Such will be the phases through which the form of the Revolution will pass. As for the soul of it, France will be steadily transformed, and, in spite of visionaries, reactions, and every political accident, a new and a strong society will be created. So the salt water comes in through old dykes; on its surface you will note the phases of a flood, innumerable little streams, a torrent, a spreading lake, and ultimately calm, but only one thing all the while is happening—where there has been land there will be the sea.
What place did Danton take in this transformation? Of his opinions in detail, his habit of body and mind, his convictions, the accidents of his life, it is the purport of this biography to treat. I will attempt only a very brief description of his position, to make clear the drift of his Revolutionary career, and with this close a chapter whose only object has been to describe the surroundings of a character with which the rest of this book is concerned.
Danton belonged to the bourgeoisie in rank, to the less visionary in the bent of his mind. A young and successful lawyer of thirty, the Revolution found him unknown to politics and not desiring election. It was the accident of oratory that gave him his first position. He discovered himself to be a leader, and there grouped round him a knot of the most ardent, some of them the most brilliant, younger reformers. The electoral district to which he happened to belong became through him the most democratic, and, in some ways, the most violent of Paris.
That part of him which led to such a position was his sympathy. His tenderness (and he had a great share of this quality) was hidden under the energy of his rough voice, great frame, and violent gesture. His pity he was slow to express. But the great crowd of men who were unrepresented, the smaller but more influential class of those who felt and knew but could not speak—these were attracted to him because he had the instinct of the people. He was a demagogue at moments and for a purpose, but never by profession nor for any period of time. What he was, however, all his life and by nature, was a Tribune.
The secret workings of the soil, the power that makes all the qualities of a nation from its wine to its heroes, these had produced him as they produce the tree or the harvest. He is the most French, the most national, the nearest to the mother of all the Revolutionary group. He summed up France; and, the son of a small lawyer in Champagne, he was a peasant, a bourgeois, almost a soldier as well. When we study him it is like looking at a landscape of Rousseau’s or a figure of Millet’s. We feel France.
His voice was a good symbol of his mind, for there was heard in it not only the deep tone of a multitude, but that quality which comes from the mingling of many parts—the noise of waters or of leaves. In his political attitude he attained this collective quality, not by a varying point of view which is confusion, but by an integration. His opinions erred on the side of bluntness and of directness. They were expressed in plain sentences of a dozen words; he abhorred the classical allusion, he was chary of metaphor. He spoke as a crowd would speak, or an army, or a tribe, if it had a voice.
This was Danton, the public orator and the Tribune, who for two years was heard at the Cordeliers, who spoke always for the purely democratic reform, who opposed the moderates, and who helped to destroy the compromise. Never identified with Paris, he yet saw clearly the necessity of Paris. He admitted her claim, fenced with her arrogance, but never worshipped her idols; once or twice he even dared to blame her worst follies. Elected to the administration of the city, he played but a slight rôle, and until the spring of 1792 there is in him no other quality.
The spring of 1792 produced the war with Europe, and from that date Danton appears in another light. Had he died then, we should have known him only by chance references, a centre of strong reforming speeches, an obscure man in opposition. But with the outbreak of a war which he had done nothing to bring on, and which his party thought unwise, Danton shows that his character, in summing up his fellows, caught especially their patriotism. France was the first thought, and if we could hear not the debaters only, but all the voices of France when the invasion began, it would be this immediate necessity of saving the country that would drown all other opinions. Thence, and for a full year after, Danton becomes the leading man of France. The ability which has led to his legal success (now that his office is abolished and its reimbursement invested in land) seems turned upon the political situation, and such ability combined with such a representative quality pushes him to the front. Two qualities appeared in him which he himself perhaps had not guessed—the power of rapid organisation, and the power of so judging character as to bring diplomacy to bear upon every accident as it arrived.
It was not strictly he who made the 10th of August, but he was the leader. He saw that with the king in power the Prussians would reach Paris, and more than any man he organised the insurrection. That was the one act of violence in his life.
The rest of the nineteen months that fate allowed were spent in the attempt to reconcile and harmonise all the forces he could gather for the salvation of the nation, Perhaps it was his chief fault that in this matter he held to no pure idea.