Chapter XIX: Appendix: I (1)

NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS

The spot once occupied by the Cordeliers is among the most interesting in Paris, and it is of some importance to sketch its history and to reconstruct its appearance at greater length than was possible in the text.

All the land from St. Germains des Près up northwards along the hillside had belonged to that abbey since its foundation, when the first dynasty of Frankish kings had endowed the foundation with a great estate carved out of what had once been the Roman fiscal lands on the south bank. Round the abbey itself a few houses had gathered, forming the “Faubourg” (or suburb) of “St. Germains”; but the greater part of the estate was open field and meadow. When Philip Augustus built his great wall round Paris it cut through the estate, leaving the Church and Abbey of St. Germains outside the city, but enclosing a small part of the fields within its boundary.

You may trace the line of the wall at this day by noting the street “Rue de Monsieur le Prince,” once called “Rue des Fossés Monsieur le Prince,” and running on the line of the outer ditch. The wall ran not twenty yards east of the modern street and exactly parallel to it. A portion of it may yet be seen in that neighbourhood, a great hollow round built into the wall of one of the houses, a cobbler’s shop in the Cour du Commerce; it is one (the last, I believe) of the half-towers which flanked Philip Augustus’s wall.

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, very shortly after the death of St. Francis, the first preachers of the new Order which he had founded came to Paris. It was the moment when the University was climbing up the hill, building its colleges, having possessed its charter for some years, and already a strong, organised, wealthy, and therefore conservative body. This order of preachers, wandering, intensely new, and founded by a mystic whose place in Christendom was not yet finally determined, were bound to come into collision with the spirit of the place. It must be remembered that the thirteenth century was not transitional, but, on the contrary, a time of settled order. For a century it had known the Roman law; it had everywhere the Gothic architecture; it had systemised and made legal the rough accidents of feudal custom; it was wealthy, proud, and successful. On it there falls one of those creations which are only possible in a time of energy, and yet which almost invariably quarrel with the period that has produced them. An Order devoted to simplicity, making of holy poverty the foundation of the inner life, specially created for the poor (whom the growing differentiation of society was beginning to debase), the early Franciscans were essentially revolutionary, because they built on the great foundations of all active and permanent reform—I mean the appetite for primitive conditions, and the determination to break through the net of complexity which the long growths of time weave about a conservative society.

The rich Abbey of St. Germains gave them asylum. It was proud to possess dependants, it was great enough to afford benevolent experiments, and it took pleasure in offending the University, which was an upstart in its eyes, and was beginning to show as a powerful rival in the affairs of the south side of Paris. The Franciscans, therefore—whom the populace already called the “Cordeliers” from the girdle of rope about their habit—were permitted to settle in that little corner of their estate which had been cut off by the building of the town wall, and they occupied a triangle of which the wall formed the south-western, a lane (afterwards called “Rue des Cordeliers”) the northern, and an irregular line bounding one of the University estates the south-eastern side.

This was in 1230. St. Louis was still a boy of fifteen. The little foundation was, for the University, nothing but an unwelcome neighbour whom it could not oust, and for the Abbey of St. Germains nothing but a guest. Their provisional tenure did not permit them a peal of bells nor a public cemetery.

St. Louis, however, grew into a manhood which, for all its piety, had a wonderful grasp of the society around it. The saint who was never clerical, and the Capetian who in all things was rather for the spirit than the letter, became their principal support. The Papacy, having once (though reluctantly) recognised the Franciscan movement in the interview between Innocent III. and its founder, continued in the succeeding generation to protect it. From a distance, where the quarrels of the University affected it little, the Holy See decided more than one dispute in favour of the new-comers, and the Franciscans of Paris flourished exceedingly. By 1240 the full privileges of an independent foundation were granted. They have their public service, their cemetery, and their bells. St. Louis helps them to build a new chapel by giving them, in 1267, part of the great fine which he levied on Enguerrand de Coucy. They succeed at last in obtaining the recognition of the University; they are permitted to teach; they number among their lecturers Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure; and they become one of the most famous of the colleges.

