I have
taken as a turning-point in the career of Danton the municipal change which
marks the summer of 1790, concluding with that event the first chapter of his political
action, and making it the beginning of a new phase. Let me explain the reasons
that have led me to make such a division at a moment that is marked by no
striking passage of arms, of policy, or of debate.
In the
first place, a recital of Danton’s life must of necessity follow the fortunes
of the capital. The spirit of the people whose tribune he was (their growing
enthusiasms and later their angers)—that spirit is the chief thing to guide us
in the interpretation of his politics, but the mechanical transformations of
the city government form the framework, as it were, upon which the stuff of
Parisian feeling is woven. The detail is dry and often neglected; the mere
passing of a particular law giving Paris a particular constitution, a system
not unexpected, and apparently well suited to the first year of the Revolution,
may seem an event of but little moment in the development of the reform; but
certain aspects of the period lend that detail a very considerable importance.
In the rapid transformation which was remoulding French society, the law,
however new, possessed a strength which, at this hour, we can appreciate only
with difficulty. In a settled and traditional society custom is of such
overwhelming weight that a law can act only in accordance with it; a sudden
change in the machinery of government would break down of itself—nay, in such a
society laws can hardly be passed save those that the development of tradition
demands. But in a time of revolution this postulate of social history fails. When
a whole people starts out to make fresh conditions for itself, every decree
becomes an origin; the forces that in more regular periods mould and control
legislative action are, in a time of feverish reconstruction, increased in
power and give an impetus to new institutions; the energy of society, which in
years of content and order controls by an unseen pressure, is used in years of
revolution to launch, openly and mechanically, the fabric that a new theory has
designed. Thus you may observe how in the framing of the American constitution
every point in a particular debate became of vast moment to the United States;
thus in our time the German Empire has found its strength in a set of arbitrary
decrees, all the creation of a decade; thus in the Middle Ages the
Hildebrandine reform framed in the life of one man institutions which are
vigorous after the lapse of eight hundred years; and thus in the French
Revolution a municipal organisation, new, theoretic, and mechanical, was strong
enough, not indeed to survive so terrible a storm, but to give to the whole
movement a permanent change of direction.
This,
then, is the transitional character of the summer of 1790, as regards the
particular life of Danton and the particular city of Paris. What the Cordeliers
had fought so hard to obtain as a constitutional reform had failed. The direct
action of the districts upon the municipality was apparently lost for ever, and
the centre of the new system was in future to be controlled in the expression
of ideas and paralysed in its action. What the Cordeliers had represented in
spirit, though they had not formulated it in decrees—government by the whole
people—was apparently equally lost The law of December (that which established
the “active and passive citizens”) was working for Paris as for all France; and
though a suffrage which admitted two-thirds of the male population to the polls
could not be called restrictive, yet the exception of men working for wages
under their master’s roof, the necessity of a year’s residence, and the
qualification of tax-paying did produce a very narrow oligarchy in a town like
Paris: the artisans were excluded, and thousands of those governed fell just
beyond the limits which defined the municipal voter. Danton may receive the
provincial delegates, may make his speeches at the feast in the Bois de
Boulogne; but once the organ of government has been closed to his ideas, the
road towards the democracy lies through illegality and revolt.
Now
there is another and a wider importance in this anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille. It is the point at which we can best halt and survey the beginning of
the heat which turned the Revolution from a domestic reform of the French
nation to a fire capable of changing the nature of all our civilisation. I do
not mean that you will find those quarrels in the moment; in 1790 there is
nothing of the spirit that overturned the monarchy nor of the visions that
inspired the Gironde; you cannot even fairly say that there are general threats
or mutterings of war, although the Assembly saw fit to disclaim them: it is a
year before the fear of such dangers arises. But there is in this summer
something to be discovered, namely, an explanation of why two periods differing
so profoundly in character meet so suddenly and with such sharp contrast at one
point in the history of the movement; it is from the summer of 1790 and onwards
that the laws are passed, the divisions initiated, which finally alienate the
King, from that lead to his treason, from that rouse Europe, and from the
consequent invasion produce the Terror, the armies, and the Empire. The mind
needs a link between two such different things as reform and violence, and
because that link is not supplied in the mere declaration of war or in the mere
flight to Varennes, men commit the error of reading the spirit of the Republic
into the days of Mirabeau, or even of seeing temperate politics in the
apostolic frenzy of ‘93. Some, more ignorant or less gifted than the general
reader, explain it by postulating in the character of the French nation quaint
aberrations which may be proper to the individual, but which never have nor can
exist in any community of human beings.
Let me
recapitulate and define the problem which, as it seems to me, can be solved by
making a pivot of the anniversary of the States-General.
There
are, then, in the story of the Revolution these two phases, so distinct that
their recognition is the foundation of all just views upon the period. In the
first, the leaders of the nation are bent upon practical reforms; the monarchy
is a machine to hand for their accomplishment; the sketch of a new France is
drawn, the outlines even begin to be filled by trained and masterly hands.
Phrases will be found abundantly in those thirty months, because phrases are
the christening of ideas, and no nation of Roman training could attempt any
work without clear definitions to guide it. But these phrases, though often
abstract in the extreme, are never violent, and the oratory itself of the
National Assembly is rarely found to pass the limits which separate the art of
persuasion from the mere practice of defiance.
In the
second phase, for which the name of the Convention often stands, those
subterranean fires which the crust of tradition and the stratified rock of society
had formerly repressed break out in irresistible eruption. The creative work of
the revolutionary idea realises itself in a casting of molten metal rather than
in a forging, and the mould it uses is designed upon a conception of statuary
rather than of architecture. The majestic idol of the Republic, in whose
worship the nation has since discovered all its glories and all its
misfortunes, is set up by those artists of the ideal; but they forget, or
perhaps ignore, the terrible penalties that attach to superhuman Attempts, the
reactions of an exclusive idealism.
What
made the second out of the first? What made a France which had discussed Sieyès
listen to St. Just or even to Hébert? The answer to this question is to be
discovered in noting the fatal seeds that were sown in this summer of 1790, and
which in two years bore the fruit of civil war and invasion.
In the
first place, that summer creates, as we have seen, a discontented Paris—a
capital whose vast majority it refuses to train in the art of self-government,
and whose general voice it refuses to hear.
In the
second place, it is the moment when the discontent in the army comes to a head.
The open threat of military reaction on the side of a number of the officers,
their intense animosity against the decrees abolishing titles, their growing
disgust at the privileges accorded to the private soldiers—all these come face
to face with non-commissioned officers and privates who are full of the new
liberties. These lower ranks contained the ambitious men whose ability, the
honest and loyal men whose earnestness, were to carry French arms to the
successes of the Revolutionary wars.
In the
third place, it is the consummation of the blunder that attempted to create an
established National Church in France. Before this last misfortune a hundred
other details of these months that were so many mothers of discord become
insignificant. Civil war first muttering in the South, counter-revolution
drilling in Savoy, the clerical petition of Nîmes, the question of the Alsatian
estates, the Parisian journals postulating extreme democracy, the Jacobins
appearing as an organised and propagandist body, the prophetic cry of
Lameth—all these things were but incidents that would have been forgotten but
for the major cause of tumult, which is to be discovered in the civil
constitution of the clergy.
Of
course, the kings would have attacked, but they were divided, and had not even
a common motive. Of course, also, freedom, in whatever form it came, would have
worked in the moribund body of Europe like a drug, and till its effect was
produced would have been thought a poison. But against the hatred of every
oppressor would have been opposed a disciplined and a united people, sober by
instinct, traditionally slow in the formation of judgments, traditionally
tenacious of an opinion when once it had been acquired. It would have been
sufficient glory for the French people to have broken the insolence of the
aggressors, to have had upon their lists the names of Marceau and of Hoche.
But with
the false step that produced civil war, that made of the ardent and liberal
West a sudden opponent, that in its final effect raised Lyons and alienated
half the southern towns, that lost Toulon, that put the extreme of fanaticism
in the wisest and most loyal minds—such a generous and easy war was doomed, and
the Revolution was destined to a more tragic and to a nobler history. God, who
permitted this proud folly to proceed from a pedantic aristocracy, foresaw
things necessary to mankind. In the despair of the philosophers there will
arise on either side of a great battle the enthusiasms which, from whencever
they blow, are the fresh winds of the soul. Here are coming the heroes and the
epic songs for which humanity was sick, and the scenes of one generation of men
shall give us in Europe our creeds, for centuries. You shall hear the “Chant du
Départ” like a great hymn in the army of the Sambre et Meuse, and the cheers of
men going down on the Vengeur; the voice of a young man calling the
grenadiers at Lodi and Arcola; the noise of the guard swinging up the frozen
hill at Austerlitz. Already the forests below the Pyrenees are full of the
Spanish guerillas, and after how many hundred years the love of the tribe has
reappeared again above the conventions that covered it. There are the three
colours standing against the trees in the North and the South; and the delicate
womanly face of Nelson is looking over the bulwarks of the Victory, with
the slow white clouds and the light wind of an October day above him, and
before him the enemy’s sails in the sunlight and the black rocks of the coast.
It may
be well, at the expense of some digression, to say why the laws affecting the
clergy should be treated as being of paramount historical importance. They ruined
the position of the King; they put before a very large portion of the nation
not one, but two ideals; and what regular formation can grow round two
dissimilar nuclei? Finally—a thing that we can now see clearly, though then the
wisest failed to grasp it—they went against the grain of the nation.
It is a
common accusation that the Revolution committed the capital sin of being
unhistorical. Taine’s work is a long anathema pronounced against men who dared
to deny the dogmas of evolution before those dogmas were formulated. Such a
criticism is erroneous and vain; in the mouths of many it is hypocritical. The
great bulk of what the Revolution did was set directly with the current of
time. For example: The re-unison of Gaul had been coming of itself for a thousand
years—the Revolution achieved it; the peasant was virtually master of his
land—it made him so in law and fact; Europe had been trained for centuries in
the Roman law—it was precisely the Roman law that triumphed in the great
reform, and most of its results, all of its phraseology, is drawn from the
civil code. But in this one feature of the constitution of the clergy it sinned
against the nature of France. Of necessity the Parliament was formed of
educated men, steeped in the philosophy of the time, and of necessity it worked
under the eyes of a great city population. In other words, the statesmen who
bungled in this matter and the artisans who formed their immediate surroundings
were drawn from the two classes which had most suffered from the faults of the
hierarchy in France.
Mirabeau,
for example, has passed his life in the rank where rich abbés made excellent
blasphemy; the artisan of Paris has passed his life unprotected and unsolicited
by the priests, whose chief duty is the maintenance of human dignity in the
poor. Add to this the Jansenist legend of which Camus was so forcible a relic,
and the Anglo-mania which drew the best intellects into the worst experiments,
and the curious project is inevitable.
