Danton
A STUDY

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC, B.A.
LATE BRACKENBURY SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE,
OXFORD

New York
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1899

TO
ANTHONY HENLEY

PREFACE

An historian of just pre-eminence in his university and college, in a little work which should be more widely known, has summed up the two principal characters of the Revolution in the following phrases: “the cold and ferocious Robespierre, the blatant Danton.”[1] The judgment is precipitate and is tinged with a certain bias.

An authority of still greater position prefaces his notebook on the Revolution by telling us that he is going to describe the beast.[2] The learned sectarian does not conceal from his readers the fact that a profound analysis had led to a very pronounced conviction. So certain is he of his ground, that he treats with equal consideration the evidence of printed documents, of autograph letters, and of a chance stranger speaking in a country inn of a thing that had happened forty years before.

The greatest of French novelists and a principal poet has given us in “Quatre-vingt-treize” a picture moving and living. Yet even in that work much is admitted, for the sake of contrast and colour, which no contemporary saw. The dialogue between Danton and Marat, with its picturesque untruths, is an example.[3]

If facts so conflicting be stated as true by men of such various calibre, it would seem a very difficult task to write history at all. Yet there is a method which neither excludes personal conviction, nor necessitates the art of deceit, nor presupposes a primitive ignorance.

It is to ascertain what is positively known and can be proved, and with the facts so gathered—only with these—to paint a picture as vivid as may be; on a series of truths—with research it grows to respectable proportions—to base a conviction, general, wide, and capable of constant application, as to the character of a period or of a man.

Such was the method of Fustel de Coulanges, and on his model there has arisen from the minute, the sometimes pedantic accuracy of French scholars, a school which is the strongest in Europe.

The method I have been describing has also this advantage, that the least learned may enter upon such a path without confusion and may progress, and that a book of no pretensions can yet, by following these rules, at least avoid untruth. With inferior tools, and on an over-rough plan, I shall yet attempt in this life of Danton to follow the example.

The motto which is printed at the head of this book, and which is borrowed from the most just of biographers, must give a note to the whole of my description. What was the movement which founded our modern society? what were its motives, its causes of action, its material surroundings? And what was the man who, above all others, represented that spirit at its most critical moment?

To find a right answer to such questions it is necessary to do two things.

First, we must make the sequence of cause and effect reasonable. In giving an explanation or in supposing a motive, we must present that which rational men, unbiassed, will admit. To put in the same character irreconcilable extremes is to leave no picture. To state a number of facts so that no thread connects them, so that they surprise by contrast but leave only confusion in the mind, is a kind of falsehood. It is the method most adopted by partisans; they frame a theory upon the lines of which such and such facts will lie, but they omit, or only mention as anomalies, facts which are equally true, but which would vitiate their conclusions. We must (to use a mathematical metaphor) integrate the differentials of history; make a complete and harmonious whole of a hundred aspects; strike a curve which shall unite in a regular fashion what has appeared as a number of scattered points. Till we can say, “This man—seeing all his character and innumerable known acts—could not have acted as such and such a report would have us believe;” or again, till we can say, “This epoch, with its convictions, its environment, its literature, could not have felt the emotions which such and such an historian lends it,”—till we can say this, we do not understand a personality or a period.

In the second place, we must recognise in all repeated and common expressions of conviction, and in all the motives of a time of action, some really existing ideal. There was a conviction common to many thousands of Parliamentarians in the earlier stages of the English Civil War. There was a genuine creed in the breasts of the well-paid Ironsides of its later period. There was a real loyalty and an explicable theory of kingship in the camp of Charles the First.

So in the period of which we deal there was a clear doctrine of political right, held by probably the strongest intellects, and defended by certainly the most sustained and enthusiastic courage that ever adorned a European nation. We must recognise the soul of a time. For were there not a real necessity for sympathy with a period which we study, were it possible for us to see entirely from without, with no attempt to apprehend from within, then of many stupendous passages in history we should have to assert that all those who led were scoundrels, that all their lives were (every moment of them) a continuous piece of consummate acting; that our enemies, in fine, were something greater and more wicked than men. We should have to premise that all the vigour belonged to the bad, and all the ineptitude to the good, and separate humanity into two groups, one of righteous imbeciles, and the other of genius sold to hell. No one would wish, or would be sincerely able to place himself in either category.

We must postulate, then, of the Revolution that which Taine ridiculed, that for which Michelet lived, and that which Carlyle never grasped—the Revolutionary idea. And we must read into the lives of all the actors in that drama, and especially of the subject of this book, some general motive which is connected with the creed of the time. We must make his actions show as a consonant whole—as a man’s—and then, if possible, determine his place in what was not an anarchic explosion, but a regular, though a vigorous and exceedingly rapid development.

A hundred difficulties are at once apparent in undertaking a work of this nature. It is not possible to give a detailed history of the Revolution, and yet many facts of secondary importance must be alluded to. It is necessary to tell the story of a man whose action and interest, nay, whose whole life, so far as we know it, lies in less than five years.

Danton’s earlier life is but a fragmentary record, collected by several historians with extreme care, and only collected that it may supplement our knowledge of his mature career. The most laborious efforts of his biographers have found but a meagre handful of the facts for which they searched; nor does any personal inquiry at his birthplace, from what is left of his family or in his papers, augment the materials: the research has been thoroughly and finally made before this date, and its results, such as they are, I have put together in the second chapter of this book.

He does not even, as do Robespierre, Mirabeau, and others, occupy the stage of the Revolution from the first.

Till the nation is attacked, his rôle is of secondary importance. We have glimpses more numerous indeed, and more important, of his action after than before 1789. But it is only in the saving of France, when the men of action were needed, that 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. When the orators could only find great phrases to lead the rage against Dumouriez’ treason, 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. If ever a nation called out men as they were, apart from family, from tradition, from wealth, and from known environment, it was France in the Revolution. The national need appears at that time like a captain in front of his men in a conscript army. He knows them each by their powers, character, and conduct. But they are in uniform; he cares nothing for their family or their youth; he makes them do that for which each is best fitted. 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. It is this feature which makes their biographies a vividly concentrated account of action in months rather than in years. 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, and this furnishes our excuse for giving as a biography so short a space in a man’s life. But it is just so to do. 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.

Thus in the political history of the English thirteenth century, the little space from the Provisions of Oxford to the battle of Evesham is everything; in the study of England’s breach with the Continental tradition, the period between the Ridolphi plot and the Armada; in the formation of the English oligarchy, the crisis of April to December 1688.

This second feature, the necessity for concentration, would excuse a special insistence on the two years of Danton’s prominence, even if his youth were better known. The two conditions combined make imperative such a treatment as I have attempted to follow.

As to authorities, three men claim my especial gratitude, for the work in this book is merely a rearrangement of the materials they have collected. They are Dr. Bougeart, who is dead (and his clear Republicanism brought upon him exile and persecution); M. Aulard, the greatest of our living writers on the Revolutionary period; and Dr. Robinet, to whose personal kindness, interest, and fruitful suggestion I largely owe this book. The keeper of the Carnavalet has been throughout his long and laborious life the patient biographer of Danton, and little can now be added to the research which has been the constant occupation of a just and eminent career.

We must hope, in spite of his great age, to have from his hands some further work; for he is one of those many men who have given to the modern historical school of France, amid all our modern verbiage and compromise, the strength of a voice that speaks the simple truth.

DANTON
A STUDY

This Portrait is presumably a David, both from its style and from the fact that it is the companion picture to that of Madame Danton which is certainly by that master. Its date is either the Autumn of 1792 or possibly early 1793. It is mentioned by Madame Chapin, Danton’s sister-in-law, in a letter which she writes during the Empire to the two boys, Danton’s sons: she says “I am sending you the portrait of your Father ... it has been retouched ... the coat especially has been made dark-blue, as that is the colour he ordinarily wore. Madame Dupin,” (Danton’s second wife) “has just seen it and calls it a striking likeness.” Both this letter and the picture are in the possession of Dʳ Robinet, to whom they were given by Danton’s grand-daughter & by whose permission this portrait is reproduced.

CONTENTS

THE
LIFE OF DANTON

CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION

Before writing a life of Danton in English it is necessary to do three things. First, to take a definite point of view with regard to the whole revolutionary movement; secondly, to explain, so far as is possible, the form which it took in France; thirdly, to show where Danton stood in the scheme of events, the nature of his personality, the effects of his brief action. This triple task is necessary to a book which, but for it, would be only a string of events, always confused, often without meaning.

What was the Revolution? It was essentially a reversion to the normal—a sudden and violent return to those conditions which are the necessary bases of health in any political community, which are clearly apparent in every primitive society, and from which Europe had been estranged by an increasing complexity and a spirit of routine.

It has never been denied that the process of gradual remoulding is a part of living, and all admit that the State (which lives like any other thing) must suffer such a process as a condition of health. There is in every branch of social effort a necessity for constant reform and check: it is apparent to the administrator of every kind: it is the business of a politician continually to direct and apply such correction:—the whole body of the law of England is a collection of the past results of this guiding force.

But what are the laws that govern it? What is the nature of the condition that makes reform imperative? What distinguishes the good from the bad in the matter of voluntary change, and separates the conservative from the destructive effort?

It is in the examination of this problem that we may discover how great a debt the last century owed to nature—a debt which demanded an immediate liquidation, and was often only paid at the expense of violence.

It would seem that the necessity of reform arises from this, that our ideas, which are eternal, find themselves expressed in phrases and resulting in actions which belong to material environment—an environment, therefore, that perpetually changes in form. It is not to be admitted that the innermost standards of the soul can change; if they could, the word “reform” would lose all moral meaning, and a thing not being good would cease to be desired. But the meaning of words, the effect on the senses of certain acts, the causes of pleasure and pain in a society, the definition of nationality—all these things of their nature change without ceasing, and must as ceaselessly be brought into accordance with the unchanging mind.

What test can be applied by which we may know whether a reform is working towards this rectification or not? None, except the general conviction of a whole generation that this or that survival obstructs the way of right living, the mere instinct of justice expressed in concrete terms on a particular point. It is by this that the just man of any period feels himself bound. This is not a formula: it seems a direction of the loosest and of the most useless kind; and yet to observe it is to keep the State sane, to neglect it is to bring about revolution. This much is sure, that where there exists in a State a body of men who are determined to be guided by this vague sense of justice, and who are in sufficient power to let it frame their reforms, then these men save a State and keep it whole. When, on the contrary, those who make or administer the laws are determined to abide by a phrase or a form, then the necessities accumulate, the burden and the strain become intolerable, and the gravitation towards the normal standard of living, which should act as a slight but permanent force, acts suddenly at a high potential and with destructive violence.

As an example of the time when the former and the better conditions prevailed, I would cite the period between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, when a change of the most fundamental kind passed over the society of Europe, indeed a change from barbarism to civilisation, and yet the whole went well. Reform, being continual, was easy. New institutions, the Parliaments, the Universities, the personal tax, rose as they were demanded, and the great transition was crowned with the security and content that surrounded St. Louis. Simplicity, that main condition of happiness, was the governing virtue of the time. The king ruled, the knight fought, the peasant dug in his own ground, and the priest believed.

It is the lack of simplicity that makes of the three centuries following the fifteenth (with vices due perhaps to the wickedness of the fifteenth) an opposite example. Every kind of phrase, emblem, or cloak is kept; every kind of living thing is sacrificed. Conditions cease to be flexible, and the body of Europe, which after all still breathes, is shut in with the bonds of the lawyers, and all but stifled.

In the sixteenth century one would say that the political quarrels of the princes were a mere insult to nature, but the people, though they are declining, show that they still exist; the passions of their religions enliven the dead game of the Tudors and the Valois. In the seventeenth the pedants give their orders, the upper classes fight the princes, the people are all but silent. Where were they in the Fronde, or in that less heroic struggle the Parliamentary Wars? As the eighteenth century falls further and further into decay all is gone; those who move in comfort above the souls which they have beneath them for a pavement, the rich and the privileged, have even ceased to enjoy their political and theological amusements; they are concerned only with maintaining their ease, and to do this they conjure with the name of the people’s memories.

They build ramparts of sacred tombs, and defend themselves with the bones of the Middle Ages, with the relics of the saint and the knight.

It is this which necessitates and moulds the Revolution. The privileged men, the lawyers especially, held to the phrase. They excused themselves in a time most artificial by quoting the formulæ of a time when life was most natural and when the soul was nearest the surface. They used the name of the Middle Ages precisely because they thought the Middle Ages were dead, when suddenly the spirit of the Middle Ages, the spirit of enthusiasm and of faith, the Crusade, came out of the tomb and routed them.

I say, then, that the great disease of the time preceding the Revolution came from the fact that it had kept the letter and forgotten the spirit. It continued to do the same things as Europe at its best—it had entirely neglected to nourish similar motives. Let me give an extreme example. There are conditions under which to burn a man to death seems admissible and just. When offences often occur which society finds heinous beyond words, then no punishment seems sufficient for the satisfaction of the emotion which the crime arouses. Thus during the Middle Ages (especially in the latter part of their decay), and sometimes in the United States to-day, a man is burned at the stake. But there are other conditions under which a society shrinks with the greatest horror from such a punishment. Security is so well established, conviction in this or that so much less firm, the danger from the criminal so much less menacing, that the idea of such an extreme agony revolts all men. Then to burn is wrong, because it is unnecessary and undesired. But let us suppose the lawyers to be bent on a formula, tenacious from habit and become angrily tenacious from opposition, saying that what has been shall be; and what happens? The Parliament of Strasbourg condemns a man to be burnt while the States General are actually in session in 1789!

Again, take the example of the land. There was a time when the relations of lord and serf satisfied the heart. The village was a co-operative community: it needed a protector and a head. Even when such a need was not felt, the presence of a political personage, at the cost of a regular and slight tax, the natural affection which long habit had towards a family and a name—these made the relation not tolerable, but good. But when change had conquered even the permanent manorial unit, and the serf owned severally, tilling his private field; when the political position of the lord had disappeared, and when the personal tie had been completely forgotten—then the tax was folly. It was no longer the symbol of tenure drawn in a convenient fashion, taken right out of the cornfield from a primitive group of families; it had become an arbitrary levy, drawn at the most inconvenient time, upsetting the market and the harvest, and falling on a small farmer who worked painfully at his own plot of ground.

It is difficult to explain to English readers how far this deadening conservatism had been pushed on the Continent. The constitution of England and the habits of her lawyers and politicians were still, for all their vices, the most flexible in Europe. Even Pitt could tinker at the representative system, and an abominable penal code could be softened without upsetting the whole scheme of English criminal law. To this day we notice in England the most fundamental changes introduced, so to speak, into an unresisting medium: witness those miniature revolutions, the Income Tax and Employers’ Liability, which are so silent, and which yet produce results so immeasurable.

It has always been a difficulty in writing of the Revolution for English readers, that in England the tendency to reform, though strong, was not irresistible. It was a desire, but it was not a necessity, and that on account of the quality which has just been mentioned, the lack of form and definition in the English constitution and legal habit.

But if we go a little deeper we shall see a further cause. Nothing will so deaden the common sense of justice in a legislator or a lawyer, nothing will separate him so much from the general feeling of his time, as distinction of class from class. When a man cannot frequently meet and sympathise with every kind of man about him, then the State lacks homogeneity; the general sentiment is unexpressed, because it has no common organ of expression, and you obtain in laws and legal decisions not the living movement of the citizens, but the dead traditions of a few.

Now by a peculiar bent of history, the stratification of society which is so natural a result of an old civilisation, was less marked in England than elsewhere in Europe. The society of the Continent is not more homogeneous to-day, as contrasted with that of modern England, than was the society of England a hundred years ago, as contrasted with that of the Continent then; and any English traveller who is wise enough to note in our time the universal type of citizen in France, will experience something of the envy that Frenchmen felt when they noted the solid England of the eighteenth century. There great lawyers were occasionally drawn from the people; there a whole mass of small proprietors in land or capital—half the people perhaps—kept the balance of the State, and there a fluctuating political system could, for all its corruption, find a place for the young bourgeois Wolfe to defeat the great gentleman Montcalm.

But while in England reform was possible (though perhaps it has been fatally inadequate), in the rest of Europe it was past all hope. Everywhere there must be organs of government, and these on the Continent could no longer be changed, whether for better or worse: they had become stiff with age, and had to be supplanted. Now to supplant the fundamental organs of government, to make absolutely new laws and to provide an absolutely new machinery—all this is to produce a violent revolution.

