Page:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu/842

 thought about as a coarser version of the great tribune of the Constituent Assembly; he was called the Mirabeau of the sans-culottes, and Mirabeau of the markets.

In the executive government that was formed on the king’s dethronement, this strong revolutionary figure found himself the colleague of the virtuous Roland and others of the Girondins. Their strength was speedily put to a terrible test. The alarming successes of the enemy on the frontier, and the surrender of two important fortresses, had engendered a natural panic in the capital. But in the breasts of some of the wild men whom the disorder of the time had brought to prominent place in the Paris commune this panic became murderously heated. Some hundreds of captives were barbarously murdered in the prisons. There has always been much dispute as to Danton’s share in this dreadful transaction. At the time, it must be confessed, much odium on account of an imputed direction of the massacres fell to him. On the whole, however, he cannot be fairly convicted of any part in the plan. What he did was to make the best of the misdeed, with a kind of sombre acquiescence. He deserves credit for insisting against his colleagues that they should not flee from Paris, but should remain firm at their posts, doing what they could to rule the fierce storm that was raging around them.

The elections to the National Convention took place in September, when the Legislative Assembly surrendered its authority. The Convention ruled France until October 1795. Danton was a member; resigning the ministry of justice, he took a foremost part in the deliberations and proceedings of the Convention, until his execution in April 1794. This short period of nineteen months was practically the life of Danton, so far as the world is concerned with him.

He took his seat in the high and remote benches which gave the name of the Mountain to the thoroughgoing revolutionists who sat there. He found himself side by side with Marat, whose exaggerations he never countenanced; with Robespierre, whom he did not esteem very highly, but whose immediate aims were in many respects his own; with Camille Desmoulins and Phélippeaux, who were his close friends and constant partisans. The foes of the Mountain were the group of the Girondins,—eloquent, dazzling, patriotic, but unable to apprehend the fearful nature of the crisis, too full of vanity and exclusive party-spirit, and too fastidious to strike hands with the vigorous and stormy Danton. The Girondins dreaded the people who had sent Danton to the Convention; and they insisted on seeing on his hands the blood of the prison massacres of September. Yet in fact Danton saw much more clearly than they saw how urgent it was to soothe the insurrectionary spirit, after it had done the work of abolition which to him, as to them too, seemed necessary and indispensable. Danton discerned what the Girondins lacked the political genius to see, that this control of Paris could only be wisely effected by men who sympathized with the vehemence and energy of Paris, and understood that this vehemence and energy made the only force to which the Convention could look in resisting the Germans on the north-east frontier, and the friends of reaction in the interior. “Paris,” he said, “is the natural and constituted centre of free France. It is the centre of light. When Paris shall perish there will no longer be a republic.”

Danton was among those who voted for the death of the king (January 1793). He had a conspicuous share in the creation of the famous revolutionary tribunal, his aim being to take the weapons away from that disorderly popular vengeance which had done such terrible work in September. When all executive power was conferred upon a committee of public safety, Danton had been one of the nine members of whom that body was originally composed. He was despatched on frequent missions from the Convention to the republican armies in Belgium, and wherever he went he infused new energy into the work of national liberation. He pressed forward the erection of a system of national education, and he was one of the legislative committee charged with the construction of a new system of government. He vainly tried to compose the furious dissensions between Girondins and Jacobins. The Girondins were irreconcilable, and made Danton the object of deadly attack. He was far too robust in character to lose himself in merely personal enmities, but by the middle of May (1793) he had made up his mind that the political suppression of the Girondins had become indispensable. The position of the country was most alarming. Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and Jemmappes, had deserted. The French arms were suffering a series of checks and reverses. A royalist rebellion was gaining formidable dimensions in the west. Yet the Convention was wasting time and force in the vindictive recriminations of faction. There is no positive evidence that Danton directly instigated the insurrection of the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, which ended in the purge of the Convention and the proscription of the Girondins. He afterwards spoke of himself as in some sense the author of this revolution, because a little while before, stung by some trait of factious perversity in the Girondins, he had openly cried out in the midst of the Convention, that if he could only find a hundred men, they would resist the oppressive authority of the Girondin commission of twelve. At any rate, he certainly acquiesced in the violence of the commune, and he publicly gloried in the expulsion of the men who stood obstinately in the way of a vigorous and concentrated exertion of national power. Danton, unlike the Girondins, accepted the fury of popular passion as an inevitable incident in the work of deliverance. Unlike Billaud Varenne or Hébert, or any other of the Terrorist party, he had no wish to use this frightful two-edged weapon more freely than was necessary. Danton, in short, had the instinct of the statesman. His object was to reconcile France with herself; to restore a society that, while emancipated and renewed in every part, should yet be stable; and above all to secure the independence of his country, both by a resolute defence against the invader, and by such a mixture of vigour with humanity as should reconcile the offended opinion of the rest of Europe. This, so far as we can make it out, was what was in his mind.

The position of the Mountain had now undergone a complete change. In the Constituent Assembly its members did not number more than 30 out of the 578 of the third estate. In the Legislative Assembly they had not been numerous, and none of their chiefs had a seat. In the Convention for the first nine months they had an incessant struggle for their very lives against the Girondins. They were now (June 1793) for the first time in possession of absolute power. It was not easy, however, for men who had for many months been nourished on the ideas and stirred to the methods of opposition, all at once to develop the instincts of government. Actual power was in the hands of the two committees—that of public safety and of general security. Both were chosen out of the body of the Convention. The drama of the nine months between the expulsion of the Girondins and the execution of Danton turns upon the struggle of the committee to retain power—first, against the insurrectionary commune of Paris, and second, against the Convention, from which the committees derived an authority that was regularly renewed on the expiry of each short term.

Danton, immediately after the fall of the Girondins, had thrown himself with extraordinary energy into the work to be done. The first task in a great city so agitated by anarchical ferment had been to set up a strong central authority. In this genuinely political task Danton was prominent. He was not a member of the committee of public safety when that body was renewed in the shape that speedily made its name so redoubtable all over the world. This was the result of a self-denying ordinance which he imposed upon himself. It was he who proposed that the powers of the committee should be those of a dictator, and that it should have copious funds at its disposal. In order to keep himself clear of any personal suspicion, he announced his resolution not to belong to the body which he had thus done his best to make supreme in the state. His position during the autumn of 1793 was that of a powerful supporter and inspirer, from without, of the government which he had been foremost in setting up. Danton was not a great practical administrator and contriver, like Carnot, for instance. But he had the gift of raising in all who heard him an heroic spirit of patriotism and fiery devotion, and he had a clear eye and a cool judgment in the