In these
first essays of European democracy there was, as all the world knows, a passion
for election. In vain had Rousseau pointed out the fundamental fallacy of
representation in any scheme of self-government The example of America was
before them; the vicious temptation of the obvious misled them; and until the
hard lessons of the war had taught them the truth, representation for its own
sake, like a kind of game, seems to have been an obsession of the upper class
in Prance They admitted it into the organisation of the Church.
Now let
us look in its detail at this attempt to make of the Catholic Church in the
eighteenth century a mixture of the administration of Constantine, of the
presbyteries of first centuries, and of the “branch of the civil service” which
has suited so well a civilisation so different from that of France.
The
great feature of this reform was the attempt to subject the whole clerical
organisation to the State. I do not mean, of course, the establishment of
dogmas by civil discussion, nor the interference with internal discipline; but
the hierarchy was to be elected, from the parish priest to the bishop; the new
dioceses were to correspond to the new Departments, and, most important of all,
their confirmation was not to be demanded from the Pope, but “letters of
communion” were to be sent to the Head of the Church, giving him notice of the
election.
This
scheme passed the House on July 12, 1790, two days before the great feast of
the federation. A time whose intellect was alien to the Church, a class whose
habits were un-Catholic, had attempted a reformation. Why was the attempt a
blunder? Simply because it was unnecessary. There were certain ideas upon which
the reconstruction of France was proceeding; they have been constantly alluded
to in this book; they are what the French call “the principles of ‘89.” Did
they necessarily affect the Church? Yes; but logically carried out they would
have affected the Church in a purely negative way. It was an obvious part of the
new era to deny the imperium in imperio. The Revolution would have
stultified itself had it left untouched the disabilities of Protestants and of
Jews, had it continued to support the internal discipline of the Church by the
civil power. It was logical when it said to the religious orders: “You are
private societies; we will not compel your members to remain, neither will we
compel them to leave their convents.” (In the decree of February 13, 1790.) It
would have been logical had it said to the Church: “It may be that you are the
life of society; it may be that your effect is evil; we leave you free to prove
your quality, for freedom of action and competition is our cardinal principle.”
But instead of leaving the Church free they amused themselves by building up a
fantastic and mechanical structure, and then found that they were compelling
religion to enter a prison. Nothing could be conceived more useless or more
dangerous.
On the
other hand, if this scheme as a whole was futile, there were some details that
were necessary results of what the clergy themselves had done, and some which,
if not strictly necessary, have at least survived the Revolution, and are
vigorous institutions to-day. It might have been possible for Rome to seize on
these as a basis of compromise, and it is conceivable, though hardly probable,
that the final scheme might have left the Church a neutral in the coming wars.
But if the councils of the Holy See were ill-advised, the Parliament was still
less judicious; its extreme sensitiveness to interference from abroad was
coupled with the extreme pedantry of a Lanjuinais, and the scheme in its
entirety was forced upon Louis. He, almost the only pious man in a court which
had so neglected religion as to hate the people, wrote in despair to the Pope;
but before the answer came he had signed the law, and in that moment signed the
warrant for his own death and that of thousands of other loyal and patriotic
men.
While
these future divisions were preparing, during the rest of the year 1790 Danton’s
position becomes more marked. We find a little less about him in the official
records, for the simple reason that he has ceased to be a member of an official
body, or rather (since the first Commune was not actually dissolved till
September) he remains the less noticeable from the fact that the policy which
he represented has been defeated; but his personality is making more impression
upon Paris and upon his enemies. We shall find him using for the first time
moderation, and for the first time meeting with systematic calumny. He
acquires, though he is not yet of any especial prominence, the mark of future
success, for he is beginning to be singled out as a special object of attack;
and throughout the summer and autumn he practices more and more that habit of
steering his course which up to the day of his death so marks him from the
extremists.
The
failure of this policy, the check which had been given to the Cordeliers, and
the uselessness of their protests on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July, had a marked
effect upon the position of Danton even in his own district. He had been
president when they were issued, and his friend D’Eglantine had been secretary.
One may say that the policy of resistance was Danton’s, and that but for his
leadership it would have been unheard. Hence, when it has notoriously failed,
that great mass of men who (when there is no party system) follow the event,
lost their faith in him.
Bailly
is not only elected by an enormous majority in all Paris[1]
on the 2nd of August, but even Canton’s own district, now become the Section of
the Théâtre Français, abandoned his policy for the moment. In a poll of 580,
478 votes were given for Bailly.
In this
moment of reverse he might with great ease have thrown himself upon all the
forces that were for the moment irregular. The Federation of July had brought
to Paris a crowd of deputies from the Departments, and to these provincials the
good-humour and the comradeship of this Champenois had something attractive
about it. In a Paris which bewildered them they found in him something that
they could understand. In a meeting held by a section of them in the Bois de
Boulogne it is Danton who is the leading figure. When the deputies of
Marseilles ask for Chenier’s “Charles IX.,” it is Danton who gets it played for
them at the Théâtre Français in spite of the opposition of the Court; and again
it is Danton who is singled out during an entr’acte for personal attack
by the loyalists, who had come to hiss the play.[2]
The
unrepresented still followed him, and he still inspired a vague fear in the
minds of men like Lafayette. Innocent of any violence, he, stood (to those who
saw him from a great distance) for insurrection. He was remembered as the
defender of Marat, and Marat in turn annoyed by repeated mention and praise in
his ridiculous journal. Note also that the time was one in which the two camps
were separating, though slowly, and the rôle of a demagogue would have been as
tempting to a foolish man on the Radical, as the rôle of true knight was to so many
foolish men on the Conservative side. Each part was easy to play, and each was
futile.
Danton
refused such a temptation. He, almost alone at that moment (with the exception,
in a much higher sphere, of Mirabeau), was capable of being taught by defeat.
He desired a solid foundation for action. Here were certain existing things:
the club of the Cordeliers, which had for a while failed him; the Friends of
the Constitution, which were a growing power; the limited suffrage of Paris,
which he regretted, but which was the only legal force he could appeal to; the
new municipal constitution, which he had bitterly opposed, but which was an
accomplished fact. Now it is to all these realities that he turns his mind. He
will re-capture his place in the Section, and make of the quarter of the Odeon
a new République des Cordeliers. He will re-establish his position with Paris.
He will attempt to enter, and perhaps later to control, this new municipality.
It was for such an attitude that St. Just reproached him so bitterly in the act
of accusation of April 1794, while at the moment he was adopting that attitude
he was the mark of the most violent diatribe from the Conservatives. Nothing
defines Danton at this moment so clearly as the fact that he alone of the
popular party knew how to be practical and to make enemies.
The
month of August may be taken as the time when Danton had to be most careful if
he desired to preserve his place and to avoid a fall into violence and
unreason. It was the 2nd of that month (as we have said) that saw Bailly’s
election, the 5th that gave Danton a personal shock, for on that date he
received, for an office which he really coveted and for which he was a
candidate, but 193 votes out of over 3000 present.
From
that moment he devotes all his energy to reconstruction. The first evidence of
his new attitude appears with the early days of September. Already the old
meeting of the Cordeliers had been changed into the club, and already his
influence was gaining ground again in the debates and in the local battalion of
the National Guard, when the news of Nancy came to Paris.
A
conflict between the National Guard and the people, an example of that with
which Lafayette continually menaced Paris—the conflict of the armed bourgeoisie
and the artisans, or rather of the militia used as a professional army against
the people this had happened at last. It was an occasion for raving. Marat
raved loudly, and the royalists gave vent to not a little complacent raving on
their side. In the great question whether the army was to be democratic or not,
whether reaction was to possess its old disciplined arm, it would seem that
reaction had won, and France had seen a little rehearsal of what in ten months
was to produce the 17th of July.
In such
conditions the attitude of the Cordeliers was of real importance. During all
Lafayette’s attempt to centralise the militia of Paris this battalion had
remained independent; its attitude during the days of October, its defence of
Marat in January, had proved this. The crisis appeared to demand from this
revolutionary body a strong protest against the use of the militia as an army
to be aimed against the people. Such a protest might have been the cause of an
outbreak in Paris. Under these circumstances Danton—by what arguments we cannot
tell (for the whole affair is only known to us by a few lines of
Desmoulins)—obtained from his battalion a carefully-worded pronouncement. “For
all the high opinion we have of the National Guards who took part in the affair
of Nancy, we can express no other sentiment than regret for what has happened.”[3]
It was moderate to the degree of the common-place, but it saved Danton from the
abyss and from the street.
There
followed another check in which he showed once more his power of self-control.
The “Notables” corresponding something to the aldermen of our new municipal
scheme in England were to be elected for Paris a little after the elections for
the mayor and for the governor of the Commune. Each Section was to elect three,
and Danton had so far regained his influence at home as to be elected for the
Theatre Français.
Unfortunately
the new constitution of Paris had been provided with one of those checks whose
main object it is to interfere with direct representation. The choice of each
Section was submitted to the censure or the approval of all the others. It is
by the judgment which they pass that we can best judge the suspicion in which
he was held by the great bulk of his equals. A regular campaign was led against
him. The affair of Marat was dragged up, especially the warrant for Danton’s
arrest which the Châtelet had issued six months before. That very favourite
device in electioneering, the doubt as to real candidature, was used. The
voter, not over-well informed in a detail of law (especially at a time when all
law was being remodelled), was told that the warrant made Danton’s candidature
illegal. They said he was sold to Orleans, because he had haunted the Palais
Royal and because he hated Lafayette. The character of demagogue—the one thing
he desired to avoid—was pinned to his coat, and alone of all the Notables he
was rejected by forty-three Sections (five only voting for him) in the week
between the 9th and the 16th of September.[4]
In these
five were the Postes, Invalides, Luxembourg. It was not the purely popular
quarters that supported Danton, but rather the University and the lawyers.
He toot
his defeat as a signal for still greater reserve, letting his name take
perspective, and refusing by any act or phrase to obscure his reputation with
new issues. The tactics succeeded. When, in October, a public orator was
needed, they remembered him, and he presents the deputation of the 10th of
November. The circumstances were as follows: —
The
ministry which surrounded the King was frankly reactionary. I do not mean that
it was opposed to the constitution of the moment. Perhaps the majority (and the
less important) of its members would have been loath to bring back anything
approaching the old regime. But there were in the Revolution not only the facts
but the tendencies, and in a period when every day brought its change, the
tendencies were watched with an extreme care. France may have thought, seeing
the federation on the Champ de Mars and the altar where Talleyrand had said
mass, that the Revolution was at an end and the new state of affairs
established in peace, but those in the capital knew better; and the men
immediately surrounding the King, who saw the necessary consequences of his
signing the civic constitution, and the growing breach between himself and the
assembly these men were on the King’s side. The affair at Nancy, which had
aroused so many passions, was the thing which finally roused Parisian opinion;
and at the very moment when the King is secretly planning the flight to
Montmédy—that flight which six months later failed—Paris is for the first time
claiming to govern the councils of the kingdom.