You could not reform such a body as the Châtelet, nor replace by a series of statutes or of decisions such a mass as the local coûtumes. Not even a radical change in the system of taxation would have made the noblesse tolerable; no amount of personal energy nor any excellence of advisers could save a king enveloped with the mass of etiquette at Versailles. These numerous symptoms of the lethargy that had overtaken European society, even the disease itself, might have been swept away by a sharp series of vigorous reforms. Indeed, some of these reforms were talked of, and a few actually begun in the garrulous courts of Berlin and of St. Petersburg. Such reforms would have merited, and would have obtained, the name of Revolution, but they might have passed without that character of accompanying excess which has delayed upon every side the liberties of Europe. We should be talking of the old regime and of the Revolution as we do now, but the words would have called up a struggle between old Parliaments and young legists, between worn-out customs and new codes, between the kings of etiquette and the kings of originality, between sleep and the new science; the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries would have been united by some curious bridge—not separated by an abyss.

As it is, the word Revolution recalls scenes almost as violent as those which marked the transition of Rome from the Republic to the Empire. We remember the name not of Condorcet but of Marat: in place of the divided Europe and complicated struggle which (on the analogy of the Reformation) should have attended a movement upon which sympathy was so evenly divided, in place of a series of long, desultory campaigns, you have a violent shock of battle between the French and every government in Europe; you have the world outlawing a people; you have, as a direct consequence of such a pressure, the creation of a focus from whose extreme heat proceeds the conquering energy of Napoleon. Blows terrible and unexpected are struck in the first four years of the war, and there appears in 1796 a portent—the sword that was not broken until it had cut down and killed the old society of the West.

To all these accidents which flow from the form the Revolution took, one more must be added, and that the most important. The shock was of such violence that all the old bonds broke. I mean the permanent things which hold society together, not the dead relics, which would in any case have disappeared.

Many great changes have passed over Europe and have left the fundamentals untouched; the Revolution, which might so easily have remoulded the shape of society, did more and possibly worse: it rebuilt from the foundations. How many unquestioned dogmas were suddenly brought out into broad daylight! All our modern indecision, our confused philosophies, our innumerable doubts, spring from that stirring of the depths. Is property a right? May men own land? Is marriage sacred? Have we duties to the State, to the family? All these questions begin to be raised. A German Pole has denied the sequence of cause and effect. Occasionally a man suddenly rises and asks, “Is there a God?” There is nothing left in reserve for the amusement of posterity.

Well, this unexampled violence, which, like the wind on the Red Sea, has bared for a moment things that had lain hidden for centuries—this war of twenty years and its results were due to the fact that the Revolution, which might have started in a different form from almost any European centre, started as fact from France.

That France was the agent of the reform is the leading condition of the whole story, for it was her centralisation that made the change so rapid and so effectual, her temperament that framed the abstract formulæ which could spread like a religion, her political position in Europe that led to the crusade against her; and this war in its turn (acting on a Paris that led and governed the nation) produced all the further consequences of the Revolution from the Terror to Waterloo.

Let us examine the conditions of the Revolution as a purely French thing, see what it was that made it break out when it did, what guided its course, what gave Paris its position, what led to the wars and the Terror.

In the first place, the causes of the Revolutionary movement in France. They were two: First, the immediate material necessity for reform which coincided with the Revolutionary period; secondly, the philosophy which had permeated society for a generation, and which, when once a change was undertaken, guided and controlled the development of that change.

As for the material circumstances that led to so urgent a necessity for reform, they may be stated as follows:—The governmental machinery, which had been growing more and more inefficient, had finally broken down; and this failure had been accelerated by a series of natural accidents, the most prominent among them being two successive years of scarcity.

Now why was France alone in such a deplorable condition? Why was she all but bankrupt, her navy in rapid decay, her armies ill-clothed, ill-fed, in arrears of pay? Why could Arthur Young, observant, honest, and inept, make his tour through France (in which the mass of accurate detail is balanced by so astounding a misconception of French society[4]), and in that book describe the land going out of cultivation, the peasant living on grass, the houses falling down, the roads impassable? The answer is discovered in the very causes that led to the past greatness of the country. Because France alone in Europe was a vast centralised body—a quality which had made the reign of Louis XIV.; because centralisation could not continue to work under the old regime—a condition which led to the abrupt wreck of 1788 and 1789.

The government of France, in the century preceding the Revolution, might be compared to a great machine made with admirable skill out of the disjointed parts of smaller engines; a machine whose designer had kept but a single end in view—the control of all the works by one lever in the hand of one man. But (to continue the metaphor) the materials to which his effort had been confined forbade simplicity; the parts would be repaired with difficulty, or sometimes not at all; the cleaning and oiling of the bearings was neglected, of necessity, on account of their position; and after two generations of work the machine had ceased its functions. It was clogged upon every side and rusty—still dependent upon one lever, but incapable of movement.

France had become a despotism, but a despotism which lacked organisation; all centred in the king, with the result that none could act but he, and yet, when he strove to act, the organs of action were useless. All had been made dependent upon one fountain-head, yet every channel was stopped up.

It is of the utmost importance in studying the Revolution to appreciate this fact: that nearly every part of the national life was sound, with the exception of the one supreme function of government. I do not mean that France and the world needed no new ideas, nor that a material change in the form of the executive would have sufficed for society. But I mean that, more than is usually the case in a time of crisis, a political act was the supreme need of the moment.

Capital was not well distributed, but at least it was not centralised as it is in our modern industrial societies. All men owned; the peasant was miserable beyond words, but his misery was not the result of an “Economic Law;” it was due to that much more tangible thing, misgovernment. The citizen was apathetic, but potentially he was vigorous and alert. If he knew nothing of the jury or of public discussion, it was the system oppressing the man, not the man creating, or even permitting, the system. In a word, the vices or the misfortunes of France were not to be traced to the character of the social system or of the national temper. They were to be found in an artificial centre, the Government.

Now of all governments a pure despotism can most quickly establish reforms. In Russia the serfs were freed, the Jews expelled, by a stroke of the pen; in India you may see great financial experiments, great military groups, come into being almost simultaneously with the decision that creates them. Why could not the central government have saved France? Because on every side its action was deadened by dead things, which it pretended were alive; because throughout the provinces and towns there lay thick the corpses of what had once been local institutions, and because so far from the Crown removing these, it had left to them the privileges which at one time were the salaries of their activity, but which had now become a kind of bribe to continue inactive.

How had this come about? How had a government been developed whose note was centralisation and despotism, and which yet carefully preserved the fossils of local administration?

To answer that question it is necessary to consider the original matter of which French society was composed and the influences that modified without destroying this matter in the course of the Middle Ages. The French, like every other national group in Western Europe, may be said to have differentiated from the mere ruins of the Empire in that dark period which follows the death of Charlemagne; until that epoch some shadow of unity remained, and certainly the forces working against unity had not yet begun to be national. The order of Rome, which had remained as an accepted ideal for five hundred years, takes under Charlemagne a certain substance and reality, as mystical and as strange, as full of approaching doom and yet as actual as a momentary resurrection from the dead. It ceases with the close of his reign, and what Dr. Stubbs has well called “the darkness of the ninth century” comes down.

The northern pirates fall on the north and west, and cut off the islands from the mainland, giving us in England the barrier of the Danish invasions, beyond which Anglo-Saxon history grows dim; they crush out the customs, and even the religion, of the coasts of the Continent. The Hungarian certainly, the heathen Slavs of the Baltic presumably, cut in streams through the Germanic tribes. The Saracens held the Mediterranean. Society fell back upon its ultimate units; in all that mechanical disintegration the molecules of which it is composed remained. The village community, self-sufficing, self-contained, alone preserved an organisation and a life.

For more than a century it hung upon a thread whether the Roman tradition should survive, or whether our civilisation should fall into the savagery which has apparently been elsewhere the fate of systems almost as strong. A new thing arose in Europe, destined more than any other factor to deflect the current of its Latin tradition. There was found, when the light began to grow upon this darkness, in nearly every village a little king. Whichever men had in the old times been possessed of power, local officials, large owners of land, leaders in the great armies, emerge from the cataclysm welded into one new class—the nobles; and with the appearance of this caste, with the personal emotions and the strong local feeling that their system developed, Europe becomes a feudal society. But that society contained another element, which was destined to control and at last to destroy the feudality. For strangely enough, this period, which had thrown Europe into such anarchy, had produced an idea the very opposite of such a character. The nationalities begin to arise. The kings—weak shadows—nobles, often of small power, but no longer the mere leaders of armies, become symbols of a local unit, separated from the Empire. They stood for the nation round which the patriotism that you will discover in the old epics was to gather.

France, more perhaps than any of the new divisions, illustrates all this. A small weak king, one Capet, was elected from among the nobles at the end of the tenth century, and the family which ultimately toppled over from the immensity of its burden, descended from him in direct line from father to son through more than eight hundred years.

In the early years of that crusading century which is the vigorous opening of the life that was to produce our Europe, a discovery was made which was destined to help this new kingship to take a very different shape. In the loot of Amalfi, in a petty war, the Roman Code of Law was rediscovered.

It had the effect which might be imagined in a barbarous society which the Normans and Hildebrand had at last aroused. It suddenly gave a text and an accurate guide to those splendid but vague memories of Imperial order and civilisation.

Everywhere the Universities arise; from Bologna come out the corporation of the lawyers, the students of the code, the men whose decisions were final, who led mediæval society as the scientists lead ours to-day; and everywhere they tended to the two bases of the Roman idea—absolute sovereignty in the case of the State, absolute ownership in the case of the Individual.

The logical end of such a movement should have been the Empire—citizens all equal before the law, the feudal system destroyed, the Church dominated by the State, the will of the prince supreme. But Europe contained a hundred elements beside the lawyers, though these were the most permanent and active force of her civilisation. The Manorial unit was strong; there are places where it survives to-day.[5] The aristocracy was strong. In Poland and England it ended by conquering the Crown and the Roman law. The Church, affected as it was by the new ideas, still had a host of anomalous habits and institutions, grown up since the fall of the Empire.

In the anarchy of the dark ages the framework of intense local differences had been constructed; the village, the guild, the chapter, each had their special customs born of isolation. Finally, the spirit of secondary nationalities was powerful in many places; notably among the Germans it conquered every other tendency.

Now France was especially favourable to the growth of the influences of this law; she was very Roman by tradition, and by tradition Imperial. Charlemagne had left his clothes to Germany, but his spirit to Gaul. The sub-nationalities, Provence, Normandy, the Gascons, had, in spite of their local patriotism, epics in which they harped on “Doulce France Terre Majeure.” But though the national forces on the whole inclined towards the lawyers and the Crown, the path by which absolute centralisation could be reached was tortuous and had to be well chosen. The nobles are slowly bereft of political power, but their privilege remains; the peasant gradually acquires the land, but many feudal dues lie on a tenure which has lost all its feudal meaning. The Church becomes the king’s, but it remains in administration of its vast possessions: to the last the Crown works through (or attempts to work through) the local organisation that was once supreme and is fast dying.

You may compare the progress of the Capetians towards absolute power to the action of a gentleman who obtains an estate at the cost of perpetual bribery, and finds himself crippled when he has at last succeeded.

Finally, the lawyers themselves become sterilised in the general decay which their policy has created. Even the Crown is half-allied to the privileged bodies in practice, and altogether allied in sentiment; the government which had for centuries created and sustained the people now found itself remote from them and the source of its power cut off.

I will give but a couple of examples to illustrate the centralisation and the hopeless confusion that accompanied it. The first is from De Tocqueville. A village near Paris wished to raise a small local rate to mend the steeple of the church. They could not do so without appealing to Versailles. The leave was granted after two years, but the steeple had broken down. The second is from the records of the election of ’89. In a bailiwick of Champagne it was discovered that no one accurately knew the boundaries of the district, that the next bailiwick was similarly ignorant, and finally an arbitrary line was drawn. This is one out of dozens of cases. The population of Paris was not known; the number of electors in every division was uncertain.

Such was the France in which reform was necessary. The land, by a continual and misdirected interference with exchange, was going out of cultivation—or rather (for even in the worst cases of depression this symptom is rare) it was yielding less and less as time went on.

The classes into which society was divided had become separated by an etiquette as rigorous as a religion, and though the thing has gone, the phrases that described it are vigorous to this day, and lead continually to the gravest misconception. A France where one Frenchman has grown so like another still lets its literature run upon some of the old lines.

Five great divisions should especially be noticed in connection with the Revolution—the peasants, the artisans, the middle class, the professionals, the noblesse; and side by side with these, a separate thing, the Church, sharply divided into the higher and lower clergy. Let me, at the risk of some digression, enter into the details of these various groups.

The peasants were the majority of the nation, as they are to-day. At a rough guess, out of some five million heads of families, three and a half at least were of this class. What were they? They were more ignorant, more fearful, and more unhappy than ever the inhabitants of French soil had been before. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the worst of the barbarian invasions had not produced among them such special and intense misery as had the running down of the governmental machine in the eighteenth century. Their songs had ceased. Search the folk-lore of France, and you will find a kind of gap after the centralisation was complete, and after the lords had left them—after the seventeenth century. It is as though that oldest sign of communal life, the traditions and the stories of the little circle of the village, had died just before the death of the village itself. As to religion, with which all this natural and fertile love of legend is so closely knit, it lingered, but it lingered hardly. The priest still survived, but his action was cut off by penury; in places the extreme physical needs of the peasantry, whose lot he shared, entered into his life to an intolerable degree, and a half-paganism resulted. Twenty, thirty pounds a year is not enough for the celibate who holds the sacramental power in the village. I will show you in the rural communes of France church after church part of whose buildings are very old, part very new: and what is the reason? That in all these places the church fell into ruins till the new State came to rebuild it. You may discover many cases of restoration in the eighteenth century where a great cathedral or a famous church or abbey is renewed: it is the work of the upper clergy, and the dole out of their vast fortunes. In the villages such cases are rare and eccentric. The Revolution, for all its antagonism, gave to the Faith a new life. There are to-day more monasteries and convents, more of the clergy, both regular and secular, by far more missionaries, than there were in 1789, but there are fewer bishops.

The peasant owned land, his roof and a few acres beside; he had been buying for generations, and the drift of the law when it turned feudal tenant-right into ownership was in his favour. But this ownership of the land, the foundation of his future citizenship, was for the moment his curse. It made him an independent man, while he still had to pay the dues of his feudal dependence. And independence works both ways. He stood, ignorant and extremely poor, face to face with the all-powerful State. His natural support and guide had left the village for the court; the lord was nothing more than a name for endless annoyance and local exaction. The symptom that comes just before death showed itself in the ploughman and the labourer in the vineyard. He lost heart; he was too tired and too beaten to work; the great burden of the State, its taxes, its follies, had accumulated on his shoulders, and had bent them so low that he could no longer stir the earth with vigour into harvests.

Such men did not make the Revolution; they were the inert mass upon which it worked. They did not sing the war-songs; they did not understand the meaning of the invasions. No peasant marked the assemblies with the sense or cunning of the fields, the sound of patois was lacking in the great chorus, and as you read the Revolution you feel continually the lack of something closely in touch with Nature, because the most French of all Frenchmen had forgotten how to speak.

The Revolution has made them; and to this day the heirs of the Republic wonder at the peasant in his resurrection. From him come the humour, the gaiety, the manhood; it is his presence in the suffrage that criticises and tones down the crudities of political formulæ. He has re-created a host of songs, he has turned all France into a kind of walled garden; underneath the politicians, and in spite of them, he is working out the necessary thing which shall put flesh on to the dry bones of the Revolution,—I mean the reconciliation of the Republic and the Church.

As to the artisans, they play in the story of the movement a subsidiary but an interesting part. The artisans (in the sense in which I use the term) were found only in the great towns. At least the artisans outside these centres must be reckoned as part of the peasantry, for their spirit was that of the village. These craftsmen of the towns did not form a large percentage of the nation. Perhaps half-a-million families—perhaps a trifle more. But their concentration, the fact that they could come in hundreds and hear the orators, the fact that they alone, by the accidents of their position, could form mobs, these were the causes of their peculiar effect upon the Revolutionary movement.

Like the peasant, the ouvrier gives hardly any type to politics. If we except Hébert, on the strength of his being a vagabond ticket-collector, there is hardly any one of prominence who comes from the labourers in the towns. But the combined effort of the class was great and was as follows:—It furnished for the party of revolt an angry and ready army of the streets; it was capable of follies and of violence almost unlimited; it was capable also of concentration and common action. It filled the tribunes of the clubs, and more than once terrorised the Parliament. It was patriotic, but wofully suspicious; and in all it did the main fault was a lack, or rather a dislike, of delay, of self-criticism, and of self-control: the ruling passion anger, and the motive of this anger the partial information, the extreme false idea, of the political movement, which it was willing to read into every speech delivered.

