For the moment this intense desire for order was uppermost in the minds of those few who were permitted to vote. In the Cordeliers it was the other character of the Parisian that was emphasised and developed. They were determined on democracy, like everybody else; but, unlike the rest, they were not afraid of the dangerous road. They were inspired and led by a man whose one great fault was a passionate contempt of danger. On this account, though they are taxpayers and bourgeois, lawyers, physicians, men of letters and the like, they do all they can to prevent the new municipal system from coming into play, but they fail.

Now, consider the Assembly. That great body was justly afraid of Paris; indeed, the man who was head and shoulders above them all—Mirabeau—was for leaving Paris altogether. The Assembly, again, had the whole task of re-making France in its hands, and it could not but will that Paris, in the midst of which it sat, should be muzzled. Through all the debates of the Provisional Commune it could easily be seen that Bailly and Lafayette were winning, and that the Parliament would be even more Moderate than they. Three points were the centres of the battle: first, the restricted suffrage which was to be established;[73] secondly, the power which was to be exercised over the new Commune by the authorities of the Department; thirdly, the suppression of those sixty democratic clubs, the districts, and their replacement by forty-eight sections, so framed as specially to break up the ties of neighbourhood and association, which the first of the Revolution had developed. It was aimed especially at the Cordeliers.

Against the first point the Cordeliers had little to say. Oddly enough, the idea of universal suffrage, which is so intimate a part of our ideas on the Revolution, was hardly thought of in early 1790. Against the second they debated, but did not decree; it was upon the third that they took most vigorous action. The law which authorised the new municipal scheme was passed on May the 27th, and, faithful to their policy, the Cordeliers did not attempt to quarrel with the National Assembly, but they fought bitterly against the application of the law by Bailly and his party. The law was signed by the King on June the 27th, and on the same day the mayor placarded the walls, ordering an immediate installation of the new system. The 27th was a Saturday. Within a week the new sections were to be organised, and on the Monday, July 5, the voting was to begin. The very next day, the 28th, the Cordeliers protested in a vigorous decree, in which they called on the fifty-nine other districts to petition the National Assembly to make a special exception of the town of Paris, to consider the great federation of July 14, which should be allowed to pass before the elections, and finally to give the city time to discuss so important a change. All through the week, on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July, they published vigorous appeals. They were partially successful, but in their main object—the reconstruction of the aristocratic scheme and the arousing of public spirit against it—they entirely failed. Bailly is elected mayor on August 2 by an enormous majority—practically 90 per cent. The old districts disappear, and, like every other, the famous Cordeliers are merged in the larger section of the Théâtre Français. It may not sit in permanence; it may not (save on a special demand of fifty citizens) meet at all; it is merely an electoral unit, and in future some 14,000 men out of a city of nearly a million are to govern all. The local club, directing its armed force and appealing to its fellows, is abolished. Danton then has failed.

But, as we shall see later, the exception became the rule. No mechanical device could check the Revolution. The demand for permanent sections is continuous and successful. From these divisions, intended to be mere marks upon a map, come the cannon of the 10th of August, and it is the section of the Théâtre Français, wherein the traditions and the very name of the Cordeliers were to have been forgotten, that first in Europe declared and exercised the right of the whole people to govern.

If I may repeat a common-place that I have used continually in this book, the tide of the Revolution in Paris was dammed up with a high barrier; its rise could not be checked, and it was certain to escape at last with the force and destructive energy of a flood.

CHAPTER IV
THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY

I have taken as a turning-point in the career of Danton the municipal change which marks the summer of 1790, concluding with that event the first chapter of his political action, and making it the beginning of a new phase. Let me explain the reasons that have led me to make such a division at a moment that is marked by no striking passage of arms, of policy, or of debate.

In the first place, a recital of Danton’s life must of necessity follow the fortunes of the capital. The spirit of the people whose tribune he was (their growing enthusiasms and later their angers)—that spirit is the chief thing to guide us in the interpretation of his politics, but the mechanical transformations of the city government form the framework, as it were, upon which the stuff of Parisian feeling is woven. The detail is dry and often neglected; the mere passing of a particular law giving Paris a particular constitution, a system not unexpected, and apparently well suited to the first year of the Revolution, may seem an event of but little moment in the development of the reform; but certain aspects of the period lend that detail a very considerable importance. In the rapid transformation which was remoulding French society, the law, however new, possessed a strength which, at this hour, we can appreciate only with difficulty. In a settled and traditional society custom is of such overwhelming weight that a law can act only in accordance with it; a sudden change in the machinery of government would break down of itself—nay, in such a society laws can hardly be passed save those that the development of tradition demands. But in a time of revolution this postulate of social history fails. When a whole people starts out to make fresh conditions for itself, every decree becomes an origin; the forces that in more regular periods mould and control legislative action are, in a time of feverish reconstruction, increased in power and give an impetus to new institutions; the energy of society, which in years of content and order controls by an unseen pressure, is used in years of revolution to launch, openly and mechanically, the fabric that a new theory has designed. Thus you may observe how in the framing of the American constitution every point in a particular debate became of vast moment to the United States; thus in our time the German Empire has found its strength in a set of arbitrary decrees, all the creation of a decade; thus in the Middle Ages the Hildebrandine reform framed in the life of one man institutions which are vigorous after the lapse of eight hundred years; and thus in the French Revolution a municipal organisation, new, theoretic, and mechanical, was strong enough, not indeed to survive so terrible a storm, but to give to the whole movement a permanent change of direction.

This, then, is the transitional character of the summer of 1790, as regards the particular life of Danton and the particular city of Paris. What the Cordeliers had fought so hard to obtain as a constitutional reform had failed. The direct action of the districts upon the municipality was apparently lost for ever, and the centre of the new system was in future to be controlled in the expression of ideas and paralysed in its action. What the Cordeliers had represented in spirit, though they had not formulated it in decrees—government by the whole people—was apparently equally lost. The law of December (that which established the “active and passive citizens”) was working for Paris as for all France; and though a suffrage which admitted two-thirds of the male population to the polls could not be called restrictive, yet the exception of men working for wages under their master’s roof, the necessity of a year’s residence, and the qualification of tax-paying did produce a very narrow oligarchy in a town like Paris: the artisans were excluded, and thousands of those governed fell just beyond the limits which defined the municipal voter. Danton may receive the provincial delegates, may make his speeches at the feast in the Bois de Boulogne; but once the organ of government has been closed to his ideas, the road towards the democracy lies through illegality and revolt.