Danton - Introduction

Introduction

Danton was the very soul of the French Revolution. His unique energy and courage was determinant to help save France from for­eign invasions during the most crucial months of the Revolution. Danton would not have become quite a legend without the French Revolution but it may equally be said that the French Revolution, probably, could not have sustained itself without Danton.

Danton, after receiving a good education in a bourgeois family in the East of France, moved to Paris where he became a moderately successful lawyer. He was a big man with a big florid face, rather ugly and scarred by, small pox, with a strong voice and a talent for oratory. He was 30 years old in 1789 when the French Revolution broke out.

In August 1788 the King Louis XVI and his ministers had to accept to call for an Estates General, an assembly composed of rep­resentatives from all over France. The aim was to endorse their pro­posals for solving an acute financial crisis and also to hear the many different grievances coming from all sections of the people.

On May 5 1789, the Estates General met. Then, after weeks of confrontation with the King, the majority of the deputies, mostly bourgeois representatives joined by a few from the nobility and the clergy, declared themselves to be the people's representatives, and formed a National Assembly. That assembly subsequently would be called the Constituent Assembly as it would frame a new Constitution for the country. At the same time, during summer,

From that moment till the middle of 1791, the relations between the King and the Assembly, which took seriously its self-appointed task of reforming and reorganizing France, steadily deteriorated. The King's attempt at fleeing France — which ended in abject failure at Varennes, quite close to the frontier—added to the mistrust. During the same period, the newly created political clubs of Paris gained more and more influence, particularly the Club of Jacobins and the Club of Cordeliers, in which Danton had a towering presence.

In September 1791, the King had no other choice than to ac­cept the new Constitution. He was now the "King of the French", and not the "King of France". This ended centuries of monarchy by divine right. The other monarchies in Europe (Austria, Prussia, England) feared that this revolutionary zeal spread and affect their own people. France was soon at war with several neighbours.

The initial defeats saw the rise of Danton as a leader. He had a decisive role in the fateful day of August 10, 1792, when a mob stormed the Tuileries palace, forcing the royal family to take refuge with the Assembly, thus becoming in effect its prisoners. By the evening, the monarchy had fallen and had been replaced by the first French Republic.

From that day, Paris, with its improvised local government "la Commune", became central to the Revolution. Danton was made minister of Justice. And it is as Minister of Justice that he would passionately arouse the courage of the French people threatened by powerful armies from all sides. Many officers and soldiers, being from the nobility, had gone into exile. Peasants, workmen, small middle-class shop-keepers would then volunteer in great number to enrol in the army for the defence of something that they had started to see as their nation. They went, as Victor Hugo said, "Against the whole of Europe and its captains, . . . the soul without fear and the feet

At the beginning of 1793, the Assembly, by then the Legislative Assembly, voted the death of the King. Danton and his friends voted for the execution.

As the Revolution became ever more radical and was devouring its own children, Danton withdrew to his native place. He was tired of the excesses and the increasing fanaticism. Yet, encouraged by some of his friends he came back to Paris in a bid to end the vicious circle of suspicions, denunciations, arrests and executions called la Terreur. His erstwhile friend and now enemy Robespierre¹ man­aged to get him accused of treason, arrested and judged. Danton was not even allowed to defend himself He was guillotined on April 5, 1794.

Robespierre himself would be executed on July 28, 1794, and this marked the end of the Terror. But the Revolution was still on, and it is only with Napoleon's arrival on the stage that it ended.

The contribution of Danton, as intense as it has been, was remarkably brief a little more than a year. As Hilaire Belloc, a British historian and writer put it, there were thirteen months, during which Danton was the main inspiration of the giant up­heaval. Here is what Belloc writes in the preface of his book Danton A Study published in 1899.

He does not even, as do Robespierre or Mirabeau,² and others, occupy the stage of the Revolution from the first. Till the nation is attacked, his role is of secondary importance. ... But it is only in the saving of France when the men of action were needed, that

1. Maximilien Robespierre (6 May 1758 — 28 July 1794) is one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. He largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror. He was described as being physically unimposing yet immacu­late in attire and personal manners. His supporters called him "The Incorruptible", while his adversaries called him "dictateur sanguinaire" (blood-thirsty dictator).
2. The comte de Mirabeau (9 March 1749 — 2 April 1791) was a French revolutionary, as well as a writer, diplomat, freemason, journalist and French politician. He was a popular orator and statesman. During the Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a constitutional monarchy built on the model of England. He died early and thus did not see the collapse of the French monarchy which he did try to save.

