Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

This famous monument, the only part of the college that has been preserved, stood well back from the street, and in the middle of the convent grounds. It was on the eastern side of the monastery, and hence in the ground plan balanced (so to speak) the church, which lay to the west of that main building; this was so designed that its western end faced about the middle of the college.

I have called it a hall because its use exactly corresponded to that of our college halls in the English universities. I mean, it was at once a refectory and lecture-room. It was approached by a little lane running up through the grounds under the side of the convent, later hemmed in with houses.

Here not only were the voices of the great scholars heard and the subtleties of the fourteenth century, but also Etienne Marcel called the States General of 1357. From hence that Danton of the mediæval invasion sent out his messengers to the Feudality. Here the District gathered for the elections of 1789; here the Club met in 1791 and urged the debate that finally produced the Republic of the next year. It was here also that the three watchwords of the Republic were devised; here Hérbert veiled the Declaration; and here the last few words of 1794 were spoken. Here the century, which owes more perhaps to that site than to any place in France, has collected a museum of surgery, where you may see anomalies preserved in spirits, skeletons hung on wires, and other objects, interesting rather than sublime.

As for the college and its estate, they continued for some three hundred years—that is, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—to increase in importance. It is a matter of common knowledge how soon the pure ideals of St. Francis had to compromise with the world. This Order, like all others, became wealthy, rooted, and traditional. The Cordeliers, as Paris grew, found themselves possessed of a most valuable plot, whose ground-value continually increased. They reserved the garden to the west, but for the rest—and especially around the buildings and along the lanes—houses were built. When the wall of Philip Augustus was first embedded by the growth of the city, and afterwards in part destroyed, the Cordeliers bought an extension to their estate, so that it stretched a little beyond the new street of “the Fossés,” which had been built on the site of the ditch. In 1580 their old thirteenth-century chapel (which must have been one of the best bits of early Gothic in Paris) was burnt down, and a larger one in the style of the time was put up by the piety of Henry IV. Throughout the seventeenth century the house seems to have suffered from a decay which continued throughout the succeeding hundred years, and culminated in the disasters of the Revolutionary period. They permitted the alienation of a strip to the west of their grounds, through which the municipality drove in 1673 the new street which, in compliment to the Order, they called “Rue de l’Observance,” after the name of their rule.

With this exception no important change occurred to change the aspect of the quarter until the Revolutionary period with which we have to deal.

We are, after this general description, in a position to recognise the site of the Cordeliers in modern Paris. As you go down the Boulevard St. Germains, just before you reach the Boulevard St. Michel (going east), you see a street leading off at a slight angle to the right. It is the Rue de l’École de Médecine, the college after which it is named facing both on this street and on the Boulevard. This street is merely the Rue des Cordeliers broadened and modernised. As you go a few yards up this street, you see on your left the great court of the college, and if you stand at its gate and look at the opposite side of the street, at the new buildings which are now the lecture-rooms and theatres of the Faculty, you are looking at the site of the old church, which has disappeared during this century. The street has been broadened by taking down the southern side, so that the church would actually have overlapped the modern street. Continuing, you pass on your right the open yard leading up to what was the hall of the Cordeliers, and is now the museum of surgery (the Musée Dupuytren), and a few yards farther brings you into the Boulevard St. Michel. Following this very broad avenue for twenty yards at the most, you may note a new street, the “Rue Racine,” turning off to the right. This did not exist in Danton’s time, but it lies nearly on the line that separated the Cordeliers from the Collège d’Harcourt (at present the Lycée St. Louis). As a fact, the line was a trifle to the south of the Rue Racine, and of course more irregular. The Rue Racine in its turn leads you into that old street the “Rue de Monsieur le Prince.” If you turn again to the right and go down this some hundred yards, you are still following the boundary of the Cordeliers, till you reach the “Rue Antoine Dubois.” This is identical with the old “Rue de l’Observance,” spoken of above, and a few steps down this short street leads you to the starting-point in the “Rue de l’École de Médecine.” Such a modern itinerary would describe as nearly as is now possible the circumference of the college and estate of the Cordeliers. The quadrilateral comprised by these four streets, the Rue de l’École de Médecine, the Rue Racine, the Rue M. de le Prince, and the Rue Antoine Dubois, is the site of the famous convent and its grounds.

To reproduce the quarter in 1788 we have to imagine the following changes:—The Rue de l’École de Médecine, very narrow, flanked for the greater part of its southern side with the church and old wall of the convent. It leads into a little narrow street called the “Rue de la Harpe,” which went right up the hill, and would correspond to a strip taken in the exact centre of the present Boulevard St. Michel. The first few buildings here, notably the Church of St. Come, were still on the Cordeliers’ estate. Just above them, however, began the grounds and buildings of the “College d’Harcourt.” As we have observed, the Rue Racine did not exist, nor anything corresponding to it. To follow the boundaries of the estate you would have had to let yourself in by a side-door, and then you might have followed a long, irregular wall which separated their land from the College d’Harcourt. This wall, after passing through a great garden, came out on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, and the rest of one’s circuit would be much what it is to-day.

Finally, to see the building as Danton saw it, you must imagine a half-deserted place, rich, but somewhat unfrequented, like certain old legal Inns that once stood in London, old walls appearing here and there from between houses of a century’s date; a mass of irregular buildings, of garden and of private house hopelessly intermingled; while up a narrow and dark passage stood the Hall, which was still the best preserved part of the college, and with which alone his name is associated.