Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

In the third place, circumstances quite as much as his own action had left him (as far as one can follow the mysteries of the Committee) sole director of an exceptional executive. On account of the illusions and necessities of the people such a position was not immediately recognised as tyrannical. The machine was theirs, working for them and made by them; all the better if an idol of theirs held the levers; he would make the most trusty of servants. Robespierre was not master in theory. Even committees were not the masters in theory. Theory was everything to France in the year II., and in theory the Convention was master. Nay, even the Convention was only master because—in theory again—the sovereign, the nation, was behind it. The majority of the Convention, and it alone, is the technical authority. Robespierre’s name was not to be discovered at the foot of those lists of the condemned which his monstrous policy constructed, and at the end of his four months he fell because the theoretical master, the Convention, acted as it chose, and no sufficient force dared to deny its right.

He starts then upon the closing act of the play, the one figure whom all regard, and into whose hands the police, the committees, the juries, and (by their own disorder) the majority of the Convention itself have fallen.

The new reign began on the 6th of April, exactly a year to a day since the Committee of Public Safety had been established. It was Germinal, the month of seeds that grow under ground, the most significant and the most terrible of the new names. M. Zola has chosen it for the title of his greatest work; it was the other day on the dying lips of a poor wretch in Spain whose madness also turned upon social injustice.

The following of Robespierre did not hesitate to show at once its tendencies and even its dogmas—for it held a religion. That same day, the 6th of April—17th Germinal of the year II.—Couthon came from the Committee with a proposition for the Parliament to discuss the establishment of a national worship of God. A new note had been heard in the clamour; soon in the clear silence of suspense it is to be the only sound, saving the dull accompaniment of the two guillotines. This or that occasional freak of theory or dramatised ribaldry the Terror had already known; unlimited power defended by inexorable severity had developed many strange decrees, dissociated from the general life and dying as they rose—absurdities whose chief purpose would seem to be the interest they have afforded to foreigners. But in these there had been no system. The Mass was being said on all sides when the churches were supposed to be closed. Even as the Feast of Reason was being held at Notre Dame, vespers were chanted at St. Germains. One thing alone had been the purpose and had given the motive force to nine months of agony endured—the salvation of Revolutionary France. But when Couthon spoke it was not France, nor common rights and liberties which were proposed as the object of the defence—it was Robespierrian Rousseau. In two months we shall have the worship of the Supreme Being, in three the reaction; in less than four the high-priest of this impossible system is to fall; yet his dream and his power will be almost enough in their fall to drag down the Republic.

Five days more saw “the rest of the factions” sacrificed to this new personal terror. Gobel, who had always been afraid, and whose conscience had been turned like a weathercock away from the nearest pike; the wives of Desmoulins and of Hébert (for women, as the Terror increased, were suspected, sometimes rightly, of being the best at plotting); Chaumette, who had helped Hébert to put up his theatricals in Notre Dame—they were all tried, and in this trial it is again not the Revolution, but Robespierre pure and simple whom we hear arguing and condemning through the mouths of the court.

One of the accused “has wished to efface the idea of the divinity.” Another has “interfered with the worship of his fellow-citizens” (this was said to Chaumette, who must have thought it even at that moment something of a platitude). To a third the reproach is made of “changing the mode of worship without authority.” We are on the highroad to those last six weeks in which trial of any kind and definite accusation itself was absent. The details of one man’s opinion are become the numberless dogmas of a creed, and of a creed that kills unmercifully. And yet even as he asserted his creed its mechanical impotence appeared in violent contrast with the humanity that the Puritan was persecuting. For Lucille lighted her face radiantly when she was condemned, and said, “I shall see him in a few hours.”

Three days more—the 17th of April—and the machinery was further centralised. St. Just demanded that the political prisoners should be taken from every part of France to be judged in Paris. The popular commissions—mere gatherings to denounce without proofs and without forms—were actively used all over the Republic. In Paris the commission was to be the feeler for the central machine. And such was the incapacity of the Dreamer, “who had not wits enough to cook an egg,” that this new feature in the machinery was not even organised: it was a government of mere rigid absolutism resting on bases that were rapidly becoming mere anarchy. But even as the system, such as it was, developed, as the central power grew more rigid, and the thing to be governed more decayed, Danton, who had been killed that it might exist, pursued it. It was due to his work that the wrestling on the frontier was showing a definite issue. The advance had begun.

With his death the diplomacy of France had ceased. The phrase of Robespierre’s, which he had so successfully combated, had reappeared in vigour: the “nation would not treat with her enemies.” But the organisation of her armies, the levies, the rigid discipline, the arms were telling. That aspect of the national energy had grown more healthy as the central brain grew more diseased and vain. Robespierre was threatening Carnot vaguely in the Committee, but Carnot was at work and was saving France. St. Just himself, when he is upon the frontier, appears in a capacity worthy of admiration, for he has there to deal with a thing in action. His energy is as fierce as ever, but its object is victory over a national enemy, and not the triumph of a jejune idea. He had better have remained with the soldiers.

In Paris the Commune had been seized. The enemy whom all had feared, whom even Danton had to the last conciliated, was fearlessly grasped. The mayor was broken simply, and replaced by a servant of the rulers; the Sections protested with the last of their vitality, but the Club denounced them, and they disappeared—even an attempt at martyrdom is to give the idol yet more gilt. Then the news of Turcoing came to Paris. It was little more than a happy rumour, a battle whose importance seems greater to us now than it did to contemporaries. But Pichegru, the peasant, had prepared a good road for Jourdan, and Fleurus was the direct result of Turcoing. Barrère long after called these victories “the Furies,” which swept upon and destroyed the fanatic in power.

With every point of good news the Terror was less necessary, yet Robespierre’s action grew as the national danger disappeared. Even Lord Howe’s great victory of the 1st of June did little to check the sentiment of relief. The Vengeur went down and left a force of many ships to the French navy for ever. The food reached port, and the eyes of Frenchmen were not directed to the sea, whose command they knew themselves to have gained and lost before then with but little resulting change; they turned, as they have always and will ever turn, to the frontier of the north-east, the wrestling-ring upon whose fair level was to be decided the fate of all their sacrifice and of all their ideals, and Paris every day grew more hopeful of the result, Robespierre more blind to everything except his vision. On the 8th of June—the 20th Prairial—he capped the edifice of his national religion with the Feast of the Supreme Being; on the 10th he forged the last piece of the machinery which was to make that religion the moral order of the new era by force.