Liberty Guiding the People, painting by Delacroix

he leaps to the front. Then, suddenly, the whole nation and its story becomes filled with his name. For thirteen months, from that 10th of August 1792, which he made, to the early autumn of the following year, Danton, his spirit, his energy, his prac­tical grasp of things as they were, formed the strength of France. While the theorists, from whom he so profoundly differed, were wasting themselves in a kind of political introspection, he raised the armies. ... He formed the Committee to be a dictator for a falling nation. All that was useful in the Terror was his work; and if we trace to their very roots the actions that swept the field and left it ready for rapid organisation and defence, then at the roots we nearly always find his masterful and sure guidance.

There are in the Revolution two features, one of which is almost peculiar to itself, the other of which is in common with all other great crises in history.

The first of these is that it used new men and young men, and comparatively unknown men, to do its best work. ... This fea­ture makes the period unique, and it is due to this feature that so many of the Revolutionary men have no history for us be­fore the Revolution. ... They come out of obscurity, they pass through the intense zone of a search-light; they are suddenly eclipsed upon its further side.

The second of these features is common to all moments of crisis. Months in the Revolution count as years... In every history a group of years at the most, sometimes a year alone, is the time to be studied day by day. In comparison with the intense purpose of a moment whole centuries are sometimes colourless. ...

Belloc's way to look at Danton is to concentrate on the essential thrust of his life. Danton had a destiny, a crucial role to play in the unfolding of one of the biggest events in History, a Revolution which would shake the establishment everywhere in Europe and deeply influence the evolution of societies in the world. This is his contribution and this is what makes him a giant among men what­ever may have been the limitations and defects in his nature which some smaller men who wrote about him keep bringing forth as if

On August 10, 1792, there was indeed a very serious threat that the Revolution could be arrested. Foreign troops were preparing to invade France. The invaders had a very simple plan: re-establish the authority of the King of France and arrest and prosecute the leaders of the mob which was trying to undo the normal order of society. The army commander of the Allies, the Duke of Brunswick, had is­sued on July 25th a Manifesto that read like an ultimatum and was threatening the French people of very severe reprisals. Among other statements, the Manisfesto declared:

Their Majesties the emperor [of Austria] and the king of Prussia having entrusted to me the command of the united armies which they have collected on the frontiers of France, I desire to an­nounce to the inhabitants of that kingdom the motives which have determined the policy of the two sovereigns and the pur­poses which they have in view. [... ]

The city of Paris and all its inhabitants without distinction shall be required to submit at once and without delay to the king, to place that prince in full and complete liberty, and to assure to him, as well as to the other royal personages, the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations demands of subjects toward sovereigns ... Their said Majesties declare, on their word of honor as emperor and king, that if the chateau of  the Tuileries is entered by force or attacked, if the least violence  be offered to their Majesties the king, queen, and royal family,  and if their safety and their liberty be not immediately assured,  they will inflict an ever memorable vengeance by delivering over  the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction, 

and the rebels guilty of the said outrages to the punishment that they merit. . . .

This manifesto, known in Paris by July 28th, inflamed the pop­ular sentiment and reinforced the doubts of many about the loy­alty of the King to France. In fact, it seems that the King himself understood immediately how damaging this manifesto was to his cause and he even denounced it. But his entourage, beginning with the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, was trying to influence him against the Revolution. What made the Brunswick Manifesto even more damaging was the fact that Marie-Antoinette was the daughter of the emperor of Austria. She was in fact called the Austrian by most people in France in a very disparaging way. But beyond the obvious clumsiness of the foreign leaders who unnecessarily let the popular sentiment of the people of France be inflamed in such a way, the menace was indeed formidable. The Prussian army was known to be one of the best in the world and there is little doubt that, if the Allies had been able to capture Paris, it may have led to the collapse of the Revolution and to the restoration of the old regime, at least for some years. The risk was therefore considerable and it is at this point that Danton begun his truly epoch-transforming intervention.

