Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

There are those for whom detail in history is pedantic, yet here upon three letters and their order hangs the interpretation not only of an individual character but of a policy whose effects we are still feeling. Michelet’s great picture is false from beginning to end. Danton had returned on the 14th, and came jaded with his journey to the bedside of her who had been his young wife of five years, who was now near to childbirth and to death. He had his own drama as well as that of the historian’s, and our own dramas are acted upon a stage where the results are real. All that night of the 14th and all the 15th he was watching in his flat of the Passage du Commerce a fate which was coming upon him, and certainly for whose thirty-six hours the Revolution was a little thing to him. He came back wearily to his position and to his duties on the 16th; he remembered there was such a thing as the Revolution—that Louis was after all on trial, and descended from his home into the hall of the Parliament to give the short angry sentence in which we seem to read less moderation and less of diplomacy than was his by nature. The scene in the home had made him not only bitter but weak, for there is surely weakness in saying, “I am not a statesman,” in borrowing, that is, the vulgar acrimony of Marat, or in talking of “the tyrant,” and in repeating the phrases of the Mountain.

But in the days that followed Michelet finds a good excuse. Certainly one would say, if one knew nothing about him except his action of January 1793, that Danton was the Mountain and nothing else. This error would be supported by the unreasoning vehemence, the almost brutal anger, into which he allows himself to fall.

They asked whether the King could be condemned to death by a mere majority, and whether that majority was decisive. Danton threw back at them: “You decided the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you think the life of one man too great for a mere majority; you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood flowed decisively enough.”

So naturally was he at that moment the Danton of unreason, so much had his character yielded to its persistent temptation of violent words, that there could be heard a voice once calling out to him as he rushed to the tribune without leave from the Speaker, “You are not a king yet, Danton.” And yet this was the man who had saved France from any folly of defiance after Valmy, who was determined upon saving her in the future by keeping upon the helm a quiet and unswerving hand. Vergniaud’s great simile, “That France might become, if she did not take care, like the statues of Egypt; they astonish by their greatness, and yet are enigmas to all who see them, because the living spirit that made them has died,” passed him by without effect. He was one of those who voted in the fatal majority, and he threw down as gage of battle the head of a king.[134]

The word had become reality, and Louis had stood at mid-day trying to be heard beyond the ring of soldiers, had cried out that he was innocent, and had died in the noon of that cold January day. This act was destined to produce the one thing that Danton had most ardently desired to avoid—it put an end once and for all to the neutrality of England.

Another people, then in their infancy, now old, whom Louis had been persuaded to help against his will, received the death of Louis like a kind of blow in the face. The people of the United States in their simplicity had imagined the French king to be their saviour; they did not know Louis’s phrase, “I was dragged into that unhappy affair of America; advantage was taken of my youth.” They regarded his crown with a certain superstition, as they still regard what is left of baubles in Europe; and when the axe fell upon him, France lost not only the calculating hypocrisy of Pitt, but the genuine sympathy of the American people.

In the days that followed (they were only ten) between the 21st of January and the end of the month, it is still plain that the shock which most affected Danton’s vigorous and independent judgment was that return after seven weeks to the wife whom he had passionately loved, and whom this ugly Orpheus felt slipping from his arms back into the shades. After her death, as we shall see, he did not reel so heavily, but in that fortnight of January, which was of such supreme importance, he permitted misfortune to rouse mere passion in his mind; and he who might have led the Moderates, who might have played with the life of Louis like a card, chose to remember his rebuff in the winter and threw his trump away.

Many have tried to explain Vergniaud’s vote. Is it not probable that he was drawn by the example of a man whom he did not understand, and whose opinion attracted an orator not unappreciative of energy? Vergniaud has always before history a doubting and a hesitating face, and it seems more than possible that the wrath of Danton carried him and many others into the vote for death.

Ever since the 10th of August had thrust him into unexpected power, Danton had held in one way or another the threads of a certain diplomacy. It was as follows:—To rely upon all the elements in Europe which admired or were indifferent to the Revolution, and to combine them in a kind of resistant body; to use, as it were, their inertia against those who were setting out as crusaders against France. On this account the foolish war of propaganda was most distasteful to him. On this account England’s neutrality haunted his mind. He knew that in this country there existed a body strong in its influence though not in its numbers, a body which would have supported the French. Priestley had written to him before his exile. Talleyrand was working for him at the moment, and opposing as an informal Dantonist the Girondin acerbity of Chauvelin.[135] Danton was even willing to use Dumouriez, mainly because Dumouriez was about to compromise with England. To this policy of observation, a policy which took advantage of England as the lover of individual liberty and of England as the merchant, the death of the King put a sudden stop. It was Danton that killed his own intrigue.

Before he left on his second mission to the armies on the 31st January 1793, he shows that new face in which he attempts to retrieve, as far as possible, the errors of which he had been largely the author. In a speech which shows once again all his old power of party political action, he demands the annexation of Belgium. He has seen that general war is inevitable, and harking back again to that unique French conception of which he was the heir, the raison d’état, he determines to save the State, and to do it by an action which opposed every theory of the Revolution. He asked “everything of their reason, nothing of their enthusiasm,” and he demanded the annexation of Belgium with France. It was pure opportunism—the determination to get hold of a revenue by force of arms; and the next day, after having painfully come back to his old policy of the real and objective, burdened by a past error, and having broken with all that he valued in French opinion, he went off again to the army. While his chaise was yet rolling on the flat roads of Flanders, Chauvelin returned with Pitt’s scrawl in his hand, and France was at war with the whole world.