During the Middle Ages (apart from certain minor structures and a few private houses which had been permitted to rise on their land, and which were technically known as the “dépendances”), three principal groups of buildings marked the foundations. First, the monastery itself, a somewhat irregular mass, running (as a whole) north and south, and separated from the Rue des Cordeliers by a little court or garden. Secondly, running from the northern end of this convent, and forming, as it were, a letter L with the main building, was the chapel, lying, of course, east and west, and forming the southern side of the Rue des Cordeliers, upon which was the principal porch. Thirdly, running also east and west, but separated from the other buildings by a short space, was the hall.

This famous monument, the only part of the college that has been preserved, stood well back from the street, and in the middle of the convent grounds. It was on the eastern side of the monastery, and hence in the ground plan balanced (so to speak) the church, which lay to the west of that main building; this was so designed that its western end faced about the middle of the college.

I have called it a hall because its use exactly corresponded to that of our college halls in the English universities. I mean, it was at once a refectory and lecture-room. It was approached by a little lane running up through the grounds under the side of the convent, later hemmed in with houses.

Here not only were the voices of the great scholars heard and the subtleties of the fourteenth century, but also Etienne Marcel called the States General of 1357. From hence that Danton of the mediæval invasion sent out his messengers to the Feudality. Here the District gathered for the elections of 1789; here the Club met in 1791 and urged the debate that finally produced the Republic of the next year. It was here also that the three watchwords of the Republic were devised; here Hérbert veiled the Declaration; and here the last few words of 1794 were spoken. Here the century, which owes more perhaps to that site than to any place in France, has collected a museum of surgery, where you may see anomalies preserved in spirits, skeletons hung on wires, and other objects, interesting rather than sublime.

As for the college and its estate, they continued for some three hundred years—that is, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—to increase in importance. It is a matter of common knowledge how soon the pure ideals of St. Francis had to compromise with the world. This Order, like all others, became wealthy, rooted, and traditional. The Cordeliers, as Paris grew, found themselves possessed of a most valuable plot, whose ground-value continually increased. They reserved the garden to the west, but for the rest—and especially around the buildings and along the lanes—houses were built. When the wall of Philip Augustus was first embedded by the growth of the city, and afterwards in part destroyed, the Cordeliers bought an extension to their estate, so that it stretched a little beyond the new street of “the Fossés,” which had been built on the site of the ditch. In 1580 their old thirteenth-century chapel (which must have been one of the best bits of early Gothic in Paris) was burnt down, and a larger one in the style of the time was put up by the piety of Henry IV. Throughout the seventeenth century the house seems to have suffered from a decay which continued throughout the succeeding hundred years, and culminated in the disasters of the Revolutionary period. They permitted the alienation of a strip to the west of their grounds, through which the municipality drove in 1673 the new street which, in compliment to the Order, they called “Rue de l’Observance,” after the name of their rule.

With this exception no important change occurred to change the aspect of the quarter until the Revolutionary period with which we have to deal.

* * * * *

We are, after this general description, in a position to recognise the site of the Cordeliers in modern Paris. As you go down the Boulevard St. Germains, just before you reach the Boulevard St. Michel (going east), you see a street leading off at a slight angle to the right. It is the Rue de l’École de Médecine, the college after which it is named facing both on this street and on the Boulevard. This street is merely the Rue des Cordeliers broadened and modernised. As you go a few yards up this street, you see on your left the great court of the college, and if you stand at its gate and look at the opposite side of the street, at the new buildings which are now the lecture-rooms and theatres of the Faculty, you are looking at the site of the old church, which has disappeared during this century. The street has been broadened by taking down the southern side, so that the church would actually have overlapped the modern street. Continuing, you pass on your right the open yard leading up to what was the hall of the Cordeliers, and is now the museum of surgery (the Musée Dupuytren), and a few yards farther brings you into the Boulevard St. Michel. Following this very broad avenue for twenty yards at the most, you may note a new street, the “Rue Racine,” turning off to the right. This did not exist in Danton’s time, but it lies _nearly_ on the line that separated the Cordeliers from the Collège d’Harcourt (at present the Lycée St. Louis). As a fact, the line was a trifle to the south of the Rue Racine, and of course more irregular. The Rue Racine in its turn leads you into that old street the “Rue de Monsieur le Prince.” If you turn again to the right and go down this some hundred yards, you are still following the boundary of the Cordeliers, till you reach the “Rue Antoine Dubois.” This is identical with the old “Rue de l’Observance,” spoken of above, and a few steps down this short street leads you to the starting-point in the “Rue de l’École de Médecine.” Such a modern itinerary would describe as nearly as is now possible the circumference of the college and estate of the Cordeliers. The quadrilateral comprised by these four streets, the Rue de l’École de Médecine, the Rue Racine, the Rue M. de le Prince, and the Rue Antoine Dubois, is the site of the famous convent and its grounds.

