Chapter V: The Republic (2)

He went through the desolate bare woods of November, under the hurrying sky, that recalls to our minds in France to-day the charges of Jemappes. The night was as wild as the time, and as dark as his forebodings, when he came on to the little group of men in the candlelight, and argued with them, and against them, and alone. Michelet gives to Danton’s mind a sentiment of coercion. He shows us Danton dragged by necessity. But I can see no necessity except the supreme desire to unite the parties and make the government real. They would not receive his alliance, and he went away from that meeting at midnight, pushed back upon Paris, thrown into the comradeship of violence. Guadet rejected him with an especial fervour. Danton as he left turned upon him with this phrase: “Guadet, Guadet, you cannot understand and you do not know how to forgive; you are headstrong, and it will be your doom.” The next day he started on his mission to the army.

During the arraignment and during the trial of the King the opinions that divided the Left and the Right fought it out in his absence.[132] He was not there to attempt such a movement as his character demanded. No one in all the Assembly dared hold out a hand as he would have done and see whether after all Vergniaud might not perhaps be right on the one hand, and the Mountain perhaps be patriots on the other.

There was in this debate upon one man’s life an element to which Danton’s nature was well suited. There had to be kept in view for the French nation the effect upon Europe which would follow from the determination as to the death or life of the King, and Danton’s great voice has so strongly and so rightly affected the historians of the period that he thrusts his personality forward into their narrative, and in at least one notable place Danton appears, in history, and in one of the greatest pages of history, by no right, and figures upon scenes which do not possess the advantage of his voice. He has been made to defend Louis’s life, to plead for a respite, and then by a violent change to vote for his death.

Let me now explain how this error passed into the mind of Michelet and of other men. Danton returned from Belgium on the night of the 14th January. On that same day a certain Dannon, apparently an honest man,[133] rose late in the evening and demanded respite for Louis. When Gallois reprinted the _Moniteur_, he saw this obscure name coupled with a politic demand; he read it again, and said, “This Dannon must be a misprint for Danton.” He corrected it so. On this chance venture there fell the eye of Michelet, the eye that from a glance or a word could bring back the colours and the movements of living men. In him also the tragedy of Danton powerfully worked; he moulded a figure from these few words in the _Moniteur_, and made of them an admirable anti-climax. Here was Danton (Dannon) hot from the armies, knowing in what peril France stood, having seen with his own eyes how momentary had been the effects of Jemappes. He comes from his travelling coach to the Assembly, and with the mud of the road yet upon him, gives his expression as an ally to the Girondins and to the Moderates. Then some rebuff, some unrecorded insult throws him back again as he had been so often thrown back into the arms of the Extremists. On the next day, the 15th of January, we are asked to watch him sitting by the side of his dying wife, sullen and despairing. On the 16th he comes back furious, and votes for the death of the King.

There are those for whom detail in history is pedantic, yet here upon three letters and their order hangs the interpretation not only of an individual character but of a policy whose effects we are still feeling. Michelet’s great picture is false from beginning to end. Danton had returned on the 14th, and came jaded with his journey to the bedside of her who had been his young wife of five years, who was now near to childbirth and to death. He had his own drama as well as that of the historian’s, and our own dramas are acted upon a stage where the results are real. All that night of the 14th and all the 15th he was watching in his flat of the Passage du Commerce a fate which was coming upon him, and certainly for whose thirty-six hours the Revolution was a little thing to him. He came back wearily to his position and to his duties on the 16th; he remembered there was such a thing as the Revolution—that Louis was after all on trial, and descended from his home into the hall of the Parliament to give the short angry sentence in which we seem to read less moderation and less of diplomacy than was his by nature. The scene in the home had made him not only bitter but weak, for there is surely weakness in saying, “I am not a statesman,” in borrowing, that is, the vulgar acrimony of Marat, or in talking of “the tyrant,” and in repeating the phrases of the Mountain.

But in the days that followed Michelet finds a good excuse. Certainly one would say, if one knew nothing about him except his action of January 1793, that Danton was the Mountain and nothing else. This error would be supported by the unreasoning vehemence, the almost brutal anger, into which he allows himself to fall.

