His influence and abilities soon caused themselves to be felt; the sentence of death, which had been recorded against him in his absence, was soon recalled; he became a leading member of the Club of Salm, which in 1797 was established to counterbalance the efforts of the Royalists in the Club of Clichy; and on the triumph of the revolutionists by the violence of Augereau in July, 1797, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, aware of the imbecility of the directorial government, he entered warmly into the views of Napoleon, upon his return from Egypt, for its overthrow. He was again made Minister of Foreign Affairs by that youthful conqueror after the 18th Brumaire, and continued, with some few interruptions, to be the soul of all foreign negotiations and the chief director of foreign policy, down to the measures directed against Spain in 1807. On that occasion, however, his wonted sagacity did not desert him; he openly disapproved of the attack on the peninsula, and was, in consequence, dismissed from office, which he did not again hold till he was appointed chief of the provisional government on the 1st of April, 1814. He had thus the singular address, though a leading character under both régimes, to extricate himself both from the crimes of the revolution and the misfortunes of the Empire.
He was no ordinary man who could accomplish so great a prodigy and yet retain such influence as to step, as it were, by common consent into the principal direction of affairs on the overthrow of Napoleon. His power of doing so depended not merely on his great talents; they alone, if unaccompanied by other qualifications, would inevitably have brought him to the guillotine under the first government or the prisons of state under the last. It was his extraordinary versatility and flexibility of disposition, and the readiness with which he accommodated himself to every change of government and dynasty which he thought likely to be permanent, that mainly contributed to this extraordinary result. Such was his address that, though the most changeable character in the whole revolution, he contrived never to lose either influence or reputation by all his tergiversations; but, on the contrary, went on constantly rising to the close of his career, when above eighty years of age, in weight, fortune, and consideration.
The very fact of his having survived, both in person and influence, so many changes of government, which had proved fatal to almost all his contemporaries, of itself constituted a colossal reputation; and when he said, with a sarcastic smile, on taking the oath of fidelity to Louis Philippe in 1830, “C’est le treisiéme,” the expression, repeated from one end of Europe to the other, produced a greater admiration for his address than indignation at his perfidy.
He has been well described as the person in existence who had the least hand in producing, and the greatest power of profiting, by revolutions. He was not destitute of original thought, but wholly without the generous feeling, the self-forgetfulness, which prompt the great in character as well as talent to bring forth their conceptions in word or action, at whatever hazard to themselves or their fortunes. His object always was not to direct, but to observe and guide the current; he never opposed it when he saw it was irresistible, nor braved its dangers where it threatened to be perilous, but quietly withdrew until an opportunity occurred, by the destruction alike of its supporters and its opponents, to obtain its direction. In this respect his talents very closely resembled those of Metternich, of whom a character has already been drawn; but he was less consistent than the wary Austrian diplomatist, and, though equaled by him in dissimulation, he was far his superior in perfidy.
It cost him nothing to contradict and violate his oaths whenever it suited his interest to do so, and the extraordinary and almost unbroken success of his career affords, as well as that of Napoleon, the most striking confirmation of the profound saying of Johnson—that no man ever raised himself from private life to the supreme direction of affairs, in whom great abilities were not combined with certain meannesses, which would have proved altogether fatal to him in ordinary life.
Yet was he without any of the great vices of the revolution; his selfishness was constant, his cupidity unbounded, his hands often sullied by gold, but he was not cruel or unforgiving in his disposition, and few, if any, deeds of blood stain his memory. His witticisms and bon mots were admirable, and repeated from one end of Europe to the other; yet was his reputation in this respect, perhaps, greater than the reality, for, by common consent, every good saying at Paris during his life-time was ascribed to the ex-Bishop of Autun. But none perhaps more clearly reveals his character and explains his success in life than the celebrated one, “That the principal object of language is to conceal the thought.”
GEORGE JACQUES DANTON.
By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759, executed 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent measures, organized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was principally instrumental in bringing on the dreadful September massacres of the same year, when all those confined in the Paris prisons were slaughtered. On being elected to the convention, he was foremost in forcing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in breaking the power of the Girondists, though he would have spared their lives. He incurred the hate of Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and moderation which would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and was sent to the scaffold by the plots of his cunning and implacable adversary.]
Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close; both are leaders of bands, and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, required the revolution. “Of low birth, without a patron,” penniless, every office being filled, and “the Paris bar unattainable,” admitted a lawyer after “a struggle,” he for a long time strolled about the streets without a brief, or frequented the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops. At the Café de l’École, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow “in a small round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm,” circulated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as cashier. Danton chatted with her, and demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his small native town.
Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, “more burdened with debts than with causes,” tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style, and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet; his free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all rebel; he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers; it is not the steady discipline of an old society that suits him, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces, or one in a state of formation. In temperament and character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.