Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

It was in the matter of the petition for the release of Hébert. Isnard rose in the chair, lifted his hand, and pronounced in his hollow voice the words that have enriched history at the expense of his country: “If such a thing should happen as an attempt upon the representatives of the nation, I say to you, in the name of all France, that very soon men would search upon the banks of the Seine for proofs that Paris had once been there.” Danton intervened, but he could do nothing. The glove had been thrown down. He asked for the withdrawal of those words; the Girondin majority reaffirmed them. Two days later he obtained the freedom of Hébert; but though for a moment he was promised the dissolution of the “Commission of the Twelve,” his effort failed, for they were immediately reinstated. In the night between the 30th and the 31st of May the Sections named a new and insurrectionary Commune; for one day the danger was warded off, and you may see Danton, still so difficult to understand, urging the Committee, while Barrère is proposing the conciliatory message to France, a document which blamed neither the Girondins nor Paris, and the twelve were dissolved. But the final blow was not to be avoided. On the 2nd of June the news of the counter-revolution in Lyons reached Paris. The Convention was surrounded; Henriot, at the head of the city militia, guarded its approaches, lined the corridors. Even in that moment, when Isnard proposed to retire, and made his superb apology, the Gironde, as a whole, stood firm. The inflexible Jansenist, Lanjuinais, proposed, with heroic folly, “a decree dissolving the authorities of Paris,” at a moment when these very authorities were holding the doors with fixed bayonets; but in spite of Barrère’s demand for Henriot’s condemnation, in spite of Danton’s demand for “a signal punishment,” the Convention yielded, voted the arrest not only of the twenty-two, whom the Commune had demanded, but of twenty-nine, and Vergniaud, Barbaroux, Guadet; Le Brun, and Clavière (who were nominally ministers); Roland (who had fled, and whose wife was imprisoned by the Commune)—in fine, the whole body of those great orators who had made the Republic—were thrust out of the Assembly, some to be held in the honourable confinement of their own houses, some to fly and raise civil war in the Departments. The Commune offered hostages in equal number, but they were refused; and before the day was over the Parliament was mutilated, and the obstacle to the dictatorship and to the Terror had been swept away.

Such is a rapid summary of the fall of the Girondins—a story of contradictions and of inextricable cross-purposes, in which for two months men seem (especially the men of the new Committee) to change sides, to hesitate, and to falter, in which the majority passes over to the Jacobins with a startling rapidity, and in which (apparently) the only two fixed points are the immovable figures of the Gironde and their opponents of the Commune.

I know that this confusion has commonly led writers to adopt an equal confusion in their explanation of the insurrection and of its motives. To disentangle such a skein it was apparently necessary to make Robespierre a prophet, Isnard for once a coward, Barrère a skilful diplomatist, Danton a vacillator. Such a method appears to me false. If, to explain a difficult passage in history, we make men behave in a way which contradicts all their lives, we must (it seems to me) be in error. These special theories are mechanical, and do not satisfy the mind.

The question is this: Somewhere a power existed; why was not that power in evidence either on one side or on the other? And why do we not see it acting? I believe the answer is as follows:—

The power was in the Committee. The Committee believed it necessary to be rid of the Girondins. But the Committee was part of the Convention—the existence and the authority of the Convention was necessary to it. It saw on the one hand a set of Parliamentary leaders who would not permit it to act with vigour, on the other it noted the angry spirit of Paris. The Committee permitted that spirit to act, but gave it its measure and its direction unknown to itself, desiring to eliminate the Moderates, but anxious to avoid their proscription, exile, or death. With this clue the maze seems to me resolved. It was the Committee that expelled the Gironde, using Paris for its arm.