They asked whether the King could be condemned to death by a mere majority, and whether that majority was decisive. Danton threw back at them: “You decided the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you think the life of one man too great for a mere majority; you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood flowed decisively enough.”

So naturally was he at that moment the Danton of unreason, so much had his character yielded to its persistent temptation of violent words, that there could be heard a voice once calling out to him as he rushed to the tribune without leave from the Speaker, “You are not a king yet, Danton.” And yet this was the man who had saved France from any folly of defiance after Valmy, who was determined upon saving her in the future by keeping upon the helm a quiet and unswerving hand. Vergniaud’s great simile, “That France might become, if she did not take care, like the statues of Egypt; they astonish by their greatness, and yet are enigmas to all who see them, because the living spirit that made them has died,” passed him by without effect. He was one of those who voted in the fatal majority, and he threw down as gage of battle the head of a king.[134]

* * * * *

The word had become reality, and Louis had stood at mid-day trying to be heard beyond the ring of soldiers, had cried out that he was innocent, and had died in the noon of that cold January day. This act was destined to produce the one thing that Danton had most ardently desired to avoid—it put an end once and for all to the neutrality of England.

Another people, then in their infancy, now old, whom Louis had been persuaded to help against his will, received the death of Louis like a kind of blow in the face. The people of the United States in their simplicity had imagined the French king to be their saviour; they did not know Louis’s phrase, “I was dragged into that unhappy affair of America; advantage was taken of my youth.” They regarded his crown with a certain superstition, as they still regard what is left of baubles in Europe; and when the axe fell upon him, France lost not only the calculating hypocrisy of Pitt, but the genuine sympathy of the American people.

In the days that followed (they were only ten) between the 21st of January and the end of the month, it is still plain that the shock which most affected Danton’s vigorous and independent judgment was that return after seven weeks to the wife whom he had passionately loved, and whom this ugly Orpheus felt slipping from his arms back into the shades. After her death, as we shall see, he did not reel so heavily, but in that fortnight of January, which was of such supreme importance, he permitted misfortune to rouse mere passion in his mind; and he who might have led the Moderates, who might have played with the life of Louis like a card, chose to remember his rebuff in the winter and threw his trump away.

Many have tried to explain Vergniaud’s vote. Is it not probable that he was drawn by the example of a man whom he did not understand, and whose opinion attracted an orator not unappreciative of energy? Vergniaud has always before history a doubting and a hesitating face, and it seems more than possible that the wrath of Danton carried him and many others into the vote for death.

Ever since the 10th of August had thrust him into unexpected power, Danton had held in one way or another the threads of a certain diplomacy. It was as follows:—To rely upon all the elements in Europe which admired or were indifferent to the Revolution, and to combine them in a kind of resistant body; to use, as it were, their inertia against those who were setting out as crusaders against France. On this account the foolish war of propaganda was most distasteful to him. On this account England’s neutrality haunted his mind. He knew that in this country there existed a body strong in its influence though not in its numbers, a body which would have supported the French. Priestley had written to him before his exile. Talleyrand was working for him at the moment, and opposing as an informal Dantonist the Girondin acerbity of Chauvelin.[135] Danton was even willing to use Dumouriez, mainly because Dumouriez was about to compromise with England. To this policy of observation, a policy which took advantage of England as the lover of individual liberty and of England as the merchant, the death of the King put a sudden stop. It was Danton that killed his own intrigue.

Before he left on his second mission to the armies on the 31st January 1793, he shows that new face in which he attempts to retrieve, as far as possible, the errors of which he had been largely the author. In a speech which shows once again all his old power of party political action, he demands the annexation of Belgium. He has seen that general war is inevitable, and harking back again to that unique French conception of which he was the heir, the _raison d’état_, he determines to save the State, and to do it by an action which opposed every theory of the Revolution. He asked “everything of their reason, nothing of their enthusiasm,” and he demanded the annexation of Belgium with France. It was pure opportunism—the determination to get hold of a revenue by force of arms; and the next day, after having painfully come back to his old policy of the real and objective, burdened by a past error, and having broken with all that he valued in French opinion, he went off again to the army. While his chaise was yet rolling on the flat roads of Flanders, Chauvelin returned with Pitt’s scrawl in his hand, and France was at war with the whole world.

