Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

There belongs to this period only one considerable speech. It is the only thing in all his public acts in which you can discover beauty. You may find in this speech the pity and the tenderness which his intimates loved, the memory which they for sixty years defended, but which no document or letter remains to perpetuate.

Cambon, careless of anything but his exchequer, had thought the new era come. That cold and inflexible head determined, seeing the steep fall towards bankruptcy that France was making, to save a hundred millions, but to save it at an expense. He proposed to separate the State from what was left of the Church, to break the vow of 1790. In almost the last speech before he went off to the armies, Danton opposed him and gave this passage—a passage better fitted to the defence of an older and stronger thing than the wretched constitutional priesthood:—

“... It is treason against the nation to take away its dreams. For my part, I admit I have known but one God. The God of all the world and of justice. The man in the fields adds to this conception that of a man who works, whom he makes sacred because his youth, his manhood, and his old age owe to the priest then: little moments of happiness. When a man is poor and wretched, his soul grows tender, and he clings especially to whatever seems majestic: leave him his illusions—teach him if you will ... but do not let the poor fear that they may lose the one thing that binds them to earth, since wealth cannot bind them.”

Before he left on the mission to the armies there occurred a scene which has always been, since Michelet described it, the most striking passage of his relations with the Girondins. He, the man who saw safety for France only in diplomacy, had, for the sake of unity, held his tongue when the Girondins passed the decree of the 19th November, which was to sustain a revolutionary crusade against Europe. I say that November is full of Danton’s attempt to maintain the unity of the Parliament. After all these efforts he was worsted, because the Girondins were possessed by a dream which admitted of no compromise and of no realities.

The scene of his last attempt was this:—He made a rendezvous with their party. They were to meet secretly at night and away from Paris in a house in the woods of Sceaux at the very end of November. The whole life of this man was a tragedy, and we see in this sad journey that kind of dramatic presentiment of his death and of theirs, the “foreknowledge” with which the tragedies of the world are filled.

He went through the desolate bare woods of November, under the hurrying sky, that recalls to our minds in France to-day the charges of Jemappes. The night was as wild as the time, and as dark as his forebodings, when he came on to the little group of men in the candlelight, and argued with them, and against them, and alone. Michelet gives to Danton’s mind a sentiment of coercion. He shows us Danton dragged by necessity. But I can see no necessity except the supreme desire to unite the parties and make the government real. They would not receive his alliance, and he went away from that meeting at midnight, pushed back upon Paris, thrown into the comradeship of violence. Guadet rejected him with an especial fervour. Danton as he left turned upon him with this phrase: “Guadet, Guadet, you cannot understand and you do not know how to forgive; you are headstrong, and it will be your doom.” The next day he started on his mission to the army.

During the arraignment and during the trial of the King the opinions that divided the Left and the Right fought it out in his absence.[132] He was not there to attempt such a movement as his character demanded. No one in all the Assembly dared hold out a hand as he would have done and see whether after all Vergniaud might not perhaps be right on the one hand, and the Mountain perhaps be patriots on the other.

There was in this debate upon one man’s life an element to which Danton’s nature was well suited. There had to be kept in view for the French nation the effect upon Europe which would follow from the determination as to the death or life of the King, and Danton’s great voice has so strongly and so rightly affected the historians of the period that he thrusts his personality forward into their narrative, and in at least one notable place Danton appears, in history, and in one of the greatest pages of history, by no right, and figures upon scenes which do not possess the advantage of his voice. He has been made to defend Louis’s life, to plead for a respite, and then by a violent change to vote for his death.

Let me now explain how this error passed into the mind of Michelet and of other men. Danton returned from Belgium on the night of the 14th January. On that same day a certain Dannon, apparently an honest man,[133] rose late in the evening and demanded respite for Louis. When Gallois reprinted the Moniteur, he saw this obscure name coupled with a politic demand; he read it again, and said, “This Dannon must be a misprint for Danton.” He corrected it so. On this chance venture there fell the eye of Michelet, the eye that from a glance or a word could bring back the colours and the movements of living men. In him also the tragedy of Danton powerfully worked; he moulded a figure from these few words in the Moniteur, and made of them an admirable anti-climax. Here was Danton (Dannon) hot from the armies, knowing in what peril France stood, having seen with his own eyes how momentary had been the effects of Jemappes. He comes from his travelling coach to the Assembly, and with the mud of the road yet upon him, gives his expression as an ally to the Girondins and to the Moderates. Then some rebuff, some unrecorded insult throws him back again as he had been so often thrown back into the arms of the Extremists. On the next day, the 15th of January, we are asked to watch him sitting by the side of his dying wife, sullen and despairing. On the 16th he comes back furious, and votes for the death of the King.