The Days of the French Revolution (26 page)

Concerned by the unrest and dissension which the ruthless policies of de-Christianization were arousing in France, and anxious to reassert its central authority over the extremist deputies who were fanatically pursuing these policies in the provinces, the Committee of Public Safety now initiated a series of decrees intended to bring provincial agents more securely under its control. Several of these agents were recalled to Paris, while others returned of their own accord in order to defend themselves against the accusations of Robespierre who forcefully condemned their atheistic measures as liable to benefit the counter-revolutionaries. Danton also returned to Paris to lend his support to Robespierre.

For some weeks Danton, who had fallen ill in the summer, had
been living quietly in the country at Arcis-sur-Aube where he had bought more land. Here, his convalescence complete and in one of his intermittent moods of indolence, he was enjoying the pleasures of country life, fishing in the Aube, going out shooting with the
curé
, relishing his food and wine and making love to the attractive, sixteen-year-old girl he had married as his second wife. He had been pleased to be out of Paris when Marie Antoinette and the Girondins had been executed, and had, it was said, reacted furiously when a neighbour passed on to him the ‘good news’ of the death of his ‘factious enemies’. ‘You wretch!’ he had exclaimed. ‘You call that good news!…You call them
factious
! Aren’t we all? We deserve death as much as the Girondins and we shall suffer the same fate one after the other.’ He returned to the capital with evident reluctance. It was no longer safe for him to stay away. He must be where he could exercise some influence over events in which, whether he liked it or not, he was bound to be implicated.

Ever since he had been away the political scene in Paris had been growing ever more confused and ever more embittered by rivalries and accusations of corruption, some invented, others true. One deputy, who had also been out of Paris that autumn, returned in the middle of November to find the Convention so changed that his ‘head swam’ and he could ‘scarcely recognize’ any of his colleagues. ‘In the place of the Mountain,’ he wrote, ‘I found a swarm of rival factions that dared not fight each other in the open but waged underground war.’

Danton immediately plunged into the war himself, counterattacking Hébert whose assaults on the Dantonists had been growing in intensity, allying himself with Robespierre in his offensive against the
Enragés
in the Jacobin Club and roundly condemning the outrages of the militant atheists as though speaking on behalf of the Oratorian fathers who had taught him as a boy, and of both his beloved and religious wives. In the Convention it might have been Robespierre speaking when Danton called for the introduction of national religious festivals. ‘If Greece had its Olympic Games,’ he said, ‘France too will celebrate its
jours sans-culottides
. The people will have festivals where they will offer up incense to the Supreme
Being, Nature’s master, for it was never our intention to destroy religion so that atheism could take its place.’

Turning upon the Hébertists, he asked the Convention why they wasted their time on such creatures. ‘The people are sick to death of them…Perhaps the Terror once served a useful purpose, but it should not hurt innocent people. No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.’

Danton’s open advocacy of toleration in religion and moderation in politics, his declared belief that the time had come to be ‘sparing of human blood’, and his support of the
Indulgents
appeared at first to be decisive. By the middle of December the Convention was persuaded to establish a Committee of Clemency whose members were to examine the lists of suspects recently thrown into prison. But Hébert and his colleagues counter-attacked vigorously. Collot d’Herbois hurried home from Lyons to speak with passionate fervour in the Jacobin Club. Hébert and Billaud-Varenne joined him there to second his condemnation of the Dantonists. Their supporters in the Convention succeeded in suppressing the Committee of Clemency, and soon afterwards most of the Hébertists who had been arrested on 20 December were released. By then, however, Robespierre had become convinced that Danton’s reasons for supporting him in his quarrel with the Hébertists were not all that they seemed. Danton, he suspected, had wanted to exacerbate the quarrel so as to deprive the Committee of Public Safety of the support of the
sons-culottes
and thus, by dividing his enemies, to protect his friends and himself from their righteous animosity. Robespierre, therefore, determined to destroy both Hébertists and Dantonists alike.