This next voyage to Belgium occupied but a very short time. He did not get there until the 3rd February, and he started to come back on the 15th. But the moment, which is necessarily a silent one in his biography, would be one of capital importance to us had he remained in Paris to speak, and to leave us by his speeches some clue as to the revolution through which his mind had passed.

Consider these contrasting pictures: Danton, up to the death of the King, seems uniquely occupied in pursuing the threads of a very careful diplomacy, and in welding as far as possible the opposing factions of the Parliament. Of course, his general theories in politics remain unaltered, but something has happened which makes him, on returning from Belgium for the second time, pursue this different policy: the immediate construction of a strong central government, and the providing of it with exceptional and terrible machinery. He works this as absolutely the unique policy. He seems to have forgotten all questions of diplomacy, nearly to have despaired of settling the quarrel between Paris and the Girondins. In fine, Danton, when first in power, had been a man so representative of France as to have many different objects, and to attempt their co-ordination. We see him the brief fortnight of Louis’s execution violent, angry, unreasoning; we see him again in less than a month transformed into a man with a single object, pursued and succeeded in with the tenacity common to minds much narrower than his own.

I know that events will largely account for the change. The Girondins had repelled him; diplomacy had no further object when once the universal war was declared; the grave perils, and later the disasters of the French armies, which he had seen with his own eyes, called imperatively for a dictatorship. Nevertheless events will not of themselves account for the very great transformation in all that he says and does. I believe that we must look to another cause—one of those causes which historians neglect, but which in the lives of individuals are of far more importance than their political surroundings. By nature he had great tendencies to indolence as well as to violence. He was capable of temporising to a dangerous extent, and this, I think, was largely the cause of his action in the autumn. But such natures are also of the kind which disaster spurs to action. As we have seen, the return in January to his household, ruined by an impending fate, made him the violent and bitter speaker who spoiled his own plans by his own speeches. But returning from Belgium in February, not a menace but a definite disaster awoke in him a much more useful energy.

Coming from fields in which he had seen the whole force of the early battles breaking up in confusion and retreat, he had suddenly to meet the news of his wife’s death. He bought a light carriage for himself in order to travel with greater speed, and arrived at the city in time, they say, to have her coffin taken out of the grave and opened, so that he might look once more upon her face. The home was entirely empty. The two little children, one of whom was in arms, the other of whom was just beginning to talk, had been taken away to their grandmother’s. The seals were on the furniture and on the doors. One servant only remained. The house had been without a fire for a week when he entered. It was an opportunity and a command for another origin in his political life. Coming and going from these rooms, he found them intolerable; he took refuge in direct and determined action, calling to his aid all that vast reserve of energy which he was accustomed to expend at the cost of so much future exhaustion.

Here was the first thing to be done—to construct at once that strong and simple government which he had talked of so long. The report which he and the other commissioners had prepared on the state of the army[136] was one deliberately intended to make such a government voted. The Commune of Paris immediately after the preparation of the report made its vigorous appeal for a further levy, and on the 8th of March Danton made the first of those speeches which riveted the armour all round France.[137]

In the first phrase of this speech he strikes the note upon which depended so much of his power. He reads his own character into that of the nation. “We have often discovered before now that this is the temper of the French people—namely, that it needs dangers to discover all its energy.” Then he strikes the other note, the appeal to Paris which had marked so much of his career. “Paris, which has been given so ill a fame” (a stroke at the Girondins), “I say is called once more to give France the impulse which last year produced all our triumphs. We promised the army in Belgium 30,000 men on the 1st of February. None have reached them. And I demand that commissioners be named to raise a force in the forty-eight Sections of Paris.”

If there was some talk at that moment of making him Minister of War after Beurnonville’s resignation, it was because no one but Danton himself understood how much his energy could do. He rejected the proposal, but he had the desire to replace the ministers themselves by a power more formidable and more direct.

