still reposes. All we can say of Valmy is this, that men quite ignorant of warfare, badly held together, managed to stand firm under an ill-directed, at times a desultory and distant cannon fire.

Valmy was not a victory. The results of Valmy have changed the world, but no one could have seen it then. Goethe, in the course of a long life, discovered it, and put it beautifully into his own mouth over one of the bivouac fires: “We entered on a new world then;” but there were better prophets than Goethe, and not one perceived it. For days the Prussian army hesitated. Dumouriez did not dare to meet them. A pitched battle in the last days of September might have changed all history.

Why then did the King of Prussia retreat? No force compelled, but two arguments convinced him. The peasantry, and Danton, the man who through the whole year is, as it were, a peasant trained and illumined. The resistance of the peasantry had taught the King that to reach Paris it required not a war of the dynasties, such as had filled the eighteenth century—wars in which armies passed like visiting caravans; the invasion of France would need a crusade. He was no crusader. He had undertaken the war with only half a heart, and at this slight check he hesitated. The second argument came from Danton. He bargained like a peasant secretly for the purchasable and obvious good, while the Parliament was talking as might talk a conqueror who was something of a poet and well read in the classics. When there was a talk of negotiations just after the battle, it launched the great words, “That the Republic does not discuss till its territory is evacuated.” That was on Tuesday; the Republic was young to discuss anything—it was four days old. On Wednesday night, Westermann, Danton’s man of the 10th of August, and his companion at the scaffold, started off secretly to diplomatise. That foolish man D’Eglantine followed him, but his folly was swallowed up in the wisdom of Danton, who sent him, a secretary and a mouthpiece, to do that which, had he done it himself, would have produced some violent and ill-considered vote. Between them this clique settled the matter, and the invaders passed back through the Argonne heavily, in wet roads and through drenched woods, with Kellermann following, impatient, above the valleys, but bound by Danton’s policy not to harass the retreat; till at last, more than a month after Valmy,[129] he fired the salute from Longwy, and the territory was free.

Did Danton know, as he was pursuing these plans, why Dumouriez helped him? Did he understand thoroughly that vain, talented, and unprincipled soldier? I think it certain. It is among those things which cannot be proved; one does not base such convictions upon documents, but rather on the general appreciation of character. Thus Danton undoubtedly helped and used Talleyrand at another time in England, and Talleyrand was patently false. But Talleyrand was, as patently, the cleverest diplomatist he could find. Dumouriez wished the King of Prussia to be left unmolested for a number of very mixed reasons, in which patriotism played a small part; Danton wished it for the sake of France, and for that only; but if Dumouriez at the head of an army was to hand, so much the better. Danton supported Dumouriez, his policy, even his retreats up to the disaster of March. To say “he sympathised with a traitor” is one of those follies which men can only make when they forget that contemporaries cannot have known what we know. With all his time-serving and his separate plans, no one dreamt that in six months the general would join the Austrians; it was a sudden blow even to those who sat in his tent.

October was a month of reconciliation. When the man broad awake succeeds, the dreamer is ready to build a new dream on that result. The Gironde was almost silent, the Mountain was afraid. In the short visit that Dumouriez paid, between a victory and a victory, to Paris, Danton appears for a moment a partner in the mental ease, the brilliant expression, and the Republican faith of the Girondins. He might perhaps have ended there, and with his great arms and shoulders have held apart the men whose mutual hatred killed the Republic. In his success—and every one bore him gratitude after Valmy—that which he most desired almost happened, and the alliance between the opposing Girondist and the Mountain was half realised.

Michelet gives us two pictures[130] which, like the revelation of lightning, show us that rapid drama standing still. In the first it is Madame Roland, in the second Marat, who makes the tragedy. In the first Dumouriez and Danton sat in the same box at the theatre, and Vergniaud was coming in with the soul of the Girondins. The door opened and promised this spectacle: Danton and the general and the orator of the pure Republicans, and the woman most identified with the Right. It would have been such a picture for all the people there as Danton would have prayed or paid for. The door was ajar, and, as she came near, Madame Roland saw Danton sitting in the box; she put out her hand from Vergniaud’s arm and shut the door. There is in her memoirs a kind of apology,“des femmes de mauvaise tournure.” Utter nonsense; it was Roland’s box, and his wife was expected. Danton and Dumouriez were not of the gutter. No, it was the narrow feminine hatred, so closely allied to her intense devotion, that made Madame Roland thrust Danton at arm’s length. The same spirit that made her vilify the Left like a fury made her the calm saint of the Girondins. For she lived entirely in the Idea.