It was
the Sections that began the movement, those Sections whose action was to have
been so restricted, and which, upon the contrary, were becoming the permanent
organs of expression in the capital.
The
Section Mauconseil on the 22nd of October sent in a petition for the dismissal
of the cabinet and appealed to the National Assembly. The Section of the
National Library followed suit three days later, and sent its petition not only
to the Assembly but to the King. It must be remembered that the legend of a
good king deceived by his advisers held at the time. Indeed, it survived the
flight to Varennes; it partly survived the 10th of August, and only the
research of recent times has proved clearly the continual intrigue of which the
King was the head.
On the
27th Mauconseil came forward again with a petition to the mayor, Bailly, to
call the general council of the Commune and consider the complaints. Fourteen
other Sections backed this petition. Bailly hesitated, and while he temporised,
all the forty-eight Sections named commissioners and sent them to an informal
gathering at the Archbishopric.[5]
Danton
was a member of this big committee and was made secretary. He drew up an
address; the mayor was twice summoned to call the general council of the
Commune. Hesitating and afraid, Bailly finally did so, and after a violent
debate the resolution passed. Bailly was sent by the town to “present the
Commune at the bar of the Assembly and demand the recall” of the Ministers of
Justice, War, and the Interior—De Cicé, La Tour du Pin, and St. Priest.
Danton
was taken out of the informal body to which he had acted as secretary, and
asked to be the orator of the legal Commune. There followed on the 10th of
November a very curious scene.
Bailly
pitifully apologising with his eyes brought in the representative body of
Paris. It was present for the first time in the National Parliament, and before
three years were over Paris was to be the mistress of the Parliament. At
present they were out of place; their demand frightened them. It needed Danton’s
voice to reassure them and to bring the opposing forces to a battle.
His
voice, big, rough, and deep, perhaps with a slight provincial accent, helped to
strengthen the false idea that the gentlemen of the Parliament had formed. This
Danton, of whom they heard so much, had appeared suddenly out of his right
place—for he had no official position and the Right was furious.
Yet
Danton’s harangue was moderate and sensible. There is, indeed, one passage on
the position of Paris in France which is interesting because it is original,
but the bulk of the speech is a string of plain arguments. This passage is as
follows: —
“That
Commune, composed of citizens who belong in a fashion to the eighty-three
Departments (The Right, No! no!)—jealously desiring to fulfil in the
name of all good citizens the duties of a sentinel to the constitution, is in haste
to express a demand which is dear to all the enemies of tyranny a demand which
would be heard from all the Sections of the Empire, could they be united with
the same promptitude as the Sections of Paris.”[6]
For the
rest, he is continually insisting upon the right of the Parliament to
govern—the right, above all, of a representative body to dismiss a ministry. He
had in this, as in certain other matters, a very English point of view, and
certainly the arguments he used were able. But he was interrupted continually,
and we get, even in the dry account of the Moniteur, a good picture of
what the scene must have been like
“A
dismissal which the Assembly has the right to demand.”
The Abbé
Maury: “Who ever said that?” [Murmurs and discussion followed. The Abbé was
called to order, when . . .]
M.
Cazales remarked: “It is our duty to listen, even if they talk nonsense.”
Danton
began again with: “The Commune of Paris is better able to judge the conduct of
ministers than . . .”
The Abbé
Maury: “Why?” [He is again calld to order.]
And so
it went on. But in a duel of this kind lungs are the weapons, and Danton had
the best lungs in the hall. He had also perhaps the soundest brain of any; but
the Abbé Maury and his friends had chosen more rapid methods than those of
arguments. The short address ended (it did not take a quarter of an hour to
read), and the deputation left the Assembly. This last debated and refused the
decree; yet the Commune had succeeded, for in a few days the Archbishop of
Bordeaux left the Ministry of Justice, and La Tour du Pin, “ who thought that
parchment alone made nobility” (a phrase of Danton’s which had upset the
Eight), left the Ministry of War.
The
deputation had petitioned on Wednesday, the 10th of November. Four days later he
was elected head of the militia battalion in which he had served for a year.[7]
There is some doubt as to whether he remained long at this post. Some
antagonists talk vaguely of his “leading his batallion” in ‘92, but never as
eye-witnesses. On the otter hand, there is a letter in existence talking of
Danton’s resignation; but it is unsigned and undated. Only some one has written
in pencil, “Gouvion, 22nd November.”[8]
At any
rate, the interest of the little incident lies in the fact that it meant a
meeting between Danton and Lafayette, and, as Freron remarks in his journal, “Cela
serait curieux.”[9] Perhaps they
did not meet.
The
campaign continually directed against Danton was as active in this matter as in
all others. It gives one, for instance, an insight into the management and
discipline of the guards to learn that “Coutra, a corporal, went about asking
for signatures against Danton’s nomination.”[10]
He had just risen above the successes of his enemies. November had put him on a
sure footing again, and in January he reached the place he had had so long in
view, the administration of Paris.
It will
be remembered that the voting was by two degrees. The electors nominated an “electoral
college,” who elected the Commune and its officers. Already in October Danton
had been put into the electoral college by twenty-six members chosen by his
Section, but not without violent opposition. Finally, after eight ballots, on
the 31st of January 1791, he became a member of the administration of the
town—the twenty-second on a list of thirty-six elected. He failed, however, in
his attempt to be chosen “Procureur,” and through all the year 1791 he keeps
his place in the administration of Paris merely as a stepping-stone. He does
not speak much in the Council. He used his partial success only for the purpose
of attaining a definite position from which he could exercise some measure of
executive control; this position he finally attains (as we shall see) in the
following December, and it is from it that he is able to direct the movement of
1792.
The year
1791 does not form a unit in the story of the Revolution. It is cut sharply in
two by the flight of the King in June. Before that event things went with a
certain quietude. The tendency to reaction and the tendency to extreme
democracy are to be discovered, but there can be no doubt that a kind of
lassitude has taken the public mind. After all, the benefits of the Revolution
are there. The two years of discussion, the useless acrimony of the preceding
autumn, began to weary the voters—there is a sentiment of jovialty abroad.
After
the flight of the King all is changed. To a period of development there
succeeds a period of violent advance, and of retreat yet more violent; there
appears in France the first mention of the word republic, and all the
characters that hung round Lafayette come definitely into conflict with the
mass of the people. The action of the troops on the Champ de Mars opens the
first of those impassable gulfs between the parties, and from that moment
onward there arise the hatreds that are only satisfied by the death of
political opponents.
In that
first period, then, which the death of Mirabeau was to disturb, the 18th of
April to endanger, and the flight of the King to close, Danton’s rôle, like that
of all the democrats, is effaced. Why should it not be? The violent discussions
that followed the affair of Nancy led, as it were, to a double satisfaction:
the loyal party saw that after all the Radicals were not destroying the State;
the Radicals, on the other hand, had learnt that the loyalists could do nothing
distinctly injurious to the nation without being discovered. At least, they
thought they had learnt this truth. They did not know how for months Mirabeau
had been in the pay of the Court, and how the executive power had concerned
itself with the King rather than with the nation.
A sign
of this appeasement in the violence of the time (a movement, by the way, which
was exactly what Danton desired) is his letter to La Rochefoucald, the president
of the Department, when the successful election, which I have described above,
was known. This letter, one of the very few which Danton has left, is a
singularly able composition. He alludes to the mistrust which had been felt
when his name was mentioned; he does not deny the insurrectionary character of
the quarter of Paris which he inspired. But hie replies: “I will let my
actions, now that I hold public office, prove my attitude, and if I am in a
position of responsibility, it will have a special value in showing that I was
right to continually claim the public control of administrative functions.” The
whole of the long letter[11]
is very well put; it is Danton himself that speaks, and it is hard to doubt
that at this moment he also was one of those who thought they were touching the
end of the reform, that goal which always fled from the men who most sincerely
sought it.
He did
not, however, come often to the Council to less than a quarter of its sittings,
at the most; moreover, the men who composed it still looked upon him with
suspicion; and when, on the 4th of May, the committees were drawn up, his name
was omitted. He asked on the next day to be inscribed on the committee that
contained Sieyès, and his request was granted.
The
activity of Danton during these few months was not even shown at the
Cordeliers; though that club occasionally heard him, it was at the Jacobins
that he principally spoke.
This
famous club, on which the root of the Revolution so largely depends, was at
this period by no means the extreme and Robespierrian thing with which we
usually associate the name. It hardly even called itself “the Jacobins” yet,
but clung rather to its original name of “Friends of the Constitution.” Its
origin dated from the little gathering of Breton deputies who were in the
habit, while the Assembly was still at Versailles, of meeting together to
discuss a common plan of action. When the Assembly came to Paris, this society,
in which by that time a very large number of deputies had enrolled themselves,
took up their place in the hall of the Dominicans or “Jacobins,” just off the
Rue St. Honoré (Its site is just to the east of the square of Vendôme to-day.)
It was a union of all those who desired reform, and in the first part of the
year 1790 it had been remarkable for giving a common ground where the moderate
and extremist, all who desired reform, could meet. The Rue de Broglie figures
among its presidents. It was the Royalists, the extreme Court party, that
dubbed these “Friends of the Constitution” “Jacobins,” and it was not till
somewhat later that they themselves adopted and gloried in the nickname. It was
composed not only of deputies, but of all the best-born and best-bred of the
Parisian reformers, drawn almost entirely from the noble or professional
classes, and holding dignified sessions, to which the public were not admitted.
Almost
at the same moment, namely, towards the autumn and winter of 1790, two features
appeared in it. First, the Moderates begin to leave it, and the schism which
finally produced the “Feuillants” is formed; secondly, there come in from all
over France demands from the local popular societies to be affiliated to the
great club in Paris. These demands were granted. There arises a kind of “Jacobin
order,” which penetrates even to the little country towns, everywhere preaches
the same doctrine, everywhere makes it its business to keep a watch against
reaction. These local clubs depended with a kind of superstition upon the
decrees of what, without too violent a metaphor, we may call the “Mother House”
in Paris; it was this organisation that aroused the apathy of provincial France
and trained the new voters in political discussion, and it was this also that
was later captured by Robespierre, who, like a kind of high priest, directed a
disciplined body wherever the affiliated societies existed.