To reproduce the quarter in 1788 we have to imagine the following changes:—The Rue de l’École de Médecine, very narrow, flanked for the greater part of its southern side with the church and old wall of the convent. It leads into a little narrow street called the “Rue de la Harpe,” which went right up the hill, and would correspond to a strip taken in the exact centre of the present Boulevard St. Michel. The first few buildings here, notably the Church of St. Come, were still on the Cordeliers’ estate. Just above them, however, began the grounds and buildings of the “College d’Harcourt.” As we have observed, the Rue Racine did not exist, nor anything corresponding to it. To follow the boundaries of the estate you would have had to let yourself in by a side-door, and then you might have followed a long, irregular wall which separated their land from the College d’Harcourt. This wall, after passing through a great garden, came out on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, and the rest of one’s circuit would be much what it is to-day.

Finally, to see the building as Danton saw it, you must imagine a half-deserted place, rich, but somewhat unfrequented, like certain old legal Inns that once stood in London, old walls appearing here and there from between houses of a century’s date; a mass of irregular buildings, of garden and of private house hopelessly intermingled; while up a narrow and dark passage stood the Hall, which was still the best preserved part of the college, and with which alone his name is associated.

II

NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK

It may be of interest to those who desire to study with some particularity the personal history of Danton to know where are to be found in modern Paris the places with which we have found him personally connected in this book.

His first offices were in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles. This street has disappeared in the improvements which included the prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli. This office in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles occupied almost exactly the same spot, which can be recognised to-day in the following manner. As you go along the northern side of the Rue de Rivoli going east, you come to a point 500 yards or so from the Louvre, from whence you begin to see the Tour St. Jacques just peering round the southern side of the street. The shops which are then upon your left hand and the pavement upon which you stand correspond to the position of the old mansard house in which Danton served his apprenticeship. It was here that he had his first offices; it was from this that he bought the business of Monsieur M. de Paisy in the Rue de la Tissanderie.

Concerning the position of these offices in the Rue de la Tissanderie, which he moved into, I have been able to learn nothing. There is a curious little record in the police archives of Paris—Danton complaining that he could not work on account of the noise that a saddle-maker made in the exercise of his trade in the same house. In this little document, which is quoted by Monsieur Clarétie in his “Life of Camille Desmoulins,” the house is mentioned as being “just opposite the Rue des Deux Portes”; but as an inference to be drawn from the same record is that he left immediately after for some other lodging in the same street, this does not help us much.

I have said in the text that Danton lived, during the six years which were those of his active political life, in a house of the Passage du Commerce. I have also mentioned in the text the fact that Dr. Robinet mentions a short residence in the Rue des Fossés Saint Germains. I have given, moreover, in the same passage my reasons for following M. Aulard in rejecting this first address. It seems proved that, after he left the Rue de la Tissanderie, he moved with his wife to the corner house of the Passage du Commerce. This was his home during the whole of the Revolution, and it is worth while to describe its position and character with some care.

In the first place, it has disappeared; the construction of the Boulevard St. Germains destroyed all that end of the Cour du Commerce. If you are going along the Boulevard St. Germains from the west towards the University, you pass on the right the statue of Danton. It is erected on an open triangle of ground, formed by the junction of the Boulevard and of the Rue de l’École de Médecine. The apex of this triangle, not twenty yards from the statue, marks the site of the old house in which Danton and Desmoulins lived, and in which they were arrested before their trial.