I will attempt to say why this character, the worst and the most dangerous of the period, was developed in the labour of the towns. In the first place, the industrial system is of itself fatal to the French character. It is not in the traditions of the nation; it is opposed to the tendencies which the most superficial observer can discover in them. The Frenchman saves and invests in small parcels, loves to work with his own tools, is impatient of a superior unless it be in some domestic relation, is attached to the home life, and above all is no good specialist: “Il veut rester homme.” You will find too many artists, too few machines in a crowd of them.

It may be that a cheap distribution of power, or that some other economic change, will reinstate the small capitalist; till then, for all his industry, the French workman will be at a disadvantage. In the great towns, in the manufactory, under a central control which has no political basis of right, cut off from the fields for which the peasant in him always yearns, he is like good wine turned sour.

In the second place, the system of the old regime had produced an aristocracy of labour such as many reformers demand in England to-day. Mediæval restrictions, which had once applied to all workers, and had been designed to limit competition between men all of whom were employed, survived in 1789 as guilds and companies strictly protected by law, with fixed hours of labour, fixed wages—every kind of barrier to exclude the less fortunate artisans. A system that under St. Louis had made life more secure for all, had, under his descendants, separated the workmen into two classes of the over- and the under-paid, and these last increased.

In the third place, the recent treaty of commerce with England had worked most disadvantageously for French manufacture, and in all the great towns, especially in Paris, thousands of men were out of work.

In the fourth place, the general scarcity of agricultural produce struck the ouvrier, even if he were employed at good wages, in the heaviest fashion.

Between the cornfield and the city came the taxes, the feudal dues, the provincial frontier duties, and finally the octroi paid at the city gates. So inept a method of continually harassing exchange could not but react upon production, and even when the harvest was plentiful bread was dear in the great cities. Even when these internal taxes did not diminish the output, they raised the price in the towns.

Finally, the Church, which, as we have seen, had none too firm a hold on the villagers, had lost all power over the townsmen. To what was this due? Presumably to the apathy which had overtaken the rich higher clergy, a class which naturally congregated in the towns, especially in Paris, and whose example influenced all the surrounding priests. Add to this the destruction of the old unit of the parish in the city. The industrial system had broken up the neighbourliness of the capital. Men rarely lived in their own houses, often changed their lodgings to follow their work. There is no worse enemy to the parochial and domestic character of our religion than the economic change from which we suffer. Now with the Church was associated all the morality of their traditions; without it they were lost. They had not read the philosophers; Rousseau had not permeated so deep. For the matter of that, they would have cared little for him or for Seneca; and, deprived of any code, they were at the mercy of every passion and of all unreason. Only this much remained: that they honestly hated injustice; that egotism had very little to do with their anger; that they were capable of admirable enthusiasms. They had not the little qualities of the rich, and they also escaped their vices. One great virtue attached to them: they did nothing at the expense of the country’s honour; no reactionary or foreigner bought them; they were patriotic through all their errors.

To these characters, which they brought into the Revolution, a further accident must be added. They became disfranchised. As we shall see later, the constitution of 1790, based upon the very sound principle of representing those only who supported the State, gave no provision (as it should have done) for making that support fall upon the shoulders of all. It enfranchised the great bulk of Frenchmen—over four million entered the ranks of the “Active Citizens”—but it disfranchised the very class which sat in the galleries of the Parliament or ran to the Place de Grève. The workman, living in lodgings or flats sublet, often changing his residence, rarely paid any direct tax; he alone, therefore, lost the vote to which practically every peasant was entitled. This accident (it was not planned) worked in two ways. It added to the discontent of the Parisian workman, but it also forbade his movements to take political shape. To the very last the initiative was in the hands of others.

These others were the three remaining divisions—the middle class, the professionals, and the nobles.

It would be an error to make too hard and fast the barriers between these classes. In the cart that took the Dantonists to the guillotine all three were to be found. Nevertheless it aids a history of the Revolutionary period to distinguish each from each.

The bourgeoisie meant almost anything from a small shopkeeper to a successful lawyer. It was not so much the man’s occupation as his breeding and domestic surroundings that made him of this rank. Let me explain what I mean. Suppose the family of a linendraper (such as was Priestley’s family or Johnson’s in England) possessed of several thousand pounds. Let them put a son to the bar, and let the son succeed at the profession; well, the man and his son, so different in their pursuits, would yet remain in the class I desire to define, unless by some accident they got “in with” one of the literary coteries with which the noblesse mingled. And this separation would be something much more definite than in the parallel case in England. This class of the bourgeoisie stood like a great phalanx in the Revolution. Not one in ten of the class I am attempting to describe had entered the salons; there was not (as there is in an aristocratic state) any great desire to know the noblesse. An accident of surroundings, of eminence, or of friendship might lift a man from this class, but he would leave it with regret.

Of this class were Robespierre, Marat (in spite of his aristocratic milieu), Bonaparte,[6] Danton himself, Santerre, Legendre, Carnot, Couthon, Barrère—dozens of all the best-known names in the second period of the Revolution.

Brewers, builders, large shopkeepers, a host of provincial lawyers—these all over France, to the number of at least a million voters, formed a true middle class such as we lack in England. Note also that they might rise to a very considerable position without leaving this rank. A man might be physician to the first houses, a king’s counsel, a judge, anything almost except the colonel of a regiment, and yet be a bourgeois, and his son after him. In the memoirs of the last century you will find continually a kind of disgust expressed by the upper class against a set just below them; it is the class feeling against the bourgeoisie, their choice of words, their restrictions of fortune, their unfashionable virtues. These men were often learned; among the lawyers they were the pick of France; they had a high culture, good manners, in the case of individuals wit, and sometimes genius, but they were not gentlefolk, and had no desire to be thought so.

Of those, however, who were technically bourgeois, possessing no coat of arms nor receiving feudal dues, some had practically passed by an accident of association into the upper class of all. They met constantly in some salon, library, or scientific body members of the privileged order; their dress, manners, and conceptions were those of the liberal noblesse. To such men, very small in number and very influential, I would give the name of Professionals. The class is complete if you add to it the many noble names who stood prominent in the sciences or the arts. It was recruited from legal families of long standing, from financiers. It was polite, wealthy, often singularly narrow. Of such a type were the Marquis de Condorcet, Bailly, Sieyès; even Roland might be counted, though he hardly stood so high. These were the theorisers of the Revolution, with no practical grievance, ignorant of the mob, despising and misunderstanding the bourgeoisie (save in their political speeches); they were the orators of the new regime, and died with the Girondins.

As to the noblesse (who partly overlapped these last, and yet as a class were so distinct), they formed a body with which this book will hardly deal, and upon which I will touch but lightly. In very great numbers, the bulk of them by no means rich (though some, of course, were the greatest millionaires of their day), they were defined by a legal status rather than an especial manner.

He was noble whom the king had ennobled or who could prove an ancestry from the feudal lords of the manors.[7] The family name was never heard, only the territorial name preceded by the “de.” They had also this in common, that the whole great swarm of families, thousands and thousands, had a cousinship with that higher stratum which made the court. This cousinship was acknowledged; it put them in the army; it gave them the right to be spitted in a duel, and, above all, it exempted them from taxes. It made them, wherever they went, a particular class, to be revered by fools, and able to irritate their enemies merely by existing—a privilege of some value. They held together in the heat of the reform, and it was only from the higher part of the noblesse that the deserters came—Mirabeau, Lafayette, and De Séchelles. The great bulk of them were poor, and consequently determined in the matter of privilege and feudal right that gave them their pittance. The class was richer than the bourgeoisie, but numerous families in it had not the capital of a bourgeois household, and many a poor lady boasts to-day of family estates lost in the Revolution, whose ancestry had no estates at all, but only a few tithes and a chance in the spoil to be had at court.

Now to all these, without exception, reform seemed necessary; it was only when the Revolution was in full swing that the opposition of particular bodies appeared. The peasant was in misery; the artisan was angry; the middle class, possessed of that feeling which Sieyès expressed in a phrase: “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?—Rien;” and they were determined to work upon the sequel: “Que doit-il être?—Tout.” To this general chorus of demand the professionals added a strong conviction (in the abstract) of the good of self-government and of the necessity for removing State interference. The noblesse, as a class, expected nothing in particular to happen, but they were not unwilling for a Parliament to meet; they also suffered from the extreme complexity, or rather anarchy, into which things had fallen. Talent saw itself wrecked by court intrigue; piety was offended by the sight of a starving priest side by side with a careless, wealthy, often irreligious member of the higher clergy. Moreover, there ran through the nobility this curious feeling—an error which you will always find in the more generous of a privileged class—namely, that in some mysterious way their special rights might be abolished and they not suffer for it—as though there were some vast sum in reserve, into which the State had but to put its hand and relieve the poor without taxing the rich. On the moral as on the material side this error obtained, and Lafayette, a man created by privilege, thought that when privilege was abolished his native virtues would lift him into the first rank.

To all this attitude of expectancy, and to this instant demand for reform, was added the insurmountable thing that made the Parliament necessary. The great symptom of decay had shown itself—the revenue could no longer be raised. Luckily for France, there existed in the last century no such international finance as exists at present, and the fatal temptation of external debt was not offered. With a population not quite two-thirds what it is to-day, the country failed to raise one-twentieth of what it now pays with ease. The debt was increasing with a terrifying rapidity, and since all the methods of centralised routine had failed, it was necessary to turn to the last resource, and the nation was asked to vote a tax. With promises of redress, with an understanding that the Assembly was to reform upon all sides, with a special demand for a statement of grievances, but especially for the necessities of revenue, the States General were summoned for the first time in a hundred and seventy-five years.

Such was the condition that preceded the Revolution. We have seen the attitude of the various social classes and the material necessity that prepared the reform. Now what were the ideas that were about to guide it? What theory was moving the men who met at Versailles? What form would the national character give to the changes which were in preparation?

It will be necessary here to propose a paradox. The French character, which has been blamed so frequently since the Revolution (and so justly) for an excess of idealism, possesses at the same time a passion for the positive, the objective, and the certain. In the same man you will continually find some idea which pushes him to extremes, and in the ordinary affairs of life a most exact sense of reality, even sometimes an exasperating accuracy of detail. They are not alone in discovering an antithesis in the national character; in England, Germany, or Northern Italy it would be equally possible to show two apparently opposite characteristics united in the same civic type. But perhaps the nearest parallel we have at home to the contrasts of the French is to be seen in the Scotch people; like the French, a nation of independents, thrifty, investing continually in small sums, zealous of pence; like the French, on the other hand, they delight in the abstract problem; they will attach themselves to some idea, and hold it to the point of martyrdom.

What was the result of these two tendencies? In some characters they balanced each other. Condorcet comes to the mind as an example. But, as with other nations, the two aspects of France appeared (in much the greater number of her citizens) exalted to a violent degree that corresponded with the extreme danger and the extreme hopes of a moment of crisis.

I do not mean that you would have found in France two factions, the one of visionaries, the other of practical men; I mean that throughout the Revolution the goal and the method of attaining it reflected this double nature. Consider the decrees and their effects. At the sight of what the Assemblies from 1789 to 1795 are trying to do you would say, “A set of men attempting to build a city of dreams;” there is hardly anything so unnatural but that they will attempt it; they are ready to reconstruct from the foundation. The most violent period, that of 1794, is nothing but an effort to make all men conform to civic virtue and believe the necessary things; the most sane, that of 1791, is yet an attempt to realise in the State an equality and a justice that can only exist in the soul.

But if you turn to their methods and to the measure of their success, then you have a very different idea. They succeeded beyond all hope. They struck in a few months the blows that remoulded all France. The centralisation which the practical side of the character had created was used to transform France as rapidly as though the nation had been a household; and not only do they find means to do this, but, when the necessity arises, they suddenly raise armies of three hundred thousand, of a million; they find the commissariat somewhere in a starving people, and they succeed.

While, then, the nation was fitted for action to such a degree, what was the theory which its idealism was about to embrace? There had permeated throughout the noblesse and the bourgeoisie something more than a philosophy. It was not only a set of eighteenth-century phrases, of Reason, and Nature, and Right, but all these things turned into a religion. The apostolic quality of Rousseau had touched the mind of France.

It is the fashion to belittle this man. Something in him angers our successful and eager century, and yet but for him our century would not have taken the shape it has. It is needless to recall the movement which had preceded and which surrounded him. He did but complete the theory of the social contract; he hardly did more than repeat the conclusions of the rationalists; in the matter of economics he was entirely ignorant; he fell continually into the error of superficiality where history or where the details of institutions were concerned. A resident in England, he imagined that her people were represented; writing his famous work at Nuneham Courtenay, he could not see that the squire was everything in the little village. He had all the faults of weakness; he invited a persecution which he had not the wit to attack nor the stamina to sustain. What, then, made him such a prophet? In the first place, the power of words. All his critics in this country (with the exception of Mr. Morley perhaps) have failed to appreciate how great this power was. See what the Jacobean translation of the Bible has done in England; note what the pure rhetoric of Burke, proceeding solely from passion and untouched by any movement of reason, effected in England within a year of the fall of the Bastille: it was this that Rousseau did in France. But not this alone. If he possessed the power of words, he also had to an extraordinary degree that other quality which does not reside in style but in the texture of the mind. He could write in the pure abstract, and produce a piece of clear exposition deduced in an unbreakable chain from some fundamental dogma. He never commits the error of supposing his first principles to rely upon reason; he postulates a Faith. He allows that Faith to illumine his every sentence. He is certain that the things common to all men are the things of immeasurable importance; he is certain that the accidents of living are secondary. He is certain that our being part of all nature is the condition of happiness and of good; he is certain that the complexity of living which separates us from Nature is an evil, and to a France tortured with age he proposes this simple water of youth: that it should return to the first conditions of a small hamlet; where the families met together dictate the law; where each sees himself to be a part of the whole, and where the harmony that all men sought comes easily to an ideal democracy hidden in happy valleys. It is idle to argue that complexity was there; that France could not have at once the patriotism of twenty million, and the institutions of a hundred, hearths. Every one saw that difficulty, and in the midst of ’94 the most fervent apostles of Rousseau compromised on the chief point, for the principle of election, which he hated, remained of necessity the chief method in their scheme of democracy.

It is not the obstacles, but the motive force that you must examine if you would comprehend the fervour of the Republic. And the motive force was that passion for the conditions under which the race has passed how many æons of its tutelage, the harking back to the prehistoric things, the village and the tribe, all of whose spirit ran through the books that preached simplicity with such admirable eloquence.

There remains one feature to be discussed before we turn to a brief outline of Danton’s place in the movement—a feature which will be of capital importance throughout this book. That feature is the hegemony of Paris. It was the rule of Paris that made the whole course of the Revolution. In that focus of discussion and of passion the great advances and the great blunders of the Revolution took place. Paris alone made the 14th of July, almost alone the 10th of August, alone and against France the 2nd of June. Many an historian has seen in her position an error that should have been and could have been avoided. It is an opinion which from the time of Mirabeau to our own day has lain in the mind of French statesmen, that Paris must be jealously watched, played, forbidden control.

Why does Paris hold this position? Here is a city-state, eager, concentrated, the centre in many things of our European civilisation; that it should continually exert a moral influence over the State is easily to be understood, but Paris did more—it conquered and dominated the State, and France continually permitted that leadership.

There is, I believe, a point of view from which this historical fact becomes no longer an accident but a reasonable thing; and if we take that point of view it will be possible to understand why from the beginning she preserved the initiative, and became and remained till Thermidor the mistress of France.

The people of that country are, for much the greater part, the peasants whom I have described. They have for centuries been owners of the soil, and for at least two thousand years (perhaps far longer) they have found all their social, all their physical, and most of their intellectual interests in the intense but narrow life of a village community. In any great expanse of view you see the white houses, all huddled together without gardens, and between each group bare vast brown fields empty of farmsteads. These peasants have in them an admirable cousinship with the soil; their phrases and their proverbs are drawn directly from the fields and rivers; they are as healthy as Nature herself. Such is the general mass of France; but these innumerable villages, these vigorous swarms of men who work in the sunlight, need a bond. Some concrete object must be present to give true unity to many vague national impressions. Something must be the persona of these millions, and through the mouth of that something they must hear action formulated, patriotism expressed, the law defined. From it must come the executive, and of it are expected the direct orders and the government by which, in times of crisis, a nation is saved.

This brain, which is necessary to a complex organism, might have been found in a high priest or a despot; but we in England unconsciously look for it in an oligarchy. Seeing the squires wanting, we think there is nothing, and we draw doleful conclusions when we note the absence in the French villages of the forces that invigorate our own. We complain of the centralisation that atrophies, forgetting the oligarchy that cows and debases the inferior class; and while we despise the political apathy of French country life, we ignore the negation of society in our great cities.