Now to prove this certain steps are necessary. In the first place, why can we say that the Committee was the centre of power? Because it alone had access to a complete knowledge of France, it alone debated in secret, and it alone existed for the express purpose of dictatorship. When once the generals, the deputies in mission, and the police became familiar with the new organ, they referred to the Committee as naturally as the corresponding men to-day would refer to a cabinet or to a monarch. If the reader will glance at any portion of the document which is printed as [Appendix XI.] of this book, and to which I shall continually refer in this passage, he will at once perceive that the men who drew it up had in their hands every lever of public machinery. I would not maintain that this power sprang at once into existence on the 6th of April, but the two months that produced such a report was ample time to have developed a corresponding grasp upon the armies, upon the diplomacy, and upon the internal resources of Revolutionary France. Where else will you find such a document in all the offices of the time? Compared with it the decisions of the ministry are vague abstractions, the reports of the Commune puerilities or ravings. Revolutionary France, until the formation of the Committee, may be compared to a marsh in which the water tends to flow to no one centre; the information, the revenue, the public forces stood incoherent and stagnant. The creation of this secret body may be compared to a pit dug in its centre, to which the waters would immediately flow. It may be objected that they had not the control of finance. No; but they had Cambon. In an assembly of men new to government this very difficult province fell of itself into the hands of a man whose genius all admitted, and whose probity no one of his enemies would deny. Long before the insurrection took place, any man with information, with authority, or with a special duty to perform, had learnt to regard the Committee as his chief, for the simple reason that no other centre of authority existed. Add to this the incalculable force of secrecy, the power by which the most glaring failures of our cabinets can be hidden by merely saying, “We know what all the rest ignore,” and it will appear reasonable to say that by June the Committee could almost, had it wished, have summoned an army to Paris. The Committee then held the power.

In the second place, we must establish, as far as is possible, the aims of the Committee and their method of guiding the insurrection. As was said earlier in this chapter, those aims and methods can only be arrived at by inference; the very nature of a body that deliberates in secret makes this method of inquiry necessary. There is no direct evidence, unless the contradictory anecdotes of a much later period can be given that name. Now we can infer with some accuracy what went on in their deliberations. There should be noted at the outset the document to which I have already referred, and which, if I am not mistaken, is printed for the first time in this book. It was the first of those general Rapports which were delivered by Barrère to the Convention for the next sixteen months, and which so profoundly affected the course of the Revolution. It sums up the result of two months of astonishing labour; everything—all the weakness of France—has been noted with the accuracy of a topographical survey. It gives the equipment, the provisioning, the local difficulties of each army, the detailed condition of the fleet (a most deplorable picture), the result of what is evidently an elaborate spy-system in the department of foreign intrigue, and everywhere the indictment is obvious—“whatever has governed France hitherto has hopelessly failed.” There are, indeed, polite references to the ineptitude of the old regime, but side by side with these there is a direct attack on the Girondin Ministers of War, and on the diplomatic, or rather non-diplomatic, methods which had been pursued abroad; indeed, many parts of this report would not be out of place had they appeared in a Compte Rendu drawn up by the victorious insurrection, instead of preceding, as they did, the fall of the Gironde.

Again, there is the date of its appearance. It was not by a coincidence that Barrère was given it to read on the 29th of May. Note this sequence. Isnard made his fatal speech on Saturday the 25th. Monday the 27th was the date of Danton’s attempt to dissolve “the twelve;” and his failure followed on Tuesday the 28th, when, by the blindness or firmness of the Gironde, they were reinstated. It is on Wednesday the 29th that Barrère rises at the end of a long and stormy discussion, and, late in the afternoon, presents his report. The vague phrases on the importance of unity which it contains have made some imagine that it was an attempt at conciliation, rapidly devised and thrown out at that critical moment. That opinion is surely erroneous. It is long (some 17,000 words) and carefully prepared; it must have taken some time to draw up, and it has all the appearance of a weapon framed at leisure and held in reserve; it comes at that moment with some such force as this, saying from the Committee, from Danton, to the Gironde—“You have refused to do what France absolutely needed. You have rejected my attempts to save you, the avenues which I opened for your escape; you were given the commission of twelve; you have fatally abused the gift. Will you be convinced at the last moment by this picture of the terrible straits to which you have brought the nation?”

Finally, we can draw a fairly conclusive set of proofs from our knowledge of the men in the Committee and of the public action they took. Of all the nine, Danton was the one commanding personality. Cambon was a specialist, and but for him and Lindet, honest but not an orator, there were Danton and his men only. Barrère, it may be urged, was not a Dantonist; but he was pliant to a degree; his pliancy is notorious, and has ignorantly been given a still worse name. Moreover, Barrère was closeted with Danton day after day; they undertook the same department in the Committee (that of foreign affairs), and they follow exactly the same course in the tribune. In the Department of War was Delacroix, Danton’s friend and right hand. Of the report itself, all the last part, and possibly some paragraphs in the middle, were drawn up by Danton. Later we shall see that his preponderance was notorious and a danger to him.