Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/853

Rh D A N T N 817 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 insur rection of May 31 and June 2, 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 ian inevitable incident in the work of deliverance. Unlike Billaud de Varennes, or Hebert, 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 com plete change. In the Constituent Assembly its members did not number more than 30 out of the 578 of the Third Estate. [n 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 mspirer, trom without, of the Government which he had been foremost in setting up. Danton was not a great practical administrator and con triver, 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 tempestuous emergencies which arose in such appalling succession. His distinction was that he accepted the insurrectionary forces, instead of blindly denouncing them as the Girondins had done. After these forces had shaken down the throne, and then, by driving away the Girondins, had made room for a vigorous Government, Danton perceived the expediency of making all haste to an orderly state. Energetic prosecution of the war, and gradual conciliation of civil hatreds, had been, as we have said, the two marks of his policy ever since the fall of the monarchy. The first of these objects was ful filled abundantly, partly owing to the energy with which he called for the arming of the whole nation against its enemies. His whole mind was now given to the second of them. But the second of them, alas, was desperate. It was to no purpose that, both in his own action and in the writings of Camille Desmoulins (Le Vieux Cordelier), of whom he was now and always the intimate and inspirer, he worked against the iniquities of the bad men, like Carrier and Collot d Herbois in the provinces, and against the severity of the revolutionary tribunal in Paris. The black flood could not at a word or in an hour subside from its storm-lashed fury. The commune of Paris was now composed of men like Hebert and Chaumette, to whom the restoration of any sort of political order was for the time indifferent. They wished to push destruction to limits which even the most ardent sympathizers with the Revolu tion condemn now, and which Danton condemned then, as extravagant and senseless. These men were not politicians, they were fanatics; and Danton, who was every inch a politician, though of a vehement type, had as little in com mon with them as John Calvin of Geneva had with John of Leyden and the Minister Anabaptists. The committee- watched Hebert and his followers uneasily for many weeks, less perhaps from disapproval of their excesses than from apprehensions of their hostility to the committee s own power. At length the party of the commune proposed to revolt against the Convention and the committees. Then the blow was struck, and the Hebertists were swiftly flung into prison, and thence under the knife of the guillotine (March 24, 1794). The execution of the Hebertists was the first victory of the revolutionary Government over the extreme insurrectionary party. But the committees had no intention to concede anything to their enemies on the other side. If they refused to follow the lead of the anarchists of the commune, they were none the more inclined to give way to the Dantonian policy of clemency. Indeed, such a course would have been their own instant and utter ruin. The Terror was not a policy that could be easily transformed. A new policy would have to be carried out by new men, and this meant the resumption of power by the Convention, and the death of the Terrorists. In Thermidor 1794 such a revolution did take place, with those very results. But in Germinal, feeling was not ripe. The committees were still too strong to be overthrown. And Danton seems to have shown a singular heedlessness. Instead of striking by vigour in the Convention, he waited to be struck. In these later days a certain discouragement seems to have come over his spirit. His wife had died durin^ his absence on one of his expeditions to the armies; he had now married agatn, and the rumour went that was allowing domestic happiness to tempt him from the keen incessant vigilance proper to the politician in such a crisis. He must have known that he had enemies. When VI -- 103