The truth is that no definite system can escape attendant evils, and that if one nation does not adopt the methods that have succeeded in another it is because those methods are connected with instinct, and instinct can neither be taught nor adopted.

It was instinct that forbade the growth in France of oligarchic institutions. Everything was ready for it; the feudal system would seem its proper parent; the lords of the manors were so many seeds of what should have been a territorial aristocracy. They were destined to fail, and to say why is impossible, because it is impossible to explain Nature; we can only feel. Something in the genius of the nation makes for equality with the depth and silence of a strong tide at night. It is not the Roman law—all the nations had that. It is not even the Church—there is a something in the Church which neglects if it does not despise civic ideals. It is not the distribution of capital—that can be distinctly proved to be an historical result and not a cause. No, it is not an exterior force, but something from within which has produced this passion, the soul (as it were) forming the body. “La France a fait la France.”

If aristocracy were impossible, what remained? The walled towns. They are like pins on which the lace of France is stretched; the roads unite them and make a web which supports the rural communes. Never far apart, always living a life intensely their own, the walled towns stood guardian over surrounding villages. Here was the cathedral or the abbey, the judges, the college. It would give the name to a district, it would form with its dependent communes a kind of little state. News from the outside was concentrated here, and if a religious or political enthusiasm ran from the Rousillion to the Artois, it was not the villages that caught fire in the mass, but the towns, that passed the message on like beacons.

Now as the roots of this municipal system were to be found in Rome, these needed a little Rome to cap it. These towns being all of a kind, they of necessity fell grouped under the largest of their class. The tendency was well marked even before Gaul was re-united; the same force that made the great archbishoprics makes the metropolitan civil influence. Thus Rheims, Lyons,[8] and Toulouse stand out hierarchically the heads of provinces—a very different kind of town from Canterbury (let us say) or Lichfield, where once they talked of an archbishopric for Mercia.

Well, as the power of the Crown increases (which is another way of saying, “as the nation realises its memories of unity”), there increase with it the means of communication, and especially the strong centralised system which, as we have seen in another part of this chapter, had become a fatal necessity to France. Remember also that till the very end of the seventeenth century Paris had been uniquely the king’s town, and had so been (with one short interval) for more than a thousand years. Here was every single organ which the executive of a centralised government may need, and (what is more important) here was the place where each organ had grown; they were in the fibre of the place. Even if we go back no farther than the Capetians, we have a full seven hundred years of development in one spot from the familiar domestic origins, the little barbarous court in the palace on the island to the great city of nearly a million souls, whose terms and professions and classes, and whose every institution had developed round the throne.

When one remembers that the king had abandoned Paris but a hundred years; that he had left in the capital by far the greater part of the central machinery, especially the lawyers; that even from what he had taken many relics remained, and that professional men of all classes had the family tradition of the court in the capital—then we can understand what Paris was, is, and must be to a France where no class is permitted to govern. Add to this the increasing specialisation of function as the organism develops—the concentration of the brain—and Paris of the eighteenth century, abandoned as it is, hurt in its dignity, and a little uncertain of its action, still fulfils the geography-books, and is the capital of France.

She herself hardly knew how certainly power would fall into her hands, yet from the first mention of the States General it was fated.

This, then, is the position as the States General meet. A nation in absolute material need of reform, that must have new institutions, especially new financial institutions, or die; classes separate from each other, mutually ignorant of each other, yet all in some degree feeling the position into which France had fallen: in the case of the bulk of the people, misgovernment appearing in the form of starvation; in the case of the upper classes and of the government itself, a conviction that the existing system was contrary to all reason and opposed to every sound interest.

In this society, at least in that part of it that will be called upon to govern, is a conviction—a religion, if you will—whose basis was the faith of Rousseau. Conditions will moderate this for a time; the necessary compromise with what exists, the desire for peace that was uppermost in the first two years, will make men slow to uproot and destroy what may touch the interests of friends and of large classes. They will always attempt a legal though a rapid reform. But, in spite of them, on account of that passionate conviction which underlay their most moderate actions, the Revolution will move up towards the region of unattainable things. The reformer will give way to the Republican idealist when once the serious opposition of the court is felt; he in his turn will give way to the man of passion and of action when the country is in danger; and even the man of passion and of action—the man of realities—will give way to the mere visionary before reaction can come to sweep the floor clean in 1794.

Such will be the phases through which the form of the Revolution will pass. As for the soul of it, France will be steadily transformed, and, in spite of visionaries, reactions, and every political accident, a new and a strong society will be created. So the salt water comes in through old dykes; on its surface you will note the phases of a flood, innumerable little streams, a torrent, a spreading lake, and ultimately calm, but only one thing all the while is happening—where there has been land there will be the sea.

What place did Danton take in this transformation? Of his opinions in detail, his habit of body and mind, his convictions, the accidents of his life, it is the purport of this biography to treat. I will attempt only a very brief description of his position, to make clear the drift of his Revolutionary career, and with this close a chapter whose only object has been to describe the surroundings of a character with which the rest of this book is concerned.

Danton belonged to the bourgeoisie in rank, to the less visionary in the bent of his mind. A young and successful lawyer of thirty, the Revolution found him unknown to politics and not desiring election. It was the accident of oratory that gave him his first position. He discovered himself to be a leader, and there grouped round him a knot of the most ardent, some of them the most brilliant, younger reformers. The electoral district to which he happened to belong became through him the most democratic, and, in some ways, the most violent of Paris.

That part of him which led to such a position was his sympathy. His tenderness (and he had a great share of this quality) was hidden under the energy of his rough voice, great frame, and violent gesture. His pity he was slow to express. But the great crowd of men who were unrepresented, the smaller but more influential class of those who felt and knew but could not speak—these were attracted to him because he had the instinct of the people. He was a demagogue at moments and for a purpose, but never by profession nor for any period of time. What he was, however, all his life and by nature, was a Tribune.

The secret workings of the soil, the power that makes all the qualities of a nation from its wine to its heroes, these had produced him as they produce the tree or the harvest. He is the most French, the most national, the nearest to the mother of all the Revolutionary group. He summed up France; and, the son of a small lawyer in Champagne, he was a peasant, a bourgeois, almost a soldier as well. When we study him it is like looking at a landscape of Rousseau’s or a figure of Millet’s. We feel France.

His voice was a good symbol of his mind, for there was heard in it not only the deep tone of a multitude, but that quality which comes from the mingling of many parts—the noise of waters or of leaves. In his political attitude he attained this collective quality, not by a varying point of view which is confusion, but by an integration. His opinions erred on the side of bluntness and of directness. They were expressed in plain sentences of a dozen words; he abhorred the classical allusion, he was chary of metaphor. He spoke as a crowd would speak, or an army, or a tribe, if it had a voice.

This was Danton, the public orator and the Tribune, who for two years was heard at the Cordeliers, who spoke always for the purely democratic reform, who opposed the moderates, and who helped to destroy the compromise. Never identified with Paris, he yet saw clearly the necessity of Paris. He admitted her claim, fenced with her arrogance, but never worshipped her idols; once or twice he even dared to blame her worst follies. Elected to the administration of the city, he played but a slight rôle, and until the spring of 1792 there is in him no other quality.

The spring of 1792 produced the war with Europe, and from that date Danton appears in another light. Had he died then, we should have known him only by chance references, a centre of strong reforming speeches, an obscure man in opposition. But with the outbreak of a war which he had done nothing to bring on, and which his party thought unwise, Danton shows that his character, in summing up his fellows, caught especially their patriotism. France was the first thought, and if we could hear not the debaters only, but all the voices of France when the invasion began, it would be this immediate necessity of saving the country that would drown all other opinions. Thence, and for a full year after, Danton becomes the leading man of France. The ability which has led to his legal success (now that his office is abolished and its reimbursement invested in land) seems turned upon the political situation, and such ability combined with such a representative quality pushes him to the front. Two qualities appeared in him which he himself perhaps had not guessed—the power of rapid organisation, and the power of so judging character as to bring diplomacy to bear upon every accident as it arrived.

It was not strictly he who made the 10th of August, but he was the leader. He saw that with the king in power the Prussians would reach Paris, and more than any man he organised the insurrection. That was the one act of violence in his life.

The rest of the nineteen months that fate allowed were spent in the attempt to reconcile and harmonise all the forces he could gather for the salvation of the nation, Perhaps it was his chief fault that in this matter he held to no pure idea.

A Republican and an ardent reformer, he yet seems to have thought France of so much the first importance that he compromised and trafficked with all possible allies. He attempted to stave off the war with England; he attempted to keep Dumouriez; he tried to prevent vengeance from following the Girondins; when the extremists captured the great Committee, he acquiesced, and still wrestled with the forces of disunion. He would have hidden, if possible, those wounds which weakened France in the eyes of the world, and he waged a futile war with the pure idealists—the men of one dogma, who in so many separate camps were destroying each other for their civic faith, and preparing all the evils of a persecution.

On another side of political action he appeared more resolute than any man. It was he who saw the necessity of a strong government, he who created the revolutionary tribunal, and he who is chiefly responsible for the first Committee of Public Safety. He made the dictatorship, caring nothing for the principle, caring only to throw back the foreigner. “He stamped with his foot, and armies came out of the earth.” The violent metaphor is just. There is a succession, a stream of great armies (they say four millions of men!) pouring out from France for twenty years. If you will glance at the head of that stream, and wonder when you read of Napoleon what first called up the regiments, you may see on the Champ de Mars in ’92, and later demanding the great levy of ’93, the presence of Danton, the orator with the voice of command, the attitude of a charge, the right arm thrown forward in the gesture of the sword.

Possessed of astounding vigour, but lacking ambition, a lover of immediate but not of permanent fame, his superb energy after a year of effort spent itself in a demand for repose. In September 1793 he thought his work done and his position secure. He went back into his country home, walked in the fields he loved (and of which he talked before his death), revelled in Arcis, filling himself with the convivial pleasure that he had always desired. He came back in November secure and happy—ready, almost from without and as a spectator, to continue the task of welding the nation together. It was too late. He had created a machine too strong for his control. He had seen the Terror swallow up the Girondins, and had cried because he could not save them.

With the winter he began his protests, his persistent demands for reason and for common-sense; in the religious and in the political persecution he called for a truce; always his effort turned to the old idea—a united Republican France, strong against Europe, with exceptional powers against treason in a time of danger, but with a margin on the side of mercy.

He failed. The extreme theorists whom he despised had captured his dictatorship, and in April 1794 they killed him.

CHAPTER II
THE YOUTH OF DANTON

I shall attempt in the following chapter to tell all that is known of the first thirty years of Danton’s life. Our knowledge of this period in his career is extremely slight. It is based upon a minute research, but a research undertaken only in the latter half of this century; and it is to be feared that the scanty materials will never be seriously augmented. Every year makes the task more difficult, and a century has rendered impassable the gulf which Michelet, Bougeart, and even Dr. Robinet, have been able to bridge with living voices.

He was born at Arcis-sur-Aube,[9] a lesser town of the Champagne Pouilleuse, that great flat which stretches out from the mountain of Rheims beyond the twin peaks, till it loses itself in the uplands of the river-partings. Here, though it is cold in winter, there are still vineyards making their last bastion on the covered slopes of the hills that form the northern boundary of the plain.

The day of his birth was the 26th of October 1759;[10] the date gives us his relation to the drama in which he was to be a chief actor. Five months older than Desmoulins, born some months before De Séchelles, eight years older than St. Just, he was the junior of Robespierre by one and a half, of Mirabeau by ten years; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were respectively five and four years his seniors. He was sixteen years old when their predecessor died in ignominy and in dirt. Born six weeks after the fall of Quebec, he received the lasting impressions of early youth during the rapid decline of the French monarchy—the end of a slow decay which threatened to be that of the nation itself. But just then Rousseau was writing the Contrat Social, to be published in two years; Voltaire was still in the full vigour of his attack, with nineteen years of life before him; it was the year of Candide; Diderot was founding the Encyclopædia.

The time of his birth coincided with the rising of a certain sun which has not yet set upon Europe, but the boy’s eyes turned to more immediate things, and saw in a little provincial place the break-up of a wretched, experimental reign.

This point must be insisted upon, that a country town was the best possible place for noting the collapse of misgovernment. The country manors were more wretched, the provincial capitals more loud and able in their expressions of opinion; but few places could show the fatal process of disintegration more clearly than these little provincial centres, the sub-prefectures of to-day. The confusion of power, the excess and the ill-working of privilege, the complexity and weakness of government, were there apparent upon every occasion. The wealth of the nation was diminished most especially by the interference with exchange. This (though ultimately a source of their penury) was less directly evident to the villagers, while the large town with its varied production could (in another form) disguise the evil; but to the small borough the experience was direct and terrible.

Again, the practical equality of educated men was there more apparent and more sinned against than in the wider societies of the large towns. In a place like Arcis-sur-Aube, isolated specimens of classes technically distinct were continually in contact. The less the number of their caste and order (and the less their importance), the more do the noblesse, to this day, put on their pride; and yet the more necessary is it, in the life of a small town, that they should associate with those whose conversation and abilities are precisely their own. In Paris or in Lyons, where large cliques were occupied in general interests, such differences were often neglected; in the forgotten towns of the provinces never.

On the other hand, the blind and dumb anger of the peasantry would hardly reach Arcis. All over France the town misunderstood the countryside, and in the early Revolution actually fought against it. This will appear strange to an English reader, who sees scarcely any contrast between a country market and an overgrown village. In England the distinction hardly exists, but in France the borough is very separate from the peasant society outside, and, though often smaller than some large neighbouring village, it keeps to this day the Roman traditions of a city.

We see, then, that Danton’s birthplace in great part accounts for the peculiar bent of his future politics: practical, of legal effect, inspired by no hatred, though strongly influenced by a personal experience of misgovernment. But his parentage will show us still more clearly how the conditions of his origin affected his career.

He was of the lawyers. His father was procureur in the bailiwick of Arcis. It is difficult to explain the functions of his office at this date and to an English reader, for it belongs to that “Administration” which is so essentially Latin, and which we are but just beginning to experience in England. Let it suffice to describe him as the official whose duty it was to supply that which in England the institution of the grand jury still in theory provides, as it did once in reality. It was his business to “present” the cases and the accused to the local criminal court—local, because in France the circuit of assize is unknown. Added to this were many duties and privileges of registration, of stamping and so forth; and the position required an accurate, and even a minute knowledge of the royal law and provincial usage, the complicated customary system of the old regime.

It is perhaps of still more importance to appreciate the social position of Jacques Danton. Belonging to the lower branches of the legal profession, and placed in a lesser borough of Champagne, the father of Danton held something of the same rank as would a small country solicitor in one of our market-towns, with whatever additions of dignity might follow from a permanent office in the municipality of the place.

As to fortune, we do not accurately know the amount of the family income during Danton’s boyhood, but we know that the office which was afterwards purchased for him was worth some three to four thousand pounds; that the money was found largely upon the credit of his father’s legacy,[11] and that the house in which the family lived was their own—a useful rule existing throughout provincial France. It is a substantial building, among the best of the little town, standing in the market-place, with the principal rooms giving upon the public square. What with the probable capital and the known emoluments of his position, we may regard Jacques Danton as a man disposing of an income of about four to five hundred pounds a year.

His mother was of a somewhat lower rank. She was the daughter of a builder from the Champagne, and her brother was a master-carpenter of the town. Of her two sisters, one had married a postmaster and the other a shopkeeper, both in Troyes; her brother was the priest of Barberey, near Arcis.

The father died when the boy was two and a half years old, leaving four children. We must presume, though we are not certain, that Danton had one brother: and we know he had two sisters, one of whom married in Troyes; the other died a nun at the same place in the middle of this century.[12]

On both sides of his family, through the connections and marriages of his relations, their employment, their dwellings, their descendants, we see the origin of Danton absolutely separate from the lower and from the higher ranks of the old regime. Only by an effort of imagination could he later understand the workman or the peasant; only by daily conversation could he appreciate the strange nobles of 1790, with their absence of national pride.

In fine, Danton came out of that middle class which has made the modern world, and which still insecurely sustains it. “Respectability and its gig” is an epigram that would exactly suit the dull and provincial surroundings of his first home; but the converse of such provincialism is sanity, order, and strength, and out of fuel so solid and so cold the bourgeoisie has time and again built a consuming fire.

From his father’s death, before he was three years old, till his ninth year, the child was with his mother in the house at Arcis, for she had from the little fortune just enough revenue to keep the family together and to educate the children. The little boy was taught his Latin elements in the town, and then sent to the “Lower Seminary” at Troyes.[13]

It was the intention of his uncle at Barberey to make him a priest, and in that case he would have passed through the regular stages, taking the higher forms in the Upper Seminary, and finally being admitted to orders a year or two after finishing his “Philosophie.” However, this programme was never completed, and the Church lost in him the material for a vigorous, charitable, and obscure country vicar.