Danton
first joined the society at the very moment when this double change was in
progress, in September 1790. His energies, which were employed in the club to
arrange the difficulty with the Moderates (if that were possible), were also
used (to quote a well-known phrase) in “letting France hear Paris.” The
Cordeliers had been essentially Parisian; steeped in that feeling, Danton spoke
from the Rue St. Honoré to the whole nation.
It is
with the end of March that he begins to be heard, in a speech attacking Collot
d’Herbois; for that unpleasant fellow was then a Moderate. It is apropos of
that speech that the “Sabbots Jacobites” give us the satirical rhyme on Danton,
which recalls his face when he spoke, looking all the uglier for the energy
which he put into his words:
“Monsieur Danton,
Quittez cet air farouche,
Monsieur Danton,
On vous prendrez pour un démon.”[12]
On the
3rd of April it was known in Paris that Mirabeau was dead. He had been killed
with the over-work of attempting to save the King from himself. A masterly
intrigue, a double dealing which was hidden for a generation, had exhausted
him, and in the terrible strain of balancing such opposite interests as those
of France, which he adored, and Louis, whom he served, his two years of
struggle suddenly fell upon him and crushed him. He smiled at the sun and
called it God’s cousin, boasted like a genius, gave a despairing phrase to the
monarchy, demanded sleep, and died.
Danton had
always, from a long way off, understood his brother in silk and with the sword.
On this day he passionately deplored the loss. Like all Paris, the Jacobins
forgot Mirabeau’s treason, and remembered his services when the news of his
sudden death fell upon them. From their tribune Danton spoke in terms in which
he almost alone foretold the coming reaction, and he was right. The King,
hardly restrained from folly by the compromise of the great statesman, plunged
into it when his support was withdrawn. He had been half Mirabeau’s man, now he
was all Antoinette’s.
It was
the fatal question of religion that precipitated the crisis. Louis could not
honestly receive the Easter communion from a constitutional priest. On the
other hand, he might have received it quietly in his household. He chose to
make it a public ceremony, and to go in state to St. Cloud for his Easter
duties. It was upon April 18th, a day or two more than a fortnight after
Mirabeau’s death, that he would have set out. As one might have expected, the
streets filled at once. The many battalions of the National Guard who were on
the democratic side helped the people to stop the carriage; in their eyes, as
in that of the populace, the King’s journey to St. Cloud was only part of the
scheme to leave Paris to raise an army against the Assembly.[13]
On the
other hand, those of the National Guard who obeyed Lafayette[14]
could not, by that very fact, move until Lafayette ordered them. Thus the
carriage was held for hours, until at last, in despair, the King went back to
the Tuilleries.
Meanwhile,
what had occurred at the Hotel de Ville? The testimony is contradictory and the
whole story confused, but the truth seems to have been something of this kind. Lafayette
certainly called on the administration of the Department and asked for martial
law. Bailly as certainly was willing to grant it. Danton was called from his
rank and came to oppose it; but did he end the matter by his speech? Camille
Desmoulins[15] says so,
and draws a fine picture of Danton carrying the administration with him, as he
carried the club or the street. But Desmoulins is often inaccurate, and here
his account is improbable. Danton’s own note of the circumstance (which he
thought worthy of being pinned to his family papers) runs: “I was present at
the Department when MM. the commandant and the mayor demanded martial law.” Nothing
more.
Desmoulins
makes another mistake when he attributes to Danton the letter which was written
to the King, and which was sent on the night of the 18th; it reproached him for
his action, sharply criticised his rejection of constitutional priests. It was
not Danton, it was Talleyrand (a member also of the Department) who wrote this
letter.
It is
probable that Danton and Talleyrand knew each other. Talleyrand was a good
judge of men, and would have many strings to his bow—we know that he depended
upon Danton’s kindness at a critical moment in 1792—but the style of the letter
is not Danton’s, and the document as we find it in Schmidt is definitely
ascribed to Talleyrand.
This is
all we can gather as to his place in the popular uprising to prevent the King’s
leaving Paris. A placard of some violence issued from the Cordeliers, saying
that he had “forbidden Lafayette
to fire on the people;” but Danton
disowned it in a meeting of the Department.
This
much alone is certain, that the 18th of April had finally put Danton and
Lafayette face to face, and that in the common knowledge of Paris they would be
the heads of opposing forces in the next crisis. But their rôles turned out to
be the very opposite of what men would have predicted. It was Lafayette who
shot and blustered, and had his brief moment of power; it was Danton who made a
flank movement and achieved a final victory. For the next crisis was the flight
of the King.
It would
be irrelevant to give the story of this flight in the life of Danton. Our
business is to understand Danton by following the exact course of his actions
during June and July, and by describing exactly the nature of the movement in
which his attitude took the form which we are investigating.
Two
things command the attention when we study the France of 1791. France was
monarchic and France was afraid. History knows what was to follow; the men of
the time did not. There lay in their minds the centuries of history that had
been; their future was to them out of conception, and as unreal as our future
is to us. You may notice from the very first moment of the true Revolution a
passion for the King. For most he is a father, but for all a necessary man.
They took him back to Paris; they forced him to declarations of loyalty, and
then, with the folly of desire, accepted as real an emotion which they had
actually dictated. Such was the movement of the 4th of February 1790; such the
sentiment of the Federation in July of that year. And the people understood his
reluctance in taking communion from a nonjuring priest, however much the upper
class might be astonished. What no one understood was that only Mirabeau stood
between the Crown and its vilest temptations; only his balance of genius, his
great and admirable fault of compromise, prevented Louis yielding to his least
kingly part, and while he lived the king of the French preferred the nation to
his own person. But Mirabeau was dead. They did well to mourn him, those who
had smelt out his treason and guessed the weakness of the artist in him; they
did well to forgive him; his head misunderstood France, but his broad French
shoulders had supported her. The 18th of April was a direct consequence of his
death; the 21st of June was a fall through a broken bridge: Louis had yielded
to himself.
Well,
France was also afraid. This democracy (as it had come to be), an experiment
based upon a vision, knew how perilous was the path between the old and the new
ideals. She feared the divine sunstroke that threatens the road to Damascus. In
that passage, which was bounded on either side by an abyss, her feet went
slowly, one before the other, and she looked backward continually. In the
twisting tides at night her one anchor to the old time was the monarchy. Thus
when Louis fled the feeling was of a prop broken. France only cried out for one
thing—“Bring the King back.” Tie up the beam—a makeshift—anything rather than a
new foundation.
Here is
the attitude of Danton in this crisis. France is not republican; his friends in
Paris are. He inclines to France. It was Danton more than any other one man who
finally prepared the Republic, yet the Republic was never with him an idea. The
consequences of the Republic were his goal; as for the systems, systems were
not part of his mind. At the close of this chapter we shall see him
overthrowing the Crown; he did it because he thought it the one act that could
save France; but the Crown as an idea he never hated: he lived in existing
things.
These
were the reasons that made him hesitate at this date. A man understanding
Europe, he saw that the governments were not ready to move; a man understanding
his own country, he saw that it would have the King in his place again; a man,
on the other hand, who had met and appreciated the idealists, he saw that the
Republic already existed in the mind; and a man who understood the character of
his fellows better than did any contemporary, he saw that the men who were
bound to lead were inclined to a declaration against the King. He suffered more
than his action should have warranted, and he goes through a sharp few days of
danger on account of association and of friends in spite of all his caution.
When
Louis was known to have fled, and when Paris, vigilant beyond the provinces,
and deceived by the declaration of April, had undergone its first wave of
passion, the word Republic began to be spoken out loud. The theorists found
themselves for once in accordance with public humour; and against the keenness,
if not the numbers, of those who petitioned for the deposition of the King on
his return, there stood two barriers—the Assembly and the moderate fortunes of
the capital, Danton lived with the former, thought with the latter, and was all
but silent.
The bust
of Louis XIV. before the Hotel de Ville was broken; men climbed on ladders to
chisel off the lilies from the palaces, and there soon appears a new portent:
some one cries out, “Only a Republic can defend itself at the last.”
To this
somewhat confused cry for a Republic came the very sharp announcement from no
less a person than Condorcet. Condorcet, the moderate and illumined, was also
half a visionary, and there had always floated in his mind the system of
contract by which England had excused the movement of 1688, but which France
took seriously. England had for him the attraction which it had for all the
professionals of that date—an attraction which lasted till the disasters of 1870,
and which you may yet discover here and there among those who are the heirs of
Lamartine. England had given them Locke, and Condorcet’s reasoning on the Kings
flight[16]
reads like a passage from the Bill of Rights. Yet he was a good and sincere
man, and died through simplicity of heart.
On the
4th of July, ten days or more after the King had been brought back to Paris,[17]
it was Condorcet who made the demand for the Republic; in a speech at Fauchet’s
club he asked for a National Convention to settle the whole matter. He wrote so
in the papers[18] all through
July, and even after the affair of the Champ de Mars he continued his
agitation.
Now how
do we know Danton’s attitude? The Cordeliers presented a petition of June 21st itself
and demanded the Republic. It is largely from this document that the error has
arisen. But Danton was not then with the Cordeliers; his name does not appear.
It is at the Jacobins that he is heard, and the Jacobins took up a distinctly
monarchical position. They all rose in a body on the 22nd and passed a
unanimous vote in favour of the constitution and the King.[19]
Danton was present when this vote was passed, and he had just heard the hissing
of the Cordeliers' petition; he was silent. Thomas Payne is demanding the
Republic in the Moniteur; Sieyès replies for the monarchy;[20]
even Robespierre tardily speaks in favour of ideas and against change of
etiquette, Marat shouts for a dictator;[21]
Danton, almost alone, refuses to be certain. On June 23rd he spoke at the
Jacobins in favour of a council to be elected by the Departments immediately,
but he proposed nothing as to its actions; it was merely his permanent idea of
a central, strong power.
Lafayette
amused himself by arresting people who repeated this in the street, but
Lafayette hated Danton blindly. Nothing republican can be made of a speech
which his enemies said was “a loophole for Orleans.”
Danton
attacked Lafayette: he saw persons more clearly than ideas, and Lafayette was
Danton’s nightmare. He was that being which of all on earth Danton thought most
dangerous, the epitome of all the faults which he attacked to the day of his
death; in Louis, in Robespierre, “The weak man in power.” He drove him out of
the Jacobins on the 21st, and later in the day gave the cry against his enemy
in the street, which the fears of the Assembly so much exaggerated.
For the
events of the twenty-four hours had all added to his natural opposition to
Lafayette, and as we relate them from Danton’s standpoint, we shall see this
much of truth in the idea that he led the movement, namely, that the three days
of the King’s flight and recapture, while they put Lafayette into a position of
great power, made also Danton his antagonist, the leader of the protest against
the general’s methods. It is the more worthy of remark that in such conditions
the word “Republic” never crossed his lips.