The manifesto made the insurrection of the 10th of August quite inevitable. Danton took the lead when he came back from his na­tive place on the evening of the 9th and organised it. He had prob­ably already decided by that day that the time had come to get rid of royalty in order to save the Revolution. And this is what happened.

Here is an account by Hilaire Belloc of the momentous events of August 10 and of the following months which Danton essentially inspired by the sheer force of his personality and his abiding preoc­cupation with saving France from the great dangers arising from the overthrow of monarchy:

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 the 9th of August the Sections named commissioners to act. They met and formed the "insurrectionary commune." At eight the next

The Storming of the Tuileries palace, painting by Jacques Bertaux - 1793

morning they dissolved the legal commune, kept Danton, and directed the fighting of the morning. [...]

Danton, who had not slept but had lain down in Desmoulin's¹ flat till midnight, had been to the Hotel de Ville since two in the morning ... He acted during the short night (a night of calm and great beauty, dark and with stars) as the organiser and chief of the insurrection. Especially he appointed Santerre² 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. [...]

[The Tuileries Palace has been invaded, most of its garrison killed. The Kingand family went to the Assembly for protection. They were arrested for high treason. Thus fell the centuries-old monarchy.]

The 10th of August is not, in the history of the Revolution, a
turning-point or a new departure merely; it is rather a cataclysm,
the conditions before and after which are absolutely different.

[...]

There is no better test of what the monarchy was than the com­parison of that which came before with that which succeeded its overthrow. There is no continuity. On the far side of the in­surrection, up to the 9th of August itself, you have armies (no­tably that of the centre) contented with monarchy; you have a strong garrison at the Tuileries, the ministers, the departments, the mayor of Paris (even) consulting with the crown. The King and the Girondins are opposed, but they are balanced; Paris is angry and expectant, but it has expressed nothing — it is one of many powers. The moderate men, the Rolands and the rest, are the radical wing. It is a triumph for the Revolution that the Girondins should be again in nominal control.

1. Camille Desmoulins: (March 2, 1760 — April 5, 1794) was a journalist and politi­cian who was a close friend and political ally of Georges Danton. He was arrested and guillotined with him.
2. Antoine Joseph Santerre (16 March 1752 — 6 February 1810) was a businessman and general. He led the people of the St. Antoine district in the successful assault on the Tuileries Palace.

The acute friction is between a government of idealists standing at the head of a group of professional bourgeois, and a crown supported by a resurrected nobility, expecting succour and strong enough to hazard a pitched battle.

Look around you on the 11th of August and see what has hap­pened. Between the two opponents a third has been intervened — Paris and its insurrectionary Commune have suddenly arisen. The Girondins are almost a reactionary party. The Crown and all its scaffolding have suddenly disappeared. The Assembly seems something small, the ministry has fallen back, and there appears above it one man only — Danton, called Minister of Justice, but practically the executive itself. A crowd of names which had stood for discussion, for the Jacobins, for persistent ineffective opposi­tion, appear as masters. In a word, France had for the moment a new and terrible pretender to the vacant throne, a pretender that usurped it at last — the Commune.

The nine months [that followed] ... formed the Republic; ... they are the introduction to the Terror and to the great wars, and from the imprisonment of the King to the fall of the Girondins the rapid course of France is set in a narrowing channel. ... The Commune, the body that conquered in August, is destined to capture every position, and, as one guarantee after another breaks down, it will attain, with its extreme doctrines and their concomitant persecution, to absolute power.

What was Danton's attitude during this period? It may be summed up as follows: Now that the Revolution was finally es­tablished, to keep France safe in the inevitable danger. He put the nation first... The Revolution had conquered: it was there; but France, which had made it and which proposed to extend the principles of self-government to the whole world, was herself in the greatest peril. When discussion had been the method of the Revolution, Danton had been an extremist. He was Parisian and Frondeur in 1790 and 1791; it was precisely in that time that he failed. The tangible thing, the objective to which all his mind leaned, appeared with the national danger; then he had something to do, and his way of doing it, his work in the trade to which he

was born, showed him to be of a totally different kind from the men above whom he showed. I do not believe one could point to a single act of his in these three-quarters of a year which was not aimed at the national defence.