The decision was probably the result of one of those family meetings, such as were habitually held in France to decide the career of an orphan child, and which the Revolution raised to the dignity of an institution with legal form. Some biographers have read the politics of a man of thirty into the action of a little child, and have made this step a precocious protest against clericalism. These biographers have no children.

The uncle consented to the change, and, with Madame Danton’s two married sisters, agreed upon the bar as his future profession. He was sent to Troyes and placed with the Oratorians, a religious order which has had the honour of training so many of the great reformers. In their College he went through that training which no amount of social change or new theories in pedagogy has been able to uproot from the secondary education of France. Little Greek, much Latin, two years all employed in the literature of the late Roman republic and early empire—a groundwork in the elements which gives the educated French an almost mediæval familiarity with Roman thought; such was the course which the bourgeois did and does go through in the French schools. A system founded upon the humanities of the sixteenth, but developed in the classicism of the seventeenth century, it has lost the Hellenism, the subtlety, and the breadth of the former, while it has preserved the rigidity, the strength, and the clearness which the latter owes to the influence of the Jesuits. It fails to develop that initiative coupled with originality to which we in England attach so much importance; it achieves, upon the other hand, a strength in the convictions, and above all a soundness in the judgment, which our public schools often fail to produce.

From just such a curriculum came the exaggerated classicism of Robespierre, the more brilliant but equally Latin style of Desmoulins, though it must be admitted that the first is a reminiscence of Cornelius Nepos, while the second is at times well modelled upon Tacitus himself. The error of such imitation, however, never marred the speech of Danton in his later life; he owed this singular freedom from the spirit of his age to travel, to his vivid interest in surrounding things and men, and to his intimacy with English and Italian.[14]

Yet in a famous speech upon public education he makes a just reference to the influence of this schooling upon the mind of his contemporaries, and notes truly its tendency to turn men republican.[15]

Unfortunately he did not remain at such a school long enough to receive its last and most beneficial impressions. The head form at a French school is called “Philosophie,” and the last year is spent largely in reading the sociology and the metaphysics of the old world. Danton left at the age of sixteen, when he had just completed “Rhétorique,” but what he lost in polishing he gained in being left to his own development for one more year of his life than were his fellows.

Active, often rebellious, full of laughter, he showed his intelligence in the final examinations, his vigour in an escapade that endeared him to at least one of his school-fellows,[16] who has given us, with Rousselin, the only notes we possess as to this period of his life. He ran off in his last year to Rheims, seventy odd miles away, that he might see the crowning of Louis XVI. Going and returning on foot, he satisfied the desire which he had expressed to his school-fellows of “seeing how they made a king.” So as a boy he went to look at the making of a king, and afterwards, when he grew older, Danton himself unmade him.

In 1780—his twenty-first year[17]—he entered the office of a solicitor at Paris named Vinot. Apprenticed as a clerk in order to read law, and above all to watch the procedure of the courts, he spent the next four years in preparing for the bar. If we are to depend on a chance phrase dropped just before his death, he was at that time entirely dependent on his master and his pen.[18] We know, at any rate, that he received no salary, but lodged and boarded with his employer; nor is it probable that he received any money from home, for his mother had married again, and a short time after this second husband (a certain Recordain) was so deeply involved that Danton was begged to hand over the most part of his inheritance to save the family. He did so, and remained with some five or six hundred pounds only as his share of the family fortune. It was invested in land near Arcis, and he kept it for his ultimate purpose of buying a barrister’s practice in one of the higher courts.

He was called to the bar (a process in the same form as taking a degree) in 1785,[19] choosing, with provincial patriotism, Rheims as the place in which formally to join the profession; but he intended to practise in the capital, and returned thither at once.

It is not easy to render to an English public the meaning of the various courts before 1789. Even in France (so completely has the new order supplanted the old anarchy) their forms have been forgotten, and research purely antiquarian cannot give us more than disjointed particulars as to their procedure.[20] There was a division corresponding to the English between Common Law and Equity. This was to be discovered in every country of the West, and had arisen of necessity from the imposition of the king’s power and the Canon Law over those local customs, mixed with reminiscences of Rome, which had once been the whole life of the early Middle Ages.

To the body of lawyers who in Paris (or in any of the great centres) formed the courts for all ordinary pleas, the name of “Parliament” was given. But that it comprised more persons, that it never went upon circuit, and that it included many barristers as well as judges, the Parliament of Paris corresponded more or less to what the English Bench would be were our judges to form a kind of permanent council for advising the Crown and registering its decrees, as well as for trying the cases brought before them. To plead at their bar was no difficult matter. It required but the taking of one’s degree in law, and the fees of entrance were slight. Danton determined to adopt this branch of the profession, and to use it as a stepping-stone towards the higher court, which he soon reached.

This higher court, “Court of Appeal,” as we should call it, or “Cour de Cassation,” as it is named in the modern French system, bore a title significant of the intense conservatism of old France. It was called the “Court of the King’s Councils”—very much what we should have to-day in England had we preserved in fact the theory that the king in his council is the final authority. But though it bore a name drawn from the Curia Regis of the thirteenth century, it had of course lost all its old simplicity. It was a Bench like any other, but there pleaded at its bar an order of lawyers strictly limited in number and highly privileged.[21] It dealt, as did its parallel in the English system, mainly with disputed inheritances, especially in matters of land, and, as we shall see, it showed the true mark of a court of Chancery, in that it took more than a hundred and thirty years to make up its mind. To plead before this court, with its monopoly of valuable causes, was to have at once an assured income and prestige; therefore its vacancies were prizes to be bought and sold. Danton determined to plead so long at the common law courts as might assure him, with economy, a substantial addition to the few hundred pounds that formed his whole capital, and then to seek a loan that might eke out these savings and place him at the Chancery bar.

Young, eloquent, eminently capable of seeing a real issue, he was well fitted for the lower practice, and he succeeded. Within two years he had a sum to offer as part payment, which was at once a proof of his business habits and of his talents. His family, therefore, especially those members of it who had urged him to go to the bar, were willing to advance the necessary sums in addition to his own savings and his little patrimony. The purchase-money was delivered, and a bond to the amount of £3000 (a sum which he could not then have furnished) was signed by his aunts and uncles at Troyes. It was in March 1787[22] that this step was taken, and this date was in some sense his entry into public life, for it brought him into direct contact with the wealthy—that is, with the ruling class.

We have on this date a vivid anecdote surviving. A Latin oration had to be delivered off-hand to the assembled college on the reception of a candidate to the order. The subject set for Danton when he entered the hall was “The Moral and Political Situation of the Country in their relations with the Administration of Justice.” A fine theme for 1787! Such a quaint scene the old regime delighted in, and its older members delighted also in catching here and there a phrase of quotation which they could understand. The genius and the memory of their candidate seem on this occasion to have furnished something new, to have given them less platitude than was expected. He mentioned reform; he spoke of the struggle in which the Parliament was engaged against the ministers—a struggle of which he wisely said, “They are fighting for the sacred centres of civic liberty, but present no positive reform by which that liberty may be brought into existence.” “Sacred centres” was, of course, aris et focis. The speech was necessarily in a large measure a series of clichés, a stringing together of the well-worn Latin mottoes. It even contained salus populi suprema lex, but its argument was Danton’s own. There is to be marked also this phrase, for it is the note of all his future work: “Let the government feel the gravity of the situation sufficiently to remedy it in the simple and in the natural way downwards from its own authority.”

The young men understood and applauded; the old men were assured that, if they had not quite followed an unconventional harangue, it was due to the originality of the speaker. Presumably their souls were softened by aris et focis, and salus populi suprema lex.

For the next two years his forensic reputation is continually rising. No longer the Common Law pleader, with pathetic and oratorical appeals for a shepherd against his lord, he had shown how large a part intellect had to do with his power of commanding attention. On the intricacies of his Chancery practice and the clearness and ability of his analysis we have an excellent witness in one of the most learned of the modern Parisian bar,[23] and three of his opinions, on the Amelinau, Dubonis, and De Montbarey cases, have come down to us, and have received the favourable criticism of an opponent.

The last case (that of De Montbarey) shows us Danton defending the claims of an old house and at work in the rustiest of all the legal grooves. It had been on the stocks since 1657, and Danton, in attempting to give the quietus to this intolerable longevity, uses a phrase which shows us the feeling that spared one grave at least when the mob sacked St. Denis: “Jeanne d’Albret[24] is a name dear to all Frenchmen, for it recalls the memory of that other Jeanne d’Albret who was the mother of Henri IV.”

There came to be his clients, among others De Barentin, the minister of justice, and De Brienne,[25] comptroller-general; it is on his intimacy with the former that his first recorded opinions on public affairs turn. They will be dealt with in the next chapter.

It is, of course, difficult to give an exact proof of a man’s private income at any moment, but we are certain that Danton’s cannot have fallen far short at this date of a thousand pounds a year. His immediate success at the bar, the monopoly and privilege of the body to which he now belonged (the work certain to come to the most inept was worth a lump sum of 60,000 francs, to which talent would add indefinitely), his eloquence and proved ability, the name of his clients, their importance and their wealth—everything leads to this as a certain conclusion. Immense fortunes were not then made in the profession; his position was not an obscure one.

He married, on attaining this status, the daughter of a man who kept one of the students’ restaurants, Charpentier by name. It was a café (Café des Écoles) very much frequented by the University and the younger men at the bar, and still one of the few remaining cafés of the last century. Danton himself was a regular customer, and there is an interesting picture, drawn by a friend, of the avocats in their special costumes at this place. It occupied the site of what is now the south-western corner of the Place de l’École,[26] nor has any change been made in it save the raising of the road level. Looking on the river, and just over the river from the Palais, it was the natural rendezvous for the young barristers in the mid-day adjournment and after the court rose.

Charpentier, the “limonadier” of Mdme. Roland, was a man worth from five to six thousand pounds, part only invested in his business;[27] he had, moreover, a little post under the Taxes, requiring a slight amount of work and bringing in only a hundred pounds a year. When he married his daughter to Danton, she was given 20,000 francs.[28]

As will be seen later, it is of the first moment in proving Danton’s position to know accurately the capital amount of which he disposed when the Revolution broke out; for in the case of generous men in a democracy, the accusation of venality is the most common and the hardest to rebut.

Passionately fond of his wife, and successful in his profession, on the threshold of a great career, I would apply to him a phrase which one of his worst enemies has given us to describe a far lesser man, “Actif et sain, robuste et glorieux, il aima sa femme et la parure.”

We leave him, then, at the summit of a laborious and perhaps of an arduous youth. He is twenty-eight years old, in the best of his vigour and of his intelligence—the age at which Jefferson ten years before had drafted his immortal paragraph; the age at which Napoleon, with his moving island of men, was ten years later to break five armies of the Austrians from Lodi to Campo Formio.

What picture shall we make of him to carry with us in the scenes in which he is to be the principal actor?

He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full of gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon the thick neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience. His upper lip was injured, and so was his nose,[29] and he had further been disfigured by the small-pox, with which disease that forerunner of his, Mirabeau, had also been disfigured. His lip had been torn by a bull when he was a child, and his nose crushed in a second adventure, they say, with the same animal. In this the Romans would perhaps have seen a portent; but he, the idol of our Positivists, found only a chance to repeat Mirabeau’s expression that his “boar’s head frightened men.”

In his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with extreme vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside oneself; but it was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at that time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the leaves, nor break up a society by throwing away a wig.[30] The decent self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from his costume, though it often left his language in moments of crisis, or even of irritation.

I will not insist too much upon his great character of energy, because it has been so over-emphasised as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably sustained in his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty, whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum.

Save when he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook, vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand.

He possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal. He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely oligarchy had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign policy, Danton was more than a sane—he was a just, and even a diplomatic man.

He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his own tongue, from Adam Smith to the “Essay on Civil Government” in that of strangers; and of the Encyclopædia he possessed all the numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and individual a collection, few shelves will be found more interesting than those which Danton delighted to fill.[31]

In his politics he desired above all actual, practical, and apparent reforms; changes for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his political countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does the French peasant,[32] and love, as the French peasant loves, good government, order, security, and well-being.

There is to be discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his conversations before the bursting of the storm, and still more clearly in his demand for a centre when the invasion and the rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached, sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to realise than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which he was too impatient to analyse.

His voice was loud even when his expressions were subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos, it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.

As to his private life, affection dominated him. Upon the faith of some who did not know him he acquired the character of a debauchee. For the support of this view there is not a tittle of direct evidence. He certainly loved those pleasures of the senses which Robespierre refused, and which Roland was unable to enjoy; but that his good dinners were orgies or of any illegitimate loves (once he had married the woman to whom he was so devotedly attached) there is no shadow of proof. His friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul, he loved France. His faults—and they were many—his vices (and a severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil effects that abundant energy may produce—the habit of oaths, the rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with its subsequent demand for repose.

Weighted with these conditions he enters the arena, supported by not quite thirty fruitful years, by a happy marriage, by an intense conviction, and by the talents of a man who has not yet tasted defeat. I repeat the sentence applied to another: “Active and sane, robust and ready for glory, the things he loved were his wife and the circumstance of power.”

CHAPTER III
DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS

A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead, must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to power.

His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but, at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with which they sympathise, or to which they were born.

It is not difficult to determine the accidents of action, temperament, and locality which predispose to success in one’s own society. It is less easy to appreciate what corresponds to them under foreign conditions.

It was seen in the first chapter that Paris sums up in herself those conditions in the case of the French nation; and it was seen also (a point of peculiar importance) that Paris at the close of the eighteenth century was ill at ease—out of herself, demanding her place and yet anxious as to the means by which it might be attained.

It might be imagined that this was a kind of usurpation. Such a belief is entertained by most foreigners, and certainly it has not been lacking among the more idealist of the French Republicans. Nevertheless, such a view is erroneous, and the Girondists, for all their virtues, went (as we shall discover) against the nature of things when they would have made of Paris but one of the cities, or rather but “an aliquot voting part” of the nation. The demand of Paris was essentially reasonable, and had to be satisfied. Why? Because without her leadership not this thing or that thing would have been done, but nothing would have been done. The crowds who waited round the coaching inns in the country towns for news of the city in the great early days of ’89, by their very attitude asked and expected Paris to move.

Paris, then, is Danton’s gate. It is up the flood of the Parisian tide that he floats. That tide rises much higher than even he had thought possible, and it throws him at last on the high inaccessible place of the 10th of August. Once there, from a pinnacle he sees all France. Just as Cromwell was the Puritan soldier till he reached power, and then became, or desired to become, the representative of England, so Danton is the Parisian Frondeur till from a place of responsibility and direction he aims partly at the realisation of French ideas, but mainly at the integrity and salvation of France itself.

Here he is, then, in the two years of active discussion that precede the elections, by an accident of ambition, Parisian; one of a group of young provincial lawyers, but the most successful of them all. Some months after his marriage, in the course of 1788[33] (we are not certain of the exact date), he moved into the house in which he lived to his death, six angry years. It was the corner house of the Cour du Commerce and the Rue des Cordeliers.[34] The house was better than that which he had inhabited in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, when he bought his practice; on the other hand, it was in a somewhat less expensive neighbourhood. We may justly infer, however, from the greater size of his new apartments, and from the fact that he kept his office still in the old house in the Rue de la Tixanderie, just behind the Hotel de Ville, that he had prospered in his profession, and the inference is sustained by our knowledge of the importance of his cases and his clients. As to the exact situation which he chose, it was doubtless determined by its proximity to the apartments of his friends. Here lived Desmoulins, his chief friend, a year younger than himself, coming (after his marriage in 1790) to live in the same house; for then, as now, in Paris it was not the habit to take a whole house but a flat, and Danton was on the first, Desmoulins on the second floor. Just across the river, over the Pont Neuf, was the café on the Quai de l’École which his father-in-law had kept, and above all, he was here in the midst of the youth of the schools. It was the slope of the famous hill of the University. Close by he would find the Café Procope, of which Desmoulins had written with such enthusiasm, which had once been illuminated with the little smile of Voltaire, which had heard the assertion of Diderot, and which in 1788 was noisy every night with discussion and speech and applause. All that atmosphere of debate which comes unconsciously to young men learning rose on the sides of the Mont Parnasse and centred in the room; and here in the winter of the year, in a society so entirely of his own rank that the high bourgeoisie and the noblesse knew nothing of its power, his great voice and generous face filled the circle with their energy. But there was yet no dream of revolution, still less of violence. France was waiting for great things, but they were to come of themselves, or on the wave of universal enthusiasm. The fire, however, was lit, and the group which afterwards passed from the Montagne to the scaffold of Germinal was already formed.