At
eleven o’clock at night on the Monday of the King’s flight, Danton and
Desmoulins were coming home alone from the Jacobins. Each remarked to the other
the emptiness of the streets and the lack of patrols, and at that moment, when
the evasion was little suspected, each was in a vague doubt that Lafayette had
some reason for concentrating the National Guard.[22]
Desmoulins will even have it that he saw him enter the palace, as the two
friends passed the Tuilleries.
The next
morning at the Cordeliers Danton cried out against Lafayette for a moment, and
then at the Jacobins he made the speech that has been mentioned above.
Continually he attacks the man who was preparing a counter-revolution, but I do
not believe he would have attached the least importance at that moment to a
change in the etiquette of government. Thus, as the Department was sent for by
the Assembly in the afternoon, Danton came later than his colleagues, provided
himself with a guard, and as he crossed the Tuilleries gardens he harangued the
people, but against Lafayette, not against the King.
Now, to
make sure of this feature, the duel between Lafayette and Danton, and to see that
it is the principal thing at the time, turn once more to the scene at the
Jacobins, and compare it with Lafayette’s Memoirs, and you will find that
Danton was the terror of the saviour of two worlds, and that it was upon
Lafayette that Danton had massed his artillery.
Here is
Danton at the Jacobins, sitting by Desmoulin’s side; he goes to the tribune and
speaks upon the disgrace and danger that the Moderates have brought about. When
Lafayette entered during the speech, he turned upon him suddenly, and launched
one of those direct phrases which made him later the leader of the Convention:
“I am going to talk as though I were at the bar of God’s justice, and I will
say before you, M. Lafayette, what I would say in the presence of Him who reads
all hearts. . . . How was it that you, who pretend to know nothing of me, tried
to corrupt me to your views of treason? . . . How was it that you arrested
those who in last February demanded the destruction of Vincennes? You are
present; try to give a clear reason. . . . How was it that the very same men
were on guard when the King tried to go to St. Cloud on the 18th of April were
on guard last night when the King fled? . . . I will not mention the 6000 men[23]
whom you have picked as a garrison for the King, only answer clearly these
three accusations. For in their light you, who answered with your head that the
King should not fly, are either a traitor or a fool. For either you have
permitted him to fly, or else you undertook a responsibility which you could
not fulfil: in the best case, you are not capable of commanding the guard. . .
. I will leave the tribune, for I have said enough.”[24]
This is
clear enough in all conscience to show what was Danton’s main pre-occupation in
the days of June 1791. And if, upon the other hand, you will turn to Lafayette’s
Memoirs, the third volume, the 83rd and following pages, you will find that
Danton was Lafayette’s pre-occupation, and that he makes this moment the
occasion to deliver the most definite and (luckily) the most demonstrably false
of his many accusations of venality. He tells us that he could not reply
because it would have “cost Montmorin his life;” that Montmorin “had the
receipt for the 100,000 francs;” that Danton had been “reimbursed to the extent
of 100,000 francs for a place worth 10,000,” and so forth. We know now exactly
the amount of compensation paid to him and his colleagues at the court of
appeal,[25]
and we know that Lafayette, writing a generation later, animated by a bitter
hatred, and remembering that somebody had paid Danton something, and with his
head full of vague rumours of bribing, has fallen into one of those
unpardonable errors common to vain and vacillating men. But at this Juncture
the main point that should be seized is that Danton was taking the opportunity
of the King’s evasion to attack Lafayette with all his might, and that a
generation later the old man chiefly remembered Danton as leading the popular
anger which the commander of the guard thought himself bound to repress. It is
this that will explain why Danton, who so carefully avoided giving the word for
the Republican “false start,” was yet marked out, fled, and returned to lead
the opposition.
The
Cordeliers followed Danton’s lead. They got up a petition,[26]
signed by 30,000 in Paris, demanding that the affair should be laid before the
country, but not demanding the abolition of the monarchy. Memdar, their
president, declared himself a monarchist. But the petition, though read at the
Assembly, was not adopted, and, on the 9th of July, the Cordeliers presented
another. Charles de Lameth (who was president that fortnight) refused to read
it. The Assembly, in other words, was dumb; it was determined (like its
successor a year later) to do nothing—an attitude which (for all it knew) might
be very wise, and those who were following Danton determined upon a definite
policy. On Friday the 15th, at the Jacobins, it was determined to draw up a
petition, which begged that the Assembly should first recognise Louis as
having abdicated by his flight, unless the nation voted his reinstatement, and secondly
(in case the nation did not do so), take measures to have him
constitutionally replaced. Now the constitution was monarchist.
The
petition was to be taken to be read at the Champ de Mars on the altar, and
there to obtain signatures. It was drawn up by Danton, Sergent, Lanthanas,
Ducanel, and Brissot, who wrote it out and worded most of it. The events that
follow must be noted with some care, because on their exact sequence depends
our judgment of Lafayette’s action and of Danton’s politics.
On
Saturday[27]
the 16th, about mid-day, a deputation of four from the Jacobins came to the
Champ de Mars. The petition was read by a little light-haired Englishman on one
side, and by a red-haired Frenchman in a red coat on the other; picturesque but
unimportant details. Danton leapt on to the corner of the altar, and read it
again to the thick of the crowd. The signatures were written in great numbers,
and when the completed document was about to start for the Assembly, when the
deputation that was to take it was already formed, it was suddenly spread
abroad that the Assembly had passed a vote exonerating Louis.
The
Jacobins were appealed to, and replied that under the conditions the petition
which they had drawn up could not be presented. The Cordeliers, however, lost
their tempers, and Robert determined to draw up a new petition. Now in this
second action Danton took no part. It was this new petition that (signed by
Robert, Peyre, Vachard, and Demoy) was drawn up hastily in the Champ de Mars on
Sunday the 17th, to this that the 6000 signatures were attached, and this which
demanded a “Convention to judge the King.” There followed the proclamation of
martial law, the appearance of Lafayette and Bailly in the Champ de Mars with
the red flag, the conflict between the National Guard and the crowd, and all
that is called the “Massacre of the Champ de Mars.”
That
petition was not signed by Danton.[28]
He was not even present,[29]
as we know from his speech on his election to be “Substitut-Procureur,” and
especially from the fact that in the fortnight of terror, when the red flag
stood over the Hotel de Ville, when the democrats were arrested or in hiding,
when the door of the Cordeliers was shut and nailed, and when the Radical
newspapers were suppressed, no warrant of arrest could be issued, because there
existed nothing definite against him. Lafayette was determined, however, to act
in a military fashion, and on the 4th of August the arrest of Danton was
ordered, on some other plea which he alludes to in his speech of the next
January, but the exact terms of which have not come down to us.
He had
left Paris at once when he saw that Lafayette had practically absolute power
for the moment. He first went to his father-in-law’s, Charpentier, at
Rosny-sur-Bois, and then escaped to Arcis. Before the warrant was actually made
out, Lafayette had sent a man to watch him at Arcis. He was “giving a dinner.
It would need a troop of cavalry to arrest him. Everybody was on his side.”[30] Marseilles and Bar spoke up for him.
But the attack only grew stronger. On the 31st of July he moved again to
Troyes, to the house of Millaud, of his father’s profession, and a friend,
because he feared a new arrival from Paris who seemed a spy.[31]
He was there when the warrant was sent down to the “procureur” for the arrest,
the official in question was Beugnot, and Beugnot told Danton jocularly that he
would not arrest him. He did not think this a sufficient guarantee, and as his
stepfather, Recordain, was off to England to buy some machinery for a
cotton-mill that he thought of starting, Danton went to England with him, and
remained in this country for a month, staying in the house of his stepfather’s
sons, who were established in
London. It was in the last days of July or the first days in August[32]
that he arrived, and he did not return to Paris until the appointment of his
friend Garran de Coulon as President of the Court of Appeal. He appears again
at the Jacobins on the 12th of September; some say he was in Paris on the 10th.[33]
It would
be of the utmost interest to know how he passed those thirty or forty days.
Unfortunately there is no direct evidence as to whom he met or what negotiations
he entered into. As to his English acquaintances, his letters from Priestley
and Christie, the relations he had with Talleyrand, and their common diplomacy
for the English alliance all these properly belong to Danton in power, the
minister directing France after August 1792, and it is in that place that they
will be dealt with. Of historical events in his voyage we have none, and there
is no more regrettable gap in the very disconnected series of ascertained facts
concerning him.
On his
return, he discovered that the Section of the Théâtre Français had named him a
member of the electoral college which sat at the Archbishop’s palace. Many
members of this Assembly had been arrested, or had fled during Lafayette’s
violent efforts of reaction in August and September. The new Parliament which
had just met did not decree an amnesty (as it was asked to do on the 5th of
September), but it was of course far more democratic than the old Assembly, and
it was understood to be tacitly in favour of the return of those whom Lafayette
had driven out. Following Danton’s example, they slowly came back; but a
curious incident shows how much of the danger remained.
On the
13th of September the Parliament, at the desire of the King, voted the amnesty.
While it was actually voting, a constable called Damien got into the gallery of
the hall in which Danton and the electors were debating, and sent a note to the
president asking him to allow the arrest. The president and the electoral
college (who did not like Danton, by the way, and who would not give him more
than forty votes when it came to electing members for Paris) yet ordered the
arrest by Damien, and it was only when they learnt of the amnesty that, on
Danton’s own motion, he was released.
It has
just been said that Danton failed to be elected: let us point out the
conditions under which the Legislative met, that short Parliament of one year
which made the war, and saw to its dismay the end of the monarchy.
The
Legislative was not elected in one of those moments of decision which were the
formative points of the Revolution. It came upon a very curious juncture, and
showed in all its first acts a marked indecision.
The
members were chosen under the action of a peculiar combination, or rather
confusion of emotions. The King had fled, had been recaptured. France, of many
possible evils, had chosen what she believed to be the least when she
reinstated him. “The New Pact” was accepted even by those who had spoken of the
Republic in July. Condorcet, who had led the civic theorists towards the
Republic, leads them also now in this movement of reconciliation. Again, these
were the first elections held since the middle class and the peasantry had been
given the suffrage over the heads of the artisans: it was the most sober part
of France that dictated the policy of the moment. The divisions that the King’s
flight had laid bare, the sharp reaction and terror of the Champ de Mars—all
these were forgotten.
Thus the
Parliament will not have Garran-Conlon for its first president, and yet on the
next day passes the extreme democratic etiquette as to the reception of the
King should he visit the Assembly. Next day it repeals this, and when the King
does visit the Assembly, he is met by an outburst of loyalty and affection.