The second scene is a reception. I will not repeat Michelet’s description; its spirit is contained in an admirable phrase: “France civilised appealed therein against France political.” Danton was surrounded with those whom he would have taught, as he taught all who ever knew him closely, to respect or to love him. Marat heard that he was there—Marat, whom he had repudiated in public a few days before. He heard that Danton was there, surrounded by the soldiers, and the women, and the orators. He called at the door, and shouted in the hall, “I want to see Danton,” and at the sound of his voice everybody grew troubled, and Danton was left alone. On the 29th of October Danton attempted openly to break with Marat: “I declare to you and to France,” he said in the Convention, “that I have tried Marat’s temperament, and I am no friend of his.” But the attempt came too late.

The discussions broke out again in November. On the 10th, the victory of Jemappes was heard in Paris. This book, dealing only with a man, cannot detail those famous charges; it was a victory won by men singing the new songs; it is the inspiration of “La victoire en chantant.” But the security it gave only went further to destroy what was left of union. Danton found himself more and more alone. He who had been named on a committee with Thomas Paine, with Condorcet, with Pétion, on the very day after his election to the presidency of the Jacobins,[131] who had in his own temporary success seemed to realise his policy of union, found himself after a month once more pushed back towards the Mountain. The growing sense of security had destroyed the chances of union. He remained silent. One would say that the time passed him by untouched, because the one thing he cared for had failed, and because the inevitable civil dissensions of the next spring covered his mind with clouds. France was irretrievably divided. The arraignment of the King, the discovery of the secret papers, all the movement of November leaves him, as it were, stranded, waiting his mission to Belgium.

There belongs to this period only one considerable speech. It is the only thing in all his public acts in which you can discover beauty. You may find in this speech the pity and the tenderness which his intimates loved, the memory which they for sixty years defended, but which no document or letter remains to perpetuate.

Cambon, careless of anything but his exchequer, had thought the new era come. That cold and inflexible head determined, seeing the steep fall towards bankruptcy that France was making, to save a hundred millions, but to save it at an expense. He proposed to separate the State from what was left of the Church, to break the vow of 1790. In almost the last speech before he went off to the armies, Danton opposed him and gave this passage—a passage better fitted to the defence of an older and stronger thing than the wretched constitutional priesthood:—

“... It is treason against the nation to take away its dreams. For my part, I admit I have known but one God. The God of all the world and of justice. The man in the fields adds to this conception that of a man who works, whom he makes sacred because his youth, his manhood, and his old age owe to the priest then: little moments of happiness. When a man is poor and wretched, his soul grows tender, and he clings especially to whatever seems majestic: leave him his illusions—teach him if you will ... but do not let the poor fear that they may lose the one thing that binds them to earth, since wealth cannot bind them.”

Before he left on the mission to the armies there occurred a scene which has always been, since Michelet described it, the most striking passage of his relations with the Girondins. He, the man who saw safety for France only in diplomacy, had, for the sake of unity, held his tongue when the Girondins passed the decree of the 19th November, which was to sustain a revolutionary crusade against Europe. I say that November is full of Danton’s attempt to maintain the unity of the Parliament. After all these efforts he was worsted, because the Girondins were possessed by a dream which admitted of no compromise and of no realities.

The scene of his last attempt was this:—He made a rendezvous with their party. They were to meet secretly at night and away from Paris in a house in the woods of Sceaux at the very end of November. The whole life of this man was a tragedy, and we see in this sad journey that kind of dramatic presentiment of his death and of theirs, the “foreknowledge” with which the tragedies of the world are filled.