The Hébertists were dealt with first. This did not prove difficult. Among their number were several men whose foreign origin enabled Robespierre to accuse them of complicity in a ‘foreign plot’; and when they planned to stage
journiée
on the lines of the
Enragés
’ demonstration outside the Convention in June 1793, they were able to enlist little enthusiasm in the
sections
and were deserted at the last moment by both Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne. The planned
journée
gave the Committee of Public Safety an excuse to
act. On 14 March 1794 Hébert and his associates were all arrested, and less than a fortnight later eighteen of them were condemned to death. Hébert fainted repeatedly on his way to the guillotine.

By then the Committee of Public Safety had also decided to take action against the
Indulgents
among whom they included both Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Overcome by remorse at the part he had played in the downfall of the Girondins, Desmoulins had burst into tears when they were executed. He had since infuriated Robespierre by declaring in an obvious reference to him, ‘Love of country cannot exist when there is neither pity nor love for one’s fellow countrymen but only a soul dried up and withered by self-adulation.’ The Committee had already imprisoned Fabre d’Églantine who had become entangled in some corrupt financial transactions.

Robespierre, while persuaded that Fabre’s corruption was proof of his treason, would have chosen to spare Desmoulins of whom he was fond. He would also have spared Danton, but Danton had made dangerous enemies. Both Saint-Just and Billaud-Varenne constantly decried him as a traitor. ‘A man is guilty of a crime against the Republic,’ declared Saint-Just, ‘when he takes pity on prisoners. He is guilty because he has no desire for virtue. He is guilty because he is opposed to the Terror.’ At the same time, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a vindictive lawyer, ardent Jacobin and influential member of the Committee of General Security which dealt with police matters, had boasted that his Committee would soon get that ‘fat stuffed turbot’, Danton. Hearing of Vadier’s threat, Danton had responded with characteristically scatological force: if his own life were threatened he would become ‘more cruel than any cannibal’; he would eat Vadier’s brains and ‘shit in his skull’. But Danton did not really believe that his life was in danger any more than he meant to be taken seriously when he threatened Vadier. He had always said that he was invulnerable, and, up till the very moment of his arrest, he supposed that Robespierre would stand by him and that Robespierre’s reputation would save him.

Yet Robespierre, reluctant as he was to sacrifice him and well aware that Danton’s death would leave him isolated, persuaded himself that the
Indulgents
were agents of counter-revolution and
accepted the unwelcome fact that Danton would have to be arrested and tried with them. His attitude towards Danton had always been equivocal: there were times when he expressed his admiration for him and seemed even to like him. But Danton’s patent sexuality and coarse masculinity disturbed him – as it disturbed Madame Roland – and often shocked him. Once, during a heated discussion, Robespierre had exasperated Danton by his constant references to ‘Virtue’. ‘I’ll tell you what this Virtue you talk about really is,’ Danton said to him mockingly, ‘It’s what I do to my wife every night!’ The remark obviously rankled with Robespierre who recorded it in his notebook and afterwards commented, ‘Danton derides the word Virtue as though it were a joke. How can a man with so little conception of morality ever be a champion of freedom?’

On 22 March he met Danton for the last time at a dinner party. ‘Let us forget our private resentments,’ Danton said to him during the course of the evening, ‘and think only of the country, its needs and dangers.’ For a moment Robespierre did not reply. Then he asked sardonically, ‘I suppose a man of
your
moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment.’ ‘I suppose
you
would be annoyed,’ Danton riposted, ‘if none did.’ ‘Liberty,’ said Robespierre coldly, ‘cannot be secured unless criminals lose their heads.’ Despite this exchange, Danton made as if to embrace Robespierre when he left. But Robespierre pulled away from him in distaste.

A few days later they saw each other at the Théâtre Français.

Robespierre was in a box [an observer who was also in the audience that night recorded]. Danton was in the front stalls. When the words ‘Death to the tyrant!’ were declaimed on the stage [the play being performed was the tragedy,
Epicharis and Nero
] Danton’s friends burst into wild applause and standing up they turned towards Robespierre and shook their fists at him. Robespierre, pale and nervous, pushed his little clerk’s face forward and then pulled it back in the way a snake reacts. He waved his little hand in a gesture indicative of both fright and menace.