As to
parties, the power lay, as it always does in a French Assembly, with the
centre—some three hundred men, unimportant, of no fixed idea, unless indeed it
were to keep the Legislative to the work for which it had been elected, that
is, to keep it moving moderately on the lines laid down for it by the
constitution of 1791.
The
right, well organised, loyal and brave, was Feuillant; that is, it was
monarchic and constitutional, but more monarchic than constitutional. It was
the support of Lafayette, and on the whole the centre would vote with it on any
important occasion.
But
there sat on the left a group less compact, full of personal ambitions and
personal creeds, containing almost all the orators whose names were to make
famous the following year. It was but a group of 130 men, even if we include
all those who signed the register of the Jacobins when the Assembly met; yet it
was destined, ill-disciplined as it was, part wild and part untrue, to lead all
France. Why? Because the King was to make impossible the action of the
Moderates, because his intrigue made Frenchmen choose between him and France,
and in the inevitable war the men who were determined to realise the Revolution
could not but be made the leaders.
As has
been said above, Danton was not elected. The electoral college, of which he was
a member, chose Moderates for the most part, such as Pastoret and De Quincy,
and the narrow suffrage represented the true drift of Parisian feeling only in
the case of a few—De Séchelles, Brissot, Condorcet, and a handful of others.
But though Danton did not sit in the Legislative he was free for action in two
other directions, which (as it turned out) were the commanding positions in the
great changes that came with the war. He was free to attain an administrative
position in the municipality of Paris, and he was free to use his power of
oratory at the Jacobins.
As to
the first, it came with his moderate but important success in the municipal
elections at the close of the year. Bailly, frightened out of place,
half-regretting his action of the Champ de Mars, had resigned, and Pétion, on
November 16th, was elected in his place. Only ten thousand voted, and he
obtained 6700 votes. On the same day the Procureur of the new Commune was to be
elected. A Procureur under the new system was a position of the greatest
importance. He was, so to speak, the advocate of the town, its tribune in the
governing body, and with his two substitutes (who aided and occasionally
replaced him) was meant to form a kind of small committee whose business was to
watch the interests and to define the attitude of the electorate whenever those
interests were in jeopardy or that attitude was opposed to the policy of the
elected body. These three positions were dangerous, but would lead to popularity,
and perhaps to power, if they were directed by a certain kind of ability. It
was precisely such a power, the quality of a tribune, that Danton knew himself
to possess.
His
candidature for the principal position was cordially supported by the Cordeliers,
but the Jacobins were divided, and they hesitated. Manuel was elected, and
Danton obtained only the third place. This vote, however, was not decisive, and
there was a second ballot on December the 2nd. In this Manuel was definitely
elected.
Cahier
de Gerville (the second substitute) was made Minister of the Interior, and
Danton, on December 6th,[34]
was elected to his place by a majority of 500 over Collot d’Herbois. It was
from this position that he prepared the 10th of August, and it was still as substitute
that he remained side by side with, the insurrectionary commune, and lending it
something of legal sanction when the King was overthrown.
Let me,
before leaving this point, define exactly the position in which his new dignity
placed him. Three men were charged with the advocacy of public opinion, the
Procureur and his two substitutes. Manuel, who was elected to the principal
position, was energetic, kindly, and conscientious, but a man of no genius; he
was good to Madame De Staël in the days of September, as is apparent from her
rather contemptuous description of how she appealed to him for safety; he did
his very best (with no power in his hands) to stop the massacres at that same
time. He was fond of work, and a little pompous in his idea of office; he was,
therefore, a man who would only leave his substitutes the less important work
to do and, from close by, would have been the dominating member of the three.
On the other hand his lack of decision and of initiative effaced him in moments
of danger or of new departures, and it is thus his second substitute who seems
to lead when seen from a distance, from the point of view of the people, who
only look round when there is a noise.
The
first substitute was Desmousseaux, He had not resigned, and had therefore not
been re-elected. Forming part of the old Commune, and in office since the
winter of 1790, he was a Moderate by preference and long tradition.
As for
Danton himself, standing third in the group, it was for him a position of
honour and of dignity. That part of him which was so capable of high office and
so desirous of an opportunity to act was well served by the election. It seemed
to put a term to the misconceptions which his person, his faults, and the
course of the Revolution had created. But the great stream of events moved him
at their will. This office wherein he desired to appear settled at last, to
show himself an administrator rather than a leader of unreasoning men, was
precisely suited in case of danger to call out those other qualities which had
made him despised by many whom he himself respected, and had aroused against
him hatred—a passion which he himself had never allowed to arise from anger.
If the
spirit of 1791 had been kept, and if after so many false promises the
Revolution had been really accomplished, then the official, or, if you will,
the statesman, would have appeared in him. I can see him in the difficulties
which even a settled kingdom would have had to meet, convincing his
contemporaries as he has convinced posterity. He was the man to impress on
others the true attitude of Europe—the only diplomat among the patriots. His
disadvantages were of the kind that are forgotten in the constant proof of
ability; and his learning, which was exactly of the kind to be used in the new
regime (a knowledge of languages, of law, of surrounding nations, a combination
of detail and of comprehension)—this learning would have made necessary a man
so popular with the people to be ruled, and, in the matter of the heart, so
honestly devoted to his country. Had France, I say, by some miracle been spared
her Passion, and had she been permitted to be happier and to do less for the
world, then as the new regime settled into the lower reaches of quiet and
content, I believe Danton would have remained for us a name, perhaps less
great, but certainly among the first. England has been permitted. She has been
given good fortune, and no fate has asked her to save civilisation with her
blood, and therefore in England we are accustomed to such careers; men whose
origin, whose exterior, and whose faults might have exiled them, have yet been
seen to rise from the municipal to the imperial office, because they were
possessed of supreme abilities, and because they devoted those abilities to the
service of England. They have died in honour.
I will
not discuss what it was that made the war. There are no causes. Burke raved
like a madman, but then so did Marat, The King was alienated by the clerical
laws, but nothing is an excuse for treason. Pilnitz was an affront and even a
menace, but it was not a declaration of war. There were peoples behind the
kings, as Mayence tragically proved; and if France fought intolerable evils,
she also seemed the iconoclast when she put out the altar-lamp, which she is
lighting again with her own hand. There are no causes. Only, if you will look
and see how Europe has lived, and how our great things have been done, you will
find nothing but armies upon armies marching past, and our history is an epic
whose beginning is lost, whose books are Roncesvalles and Cortenuova and
Waterloo, and whose end is never reached. The war came, and with it a definite
necessity to choose between France and the Crown. In that crisis Danton is
thrown back upon insurrection. He, who desired men to forget the days of
October, was compelled to the 10th of August because he was aroused. Even the
massacres were attached to his name, and there still trails after him an easy
flow of accusation, only a little less sordid or less terrible.
To
follow his action during the first months of 1772 [sic], to hear his speeches
on the war, and to note his policy, we must leave him at his post in the
Commune (where we shall find him again when Paris rises in the summer), and see
how he stands for the Mountain at the Jacobins.
This
club was now definitely the organ of the left. It was after Danton had been
elected, but before he was definitely installed in office,[35]
on the 14th of December, a week after the former and five weeks before the
latter event, that the debate on the war was begun at the Jacobins, —a debate
of the first importance, because it opened the breach between the Girondins and
the Mountain, between the orators who insisted on going to meet Europe, and
even on a war of propaganda, and the reformers who wished Europe to take the
first step, who dreaded war or who thought a war of aggression immoral. At the
head of these last was Robespierre. But it is not too much to say that in the
first months of the year Danton was more important at the Jacobins than
Robespierre. What was his attitude? It was part of the general policy upon
which he had determined: he compromised. In his first motion on the 14th of
December, he attacked the idea of declaring war. On the 16th he still attacked
it, but in other terms. “I know it must come. If any one were to ask me, ‘Are
we to have war?’ I would reply (not in argument, but as a matter of fact), ‘We
shall hear the bugles’” But the whole speech is taken up with an argument upon
its dangers, and especially upon “those who desire war in the hope of reaction,
who talk of giving us a constitution like that of England, in the hope of
giving us, later, one like that of Turkey.”
In March
and April, the months when the war was preparing and was declared, he was silent.
And we can understand his silence when we turn to his speech in the Commune
when he was given office. He alludes to the false character given him; he
speaks of the reputation which his past actions in Paris had given; he says
things that indicate a determination to play the part of a Moderate, and to see
whether in his case, as in that of so many others, there would not be
permanence in the compromise of the last six months. But there rankled in his
mind the insults of the men with whom he sat, Condorcet’s disavowal in his
paper of so much as knowing Danton, and he made a peroration which at the time
offended, but which possesses for us a certain pathos. “Nature gave me a strong
frame, and she put into my face the violence of liberty. I have not sprung from
a family which was weakened by the protection of the old privileges; my
existence has been all my own; I know that I have kept and shown my vigour, but
in my profession and in my private life I have controlled it. If I was carried
away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, have I not atoned for
it ? Have I not been ostracised? . . . I have given myself altogether to the
people, and now that they are beyond attack, now that they are in arms and
ready to break the league unless it consents to dissolve,[36]
I will die in their cause if I must, . . . for I love them only, and they
deserve it. Their courage will make them eternal.”
This
outburst is the one occasion of his public life in which Danton spoke of
himself, and it has the ring of genuine emotion; for in all his harangues he
preserved, both before and after this, an objective attitude, if anything too
much bent upon the outward circumstances.
Thus,
when the notes came to go between the Austrian and the French governments, he
was silent. He fears that France is unprepared; he fears that the King is
betraying the nation. How much he was a traitor was not known till a far later
period; but when at least it is proved that something is undermining the French
people, that, apart from the defeats and the lack of preparation, there is
treason, then he leaves his silence. The policy of the Moderate acting in a
settled state is no longer possible to any one; the court and the nation stood
one against the other, and one side or the other must be taken by every man.
Then he put off the conventions which he respected, and which he regretted to
the end; he went back into the street; he headed the insurrection, destroyed
the monarchy; for twelve months he took upon himself all the responsibility of errors
in his own policy, and of crime in that of his associates. He saved France, but
at this expense, that he went out of the world with a reputation which he knew
to be false, that he saw his great powers vulgarised, and that he could never
possess, either in his own mind or before the world, not even in France, his
true name. The whole of this tragedy is to be found in his trial, and here and
there in the few phrases that escape him in the speeches or with his friends.
If you sum it up, it comes to this paraphrase of a great sentence: Son nom
était flétri mais la France était libre.
