In 1780—his twenty-first year[17]—he entered the office of a solicitor at Paris named Vinot. Apprenticed as a clerk in order to read law, and above all to watch the procedure of the courts, he spent the next four years in preparing for the bar. If we are to depend on a chance phrase dropped just before his death, he was at that time entirely dependent on his master and his pen.[18] We know, at any rate, that he received no salary, but lodged and boarded with his employer; nor is it probable that he received any money from home, for his mother had married again, and a short time after this second husband (a certain Recordain) was so deeply involved that Danton was begged to hand over the most part of his inheritance to save the family. He did so, and remained with some five or six hundred pounds only as his share of the family fortune. It was invested in land near Arcis, and he kept it for his ultimate purpose of buying a barrister’s practice in one of the higher courts.
He was called to the bar (a process in the same form as taking a degree) in 1785,[19] choosing, with provincial patriotism, Rheims as the place in which formally to join the profession; but he intended to practise in the capital, and returned thither at once.
It is not easy to render to an English public the meaning of the various courts before 1789. Even in France (so completely has the new order supplanted the old anarchy) their forms have been forgotten, and research purely antiquarian cannot give us more than disjointed particulars as to their procedure.[20] There was a division corresponding to the English between Common Law and Equity. This was to be discovered in every country of the West, and had arisen of necessity from the imposition of the king’s power and the Canon Law over those local customs, mixed with reminiscences of Rome, which had once been the whole life of the early Middle Ages.
To the body of lawyers who in Paris (or in any of the great centres) formed the courts for all ordinary pleas, the name of “Parliament” was given. But that it comprised more persons, that it never went upon circuit, and that it included many barristers as well as judges, the Parliament of Paris corresponded more or less to what the English Bench would be were our judges to form a kind of permanent council for advising the Crown and registering its decrees, as well as for trying the cases brought before them. To plead at their bar was no difficult matter. It required but the taking of one’s degree in law, and the fees of entrance were slight. Danton determined to adopt this branch of the profession, and to use it as a stepping-stone towards the higher court, which he soon reached.
This higher court, “Court of Appeal,” as we should call it, or “Cour de Cassation,” as it is named in the modern French system, bore a title significant of the intense conservatism of old France. It was called the “Court of the King’s Councils”—very much what we should have to-day in England had we preserved in fact the theory that the king in his council is the final authority. But though it bore a name drawn from the Curia Regis of the thirteenth century, it had of course lost all its old simplicity. It was a Bench like any other, but there pleaded at its bar an order of lawyers strictly limited in number and highly privileged.[21] It dealt, as did its parallel in the English system, mainly with disputed inheritances, especially in matters of land, and, as we shall see, it showed the true mark of a court of Chancery, in that it took more than a hundred and thirty years to make up its mind. To plead before this court, with its monopoly of valuable causes, was to have at once an assured income and prestige; therefore its vacancies were prizes to be bought and sold. Danton determined to plead so long at the common law courts as might assure him, with economy, a substantial addition to the few hundred pounds that formed his whole capital, and then to seek a loan that might eke out these savings and place him at the Chancery bar.
Young, eloquent, eminently capable of seeing a real issue, he was well fitted for the lower practice, and he succeeded. Within two years he had a sum to offer as part payment, which was at once a proof of his business habits and of his talents. His family, therefore, especially those members of it who had urged him to go to the bar, were willing to advance the necessary sums in addition to his own savings and his little patrimony. The purchase-money was delivered, and a bond to the amount of £3000 (a sum which he could not then have furnished) was signed by his aunts and uncles at Troyes. It was in March 1787[22] that this step was taken, and this date was in some sense his entry into public life, for it brought him into direct contact with the wealthy—that is, with the ruling class.
We have on this date a vivid anecdote surviving. A Latin oration had to be delivered off-hand to the assembled college on the reception of a candidate to the order. The subject set for Danton when he entered the hall was “The Moral and Political Situation of the Country in their relations with the Administration of Justice.” A fine theme for 1787! Such a quaint scene the old regime delighted in, and its older members delighted also in catching here and there a phrase of quotation which they could understand. The genius and the memory of their candidate seem on this occasion to have furnished something new, to have given them less platitude than was expected. He mentioned reform; he spoke of the struggle in which the Parliament was engaged against the ministers—a struggle of which he wisely said, “They are fighting for the sacred centres of civic liberty, but present no positive reform by which that liberty may be brought into existence.” “Sacred centres” was, of course, aris et focis. The speech was necessarily in a large measure a series of clichés, a stringing together of the well-worn Latin mottoes. It even contained salus populi suprema lex, but its argument was Danton’s own. There is to be marked also this phrase, for it is the note of all his future work: “Let the government feel the gravity of the situation sufficiently to remedy it in the simple and in the natural way downwards from its own authority.”
The young men understood and applauded; the old men were assured that, if they had not quite followed an unconventional harangue, it was due to the originality of the speaker. Presumably their souls were softened by aris et focis, and salus populi suprema lex.
For the next two years his forensic reputation is continually rising. No longer the Common Law pleader, with pathetic and oratorical appeals for a shepherd against his lord, he had shown how large a part intellect had to do with his power of commanding attention. On the intricacies of his Chancery practice and the clearness and ability of his analysis we have an excellent witness in one of the most learned of the modern Parisian bar,[23] and three of his opinions, on the Amelinau, Dubonis, and De Montbarey cases, have come down to us, and have received the favourable criticism of an opponent.
The last case (that of De Montbarey) shows us Danton defending the claims of an old house and at work in the rustiest of all the legal grooves. It had been on the stocks since 1657, and Danton, in attempting to give the quietus to this intolerable longevity, uses a phrase which shows us the feeling that spared one grave at least when the mob sacked St. Denis: “Jeanne d’Albret[24] is a name dear to all Frenchmen, for it recalls the memory of that other Jeanne d’Albret who was the mother of Henri IV.”