In these days one disaster after another came to help his scheme. More than one of his enemies had suspected in a vague fashion that he was framing a new power,[138] but they could not imagine in Danton anything higher than ambition, and they lent him the ridiculous project of forcing a new ministry upon the Assembly. What he was really preparing, and what he produced on the 10th of March, was the weapon which history has called the Revolutionary Tribunal.

It was the moment when the mutterings against the Girondins seemed about to take the form of an insurrection, when their printing presses were broken, and when, in the vague panic that always followed any popular movement since September, men feared a renewal of the massacres. The proposal is put forward with ability of argument rather than with passion; but, in the teeth of the majority and a ministry to which such methods were detestable, in the teeth, that is, of the Girondin idealism which was ruining the country, he affirmed the necessity of his scheme, and he passed it.[139] He had given the Revolutionary Government its first great weapon, a weapon that was later to be turned against himself; his second move was to put it into vigorous hands.

This next proposition, which, combined with the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was to change the history of France, did not proceed from Danton alone, but it was based upon Danton’s suggestion; it sprang largely from the vivid impression he had given of the peril in which France lay and of the necessity of forming something central and strong, of providing a hand which could use the dictatorship of the Terror. The Committee of Public Safety, in a word, could not have been declared but for the interpretation which Danton had given to the disasters of March.

The crowning defeat of Neerwinden, which at the time must almost have seemed the death of the Republic, gave the first impulse. The old Committee of General Defence was renewed. But though this committee was far too large and far too feeble, we owe it to Danton that it contained a vigorous minority from the Left. The final blow that replaced it by an institution round which the rest of this book will turn was the treason of Dumouriez.

Let us consider what the situation was at this moment. The Republic had lost every man upon whose ability she could rely in the leadership of armies. Of all the school of generals who had grown up under the old regime, Lafayette alone in his weak way had loved freedom, and Dumouriez alone had remained on the side of the French. Spain, England, the German Powers—nine allies—were threatening the territory of the Republic and the very existence of the new regime; the civil war, which was soon to take such gigantic proportions, had already made its successful beginning at Machecoul. Between the Convention and immediate disaster there lay only the personality of Dumouriez. When the news of his desertion, following on the news of his defeat, reached Paris, the Girondins were hopelessly discredited, and the line of their political retreat, the pursuit of their enemies, ran in a direction that Danton’s speeches had prepared.

For several days he had himself been the object of the most violent attacks, especially for his friendship with Dumouriez and on the question of the Belgian accounts. For he had just returned from a third mission to the army, and had been close to the general. On the 1st of April practically the whole sitting was devoted to an attack upon him and to his defence. Had you been sitting in the house that night, you would have said that a violent demagogue, surrounded by a little group of yet more violent friends, was resisting with some difficulty the attacks of an honest and loyal majority. But this demagogue was so far-seeing, was so much the greatest of all those in the hall, that when three days afterwards the Parliament was brought face to face with the reality, Danton’s method becomes the only solution. They hear of Dumouriez’ treason, and on the night of the 4th of April, Isnard, himself a Girondin, proposed the creation of the Committee. Danton supported him at midnight with a definite speech such as no Girondin would have dared to make. He said practically, “This Committee is precisely what we want, a hand to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”

It was Isnard that formulated the idea, but it was Danton that baptised it “A Dictator.” It was at midnight that he spoke, and he closed his short speech just on the turn of the morning of the 5th of April. That very day a year later the Dictator seized him, and his own Tribunal put him to death.

On the 5th of April, the next day, in the evening, we begin to get those large measures and rapid which came with the new organ of power. And Danton speaks with a kind of joy, and demands at once such measures as only a dictatorship can produce—calling all the people to the defence, fixing a maximum upon the price of bread, even the first mention of a levée _en masse_. The air is full of such a spirit as you get in an army, the certitude that with discipline and unity and authority all things can be done. On the following day, the 6th, the Committee was chosen, and on the 7th the names were read out, which showed that the power had finally passed from the Girondins to those whom they had rejected at the moment when France was forgiving everything for the sake of Jemappes. The Convention, in need of men of action, had been forced to abandon its own leaders and to turn to Danton.

The names that they heard read out were Barrère, Delmas, Bréard, Debry, Morvaux, Cambon, Treilhard, Lacroix, and Danton.