To all this, however, which was but the relaxation of an abundant spirit, must be added days of continual and serious work on the other side of the river. If his nights were in the Latin Quarter, his days were in the office of the Rue de la Tixanderie. A minister of the crown[35] does not intrust his family affairs to such a wastrel as the chance memoirs of opponents would make of Danton at this period, nor a lawyer who is never in his chambers, but gadding about politicising, get the conduct of one of the most important Chancery cases of his day.

There is one matter in these pre-revolutionary months which is of no very great importance, but which is well worth noticing, though the confusion apparent in our one account of it has lessened its value. There can be no doubt that Barentin, apart from his business relations, was personally intimate with Danton; and when that careful and moderate man had succeeded Lamoignon in September 1788, there was some kind of informal offer made to Danton of what we should call an official secretaryship to the minister[36]—or rather we have no name for it, for the ministry in France was not associated with legislation, but only with executive power, and therefore positions in its gifts had not the political importance they have with us.

As to the precise date of the offer, how far it was pressed, or how seriously it was made, we can have no exact knowledge. But it seems to me unwise to reject so characteristic an anecdote, and one which fits in so well with Danton’s known position, merely on the somewhat strained theory that documentary evidence alone should be admitted in history, and documentary evidence sifted by the rules of a rigid cross-examination.[37]

At any rate, Danton refused it. And not only did he refuse it, but there is no trace of an attempt to use his friend’s influence or to make a political success at a time when nearly every man’s head was turned by the chances of a great social change. He felt no need of politics, and it was not till much later, after quite twelve months of action and speech, that his oratory found foothold, and he felt the imperious appetites of a new power. Success in his profession was without question the one ambition which occupied him in the close of 1788, it was an ambition closely bound up with that business sense which was a strong element in the sane and practical mind of the Champenois lawyer.

It was upon him and his group of friends, in a Paris that every day grew keener in its discussion and attention, that the long-expected decree of the 27th of December fell. There were to be elections. Paris, all pamphleteered to death, but inclining as a whole to the moderate criticism of the more practical men, was at last called upon to act.

Many conditions must be made clear before we can understand the effect of these elections upon the history of the next three years. In the first place, France was suffering from a great material evil: she was going bankrupt, her agriculture was hopelessly depressed, her industries ruined, and thousands and thousands of men out of work were wandering about the streets of the cities. In the second place, the class which was going to vote for the Commons was the tax-paying class. And in the third place, the voting was by two degrees. I name these three conditions as qualifying a broad and often erroneous impression. I do not mean that the ideals were not abroad; all the world knows how bright the eyes of the young men were getting, and we are all familiar with Desmoulins, eager, passionate, stuttering but voluble, and passing from group to group as they discussed or dreamed. But it is too common to read the spirit of ’93 into those elections of ’89, and the error is a grievous one. As well might you interpret the spirit of an eloquent man who is about to defend a just and practical cause by hearing what he said later in the day, should his opponents have taken to fists and fought him heavily for several hours.

The immediate need was fiscal; the class called upon to meet it were the middle class; the men they were about to elect were of professional rank.

The electoral units and all corporations were asked to state their grievances before the gathering of the Parliament, and it is in these “cahiers” that the spirit of the time is best discovered. The abstractions, the phrases, the great general conceptions are found (as we might have expected, though it comes as a new thing) mainly in the complaints of the clergy and nobility; the peasant, the bourgeois, and the artisan have a more material grievance.

Thus the nobility of Caen in their cahier talk of the “National Contract,” and the clergy of Forez (after some remarks on the care and cleansing of ponds) end up with an admirable little essay on individual liberty, its limits and proper extension.[38] The nobility of Nantes and of Meulan talk roundly of the “rights of man,”[39] and generally this order calls for a Constitution—of which word they had in a very short time supped and dined. With lesser men the demands are rather for sublunary things, but the complaints that made Beugnot laugh give a good picture. “To have one’s dogs killed if necessary but not hamstrung, to be allowed to keep a cat, to be allowed to light a fire without paying dues, to sell one’s wine when one liked;” and from the bourgeoisie, regular trial, abolition of lettres de cachet, the old European policy that the growth of rich corporations should be checked and much of their property confiscated, the equalisation of taxation—such are the points upon which (a mere redress) the great bulk of Frenchmen were determined. One might sum up and say, “They demanded the freedom and common justice obtainable in the modern State.” But the privileged orders, for all their phrases, resisted when the time for reform was come, and their friction lit the flame of the ideal, disastrously for themselves and happily for the world.

As for the cahier sent from the electoral district of Paris in which Danton lived, it was destroyed by the Commune when they burnt the Hotel de Ville in 1871. We know, however,[40] that it demanded “the destruction of the Bastille,” a symbolic act ever present to the minds of Parisians, and, for the matter of that, by several cahiers of the provincial noblesse and clergy. There is no direct documentary evidence that Danton helped to draw up this cahier, but I cannot believe that a man of such influence in so small a space and among (comparatively) so few voters[41] had nothing to do with the framing of this document, especially when we consider the cry he gave as a boy, swimming in the river just beneath the walls of the prison.[42] There is, however, nothing to prove it, and he certainly took no memorable part in an action where all was tranquil and even tedious.

The mention, however, of the districts of Paris, and especially of that which could claim Danton, makes very necessary a view of that focus of revolutionary energy. It was called the district of the Cordeliers. It was small, one of the smallest of the sixty into which Paris was divided, yet it contained the very strongest of the brains and eloquence of its time, very few nobles, and, for the matter of that, very few of the artisans and hardly any of the proletariat. Later, when Danton threatened the reactionaries with the populace, it was not to the district of the Cordeliers, but to the Faubourg St. Marceau that he appealed; for the workmen were rare in its ancient, narrow streets, with their tall houses and little dark courts framing each some relic of the Middle Ages. Here were found many of the clergy, but above all a swarm of the young lawyers and students, the class that think high and hard and breed thoughts in others, a kind of little united clan of what was strongest in the youth of the University and the professions; and the whole homogeneous group centred round Danton.

If you stood in the Cour du Commerce in Danton’s time, and looked north to where his house made the corner of the narrow entry, you would have seen a main street only a trifle broader than the court, and running at right angles. Standing in the mouth of the narrow passage, you would have seen on the other side of the main street, and a hundred yards up it, a little fifteenth-century turret, capped with a pointed slate roof and jutting outward on round supports.[43] This was the extreme angle of an old convent called the Cordeliers.[44] Here the Franciscans had settled in St. Louis’s time, five hundred years before, but the walls you would have seen were not of the thirteenth, but rather of the early fourteenth century, while the church which flanked the street was of the sixteenth, and additions had been made of all periods. As you came out of the Cour du Commerce and went up the street, you would have the convent running all along the opposite side, from the little turret on the corner to the church of St. Come in the Rue de la Harpe, save where it was interrupted by private houses, and where it was broken in one place by a little lane leading to the hall of the University College, which the convent supported. Like so many great foundations, this rich place was in full decay, and the vaulted hall, with its dim light and resonant echoes, was given over to the meeting of the district, and later to the thunder of the voice that threw back the armies of Europe. Alone of all the mediæval buildings of the Cordeliers this hall remains to-day as the Musée Dupuytren.

There is yet one further point to be mentioned before we can make a complete picture of Danton’s position before these elections of 1789. There can be no doubt that the Masonic lodges had proved a powerful instrument in the preparation of opinion, and though our information on their formation in Paris is scanty, we can safely affirm that Danton belonged to the lodge of the “Nine Sisters,” which included such members as Sieyès or Bailly on the one hand and Collot D’Herbois on the other.[45] It would be foolish to over-estimate the influence of these societies. The subsequent history of their members proves quite clearly that the bond between them was slight (who can, for instance, reproach Desmoulins with a secret support of Bailly?), and (what is much more important) the very character of their composition disproves effectually any secret or prearranged action. The foolish Bailly, the learned Sieyès, the admirable, unpractical, high-minded Condorcet, the weak Garat, Collot D’Herbois the potential Red, all members of one lodge! They can have been little more than associations whose character of mutual help and whose opportunities of club-life (that comfort so lacking in Paris) attracted men. They were authorised, and were one of the very few kinds of refuge from a society where political discussion had decayed and where combined action was almost unknown.

This is all the importance, I think, which should be attached to them. Where men are free, and where the suffrage is open and common, secret societies may very justly be dreaded; their action will be at all times separate from that of society in general, and may be in a hidden antagonism to the will of the nation. But in a society where reunion, discussion, and all that is the blood of civic political life has been exhausted, then, like a special drug which cures, they have an excellent use. They may, in such societies, just keep alive the habit of political conversation and expectancy, and they may develop in some at least that organising spirit without which a political movement degenerates into anarchy.

This, then (to recapitulate), is Danton’s position just before the Parisian elections. He is in the midst of what are to be his group of young Revolutionary friends on the outskirts of the Latin quarter; his daily occupation is the conducting in his office on the north bank and at the Palace in the Cité of those important pleas in the highest court, which bring him into contact with the ministers, with the great corporations, and especially with the various organs of government of the old regime—for it was in cases for and against these that the Conseil du Roi came into play. His income is sufficient for his needs and for a slow but methodical payment of the price of his practice. It amounted (we may presume) to something in the neighbourhood of 25,000 francs, possibly a little less, but not much, for it was drawn from one of the most important Chancery cases of his day, and his clientele, to judge by the names which alone have reached us, was wealthy and of influence. He was thoroughly well read; he was not expecting nor planning a political career, as were so many of his friends (for instance, Desmoulins), but certain characters which he was rapidly developing, or rather discovering, in himself were preparing that career of necessity. He was learning in discussion and laughter, first that he was an orator, and secondly that his energy sufficed for a whole group of men, and that he could avoid leadership only at the expense of entire seclusion. In a time of innumerable pamphlets, he never put pen to paper outside his profession; and in days that were producing the ardent similes of Camille, and that were just beginning to feel the ravings of Marat, he wrote nothing but three grave, learned, concise, and dull opinions, which were admirable in argument, clear in exposition, and tolerable only to elderly lawyers.

As for his politics, he was centred wholly on the outward thing. He seems to have lacked almost entirely the metaphysic. Here was France all ruined and every day approaching more nearly to disaster; let her be turned into a place where men should be happy, should have enough to eat and drink, should be good citizens to the extent of making the nation homogeneous and strong. Reform should be practical: in part it would require discussion, not too much of it. In part, however, its lines were laid down for it. Economics taught certain truths; let them be applied. He had read in Adam Smith certain indubitable principles of this science; let them be used. Science had in such and such matters definite remedies to offer; let them be applied. Such were his over-simple aims. He was of the Encyclopædists. Had he no beliefs, then, in his politics? Undoubtedly he had; no man could desire “the good” without feeling it. But, like all minds of his type, he refused to analyse. His dogmas were all the more dogmas because he took them so entirely for granted that he refused even to define them. At a time when all men had their first principles ready-made in words, his was rather that confused instinct which is, after all, nearest to the truth. Patriotism, good-fellowship, freedom for his activities, the satisfaction of the thirst for knowledge—all these he desired in himself and for the State. And that is why you will find his great body at the head of mobs and daring criminal things when it is a question of saving the nation, or later of breaking an inquisitorial idea. It is this simplicity which makes him daring, and this concentration on a few obvious points which makes him judicious, unscrupulous, and successful in the choice of means and of phrases.

On the 24th of January 1789, the Primaries were convened. It was the opportunity for movement, in Paris especially, since it was the first definite action after so much discussion, attention, and fever. The district of the Cordeliers met in the hall of which so much mention has been made above. But there does not seem to have been anything of importance transacted, unless we call this important; I mean the beginnings of the habit of reunion and of open discussion. For three months the place seems to have had its doors open to the first comer of the quarter. The cahier was drawn up here, and the rough foundations of what was to be the famous permanent survival of the “République des Cordeliers” were laid. But of Danton’s part in all this we have, as I have said above, no trace. We can only conjecture and infer.

It was on April 21 that the elections were finally held. The voters all met together in the central halls of their districts (churches for the most part) and elected the electors, who in their turn were to nominate the deputies for Paris. Of Danton’s rôle in this important action, again we know nothing. M. Bougeart[46] has taken it for granted that he was at least “president of the district,” chairman (as we should say) of the electoral meeting; but he is either in error, or else he is relying on some verbal evidence which he has not given us. We have no document to prove it, and we know that three months later Timbergue and Achimbault, two barristers of the district, were successively presidents, not Danton.[47] What we do know of importance is that the Cordeliers were among those districts which did not disperse after the elections, but maintained themselves as a permanent club. This action by the districts was of the very first importance in the history of the Revolution. It created the municipal movement in July, it made Paris an organisation, gave the town a method and a voice, and more than any other accident it placed the ladder for Danton’s feet.

The elections of Paris once completed, the gates of the Revolution are passed, and the States-General, whose Commons formulated its first principles, are definitely formed; for Paris completed its voting much later than the provinces. The Parliament meets at Versailles, and that town presents for the next six months the centre of official interest. But since Paris is going to be, by its destiny, the heart of the reform, and since Danton is the tribune of Paris, we must, for the purposes of this biography, mention the assembly only in its relation to what passed in the capital.

The tone of Paris during the first two months of the Parliament was, as has been expressed earlier in this chapter, essentially one of ill-ease and watching. But this anxiety of the town took long to find a formula and to recognise its own nature. What Paris needed was the leadership; but to hear the confused murmur of the thousand voices, you would have thought that all her demands were for a number of more or less conflicting ideals. And yet there was no appearance of Party. One may say, by a just paradox, that her very cliques made for solidarity. The higher bourgeoisie could afford at first to ignore the group of the Latin Quarter, thinking the young lawyers and students to be merely foolish demagogues, not even dangerous. The ears of these last were closed to the confused demands of the populace, and the orators could honestly believe that ideas rather than hunger were to be the goad of change. By great good fortune their position was never wholly abandoned, and the Revolution from first to last mastered Materialism and its attendant Anarchy. Finally, the poor—the out-of-work, the starving labourers of the economic crisis—standing apart from both these leading classes, could convince themselves that the great phrases meant bread, and that a constitution was allied in some vague way to a lowering of prices. They were right in that instinct, but, with the picturesque inexactitude of mobs, they fearfully under-estimated the length of the connecting links.

The place where the average of these different views could best be found was the Palais Royal. Here a great popular forum gathered in the gardens which the Duke of Orleans had thrown open to the people. It was not a bad thing that the debts of this debauchee and adventurer had led him to let out the ground-floor of the wide quadrangle, for the cafés and shops that surrounded it made it a more permanent resort than the squares or gardens could have been, and there could be a perpetual mob-parliament held from day to day. Its orators were the Dantonist group; its instigators, I fear, the unprincipled men who surrounded D’Orleans, its committee-room and centre (as it were) the Café Foy. Still, by the action of the main virtue of revolutions, the general sense of the meeting was stronger than any demagogue; for in such times society is not only turbulent but fluid, and while it will support a leader who can swim, no mortal force can give it any direction other than that which it desires.

In this great daily crowd Danton was a prominent but not a principal figure; undoubtedly (though we cannot prove it by any record) he had begun to speak in his district, and we may presume that his voice had been heard in the Palais Royal before July; for just after the fall of the Bastille his name is mentioned familiarly. But even had he desired to identify himself with the place, which is doubtful, his profession would not have permitted it. He was not briefless, unmarried, and free, like Desmoulins, but a man of three years’ standing in the highest branch of his profession; doubtless, however, he was present daily when the crowd was thickest—I mean on the holidays and during the summer evenings.

All this pamphleteering, discussion, violence, salonising, oratory, and anxious criticism, even the mob violence which hunger and bad laws had inflamed, found a head in the three famous days that followed July 12, 1789. All the world knows the story, and even were it unfamiliar it would be impossible to treat of it at any length in this book, for Danton’s name hardly touches it, and our only interest here, in connection with his life, is to discover if he took part in the street fighting; for the event itself, one of the most decisive in history, a few words must suffice.

Paris, and especially the Palais Royal, had been watching the struggle at Versailles with gathering anger. There, twelve miles off, every purpose for which the Parliament had met, and every good thing which the elections had seemed to ensure, lay in jeopardy. Step after step the Commons had in fact, though not in their phrases, been beaten, and the promises of six months before seemed in danger, not through any known or calculable enemy, but from the sudden appearance of an opposition which the nation, and especially Paris, had ignored. The King had retreated from his position of the last December, and the privileged orders were sympathising with a growing reaction. How far all this was due to the unconstitutional and unprecedented action of the Commons in insisting on a General Assembly cannot be discussed here. Suffice it to say that, in the opinion of the nation, the new departure of the Commons was in thorough accordance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the recent decrees; the King was held to have broken his word, and the privileged orders to have abandoned their declarations in the face of facts. The symbol, though a poor one, of the constitutional position was the personality of Necker. Conceited, foreign, and common-place, the father of an authoress whom neither Napoleon nor posterity could tolerate, Genevese and bourgeois to the backbone, this mass of impotence yet stood, by one of the ironies of history, in the place of an idol. He, the banker, was the imagined champion for the moment of that other man from Geneva, who had died of persecution ten years before, the tender-eyed, wandering, unfortunate Rousseau, between whom and him was the distance between a financier and an apostle.