It was
upon April the 18th that the new Girondin ministry received the note from
Vienna rejecting the French proposals of a month before. The poor King, who had
been protesting his loyalty to the nation in Paris, had been protesting in
Vienna the necessity of sending an army to save him, and Austria gave this
reply. On April 20th the Assembly declared war with practical unanimity[37]
upon “the King of Hungary and of Bohemia.” But the phrase was useless. You
might as well put a match into gunpowder and say, “It is the sulphur I am
after, not the charcoal.” Prussia joined, and within a year we shall see all
Europe at war with France, in a war that outlawed and destroyed.
Danton
was right. France was hopelessly unready. She had not learnt the necessary
truth that the soldier is a man with a trade. The orators had mistaken words
for things; honest and great as they were, they had fallen in this matter into
the faults common to small and dishonest verbiage. The rout and panic under De
Dillon, his murder by the troops, the occupation of Quiévrain, came one upon
the other. Paris was full of terror and anger in proportion to the greatness of
the things she had done, which now seemed all destroyed. “We said and did
things that should have convinced the world; we were to be a people
unconquerable from our love of liberty, and we appear a beaten, panic-stricken
lot—volunteers and babblers who cannot stand fire.”
The King
dismissed the Girondin ministers, even sent Dumouriez away, heard Roland’s
remonstrance, knew that the Assembly was more and more against him; but he
remained calm. There was a plan of the simplest. There was to be nothing but a
few days of monotonous marching between the allies and Paris. Lafayette with
his army of the centre was on his side. The Assembly decreed a great camp of
20,000 men under Paris, and the disbanding of the guard; the guard was
disbanded, but the King vetoed the decree. Lafayette wrote his letter menacing
the Parliament with his army; the reaction seemed in full success and the
invaders secure, when Danton reappeared.
On the
18th of June he found the old phrases against Lafayette at the Jacobins. “It is
a great day for France; Lafayette with only one face on is no longer dangerous.”
He did not make, but he permitted the 20th of June; and as Paris rose, and the
immense mob, grotesque, many-coloured, armed with all manner of sharp things,
passed before the Assembly and into the Tuilleries, it might have been a signal
or a warning. The excited citizen makes a poor soldier, but if Paris moves the
whole great body of France stirs. Such giants take long to be fully awake, and
it is a matter of months to drill men; still it is better to let great enemies
sleep. There was in that foolish, amiable crowd, with its pleasure at the sight
of the King, its comic idea of warning him, something serious underlying.
Danton will be using it in a very short time; for there are points of attack
where mobs are like machine-guns—ridiculous in general warfare, but very useful
indeed in special conditions, and in these conditions invincible. This
something serious was that vague force (you may call it only an idea) which you
will never find in an individual, and which you will always discover in a
mass—the great common man which the French metaphysicians have called “La
Peuple;” that, drilled, is called by the least metaphysical an army.
A week
later Lafayette appeared. He demanded the right to use the army, and July opened
with the certainty of civil war.
July is
the month of fevers; the heat has been moving northward, and all France is
caught in it. The grapes fill out, and even in Picardy or in the Cotentin you
feel as though the Midi were giving her spirit to the north. July made the
Revolution and closed it. A month that saw the Bastille fall and that buried
Robespierre is a very national time.
If you
overlook France at this moment, you may see the towns stirring as they had
stirred three years before; it is from them that the opposition
rises—especially from Marseilles. A crowd of young men dragging cannon, the
common-place sons of bourgeois, whom the time had turned into something as
great as peasants or as soldiers, surged up the white deserts along the Rhone,
passing the great sheet of vineyards that slopes up the watershed of Burgundy.
As they came along they sang an excellent new marching song. When they at last
saw Paris, especially the towers of Notre Dame from where they just show above
the city as you come in from Fontainebleau, and as the roads came in together
and the suburbs thickened they sang it with louder voices. On the evening of
the 30th they came to the gates, and the workmen of the south-eastern quarter
began to sing it and called it the “Marseillaise.” No one can describe music;
but if in a great space of time the actions of the French become meaningless
and the Revolution ceases to be an origin, some one perhaps will recover this
air, as we have recovered a few stray notes of Greek music, and it will carry
men back to the Republic.
For ten
days the insurrection grew. In a secret committee which the Sections formed,
men violent like Fournier, or good soldiers like Westermann, or local leaders
of quarters like Santerre—but all outside the official body organised the
fighting force, and at their head the one man who held the strings of the
municipality—Danton. The Assembly had heard Vergniaud’s angry speech, but it
had also confirmed the constitution and the monarchy in the “baiser Lamourette.”
Paris had to work alone, and the King, seeing only Paris before him, filled the
Tuilleries, and stood by with a small garrison to repress the mere movement of
the city—“something that should have been done in ’89.”
It was
on a Paris thus enfevered, doubtful, nursing a secret insurrectionary plan, but
full of men who hesitated and doubted, having still many who were loyal, that
there fell[38] the
document which the King had asked of his friends but which he must, on seeing
it, have regretted—the manifesto of the commander of the allies. This
extraordinary monument of folly is rarely presented in its entirety. It is only
in such a form that its fall monstrosity can be appreciated, and I have
therefore been at pains to translate for my readers the rather halting French
in which Charles William proposed to arrest the movements of Providence. It ran
as follows[39]:—
“Their
Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia having given me the command of
the armies assembled on the French frontier, I have thought it well to tell the
inhabitants of that kingdom the motives that have inspired the measures taken
by the two sovereigns and the intentions that guide them.
“After
having arbitrarily suppressed the rights and the possessions of the German
princes in Alsace and Lorraine, troubled and overset public order and their
legitimate government, exercised against the sacred person of the King and
against his august family violence which is (moreover) repeated and renewed
from day to day, those who have usurped the reins of the administration have at
last filled up the measure by causing an unjust war to he declared against his
Majesty the Emperor, and by attacking his provinces in the Netherlands.
“Several
possessions of the German Empire have been drawn into this oppression, and
several others have only escaped from, a similar danger by yielding to the
imperious threats of the dominant party and its emissaries.
“His
Prussian Majesty with his Imperial Majesty, by the ties of a strict and
defensive alliance, and himself a preponderant member of the Germanic body (sic),
has therefore been unable to excuse himself from going to the aid of his ally
and of his fellow State (sic). And it is under both these heads that he
undertakes the defence of that monarch and of Germany.
“To
these great interests another object of equal importance must be added, and one
that is near to the heart of the two sovereigns: it is that of ending the
domestic anarchy of France, of arresting the attacks which are directed against
the altar and the throne, of re-establishing the legitimate power, of giving
back to the King the freedom and safety of which he is deprived, and of giving
him the means to exercise the lawful authority which is his due.
“Convinced
as they are that the healthy part of the French people abhors the excesses of a
party that enslaves them, and that the majority of the inhabitants are
impatiently awaiting the advent of a relief that will permit them to declare
themselves openly against the odious schemes of their oppressors, His Majesty
the Emperor and His Majesty the King of Prussia call upon them to return at
once to the call of reason and justice, of order, of peace. It is in view of
these things that I, the undersigned, General Commander-in-Chief of the two
armies, declare—
“(i)
That led into the present war by irresistible circumstances, the two allied
courts propose no object to themselves but the happiness of France, and do not
propose to enrich themselves by annexation.
“(2)
That they have no intention of meddling with the domestic government of France,
but only wish to deliver the King, and the Queen, and the Royal Family from
their captivity, and procure for his Most Christian Majesty that freedom which
is necessary for him to call such a council as he shall see fit, without danger
and without obstacle, and to enable him to work for the good of his subjects
according to his promises and as much as may be his concern.
“(3)
That the combined armies will protect all towns, boroughs, and villages, and
the persons and goods of all those that will submit to the King, and that they
will help to re-establish immediately the order and police of France.
“(4)
That the National Guard are ordered to see to the peace of the towns and
country-sides provisionally, and to the security of the persons and goods of
all Frenchmen provisionally, that is, until the arrival of the troops of their
Royal and Imperial Majesties, or until further orders, under pain of being
personally responsible; that on the contrary, the National Guards who may have
fought against the troops of the allied courts, and who are captured in arms,
shall be treated as enemies, and shall be punished as rebels and disturbers of
the public peace.
“(5) That
the generals, officers, non-commissioned officers, and privates of the French
troops of the line are equally ordered to return to their old allegiance and to
submit at once to the King, their legitimate sovereign.
“(6)
That the members of departmental, district, and town councils are equally
responsible with their heads and property for ill crimes, arson, murders,
thefts, and assaults, the occurrence of which they allow or do not openly, and
to the common knowledge, try to prevent in their jurisdiction; that they shall
equally be bound to keep their functions provisionally until his Most Christian
Majesty, reinstated in full liberty, has further decreed; or until, in the
interval, other orders shall have been given.
“(7)
That the inhabitants of towns, boroughs, and villages who may dare to defend
themselves against the troops of their Imperial and Royal Majesties by firing
upon them, whether in the open or from the windows, doors, or apertures of
their houses, shall be punished at once with all the rigour of the laws of war,
their houses pulled down or burnt. All those inhabitants, on the contrary, of
the towns, boroughs, and villages who shall hasten to submit to their King by
opening their gates to the troops of their Majesties shall be placed under the
immediate protection of their Majesties; their persons, their goods, their
chattels shall be under the safeguard of the laws, and measures will be taken
for the general safety of each and all of them.
“(8) The
town of Paris and all its inhabitants without distinction shall be bound to
submit on the spot, and without any delay, to the King, and to give that Prince
full and entire liberty, and to assure him and all the Royal Family that
inviolability and respect to which the laws of nature and of nations entitle
sovereigns from their subjects. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties render
personally responsible for anything that may happen, under peril of their
heads, and of military execution without hope of pardon, all members of the
National Assembly as of the Districts, the Municipality, the National Guards,
the Justices of the Peace, and all others whom it may concern. Their aforesaid
Majesties declare, moreover, on their word and honour as Emperor and King, that
if the Palace of the Tuilleries be insulted or forced, that if the least
violence, the least assault, be perpetrated against their Majesties, the King,
the Queen, and the Royal Family, and if steps be not at once taken for their
safety, preservation, and liberty, they, their Imperial and Royal Majesties,
will take an exemplary and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance, by giving up the
town of Paris to military execution and to total subversion, and the guilty
rebels to the deaths they have deserved. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties
promise, on the contrary, to the inhabitants of Paris to use their good offices
with his Most Christian Majesty to obtain pardon for their faults and errors,
and to take the most vigorous measures to ensure their persons and goods if
they promptly and exactly obey the above command.
