speak with horror of the 1,200 victims of September would do well to bear in mind the appalling amount of wrong and wretchedness which, though unrecorded by newspapers and unexaggerated by loud-tongued pamphleteerists, had gone on accumulating during those interminable years which preceded the vengeance of one week. Well may the sturdy English farmer, who has been quoted, doubt the wisdom of those who 'feel no compassion for the many because they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions'; and conclude that he who chooses to be served by slaves and by illtreated slaves must know that he holds his property and life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the services of well treated freemen; and he who dines to the noise of groaning sufferers must not in the moment of insurrection complain that his daughters are ravished and then destroyed, and that his sons' throats are cut.'

What the Englishman had generalised during a tour of a few months, Danton had watched in detail from boyhood, and had treasured up in a heart which naturally rebelled against tyranny. This was why it was inevitable that, being in Paris, he should embark on a political career.

CHAPTER III

1789

PRESIDENT OF THE CORDELIERS-CHAMPIONSHIP OF MARAT-THE
CHATELET-THE BASTILLE-THE MARCH TO VERSAILLES-FIRST
MENTION IN THE MONITEUR '-CHARGES OF ORLEANISM, OF
ROYALISM-TESTIMONY OF THE CORDELIERS

DANTON, we have seen, had on two occasions at least
attracted the notice of his contemporaries by his
eloquence, once in defending a client, and once at his
installation as Avocat aux Conseils. Though we do
not know it, we may reasonably infer that as he ac-
quired confidence he exercised his natural powers fre-
quently, and that it was owing to constant experience
of his persuasive speech that the district of the Cor-
deliers elected him as its president in the spring of
1789. That year might have been christened the
Year of Newspapers if other things had not made it
even more memorable. The liberty of the press had
been decreed in August, and journal after journal
sprang into existence, potent at the time and still not
forgotten. Among them were the Patriote Français,'
the Révolutions de Paris,' the Courier de Brabant,'
and, most famous of all, the Ami du Peuple.' But
Danton had no newspaper and wrote in none.
was never a writer. And when so many active intelli-
gences were stirring with their pens it is significant
that not one of them should have been preferred before
him in the place where, even more than in the Mother

6

He

Society, the mother ideas of the Revolution were engendered. The mechanism of the Revolution was to be seen at work at the Jacobins. But that the motive force was drawn chiefly from the Cordeliers, we gather both from its enemies and its friends. It was,' says Fréron, the terror of the aristocracy and the refuge of all the oppressed of Paris,' and it was in the hope of disuniting it and cutting at the root of the vigour which it displayed under Danton's presidency, that the sixty districts were converted into forty-eight sections. But the attempt failed, and the flame of patriotism was kept burning as brightly as ever in the Section Théâtre Français.

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6

Mercier's testimony from the opposite point of view is to the same effect. During Danton's life the two men had, it seems, been on tolerably familiar terms. Mercier in a chance conversation had been moved to begin a solemn exhortation with the words, 'You are ruining the Republic and France,' only to hear Danton's bantering ejaculation, The rabid man,' and such irreverence may have helped to embitter his pen. Hence his abusive epithets client-hunting pettifogger with the fluency of the gutter and the logic of a thief.' But though our confidence in the acumen of his political post-mortem is not enhanced by the operator's maledictions, Mercier's estimate of the influence of the Cordeliers district is instructive. Every revolutionary crime was, according to him, sown there and grown there, and its president was the arch-fiend who scattered and watered the tares. Equally significant is his judgment that the first act in the demagogic drama was Danton's championship of Marat in the winter of 1789-90. The first warrant for Marat's arrest should have been, though it was not, executed

DANTON AND MARAT

23

on October 6. Though he escaped then, he was arrested December 12 and rearrested January 22. Danton, though personally he did not like Marat, viewed his arrest as an attempt to stifle free speech and to bolster up sore-smitten regal tyranny by the municipal tyranny of Mayor Bailly. He spoke out boldly, therefore, in behalf of Marat, threatening to raise St. Antoine in his defence. Marat affirms that 12,000 men, cavalry and infantry, were called out to catch him, and that the reason for such a grotesque display of force was that the authorities dreaded the resistance of the Cordeliers. They might well do so. That district named five commissioners, of whom its President was to be ex officio one, to protect any citizen from arrest unless with the committee's cognisance and assent. It called on the military force of the district to enforce its decree, in which it invited the other districts of Paris to co-operate. And it sent formal notice of the decree to the Châtelet and the National Assembly.

The Châtelet was not slow in taking up so bold a challenge, and issued a warrant for Danton's arrest. His menacing language seemed doubly outrageous to the men of the robe as coming from the lips of one of their own order. But they had gone too far. The National Assembly's decree of August 23 had plainly forbidden interference with a citizen's free speech. Their action excited universal indignation, and the appeal of the Cordeliers to the National Assembly was universally approved. Meantime the case was also brought before the Assembly of the Commune. Though at that time by no means Dantonist, it incidentally testified through its president to the uprightness of Danton's career, giving the lie thereby to Mercier's insinuation that he was to

The

be arrested for debt. But it prudently shrank from interference where legal means would suffice. Danton equally disclaimed any idea of resisting the National Assembly, and a manifesto of the Cordeliers was issued which in politic terms said the same thing. Châtelet had to recognise its mistake and for the time abandon the attack. But it did not forget, and we shall find a second onslaught on Danton in the following year.

At the same time as this affair of Marat, and even prior to it, Danton had taken other parts in the demagogic drama' of 1789. He is said to have shared in the attack on the Bastille in July, and two days after its capture to have gone at the head of the men of his district and arrested its provisional governor. Camille Desmoulins records his share in the events of October 5-6. When tidings came to Paris of regiments concentrating at Versailles, of plots for spiriting the King away to Metz, of the fatal banquet at which the Austrian Woman' smiled on the bodyguard and their guests, as, 'flown with insolence and wine,' they trampled on the national cockade, it was Danton's voice that sounded the tocsin among the men of the Cordeliers, and he no doubt worded the manifesto with which they placarded Paris and demanded and headed the march to Versailles.

His name first appears in the 'Moniteur' on November 30, 1789. The Cordeliers district, at the instigation of its president, is noticed as insisting on the responsibility of deputies to their constituents and on their dismissal in case of contumacy. Doctrine so democratic at so early a date naturally provoked criticism and opposition. Danton, while not dissociating himself from the principle at issue, thought it necessary to disavow