While the king was changing his advisers, and even while the foreign troops—fatal error—were being massed in wretched insufficiency on the Champ de Mars (not three miles from the Palais Royal) Necker still stood like a wooden idol, a kind of fetish safeguard against force. He just prevented the growing belief in the dissolution from becoming a certitude, and on account of his attitude Paris waited. These things being so, the king began his great programme of working out the good of his people alone. Relying on the three thousand foreigners, a regiment of home troops, and practically no guns wherewith to hold in check a tortuous city of close on a million souls, the king on Saturday, July 11, dismissed Necker.

Desmoulins first brought the news, running. It was the morrow, Sunday, and the Palais Royal was crowded. He forgot his stammer and hesitancy, and shouted to the great holiday crowd in the gardens to strip the trees for emblems, led them as they marched to the Place Louis Quinze, saw the French troops defend their fellow-citizens against the mounted mercenaries, and heard during a night of terror and of civil war the first shots of Revolution.

All the next day, Monday, July 13, 1789, Paris organised and prepared. Thanks to the permanence of the assemblies in certain districts, a rough machinery was ready, and on the 14th, a Tuesday, two great mobs determined upon arms. The time is not untainted, for St. Huruge was there promising and leading, but if D’Orleans was trying to make the most of the adventure, he no more created the uprising than a miller makes the tide. One stream of men seized the arsenal at the Invalides on the west side of the town, the other going east in a smaller band demanded arms of the governor of the Bastille, a place impossible to take by assault. The demand was refused.

A body of men, however, were permitted to enter the courtyard, for which purpose the drawbridge had been lowered: once in that trap, De Launay fired upon them and shot them down. There is no evidence, nor ever will be, as to the motives of that extraordinary act; but to the general people who were gathering and gathering all about in the narrow streets, it was an act of deliberate treason, part of that spirit with which our own time is not unfamiliar, and which has ruined a hundred reforms,—I mean the sentiment that there is no honour to be kept between government and insurrection. The misfortune or crime of De Launay struck a clear note in the crowd; if after that they failed, the blow that was being struck for the Parliament would fail also. Thus it was that, under a dull grey sky, the whole of Paris, as it were, ran up together to the siege of the fortress. Curés were there gathering up their soutanes and joining the multitude, notably the man who had once been Danton’s parish priest, the vicar of St. Germains, with his flock at his heels, like the good Curé of Bazeilles in later times, or the humorous Bishop of Beauvais six centuries before. Lawyers, students, shopkeepers, merchants, the big brewer of the quarter, the pedants, the clerks in the offices, soldiers and their officers, the young nobles even—there was nothing in Paris that did not catch the fever. The castle fell at last, because its garrison sympathised with the mob (of itself it was impregnable); the old governor made a futile attempt to blow up his stronghold and his command; some few who still obeyed him (probably the twenty Swiss) fired on the mob just after the white flag had been hoisted on the Bazinière tower, and a great tide of men mad with a double treason swirled up the fortress. Second on the wall was a man with whom this book will have to deal again—Hérault de Séchelles, young, beautiful, and of great family, beloved at the court and even pampered with special privilege, the friend and companion of Danton, and destined five years later to stand in the cart with him when they all went up to the scaffold together on a clear April evening in the best time of their youth.

The Cordeliers were in the attack, and presumably Danton also, since all the world was there. But his only allusion to the scene is a phrase of his circular to the courts when he took the Ministry of Justice in 1792, and he mentions his district only without including his own name. One anecdote, and only one, connects him with the days of July. It seems that in the night of the morrow, the early morning of the 16th, he was at the head of a patrol in that sudden levy of which mention will be made in this chapter. He thought it his duty to pass into the court of the Bastille, probably in order to gather some detached portion of his command; but he was met by Soulès, whom the informal meeting at the Hotel de Ville had named governor. Full of new-fangled importance, Soulès pompously forbad him to enter, and showed his commission. Danton did a characteristic thing, part and parcel of that intense sectionalism upon which he based all his action until Paris was at last in possession of herself: for him power was from below, and the armed district had a right of passage: he called the informal commission a rag, arrested Soulès, and shut him up in the guardroom at the Cordeliers; then, with a rather larger force, he marched him back through the streets and gave him into the custody of the Hotel de Ville, whose authority for judgment he admitted. The matter would be of no importance were it not for the fact that, in the very natural and on the whole just censure which the informal municipality passed on Danton’s action, Lafayette showed an especial bitterness.[48] It was the first clash between two men one of whom was to conquer and drive out the other; and it was a typical quarrel, for Danton stood in the matter for the independence of the electoral unit and for the power of Paris over itself: Lafayette represented the principle of a strong municipality based on moderate ideas and on a limited suffrage; in other words, the compromise which was planned for the very purpose of muzzling the capital.

I have spoken of an armed force and a patrol: it is in this connection that the meaning of the days of July—for Danton and for the Revolution—must be considered. They form above all a municipal reform. Those towns of which I have spoken as being the bond of France harked back suddenly to their primitive institutions, and were organising communal government. Paris of course was the leader. Even before the taking of the Bastille, the districts had in some cases maintained their electoral colleges as a permanent committee, and these electoral colleges met at the Hotel de Ville, forming a rough government for the two nights of the revolt, and finally directing the whole movement. Such a body was of necessity too large to work. But its plans were rapidly formed. They named a committee, which was formed of electors with one citizen (not an elector) added. They invited and obtained the aid of the permanent officers of what had once been the old dying and corrupt corporation, and they thus had formed an irregular but sufficient organ of government for the city. It was not confirmed from above, nor had it, for days, any authority from the King, but it reposed on a force which was admitted in the theory of those times to be the source of power, for it was composed of men elected by the new suffrage. They had been elected for another purpose, but they were the only popular representatives present at all in Paris.

Their weakness, however, lay in this quality of theirs. Reposing merely upon power from the districts, they could not act with central authority, nor had they an armed force of their own. They could, indeed, prevent the success of the rough anarchy which threatened the Hotel de Ville itself in the early morning of July 14, before the attack on the Bastille, but they could not prevent the lynching of those against whom the popular rage had arisen—De Launey, De Méray, De Persan. As for force, they organised a huge levy of 1200 men from each of the sixty districts, a force which, with certain additions, rose to 78,000. It was in this suddenly armed militia that Danton was elected a captain (for the moment), and in connection with its duties of police on the nights following the taking of the Bastille that his quarrel with Soulès had occurred. They named Bailly their first mayor. They gave the command of the new national guard to Lafayette; on the 16th they ordered, with a pomp of trumpets in the Place de Grève, the destruction of the Bastille, in which their new governor was installed. But through all this vigorous action there is one cardinal fact to be remembered: the whole of their power was from below, not only in theory but in fact. We may construct a metaphor to express the future effect of this, and say that, at the very origin of the Revolution, the body of government in Paris was tainted by an organic weakness which no structural changes could remove, and to whose character all subsequent events for three years can be traced. It was essentially federal; feeble at the centre, continually asking leave, morally a servant and not a master; lacking above all things the supreme force of conviction, it acted without power because it did not believe in itself.

The history, then, of its struggle with the extremists is the history of a body attempting by compromise and ruse to attain a position whose theory it openly denies, whose moral right it will not affirm, and whose very existence is made dependent upon those whom it would coerce against their will. The municipality tried to be a strong government while it openly approved of voluntaryism, to be powerful in its acts and weak in its structure. Ultimately the centre of compromise is captured by ardent revolutionaries whom it has attempted to check, and then we get a true despotism in Paris—the terrible commune of the second period of the Republic and of the Terror.

But if the character of the new municipal government (a character which became specially prominent after the legislation of the whole system later in the year) is the special feature of the movement, its general motive is of course more important. We have called it the Reform; what occurred in the next few days was without any question the origin of the active Revolution, and a little examination of facts will show that the taking of the Bastille was not merely a dramatic incident, still less the exaggerated bagarre that certain modern special pleaders would make it, but, on the contrary, the foundation of everything. The contemporaries are proved to have been right in their view of this matter, as of so many others.

Why was this? Because, first, in taking the Bastille, after having sacked the Invalides, the people of Paris (for it was not a particular mob, but a gathering of every possible class) held all the cannon in the city, and were thoroughly provided with small arms. They were suddenly become the masters of that insufficient camp in the Champ de Mars on which the King had relied. In open country and without artillery these seventy thousand civilians would, of course, have been so many sheep, but in the town and with a number of old artillerymen (officers and men) to work their guns, it was another matter. On and after July 14, 1789, Paris had found that possession of herself which we postulated as her first great appetite in the Revolution.

Secondly, by this sudden stroke Paris forced the Court to capitulate. At Versailles the King went bareheaded to the Assembly, gave permission for the reunion of the three orders, for a discussion of grievances before supply, for the title of National Assembly, for the formation of a constitution before the voting of fiscal measures—in a word, for all that the Commons had demanded, and for the fulfilment of all the promises from which he had attempted to recede.

Thirdly, the victory, or rather the act of Paris, changed and weakened the opposition. From openly gathering troops, and boasting an approaching attack on the Parliament, they are reduced to intrigue and to the difficult business of arming in the dark. Many of the heads of the reaction (notably the Comte d’Artois) leave France in the “first emigration,” and the whole action of the uncompromising party is made weaker, and clearly unnational.

Fourthly (and perhaps this is the most important point), that municipal movement, of which mention has been made above, took its rise directly from the 14th of July. The towns hear of Necker’s dismissal and of the Parisian rising by the same courier, and in a week or ten days the story is repeated all over France. Rouen, Lyons, Valence, Montpellier, Nîmes, Tours, Amiens (to cite but a few of the more prominent examples), organise a new town government. Sometimes the old hereditary or appointed body is deposed, more often it is enlarged by the addition of the electoral college of the city; occasionally it takes upon itself the task of adding to itself representatives of the three orders. Again, the towns arm themselves as Paris did; and finally, by what a contemporary called “spontaneous anarchy,” the whole network of cities has received the pulse and vibration of Paris; the National Guards are being drilled in thousands; the rusty, confused, and broken machinery of the ancien régime is replaced by a simple if rough system of local government. Moreover, since all this has been done by the people themselves, and without a command or a centralised effort, since it is natural and not artificial, it has entered into the body of the Revolution and cannot be undone.

You see, then, that the days of July gave Paris the first word, and made the spirit of sectionalism and local autonomy based upon a highly democratic theory. All these things are the conditions of Danton’s rise; they make possible, and even necessary, the society of which he is to be the guide. After the 14th of July the Cordeliers meet daily; the bell was rung above the church at nine in the morning, and an assembly of the district was held.[49] It was not yet in name the famous “club”; but when we consider the action of the popular societies in Paris, we must always remember that this, even before it regularly assumed its final name and functions, was a society organised for debate and action, and that it was the first to be established.

From its origin, this famous meeting is sharply marked in its spirit—the spirit that will later divide it not only from the moderate clubs, such as the Feuillants, but from the Jacobins themselves. In the first place, it is Parisian; it attempts no provincial propaganda; it confines itself to action in Paris, and even to its own immediate neighbourhood. In the second place, it is purely popular. But (it may be asked) were not the Jacobins in their later stage a purely popular club? No, not in the same sense. The Jacobins, as will be seen later in this book, were an organised body; the public was admitted to their galleries; but, even in the most feverish time of the Revolution, they are distinguished by a close bond from the general people. Their membership is almost exclusively confined to the politicians, and their business is inquisitorial. They preach certain political dogmas, and make it their affair to canalise the Revolutionary current; they desire to establish in France a Republican religion, as it were, and we shall see later in Robespierre their high priest and dictator.

The Cordeliers had nothing of all this. If the Royalist writers begin calling them from the outset the “République des Cordeliers,” it is because they show the general spirit which Danton surely gave to, rather than received from, his district. Freedom of opinion, the value of varied discussion, open doors, and even an intermingling with the street—such were their methods. The men who sat on the benches would vary from one hundred to three,[50] according to the interest of the debate or the value of the occasion. The number inscribed on the registers of the society were simply the whole voting strength of the district; under the limited suffrage of the time it would fluctuate round the figure six hundred; and hence we may observe that those who were so strongly touched by the contemporary movement as to add meeting and debating to their mere votes numbered a good half of the electorate. Standing grouped, or moving in and out of the far end of the hall, would be the chance-comers, the disfranchised multitude of the district—those even who had no residence in the quarter, but whom anger, interest, or curiosity might attract. It was composed of every kind of man—the pedantic but accurate Sieyès; the fastidious radical and poet D’Eglantine; the coarse, brutal, and atheistic Hébert; Desmoulins, ardent and admirably polished, linked by his style to the classics of his own country and of Rome; Legendre, the master-butcher, no great politician, but an honest friend; and, added to all these, the lawyers. There was a preponderance of the young men, the students and barristers in their thirtieth year; but take it all in all, it was the most representative, the most general of the meetings.

The society, then, from which Danton rises is marked by these characters: it tends always to defend the presence in politics of the whole people; it is unitarian, designing above all things a common ground where Frenchmen may found the new order in harmony; and finally, it possesses nothing of the metaphysical spirit abroad at the time. It is all for action along the lines of common sentiments—the defence of the new individual liberty, the destruction as soon as may be of whatever relics of the old machinery might be spared by the fear or inertia of certain reformers.

I cannot leave what has already grown to an over-lengthy description of their political attitude without touching upon a quality of theirs, which was not indeed a principle, but which was a method of action necessarily flowing from the ideas they held. The Cordeliers are essentially “Frondeurs.” They are rebellious and in opposition so long as the Revolution remains incomplete. They do things deliberately illegal, but which they justly consider to be in the spirit of the reform and calculated to aid its rapid development. Why was this? Because the day after Paris had captured the position, in the very moment when the city had forced reaction into subterranean channels, her power was bridled. The King came to Paris on the 17th of July and confirmed the revolutionary appointments. Bailly is mayor, and Lafayette is commissioned head of the National Guard. In those two names you have the forces, or rather the resistances, against which Danton and the Cordeliers made it their business to fight. Both of them were amiable, both weak, and both sincere; but they belonged, the one to the high bourgeoisie, the other to the noblesse; they were both full of an intense class-prejudice; both thought rather of the restraints to be imposed than of the great change in the midst of which they lived. The little movements that Bailly might have mistaken for an enthusiasm would arise at the sight of his telescope; the undoubted excitability of Lafayette was aroused by the public mention of his own name. Under these weaknesses their external sign was pomposity, their political action an attempt to confine the Revolution to the middle class. Thus, later, the sixty districts are replaced by the forty-eight sections in order to jerrymander the Parisian radicals; thus Bailly tries to oppose Parisian appeals to the Parliament; and thus Lafayette not only attempts to convert the National Guard into a political army, but makes it impossible for the poor to join it.

Against all this the Cordeliers set their face. Such a partial conception of the State was the enemy of that ideal by which they lived and which has formed the Republic in France and the Jeffersonian democracy in America. Only four days after the King had worn his tricolour cockade, smiling on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, they issue and print a resolution to use the armed force of their district at its own discretion; they do not (of course) claim to act further, but they determine to be themselves the police which shall conduct prisoners to the tribunals.[51] At the close of 1789, and especially in the succeeding year, we shall find them in the affair of Marat, of Danton’s election, of the Mandat Imperatif, and of the Châtelet continually acting in the spirit of local autonomy, and refusing to admit any central authority save that of the whole people—bowing after every revolt to the Assembly, but refusing to admit the bourgeois power.

The end of July was the destruction of the feudality in France. When the towns had fallen with a shock into the new conditions, the great dust of villages rose of itself into a storm, and there passed over all the countrysides that strange panic, “The Great Fear,” whose legend alone of Revolutionary memories remains among the peasantry to-day.

