In these five were the Postes, Invalides, Luxembourg. It was not the purely popular quarters that supported Danton, but rather the University and the lawyers.
He took his defeat as a signal for still greater reserve, letting his name take perspective, and refusing by any act or phrase to obscure his reputation with new issues. The tactics succeeded. When, in October, a public orator was needed, they remembered him, and he presents the deputation of the 10th of November. The circumstances were as follows:—
The ministry which surrounded the King was frankly reactionary. I do not mean that it was opposed to the constitution of the moment. Perhaps the majority (and the less important) of its members would have been loath to bring back anything approaching the old regime. But there were in the Revolution not only the facts but the tendencies, and in a period when every day brought its change, the tendencies were watched with an extreme care. France may have thought, seeing the federation on the Champ de Mars and the altar where Talleyrand had said mass, that the Revolution was at an end and the new state of affairs established in peace, but those in the capital knew better; and the men immediately surrounding the King, who saw the necessary consequences of his signing the civic constitution, and the growing breach between himself and the assembly—these men were on the King’s side. The affair at Nancy, which had aroused so many passions, was the thing which finally roused Parisian opinion; and at the very moment when the King is secretly planning the flight to Montmédy—that flight which six months later failed—Paris is for the first time claiming to govern the councils of the kingdom.
It was the Sections that began the movement, those Sections whose action was to have been so restricted, and which, upon the contrary, were becoming the permanent organs of expression in the capital.
The Section Mauconseil on the 22nd of October sent in a petition for the dismissal of the cabinet and appealed to the National Assembly. The Section of the National Library followed suit three days later, and sent its petition not only to the Assembly but to the King. It must be remembered that the legend of a good king deceived by his advisers held at the time. Indeed, it survived the flight to Varennes; it partly survived the 10th of August, and only the research of recent times has proved clearly the continual intrigue of which the King was the head.
On the 27th Mauconseil came forward again with a petition to the mayor, Bailly, to call the general council of the Commune and consider the complaints. Fourteen other Sections backed this petition. Bailly hesitated, and while he temporised, all the forty-eight Sections named commissioners and sent them to an informal gathering at the Archbishopric.[78]
Danton was a member of this big committee and was made secretary. He drew up an address; the mayor was twice summoned to call the general council of the Commune. Hesitating and afraid, Bailly finally did so, and after a violent debate the resolution passed. Bailly was sent by the town to “present the Commune at the bar of the Assembly and demand the recall” of the Ministers of Justice, War, and the Interior—De Cicé, La Tour du Pin, and St. Priest.
Danton was taken out of the informal body to which he had acted as secretary, and asked to be the orator of the legal Commune. There followed on the 10th of November a very curious scene.