The old quarter was a network of narrow streets, and where the Boulevard St. Germain now stands, an intricate block of houses, with courtyards and passages, not unlike the similar intricate masses which you will find in the City of London, formed the northern side of the Rue des Cordeliers (that is to say, the modern Rue de l’École de Médecine). A narrow alley, known as the Cour de Commerce, joined this Rue des Cordeliers by a still narrower passage. Danton’s house was the corner house, as is proved by the mention in the inventory that some rooms looked upon this passage and some upon the Rue des Cordeliers.

Of course he did not occupy the whole of it, but, in the Parisian custom, which had already obtained for more than a century, he took a flat, and two rooms (used as a lumber and as a servant’s bedroom) were added from the entresole below. This flat was just such an apartment as a similar bourgeois householder would have in Paris to-day: a dining-room, two bedrooms, a study, a little library, a drawing-room, a kitchen, and offices, built round the staircase and courtyard or well of the house.

I have been unable to find any mention of the rental which was paid, but a guess at something like £150 a year in that quarter at that time for such a flat would, I think, not be extravagant. The corresponding flat above, Desmoulins took after his romantic marriage in December 1790, but he did not begin to occupy the house until the early part of 1791. It was here that his little Horace was born; it was here that his wife and Danton’s passed the terrible night of the 10th of August, and it was here, in the great bedroom overlooking the Rue des Cordeliers, that Danton’s wife died in February 1793.

As to the furniture of the little apartment, it may be described as follows:—The drawing-room was not very large, but there had been spent upon it the most considerable sum in the furnishing of the house. It figures for very nearly a third in the valuation, which may be read in Appendix VII. The white furniture, which was the mark of the eighteenth century, was its principal note; it is also worth observing that the household was sufficiently cramped for room to use the cupboards in the drawing-room as wardrobes. The principal bedroom was well furnished, but, as you will find to be the case in such houses in Paris, the study, the dining-room, and the spare room to the side of the study were very bare. It is also remarkable that the lumber-room held nothing but two trunks and an old double bedstead. It was the household of a man who made every effort to maintain his position before his wife’s friends, but who was not wealthy, and who had evidently arranged the scale of his expenditure considerably below the probable receipts which an office such as his would have brought in. I should much doubt whether as much as £500 a year would go out on such an establishment, though he was certainly receiving £1000. We know the reason of this; he had to pay off by every means in his power the debt which he had incurred in buying the practice. While he lived in this house, and until the office was suppressed in 1790, he continued to keep his business rooms in the Rue de la Tissanderie. It may be worthy of mention that he kept two servants, and that his apartment was on the first, whilst that of Desmoulins was on the second floor of the house.

As to the Cordeliers, on which the preceding note is written, the hall in which their meetings were first held still exists (as we have said in the text) under the title of Musée Dupuytren. The Church of the Cordeliers, into which they afterwards moved, has disappeared, but the last locale of the club (when the Municipality had turned them out of the church in 1791) still remains, and is to be discovered at No. 105 Rue Thionville. Danton’s father-in-law had been master of a café on the Quai de l’École. This house still remains. If I am not mistaken, it was altered slightly during the restorations of the Second Empire. It is the house which now stands at the south-western corner of the Place de l’École, and which faces the quai on one side and the square on the other. The street and quay outside M. Charpentier’s café was, however, somewhat oblique to the modern street, and ran less east than west, more south-east than north-west, than it does to-day.

The quay has been raised and the old fountain in the Place de l’École destroyed. Otherwise the quarter is much the same. The café became famous later for its draught players, a reputation that still continues.

III

NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON

I will not go in this note into any of the general considerations which have led the greater part of modern historians to reject the legend of Danton’s venality. These general considerations are by far the strongest arguments upon which we can rely in this matter, but I trust that the character which I have attempted to draw in the text of the book will furnish them in sufficiency.

Neither do I desire to insist in this note upon the unquestionable value of the two principal modern authorities in England and in France (Mr. Morse Stephens and M. Aulard), who both of them regard the question as finally settled in Danton’s favour. I have insisted sufficiently upon this in the text. What I shall attempt to do is to quote the contemporary accusations, to determine how much reliance can be placed upon them, to show their character, and to describe in what way and to what extent they are explained by documents which have since come to light.

* * * * *

First of all, a list of those contemporaries who took his venality for certain. It is very formidable.