The woods were full of terrors; ploughmen started out at night by bands to meet invisible armies; an unsubstantial enemy threatened the thousands of little lonely villages that lie undefended on the skirts of forests or lost on the leagues and leagues of plains. In that mysterious panic the Jacquerie arose; the cowed and the oppressed, who had forgotten the generous anger which makes men brave, rose under the lash of fear. They had heard of the promises of reform, they had seen the cahiers drawn up that they might become free men, and yet the town close by had risen and armed because something had gone wrong; the King, whom they loved, was not allowed to help his people; some one was delaying or destroying their hopes, and the brigands were coming down the road. Not with committees, organisation, and battalions, as the intelligence of the towns had just done, but instinctively and with the anarchy of the torch they destroyed the skeleton idol of the old regime. Like their fathers of four hundred years before, they were out to destroy the records of their servitude, and where the records were defended the country-houses burned. But this time no vengeance followed: the wild beast was dead. When in the noisy night of the 4th of August the privileged men scattered away their rights, then that last largesse of the nobles, the “Orgy,” as Mirabeau called it, was but a gift of things already taken. After Paris, after the cities, the peasantry had suddenly stiffened the phrases by an act; perhaps it was their formless and vague energy that laid the heaviest of the foundation-stones, for we are told that in twenty years an exile returning thought that France had been re-peopled with a new kind of men.

It is not wonderful that, with such a fire just smouldering down, and with the spirit of renunciation abroad as well, a regular stream of emigration should set out. But it did not leave the opposition powerless though it deprived it of chiefs. If we consider the Court, the capital, and the Assembly in the months of August and September, the next great step (and the first in connection with which the name of Danton is directly connected) becomes clear.

At Versailles all the first part of August is taken up in voting the famous decree which consecrated the debate of the 4th. The Parliament abolished feudal dues, declaring all rights in service at an end, and establishing a period for the national purchase and subsequent abolition of the rest of the feudal dues. All the second part of August and the whole of September were occupied in drawing up the declaration of the rights of man and in decreeing the fundamental articles of the new Constitution. The National Assembly, then, as a whole, is thoroughly the organ of France. It is not yet so divided as to arouse definite party feeling in the capital, nor to prevent on important occasions a practically unanimous vote. But there is another factor. The Court (especially the Queen) has a definite party formed; it has its correspondence with the emigrés, and they with the personalities, if not with the official organs of foreign governments. It was without any question the object of this very small and very powerful group to arrest the Revolution, and if possible to wipe out the last six months. Between and above these stands the King. Louis (we are too apt to forget it in our knowledge of what follows) still possessed far more power even than the National Assembly; not only by the political decrees of the time, but by that immeasurable force of custom, by the affection which he personally had inspired in the great bulk of men, he was a powerful king. What was his attitude? He was patriotic; he greatly sympathised with the ideas at the root of the reform; he was sensible, and saw the practical value of casting away what is broken and worn out. On the other hand, he was not brave (especially in the face of the unknown); new developments irritated him; he was (by the inevitable result of his training) determined to preserve in his own hands the bulk of power, and sometimes he was panic-stricken at a phrase or a debate which seemed to put it in jeopardy. Finally—a matter of the utmost importance with a character of such well-balanced mediocrity—the people with whom he hunted, dined, and conversed were almost all of them members of a powerful, bitter, and skilful faction, headed by the most determined and able of all—his wife, for whom he had latterly developed a marked tenderness and even respect.

This ring of courtiers, who were Louis’s evil fates, had a certain quality that gave them great power in spite of their small numbers. It must be remembered that they were of the high cosmopolitan type, those who, a generation earlier, delighted in the wit of Voltaire, who, a generation later, smiled at merely hearing the name of Talleyrand. Perhaps there was never a body better fitted to influence an isolated man by phrases, continual conversation, and intrigue.

What is the effect? That the King, always honestly intending the reform, always hesitates a little too long, with doubts that are often intellectual in origin and sometimes wise in their nature, but foolish at the moment. He hesitates to sign the decree of the 4th of August;[52] he hesitates about this and that expression in the Declaration of rights. He has a very strong reluctance to forego the absolute veto; all through September you can hear the machinery creaking, and it gets worse as the autumn advances.

Meanwhile in Paris two forces are at work to aid this crisis at Versailles. First, the popular societies, notably that meeting in the Palais Royal, which now is almost a Parliament, where every prominent Parisian name is heard, and whence those curious documents, parodies of the old-fashioned decrees, emanate,[53] not unfrequently with the power to cause insurrection. Secondly, the price of food, especially of flour, is rising rapidly. We have explained in the first chapter how largely the lack of food in the towns was due to vicious interference with exchange: when such is the prime cause of economic trouble, the least disturbance aggravates it to a high degree; thus it was that while the harvest was being gathered in the north, and in the south had been already stored, the supply of cereals in the capital was all but exhausted.

Thus curiously side by side (and partly overlapping) the intense political interest of the voting class and the growing misery of the populace ran fatally towards the days of October. At the Cordeliers, innocent of pedants, practical, alert, debating with open doors, there met the two revolutionary interests, those of the politicians and of the poor; and this is why they are heard so loudly in September, and why Danton and his district become famous just before the march on Versailles.

It will be remembered that the assembly of electors at the Hotel de Ville had guided Paris through the great storm of July 13-17; their powers were vague and unconstitutional, for they had been elected at first merely to choose Deputies for Paris, nevertheless it was they who had made Bailly mayor, who had nominated Lafayette, who had formed the National Guard, and who had been confirmed by the King in their functions of a provisional municipality. It was acting on this decree which gave them a right to take political initiative, that on Thursday, July 23, they had sent a circular to the sixty districts asking each to name two members. The hundred and twenty so elected were to draw up a plan for a new municipality; they met, did so, and the result of their labours was the issue on August 30th of a scheme for a new municipal system, upon which the primaries in every districts were asked to debate. Somewhat illogically, however, the complicated document was accompanied by a writ demanding the immediate election in each district of five members to form the new corporation. In other words, the primaries were asked to form a new municipality, to give it full powers, and then to debate academically upon what they had done.

It may have been only a blunder, but the Cordeliers took alarm at what certainly seemed to be a plot on the part of the Moderates. The project and the writ had reached them on Sunday August 30th; by Thursday, September 3rd, they had arrived at a decision to refuse the writ. They argued that it was absurd to ask the districts to debate on a project after its most essential part had been realised, namely, the election of deputies. On that election, its methods, the powers of the members, and so forth, the greater part of the discussions would turn, and by the time the districts had arrived at such and such conclusions, or had modified the powers of their deputies in such and such a fashion, those deputies would already have been sitting for some time as a municipal council, would be helping to frame or to modify the new municipal system on their own account. It would have been not only confusion but an encroachment on the principle by which (nominally) the districts had been consulted, viz., that the electors themselves in their districts should thrash out the new system. The Cordeliers named commissioners who examined the whole matter, and, on Saturday, the 12th, definitely rejected the writ. Nevertheless, as the other districts had all obeyed and had elected their five members each, the Cordeliers elected their five under protest[54] on the following Monday, the 14th, and sent them, bound by a strict oath, to the Hotel de Ville.

This little incident merits a very considerable degree of attention, although it has been somewhat neglected by the historians, and even by Danton’s biographers. It was the first skirmish in that decisive struggle between the democratic idea, headed by the Cordeliers, and the limited suffrage of the first municipality—a struggle which is at the root of all the action of Paris. It is the first act of Danton in an official position; in much that the Cordeliers had done he was evidently the leader, but in this document we learn that he is elected president of the district, and see his name signed.[55] And finally, there appears here, for the first time in the Revolution, the Mandat Imperatif, the brutal and decisive weapon of the democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its principal election, and which must in the near future be the method of our final reforms. It had been raised, and Danton had raised it; for these five deputies, before being permitted to attend at the Hotel de Ville, swore to a definite plan of action whose terms were dictated at the general meeting of the district.

The struggle as it continues becomes of greater importance, until, within four months, it faces Danton himself in the Hotel de Ville; but we cannot describe its further steps until we have mentioned the next action with which the Cordeliers are associated, and in which their decisive rôle is largely determined by the Revolutionary championship which this brush with authority had given them.

We have described above the various forces that were fatally converging to form the whirlpool of October—the hesitancy of the King, the desperate intrigues of the Court, the intense political excitement of the Palais Royal and of the electors in Paris, the growing misery of the populace. We have pointed out how the Cordeliers, with their popular audience and popular sympathies, were at once the only great debating place in Paris and the only spot where the forces of voters and non-voters could join hands. Add to this the effect of the protest described above and of the position such a struggle gave them in the democratic movement, and their importance in the days of October becomes evident.

It was at the close of September that all these tendencies came together. Again, after three months of silence, the reaction found its voice, and the King’s uncertainty, the Court faction’s plotting, culminated in the arrival at Versailles of military reinforcements. The body-guards were doubled, and there marched in the Regiment of Flanders—a body (by the way) to whose name clings something of comedy, and whose raggedness has passed into a marching legend. This book is not the place to describe at any length what followed, save in its connection with Danton and the Club. On Thursday, October the 1st, a famous dinner was given by the body-guard to the newly arrived regiment. The Court dealt with excellent material, and with the wine and the night the admirable feelings of loyalty arose: the poor King assumed the halo of a leader to these men whose regimental traditions were knit up with the monarchy; soldiers, they appreciated his defeat, and, being comrades, they were angry at his loneliness. They greeted him with a passionate song, destroyed the three-coloured cockades, and pinned on the white ribbons; for the first time in a year enthusiasm was with the beleaguered, though it lasted but a few hours and stretched to but a few hundred of men. To Paris, hearing of it on the next day, Friday, it was a challenge, discussed, oddly enough, with some contradictions and confusions. Men talked of Bouillé, the courtier, and his frontier command at Metz; people were afraid that he would protect the King in some flight to the provinces; there ran a vague uneasiness and a fear of anarchy with the King’s disappearance; above all, in the minds of the politicians a fear of armed reaction, and in the minds of the starving a terror that the reforms which were so material to them were in jeopardy. Still, all Saturday the waters only moved at the surface, and you might have thought that Paris was incapable of any combined action.

But if the reaction contained a powerful integrating force in the Court party, Paris also possessed it in a small meeting and in one supremely energetic man. On the morning of Sunday, a day when there was leisure to read, the walls were placarded with the manifesto of the Cordeliers. It demanded an insurrection, and was signed with Danton’s name. On Monday morning they rang the tocsin at the belfry of the convent, and the battalion of the district was drawn up and armed. De Crèvecœur, their commander, prevented them marching in a body, but a number of the district determined to merge with the crowd. Meanwhile, the mob gathered from every quarter, especially the Place de Grève—a true mob this time, and accompanied, as all the world knows, by a crowd of women, poured up the Versailles road. They made a hideous night in the great space before the palace. Lafayette followed tardily with his organised volunteers, the National Guard; but on the Tuesday the palace was forced, and some of its defenders killed. The royal family came in their heavy coach down the twelve miles of falling road into Paris, and, not without some state, they entered the Tuilleries. The National Assembly followed the King into the capital.

Thus the second milestone of the Revolution was passed. Of all the revolutionary days, these were the most purely anarchic. The action was that of men hardly possessing ideas, but fixed upon a practical thing—the presence of the King in Paris. It had for its main object good, and for its method mad anger. Nevertheless, the instinct of the mob had hit the mark. Like all sudden actions, it had made issues definite which had till then been confused. It put an end once and for all to the idea of crushing the reform at its outset by force; it gave Paris a mastery over every subsequent action; of the many ways the Court party might have tried it reduced them to one only, namely, an organised secret diplomacy with the object of raising Europe against France.

As for Louis, we may honestly believe that his capture was not entirely distasteful to him: as he was less acute, so he had certainly more common-sense than his wife. If he was jealous of his dignity, which had been grievously offended, yet he was very French, patriotic, and not unwilling to see himself the object of a violent demand. Everybody saw—the King must have seen it too—that the whole uprising was monarchic. There was not any class more monarchic in France than the poor. The King as their father was an idea bred in them for centuries, and he knew that they made of him a kind of providence who could give them food; that they rose not to make him less powerful, but to make a faction impotent. And there was nothing distasteful to him in being a King of the French, seated in the midst of his great capital, and on the summit, as it were, of a new order. October did not threaten to make him less, but more of a King. It was later, in questions that affected the heart, especially in matters of religion, that the gulf opened between Louis and his people.

With the King, then, at the Tuilleries, with the Assembly some three hundreds yards off down the gardens in the riding-school of the palace,[56] we enter the long avenue by which Paris obtains the initiative in every subsequent reform. Let us turn, then, to follow once more the action of the society and the man who, between them, determine the direction of Paris for the next three years.

The quarrel which was sketched earlier in this chapter, the assault of the district upon the Moderates, continued throughout the autumn and winter. Four times running Danton is elected President,[57] and it is under his guidance that the affair proceeds. While the Assembly are making a new France at the Manège, organising the departments,[58] fixing the restricted suffrage,[59] creating the communes over all France,[60] the Cordeliers are making the spirit of a new Paris on the hill over the river; this spirit will conquer and transform the debaters in the Parliament.

On the 22nd of October they follow up their previous action. Already before the revolt they had come into collision with the municipality: in this new resolution they protest against a demand of Lafayette for regular courts-martial in the National Guard. The protest had a meaning, for Lafayette was raising an armed bourgeois power, but the motive of the Cordeliers was mainly the desire to harass the Moderates. A week later the Municipal Council gave its reply to these various encroachments on the part of the Cordeliers in a decree of the 29th of October: it condemned the action of the district in three definite points: first, its habit of passing resolutions like a small municipal body; secondly, its habit of asking the fifty-nine other districts to pass spontaneous resolutions on important matters; thirdly (and most important), its revolutionary action in demanding an oath from its delegates. In this last point the purely democratic idea on the one hand, and the senatorial theories of the Moderates on the other, came face to face, and on that point the issue turned. On the 2nd of November the district replied by a resolution denying the right of the elected to control the electors, and especially condemning the interference of the Hotel de Ville with debates in the districts. On the 12th, ten days later, they came out into the open with a resolution that was like a declaration of war against Bailly and Lafayette; they drew up a form of oath which their five deputies were to swear, and this oath bound the members of the district not only to obey the district in all its resolutions, but also to admit that they could be dismissed after being called upon three times to resign by a majority of the district. It was the full doctrine of delegacy and of the corporate will.

Only two of the five members took the oath, the rest resigned and were promptly replaced by others, and these presented themselves at the Hotel de Ville on November 16th. Condorcet was President of the municipal body, and practically everybody there was furious against the Cordeliers. They demanded a recital of the causes which had led to the dismissal of the three members, and then they insisted on hearing the terms of the famous oath that bound the five deputies. Of the two who had consented to take the oath in the first instance, one (Peyrilhe) muttered excuses, but the other (Croharé), who seems to have been more of a true Cordelier, was very proud of the position he held, and would have explained the true doctrine at great length, had not the meeting cut him short by a vigorous vote, declaring all such oaths inadmissible, sending away the three new members, and recalling those who had resigned. On the next day the municipality broke the law. It turned Croharé out, but by a very small vote, in which many abstained.[61] Of course such an action was not to be tolerated, for it would have made the majority of the municipality able to end all opposition or debate, and the mistake of Condorcet was Danton’s opportunity.

Every character he possesses is apparent in the struggle that follows. He carries it on with something of the diplomacy that later was matched against all Europe: he secures his allies and isolates his enemies: he pleads to convince and to obtain official support, not (as do so many of his contemporaries) in order to follow a line of thought. In a word, he is habile, and practically he succeeds.

Observe the quality of this action. When the district meets on the 17th (while the Commune was dismissing Croharé), Danton sees the importance of keeping its debate in bounds. That gathering, which is so enamoured of abstract rights, is suddenly bound down by the superior ability of its chairman: the discussion is made to follow points of legal technicality, and Danton imposes upon the Cordeliers so strict a discipline for one day, that two points alone emerge from the speeches, and they are precisely the two which could be used as arguments. (1.) That the Commune was provisional, and its raison d’être was the formation of a new municipal system: in such cases (say the Cordeliers) the subjects of the experiment must remain masters, and it would be absurd to take away the power of control, that later would have to be readmitted when the new municipal constitution should be sent to the districts for acceptance or rejection: in a word, they argued on the vice de raisonnement—the want of logic—in the Commune’s action. (2.) They appealed to the Assembly—that is, they recognised and submitted to the centre of national power.[62] The Assembly was in a dilemma. It was in full sympathy with the Moderates with Bailly and with Lafayette; on the other hand, it could not, without a great loss of prestige, deny the very principles upon which its own power rested. Their committee on the subject desired a complete admission of the Cordeliers’ claim; the Assembly rejected this, and tried to compromise by saying that both parties should go back to “the state of things of November 10th”—that is, to the state of things before the oath and before the whole trouble. The compromise would not hold. The deputies thus legally reinstated all resigned (except Croharé) on account of the feeling in their district, and the Cordeliers then, with full legality, re-elected their popular champions of the Mandat Imperatif.