Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

And so it went on. But in a duel of this kind lungs are the weapons, and Danton had the best lungs in the hall. He had also perhaps the soundest brain of any; but the Abbé Maury and his friends had chosen more rapid methods than those of arguments. The short address ended (it did not take a quarter of an hour to read), and the deputation left the Assembly. This last debated and refused the decree; yet the Commune had succeeded, for in a few days the Archbishop of Bordeaux left the Ministry of Justice, and La Tour du Pin, “who thought that parchment alone made nobility” (a phrase of Danton’s which had upset the Right), left the Ministry of War.

The deputation had petitioned on Wednesday, the 10th of November. Four days later he was elected head of the militia battalion in which he had served for a year.[80] There is some doubt as to whether he remained long at this post. Some antagonists talk vaguely of his “leading his battalion” in ’92, but never as eye-witnesses. On the other hand, there is a letter in existence talking of Danton’s resignation; but it is unsigned and undated. Only some one has written in pencil, “Gouvion, 22nd November.”[81]

At any rate, the interest of the little incident lies in the fact that it meant a meeting between Danton and Lafayette, and, as Freron remarks in his journal, “Cela serait curieux.”[82] Perhaps they did not meet.

The campaign continually directed against Danton was as active in this matter as in all others. It gives one, for instance, an insight into the management and discipline of the guards to learn that “Coutra, a corporal, went about asking for signatures against Danton’s nomination.”[83] He had just risen above the successes of his enemies. November had put him on a sure footing again, and in January he reached the place he had had so long in view, the administration of Paris.

It will be remembered that the voting was by two degrees. The electors nominated an “electoral college,” who elected the Commune and its officers. Already in October Danton had been put into the electoral college by twenty-six members chosen by his Section, but not without violent opposition. Finally, after eight ballots, on the 31st of January 1791, he became a member of the administration of the town—the twenty-second on a list of thirty-six elected. He failed, however, in his attempt to be chosen “Procureur,” and through all the year 1791 he keeps his place in the administration of Paris merely as a stepping-stone. He does not speak much in the Council. He used his partial success only for the purpose of attaining a definite position from which he could exercise some measure of executive control; this position he finally attains (as we shall see) in the following December, and it is from it that he is able to direct the movement of 1792.

The year 1791 does not form a unit in the story of the Revolution. It is cut sharply in two by the flight of the King in June. Before that event things went with a certain quietude. The tendency to reaction and the tendency to extreme democracy are to be discovered, but there can be no doubt that a kind of lassitude has taken the public mind. After all, the benefits of the Revolution are there. The two years of discussion, the useless acrimony of the preceding autumn, began to weary the voters—there is a sentiment of joviality abroad.

After the flight of the King all is changed. To a period of development there succeeds a period of violent advance, and of retreat yet more violent; there appears in France the first mention of the word republic, and all the characters that hung round Lafayette come definitely into conflict with the mass of the people. The action of the troops on the Champ de Mars opens the first of those impassable gulfs between the parties, and from that moment onward there arise the hatreds that are only satisfied by the death of political opponents.

In that first period, then, which the death of Mirabeau was to disturb, the 18th of April to endanger, and the flight of the King to close, Danton’s rôle, like that of all the democrats, is effaced. Why should it not be? The violent discussions that followed the affair of Nancy led, as it were, to a double satisfaction: the loyal party saw that after all the Radicals were not destroying the State; the Radicals, on the other hand, had learnt that the loyalists could do nothing distinctly injurious to the nation without being discovered. At least, they thought they had learnt this truth. They did not know how for months Mirabeau had been in the pay of the Court, and how the executive power had concerned itself with the King rather than with the nation.

A sign of this appeasement in the violence of the time (a movement, by the way, which was exactly what Danton desired) is his letter to La Rochefoucald, the president of the Department, when the successful election, which I have described above, was known. This letter, one of the very few which Danton has left, is a singularly able composition. He alludes to the mistrust which had been felt when his name was mentioned; he does not deny the insurrectionary character of the quarter of Paris which he inspired. But he replies: “I will let my actions, now that I hold public office, prove my attitude, and if I am in a position of responsibility, it will have a special value in showing that I was right to continually claim the public control of administrative functions.” The whole of the long letter[84] is very well put; it is Danton himself that speaks, and it is hard to doubt that at this moment he also was one of those who thought they were touching the end of the reform, that goal which always fled from the men who most sincerely sought it.