GEORGE JACQUES DANTON. By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759, executed 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent measures, organized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was principally instrumental in bringing on the dreadful September massacres of the same year, when all those confined in the Paris prisons were slaughtered. On being elected to the convention, he was foremost in forcing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in breaking the power of the Girondists, though he would have spared their lives. He incurred the hate of Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and moderation which would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and was sent to the scaffold by the plots of his cunning and implacable adversary.]

Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close; both are leaders of bands, and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, required the revolution. “Of low birth, without a patron,” penniless, every office being filled, and “the Paris bar unattainable,” admitted a lawyer after “a struggle,” he for a long time strolled about the streets without a brief, or frequented the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops. At the Café de l’École, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow “in a small round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm,” circulated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as cashier. Danton chatted with her, and demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his small native town.

Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, “more burdened with debts than with causes,” tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style, and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet; his free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all rebel; he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers; it is not the steady discipline of an old society that suits him, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces, or one in a state of formation. In temperament and character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.

A colossus with the head of a “Tartar,” pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling “bull-dog,” with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illimitable, like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when speaking, and heard through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge, and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal, profane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, and affectedly like Hébert, but spontaneously and to the point, full of crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone; in short, outwardly and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all contributing to the formation of “his inborn, practical popularity,” and to make of him “a grand seignior of sans-culotterie.”

Thus endowed for playing a part, there is a strong temptation to act it the moment the theatre is ready, whether this be a mean one, got up for the occasion, and the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the part an ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate object and definite result of the revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the violent minority. Immediately after the “14th of July,” 1789, he organized in his quarter of the city a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, Théroigne, Marat—while, in this more than Jacobin state, the model in anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterward reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisterings, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it a-going and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the plating which guarded it from the foreigner and against all outward violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?

Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage it. In a crisis he may take hold of the wheel himself, excite an assembly or a mob in his favor, carry things with a high hand, and direct an executive committee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular, persistent labor; he is not made for studying documents, for poring over papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods, and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and, especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.

On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory; he does not regard men through the “Contrat-Social” as a sum of arithmetical units, but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, instincts which culture had neither impaired nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and permit the September massacre, but which did not allow him to practice, daily and blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in September, “cloaking his pity under his bellowing,” he had shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the ax is about to fall on the Girondists, he is “ill with grief” and despair. “I am unable to save them,” he exclaimed, “and big tears streamed down his cheeks.”

On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity or lack of forethought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the inevitable and approaching suicide of the revolution. “The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the sans-culotterie which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up.” “Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebaid of political Trappists.” At the end he sees more clearly still. “On a day like this I organized the revolutionary tribunal.... I ask pardon for it of God and man.... In revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.... It is better to be a poor fisherman than govern men.”

Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its creaking, it worked in conformity with its structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles, forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any case, they do not pursue him; “they would not dare do it.... No one must lay hands on me; I am the ark.” At the worst he prefers “to be guillotined rather than guillotine.” Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold.