'La peur

de frapper les Parisiens par la terreur.' poussera cette Assemblée dans le sens où elle va jusqu'à ce qu'une autre terreur la pousse dans le sens contraire. Soyez sûrs que ces gens-ci ne sont plus susceptibles d'autre sentiment que celui de la peur.' Invasion might involve an explosion, but la terreur y succéderait sûrement bientôt.' Such words recall many a page execrating the more famous en faisant peur.' Yet they are Montmorin's, not Danton's, and the date of them is not August, but July. Mallet du Pan wrote that at Coblentz the sole talk was of hanging and extermination. He himself was for no pernicious pity. Mercy would be a crime against society.' The march on Paris was to be made en jetant partout la terreur et le désordre.' Mercy, Marie Antoinette's friend, is never tired of the word. On ne peut écraser la Révolution que par la terreur,' he wrote. 'Ce ne seront ni une ni plusieurs batailles gagnées qui ré duiront une nation laquelle ne peut être domptée qu'autant que l'on exterminera une grande portion de la partie active et la presque totalité de la partie dirigeante.' And he went on to say that it was necessary to destroy this superb capital, i.e. Paris. Even the Queen did not go so far as this when she suggested to him the necessity of 'la crainte d'une punition prochaine.' The philosophy of such a programme was enunciated a couple of years later by Joseph de Maistre. The spirit. of man, he thought, when it had gone astray, as in the Revolution, needed a blood-bath to regenerate it, 'ne peut être retrempée que dans le sang. On dirait que le sang est l'engrais de cette plante qu'on appelle le génie.' Others before De Maistre preached from the same text. 'This den of assassins must perish,' said a Minister of Sweden; while France has a Paris it will have no king.'

WHO INVOKED TERROR FIRST

71

But the emigrants needed no stimulus. Had they been able they would have perpetrated all the Revolution's horrors unredeemed by one of the lasting benefits which it conferred on France. Their allies already loathed them. Brunswick cursed as he signed the abominable manifesto which bears his name. 'I would give my life not to have signed it,' he said. Fersen thus describes their prelusive exploits in friendly territory: Ils ont fait des horreurs, pillé et ravagé tout dans le pays de Trèves.' The King of Prussia's secretary said of them, 'Young and old they seem to be the scum of the nation. Their words are atrocious. If one was to leave their fellow citizens to their vengeance France would soon be one monstrous cemetery.'

In Paris the people could not know all these dissensions which foredoomed the invasion to failure, nor how much those emigrants were distrusted by the King, who yet shielded them, and how much hated by the Queen. To them their enemies seemed at last to show a united front. They could not guess the subtleties with which Louis, in playing his double game, satisfied his conscience. Nor if they had known it would they have appreciated the difference between the comparatively mild coercion invoked by Mallet du Pan and the much more drastic suggestions of the King's much more intimate representative Breteuil. Enough for them what they could see with their own eyes-famine; plots of insurrection propagated by priests; emigrants boasting of the agencies they had everywhere, and of the gibbets they would soon rear in Paris; foreigners entering France; a constitutional guard illegally tripled in number by the King, chosen almost exclusively from Royalists, and openly

exulting at the news of the disasters to French arms. If such perils were to be weathered it could only be by weeding out traitors promptly. The Constitutional Guard was suppressed. A volunteer camp was ordered to be formed outside the walls of Paris, and the troops of the line in Paris were ordered to the frontier.

Against the formation of the camp 8,000 National Guards petitioned, the petitioners, all under arms,' defiling through an empty Assembly. For them it was to be a day of fatal memory, but it encouraged the King. He vetoed the camp. He vetoed the decrees against recalcitrant priests. He had vetoed the measure against the emigrants. Roland lectured him and

he dismissed Roland. He had long been credited with passive connivance at the Queen's active complicity in the conspiracy against the nation. Even now she was felt to be the arch-conspirator.

Madame Veto avait promis

De faire égorger tout Paris.

So the people sang in the streets, and in June, little more than half a year after the speech recorded in the previous chapter, we find Danton demanding her expulsion from France.

Could Danton's demand have been executed and she had been sent to Vienna, avec tous les égards, les ménagements et la sûreté qui lui sont dûs,' as he was careful to stipulate, France might have been spared some horrors. But she would neither save herself nor let others save her. She was determined to fight, and she hoped, not without reason, to win. It is even possible that if she had had only the Girondin leaders and not Danton to deal with she might have won. Before this we hear comparatively little of him in 1792, en

DANTON AGAINST WAR

73

grossed, as he was, by his official duties. But he had spoken at the Jacobins on the all-important question of the war, and the manner as well as the matter of the speech was characteristic. Brissot is complimented in it as this vigorous athlete of liberty.' His Jacobin audience he captures with, The destroying angel of liberty will make the satellites of despotism fall, and the clarions of war will sound. But,' and then after such rotund tribute to those with whom the war was most popular, he proceeded to instil the necessity of caution, caution as to the time, caution as to the men into whose hands the army was to be entrusted. And so he introduces his listeners gradually to what practically were arguments against war. Its champions, he says, aimed at giving France an English Constitution, in the hope ere long of exchanging it for that of Constantinople. I am for war-it is indispensable-we are bound to have it, but we ought to exhaust all means of staving it off.'

The speech reveals Danton's proficiency in the orator's art of keeping in touch with his audience, and leading it while seeming to be led. Incidentally he alludes to his official position in words showing that he clung still to the hope of avoiding civil war. 'However my own opinion may have been opposed to those who have hampered the Constitution, I now declare that I will only defend the people, will only terrify its enemies, with the club of reason and the sword of the law.' It was with other clubs and swords that the victory of August was to be won; but much was to happen before August which Danton could not foresee. His attitude towards the war was dictated by doubts as to the motives of those who would direct it, not by any fear of the Austrians. He might have accepted it with

misgivings, but he did not welcome it. Ultra-Royalists welcomed it as a desperate gambler welcomes double or quits, willing to stake all on the chance of regaining all. The Girondins dreamt of it as a crusade abroad which would unite all patriots at home, and out of which they themselves should emerge covered with glory, 'masters of France, liberators of Europe, benefactors of humanity.' Danton dreaded it as likely to render men like Lafayette more dangerous, and because the 'when' it should be made was not yet come. Mais, messieurs, quand devons-nous avoir la guerre ?'

In both calculations he was correct.

What he did

not foresee was that the burden of the war was to rest

on his own shoulders.

But a shrewd observer had already said of him 'Il paraît que Danton jouerait désormais un grand rôle.' That rôle was forced on him. Little by little he had come to be looked on as the people's tribune, from whom more practical counsel was to be expected at a pinch than from the pontifical generalities and petty animosities of Robespierre, whose opposition to the war was as much opposition to Brissot as anything else. He had been, as we shall see hereafter, profoundly influenced by what he had observed in England in 1791. Il viendra,' he said in the spring of 1792, 'un temps où les baïonnettes n'éblouiront point les yeux des citoyens, car en parcourant l'Angleterre on ne voit des baïonnettes que dans les lieux qu'habite le pouvoir exécutif de ce pays.' And though he had obtained only a one-sided view of English politics he spoke after his visit with more weight than before. Probably his communications with the English Opposition led him, in common with Dumouriez, to hope to isolate Austria by neutralising England and Prussia, for this would be in keeping with his subsequent policy when in power.