“Finally,
since their Majesties can recognise no laws in France save those that proceed
from the King in full liberty, they protest in advance against any declarations
that may be made in the name of his Most Christian Majesty, so long as his sacred
person, those of the Queen and of the Royal Family, are not really safe, for
which end their Imperial and Royal Majesties invite and beg his Most Christian
Majesty to point out to what town in the immediate neighbourhood of his
frontiers he may judge it best to retire with the Queen and the Royal Family,
under good and sure escort that will be sent him for that purpose, in order
that his Most Christian Majesty may be in all safety to call to him such
deputies and counsellors as he sees fit, call such councils as may please him,
see to the re-establishment of order, and arrange the administration of his
kingdom.
“Lastly,
I engage myself, in my own private name and in my aforesaid capacity, to cause
the troops under my command to observe everywhere a good and exact discipline,
promising to treat with mildness and moderation all well-meaning subjects who
may show themselves peaceful and submissive, and to use force with those only
who may be guilty of resistance and of recalcitrance.
“It is
for these reasons that I require and exhort, in the strongest and most instant
fashion, all the inhabitants of this kingdom not to oppose themselves to the
march and operations of the troops under my command, but rather to give them on
all sides a free entry and all the good-will, aid, and assistance that
circumstances may demand.
“Given,
at our headquarters of Coblentz, July 28.
(Signed)
“CHARLES WILLIAM FERDINAND, Duke of Brunswick-Lunebourg.”
With
that weapon the insurrection was certain of all Paris. Mandat, who had replaced
Lafayette at the head of the armed force in the town, was still loyal to the
King; he organised, as far as was possible, the forces that he could count
upon. The other side also prepared, and the movements had all the appearance of
troops entrenching themselves before battle.
Danton
went to Arcis and settled an income on his mother in case of his death, came
back to Paris, and on the night of August the 9th the Sections named
commissioners to act. They met and formed the “insurrectionary commune.” At
eight the next morning they dissolved the legal commune, kept Danton, and
directed the fighting of the morning.
Meanwhile
the King had gathered in the Tuilleries about 6000 men, and depended very
largely upon the thick mass of wooden buildings in the Carrousel for cover. The
Swiss Guard, whom the decree had removed, were only as far off as Rueil, and
were ordered into Paris, over 1500. They were the nucleus, and with them some
2000 of the National Guard, 1500 of the old “Constitutional Guards,” and a
group of “Gentils-hommes.” Mandat had ordered a battery of the National Guard’s
artillery to keep the Pont Neuf; they revolted and joined the people, and
Mandat himself, the chief of the defence, was killed on the steps of the Hotel
de Ville. Danton, who had not slept, but had lain down in Desmoulin’s flat till
midnight, had been to the Hotel de Ville since two in the morning, and he took
before posterity—in his trial—the responsibility of Mandat’s death. He did
more. He acted during the short night (a night of cairn and great beauty, dark
and with stars) as the organiser and chief of the insurrection. Especially he
appoints Santerre to lead the National Guard. On these rapid determinations the
morning broke, and the first hours of the misty day passed in gathering the
forces.
Meanwhile
all morning the King had waited anxiously in the Tuilleries gardens, and asked
Roederer, like a king in comic opera, “when the revolt would begin.”
All
night the tocsin had sounded, but the people were slow to gather—“le tocsin ne
rend pas”—and it was not till the insurrectionary commune had done its work
that a great mob, partly armed, and in no way disciplined, came into the
Carrousel.
Westermann
(riding, as was Santerre) came up to parley with the Swiss Guard; he asked them
in German (which was his native tongue, for he was an Alsatian) to leave the
Tuilleries, and promised that if the guard retired and left the palace
un-garrisoned the people would also retire. The Swiss—the only real soldiers in
Paris—replied that they were under orders, and when Westermann retired to the
crowd they opened fire.
Antoinette
had said, “Nail me to the Palace,” and even Louis, timid and uncertain, thought
that the chances were in his favour. Let only this day succeed, and the city
could be kept quiet till the allies should arrive; that had been the boast in
the Royalist journal of August 1st; it was Louis’s hope now.
Had the
Carrousel been a little more open, the battle might have ended in favour of the
garrison, but the numerous buildings, on the whole, helped the attack, and the
Swiss, unable to deploy, fought, almost singly, a very unequal fight. There
were no volleys except the first. Rapid individual firing from the doors and
windows of the palace, the crowd pressing up through the narrowest space (but
at a loss of hundreds of lives), and finally, by the end which gave on the “Grande
Galerie” the Tuilleries were forced, the garrison killed, and only a small detachment
of the Swiss Guard retreated through the gardens, firing alternate volleys, and
saving themselves by an admirable discipline.
But
while the issue was still doubtful, Louis and his family had gone slowly
through the same gardens to the Riding-school, and had taken refuge with the
Assembly. The noise of the fusillade came sharply in at the windows, and the
event was still uncertain when the Parliament received the King and promised
him protection. The president opened for him a small door at the right of the
chair, and the King and Queen and their children watched the meaningless
resolutions through a grating as they sat in the little dark box that gave them
refuge. The debate, I say, lacked meaning, but the battle grew full of meaning
as they heard it. The shots were less frequent, the noise of the mob—the
roar—was suddenly muffled in the walls of the palace. The crowd had entered it.
Then came the few sharp volleys of the retreating guard right under the windows
of the Manège, and finally the firing ceased, and the Assembly knew that their
oath was of no value, and that the Tuilleries had fallen. Louis also knew it,
eating his grotesque roast chicken in the silent and hidden place that was the
first of his prisons. He saw in the bright light of the hall many of the faces
that were to be the rulers of France, but for himself, in his silence, he felt
all power to be gone. He had become a Capet—there was truth in the Republican
formula. There had been played—though few have said it, it should be said—a very
fine game. The stakes were high and the Court party dared them. They played to
win all that the Kings had possessed, and for this great stake they risked a
few foolish titles without power. The game was even; it was worth playing, and
they had lost. But the man who had been their puppet and their figure-head
hardly knew what had happened. Perhaps the Queen alone comprehended, and from
that moment found the proud silence and the glance that has dignified her end.
In her the legend of the lilies had found its last ally, but now the great
shield was broken for ever.
So
perished the French monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out and lost themselves
in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and recognised its own nature when the
vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian
kings. Look up that vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the
gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white beard
tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the globe and in his right
the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There also are the short, strong horsemen
of the Robertian house, half-hidden by their leather shields, and their sons
before them growing in vestment and majesty, and taking on the pomp of the
Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip the Conquerer; Louis
IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they stand in a widening interminable
procession, this great crowd of kings; they loose their armour, they take their
ermine on, they are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last,
in their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the pride
and the achievement of the French nation. But time has dissipated what it could
not tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has turned these mighty
figures into unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of
darkness, like a pageant all standing still. You look again, but with the
growing light and with the wind that rises before morning they have
disappeared.
[1] He received 12,550 votes, the
great bulk of the limited suffrage. Forty-nine odd votes were cast for Danton,
but he was obviously not candidate (Aulard).
[2] Ami du Peuple, No. 192.
[3] Revolutions de France et Brabant, tom. x. p. 171.
[4] There is a misprint (a very rare
thing with this careful historian) in footnote No. 3, p. 231, of M. Aunlard’s
article on Danton in the Rev. Française for March 14, 1893. For “November”
we should read “September,” for we know that the voting was over on September
16. See Robiquet, Personnel Municipal, p. 373, and the evidence on all
sides that a new poll was ordered on September 17 in his Section.
[5] This big building in the island
next Notre Dame disappeared in the restorations of Viollet le Duc. It was often
used in the revolutionary period for public meetings, and even the Assembly sat
there for a few days after entering Paris in October, and while the
Riding-School was being prepared for it.
[6] Montieur, Old Series, No. 316 (1790).
[7] M. Aulard says “somewhere between
the 10th and the 15th,” and “nous n'avons pas la date precise.” He has probably
overlooked L’Ami du Peuple, No. 290, “Le 14 de ce mois Danton a été
nommé à la place du Sieur Villette.”
[8] Aulard. The other biographers all
assume that he did not resign.
[9] Orateur du Peuple, vol. iii. No. 24.
[10] Ibid., vol. vi. No. 27.
[11] The letter will be found in M.
Etienne Charavay’s Assemblée Electorate, p. 437.
[12] I quote from M. Aulard, Rev.
Française, March 14, 1893.
[13] Note that Lafayette in his Memoirs
(vol. iii. p. 64) talks of Danton “at the head of his battalion.” I doubt an
error on the part of a soldier whose business it was to know his own command.
[14] e.g. that of the quarter of the
Carmelites (ibid.).
[15] Revolutions de France et Brabant, No. 74.
[16] See his Collected Works, vol. xii
pp. 264, 265.
[17] M. Aulard points out an error in
Condorcet’s own note (xii. p. 267), where it is mentioned as the 12th of July;
but the Bouche de Fer of the 10th gives us the above date over these two
speeches.
[18] He wrote a funny little letter
(among other things) to the Républicain of July 16, describing a “mechanical
king,” “who is practically eternal.”
[19] See Socéité des Jacobins,
vol. ii. p. 541.
[20] Moniteur, July 16,
1791.
[21] Ami du Peuple, June 22, 1791.
[22] Révolutions de France et de
Brabant, No. 82.
[23] This is not a rhetorical
exaggeration. It indicates, as will be seen later in the chapter, the very
number that finally formed the garrison of the palace—a point not hitherto
noticed, and well worth remembering, for it shows how Lafayette’s accusations
are half the truth. He had approached Danton, and he had told him many of his
plans. Danton had not acceded, but he used the knowledge.
[24] Révolutions de France et de
Brabant, No. 82.
[25] Appendix II.
[26] On June 24.
[27] I follow Aulard in this as to the
general scheme, and largely as to authorities also.
[28] Aulard is my authority for the
fact that the actual text of this second petition disappeared in 1871, when the
Hotel de Ville was burnt by the Commune, but that Berchez saw it before that
event, and carefully drew up a list of the principal names. Danton is not among
them.
[29] The Courrier Français of
July 22 asks if “the man in holland trousers and a grey waistcoat was Danton,” but
says nothing more.
[30] See the letter published in the Rev.
Française, April 1893, p. 325.
[31] Orateur du Peuple, viii. No. 16. Not
over-trustworthy.
[32] Possibly later. Beugnot seems to
speak as though Danton was still in Troyes on at least as late a date as the
6th of August (Mémoires, i. pp. 249-250).
[33] Since writing the above I notice
that M. Aulard in the same article quotes a remark of Danton’s in the Electoral
Assembly of September 10th. This is taken from the procès verbal of the
Assembly, and M. Gharavay communicated it to M. Aulard.
[34] His election was not declared
till the 7th, but was known on the 6th.
[35] January 20, 1792.
[36] I see in that phrase all Danton’s
attitude upon the war.
[37] There was a minority of seven.
[38] Perhaps as early as the evening
of the 28th.
[39] This account is translated from
the Moniteur, August 3, 1792.