Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

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.