[...] Now, after the insurrection, he became "in himself the ex­ecutive," and later "in himself the Committee." So much is he the first man in France during these few months of his activity, that only by following his actions can you find the unity of this confused and anarchic period.

It falls into four very distinct divisions, both from the point of view of general history and from that of Danton's own life. The first includes the six weeks intervening between the 10th of August and the meeting of the Convention; it is a time al­most without authority; it moves round the terrible centre of the massacres. During this brief time the executive, barely exis­tent, without courts or arms, had him in the Ministry of Justice as their one power — a power unfortunately checked by the anarchy in Paris.

The second division stretches from the meeting of the Convention to the death of the King. It covers exactly four months, from September 1792 to January 1793. It is the time in which the danger of invasion seems lifted, and in which Danton in the Convention is working publicly to reconcile the two par­ties, and secretly to prevent, if possible, the spread of the coali­tion against France.

The third opens with the universal war that follows the death of Louis, and continues to a date which you may fix at the rising of the 10th of March, or at the defeat of Neerwinden on the 19th. Danton is absent with the army during the greater part of these six weeks; he returns ... when things were at their worst, to create the two great instruments which he destined to govern France — the Tribunal and the Committee [of Public Safety]. Finally, for two months, from the establishment of these to the expulsion of the Girondins on the 2nd of June, he is being gradually driven from the attempt at conciliation to the necessi­ties of the insurrection. He is organising and directing the new

1792-1794: External and Internal Fronts

Execution of Louis XVI in the Place de la Revolution, 21 January 1793

Government of the Public Safety, and in launching that new body, in imposing that necessary dictator, we shall see him sac­rificing one by one every minor point in his policy, till at last his most persistent attempt — I mean his attempt to save the Girondins — fails in its turn. Having so secured an irresistible government, and having created the armies, the chief moment of his life was past. It remained to him to retire, to criticise the excesses of his own creation, and to be killed by it.

(from Danton A Study, by Hilaire Belloc, pp.166-175)

The tocsin which is about to sound is no alarm-signal but a sum­mons to charge the foe. To conquer, gentlemen, we must dare, and dare, and dare, and so save France.

Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian revolutionary, seer and poet, saw the greatness in Danton. In his studies of human evolution, Sri Aurobindo gave importance to the French Revolution as one of these rare moments where the Spirit seems to move directly the masses of humanity. For him, the role of Danton in the French Revolution was crucial:

There are times when a single personality gathers up the tem­perament of an epoch or a movement and by simply existing ensures its fulfilment. It would be difficult to lay down the precise services which made the existence of Danton necessary for the success of the Revolution. There are certain things he did, and no man else could have done, which compelled des­tiny; there are certain things he said which made France mad with resolution and courage. These words, these doings ring through the ages. So live, so immortal are they that they seem to defy cataclysm itself and insist on surviving eternal oblivion. They are full of the omnipotence and immortality of the human soul and its lordship over fate. One feels that they will recur

again in aeons unborn and worlds uncreated. The power from which they sprang, expressed itself rarely in deeds and only at supreme moments. The energy of Danton lay dormant, indo­lent, scattering itself in stupendous oratory, satisfied with feel­ings and phrases. But each time it stirred, it convulsed events and sent a shock of primal elemental force rushing through the consciousness of the French nation. [...] Every great flood of action needs a human soul for its centre, an embodied point of the Universal Personality from which to surge out upon others. Danton was such a point, such a centre. His daily thoughts, feel­ings, impulses gave an equilibrium to that rushing fury, a fixity to that pregnant chaos. He was the character of the Revolution personified, — its heart, while Robespierre was only its hand. History which, being European, lays much stress on events, a little on speech, but has never realised the importance of souls, cannot appreciate men like Danton. Only the eye of the seer can pick them out from the mass and trace to their source those immense vibrations.

This statement of Sri Aurobindo goes straight to the core of Danton's being. This is why his life, as brief as it was, has been so important in the long struggle of man's evolution. At the time of the greatest crisis, when the gains of the nascent revolution could have been trampled under the boot of foreign armies, alone he stood, like a massive presence, giving heart and direction to the people of France.

In the following pages, we shall try to evoke Danton through a few texts which, we feel, do justice to the true character of this great man. A few extracts of some of his most famous speeches are also presented. In appendices, a brief history of the French Revolution is given as well as a time-line.

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