The decision to arrest Danton was taken at a joint meeting of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security on the night of 30 March after Robespierrists had been nominated to all the important posts in the Commune which had been vacated by the defeated
Hébertists. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s pale, handsome, cold-blooded disciple, the ‘Angel of Death’–upon whose lucid brain and incisive pen his master had come to depend in times like these – produced a document denouncing Danton which he intended to read out in the Convention the next morning. It was objected that this was too risky a procedure, Danton being still so popular a character in the Convention, and that he and the other leading
Indulgents
would have to be arrested first, whereupon Saint-Just, displaying some emotion for once, petulantly tossed his hat into the fire. Robespierre agreed with Saint-Just that Danton ought to be denounced in the Convention before his arrest, but he did not press the point after Vadier said, ‘You can run the danger of being guillotined if you like, but I’m not going to.’

The warrant for Danton’s arrest was placed on the table and, one after the other, those present at the meeting took up a pen to sign it. Only two of them refused, Ruhl, an Alsatian who protested that he could not betray an old friendship, and Robert Lindet, the Committee of Public Safety’s hard-working administrator of food supplies, who bluntly said that his job was to ‘feed citizens not put patriots to death’. Carnot afterwards claimed that he warned his colleagues, ‘We must consider the consequences well before we do this. A head like Danton’s will drag down many others after it.’ But he signed the paper with the rest. And so, in the early hours of the following morning, warrants were issued for the arrest of Danton together with several of his associates and some foreigners whose financial crimes would conveniently serve to muddy the issues and discredit the political prisoners.

Warned of his impending arrest, Danton had sat up all night by the fire in his study on the first floor of his house in the Cour du Commerce. He had rejected all suggestions that he should try to escape abroad. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘cannot carry his country away with him on the soles of his shoes.’ Nor would he consider fighting back at his accusers: that would ‘only mean the shedding of more blood’ and there had been ‘far too much blood shed already’. He would ’rather be guillotined than guillotine’. Besides, he was ‘sick of men’, and had not himself been guiltless. ‘It was at this time of year,’ he
lamented, ‘that I had the Revolutionary Tribunal set up. I pray to God and men to forgive me for it.’

So, when he heard the sounds of the patrol in the cobbled street outside he stood up with weary resignation and went to put his arms round his wife who was weeping helplessly. ‘They are coming to arrest me,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be frightened.’ He walked down into the street and was taken up the hill to the prison of the Luxembourg.

There were some protests in the Convention later that day when Danton’s arrest was announced but Robespierre, now committed to his downfall, turned angrily upon Legendre who had had the temerity to suggest that the accused was a victim of personal spite and that, having saved France in September 1792 ‘ought to be allowed to explain himself before the Convention’. No, objected Robespierre, he should not. ‘The question is not whether a man has performed any particular patriotic act, but what his whole career has been like…In what way is Danton superior to Lafayette, to Dumouriez, to Brissot, to Hébert? What is said of him that may not be said of them? And yet have you spared them?…Vulgar minds and guilty men are always afraid to see their fellows fall because, having no longer a barrier of culprits before them, they are left exposed to the light of truth. But if there exist vulgar spirits, there are also heroic spirits in this Assembly and they will know how to brave all false terrors. Besides, the number of guilty is not great. Crime has found but few culprits among us, and by striking off a few heads the country will be delivered…Whoever trembles at this moment is also guilty.’

After this speech and another by Saint-Just who read the indictment in a dull, toneless voice – emphasizing his points, so a fellow-deputy recorded, with a threatening, chopping gesture of his outstretched hand, ‘a motion like that of the knife of the guillotine’–objectors were silenced and the trial of Danton, Desmoulins and the other accused was approved.

It opened on 2 April. As Danton well knew, the verdict had already been decided upon, even though most of the charges seemed to be directed more at his character than at any provable crimes, and much of the rest of the indictment might as convincingly have been
laid against his accusers. The Public Prosecutor was Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.