Danton - Danton by Hilaire Belloc

Departure of a volunteer to the revolutionary armies, painting by Watteau de Lille

Extracts from "Danton A Study"
by Hilaire Belloc

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

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 role, 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.

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 organized the in­surrection that was the one act of violence in his life.

The rest of the nineteen months that fate allowed [him] 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 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

New revolutionary attire for lower classes in Pat-is.
The "sans culottes" were so named because they wore long trousers with red and white stripes instead of the traditional silk knee-breeches. They had a kind of red conical cap, the "bonnet rouge" (this Phrygian cap was used in the Antiquity by freed slaves and thus was the symbol of freedom from tyranny). The women wore a striped skirt.

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 inth 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.

From Danton A Study, pp. 35-39

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.

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 of 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. 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

Maximilien Robespierre

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

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 Encyclopedia 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.

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, 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

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."

From Hilaire Belloc, Danton A Study, pp. 53-56