Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

The second: “I am leaving everything at sixes and sevens; one had better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the art of governing men.” There you have the real Danton—a reminiscence of some strong and passionate utterance put into this undantonesque and proverbial form. A real sentiment of his—all of him; careless of life, intense upon the interests of life, above all upon the future of the Revolution and of France, knowing the helpless inferiority of the men he left behind. And in the close of the phrase it is also he; it is the spirit of great weariness which had twice touched him, as sleep an athlete after a day of games. It was soon to take the form of a noble sentence: “Nous avons assez servi—allons dormir.”

On the 13th (April 2, 1794), about ten in the morning, they were led before the tribunal.

The trial began.

It must not be imagined that the Dantonists alone came before the tribunal to answer for their particular policy. There had originated under Robespierre (and later when he alone was the master it was to be terribly abused) the practice of confusing the issues. Three groups at least were tried together, and the Moderates sat between two thieves—for D’Eglantine on a charge of embezzlement alone, Guzman, the Freys as common thieves and spies to the Republic, were associated on the same bench. Fourteen in all, they sat in the following order:—Chabot, Bazire, Fabre, Lacroix, Danton, Delaunay, Hérault, Desmoulins, Guzman, Diederichsen, Phillippeaux, D’Espagnac, and the two Freys. D’Eglantine occupied “the armchair,” and it will be seen that the five—the Moderates—were carefully scattered.

The policy was a deliberate one; it was undertaken with the object of prejudicing public opinion against the accused. Nor was it permitted to each group to be separate in accusation and in its method of defence. They were carefully linked to each other by men accused of two out of the three crimes.

Herman was president of the tribunal, and sat facing the prisoners; on either side of him were Masson-Denizot, Foucault and Bravé, the assistant-judges. They say that Voullaud and Vadier, of the lower committee, appeared behind the bench to watch the enemies whom they had caught in the net. Seven jurors were in the box to the judges’ left, by name Renaudin (whom Desmoulins challenged in vain), Desboisseaux, Trinchard, Dix-Aout, Lumière, Ganney, Souberbielle,[151] and to these we must add Topino-Lebrun, whose notes form by far the most vivid fragment by which we may reconstruct the scene. The jury of course was packed.[152] It was part of the theory of the Revolutionary Government that no chance element should mar its absolute dictatorship. It was practically a court of judges, absolute, and without division of powers.

At a table between the President and the prisoners sat Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor; and finally, on the judges’ right was the open part of the court and the door to the witnesses’ room.

Here was a new trial with a great and definite chance of acquittal, a scene the like of which had not been seen for a year, nor would be seen again in that room. The men on the prisoners’ bench had been the masters, one of them the creator, of the court which tried them; they were evidently greater and more powerful than their judges, and had behind them an immense though informal weight of popularity. They were public men of the first rank; their judges and the public prosecutor were known to be merely the creatures of a small committee. More than this, it was common talk that the Convention might yet change its mind, and even among the jury it was certain that discussion would arise.

By the evidence of a curious relic we know that the Committee actually feared a decree or a coup-de-main which would have destroyed their power. This note remains in the archives, a memorandum of a decision arrived at in the Committee on the early morning of the 13th or late in the night of the 12th.

“Henriot to be written to, to tell him to issue an order that the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal are not to be arrested.”