Mirabeau (letter to Lamarck, Thursday, 10th March 1791).—... “Montmorin has told me ... of particular schemes ... for instance, that Beaumetz and ... D’Andrée dined yesterday alone and got Danton’s confidence ... and then proposed to demolish Vincennes in order to make themselves popular. Danton got 30,000 livres yesterday, and I have the proof that Danton inspired the last number of Desmoulins’ paper.... If it is possible I intend to risk 6000 livres, but at any rate they will be more innocently distributed than the 30,000 livres of Danton.” Here is a categorical statement in which a man says what the court had often said (and Mirabeau was then an agent of the court), “I have managed Danton at such and such a price,” and the passage gives us indirectly the name of Montmorin. The date should be noted.

Bertrand de Molleville, a far less practical and a far less careful man than Mirabeau, also a singularly untrustworthy authority, has the following:—Memoirs Particuliers, i. 354.—“By the hands of this man Durand, under the ministry of De Montmorin, Danton received more than 50,000 francs to propose certain motions of the Jacobins. He was fairly faithful in keeping this contract, but stipulated that he should be left free as to the means he employed.” ... Again ... “In the first debates upon the king’s trial the infamous Danton, whose services had been so dearly paid _out of the Civil List_, was one of those who displayed the greatest violence. I was the more alarmed as this scoundrel was at the moment (Autumn 1792) a most powerful and dangerous man in the Assembly. The ardent zeal which I felt for the safety of the king, and which would have made me think all means legitimate, suggested this means against Danton to neutralise the rage of the monster; and though the method I took required a lie, I did not hesitate to employ it without the least scruple. I wrote to him on the 11th December:—‘I must not leave you ignorant, Sir, of the fact that I have found in the papers of the late Monsieur Montmorin notes of the dates of the sums which have been paid out of the secret service money, including a receipt in your handwriting. Hitherto I have made no use of this document, but I warn you that I have enclosed them in a letter which I am writing to the President of the Convention, and I will have them printed and placarded on the corners of the streets if you do not conduct yourself well in the trial of the king.’ As a fact, Montmorin had shown me these papers a year before, though he had not given them to me. But Danton knew they existed, and knew how intimate had been my relations with Montmorin. He did not reply to the letter, but I saw in the published prints that he had got himself named deputy in a mission to the army of the North. He only returned at the end of the king’s trial, and contented himself with voting for death without giving any opinion.” (Particular Memoirs, ii. 288-291.) I would have the reader to specially mark this extract, to which I shall return at the end of my note, as it can be easily proved by internal evidence to be a falsehood. It is, indeed, of more value to any one who desires to write a life of Bertrand himself, than it is to one who is writing the life of Danton.

Thirdly, Lafayette says (Memoirs, iii. 83-85): “Danton, whose receipt for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin, asked for Lafayette’s head; that was running a great risk, but he depended on the discretion of Lafayette and on his keeping a secret. For Lafayette to have spoken would have been to have signed the death-warrant of Montmorin, who had paid Danton in order to moderate his anarchic fury.” And again (iv. 328-330), he says of Danton: “He was a vulgar tribune and incapable of turning the masses from evil by persuasion or by respect, but he knew how to flatter their passions, &c. &c.... I knew him from the first week of the Revolution in the district of Cordeliers, whither I had been attracted. After the 6th October he took money from Montmorin, whom he caused in consequence to be assassinated on the 2nd September. In connection with this secret he said to me once, ‘General, I know you do not know me, I am more of a Monarchist than you.’... I have learnt since from the person to whom Madame Elizabeth told it that he had received, about the 10th August, a considerable sum to give the movement a direction in the king’s favour, and, indeed, he got the royal family sent to the Temple. He said to a friend of the king, ‘It is I who will save him or kill him.’”

Fourthly, there is Brissot (iv. 193-194). “Among the stipendiaries of Orleans was ... Danton. I have seen the receipt for 500,000 francs which were paid him by Montmorin. He was sold to the court in order to thrust the Revolution into the excesses which would make it odious to the great bulk of Frenchmen.”

Fifthly, Madame Roland (who has so much to say against a character so profoundly antipathetic to her) has this special passage on his corruption (Dauban’s edition, 1864, pp. 254-255): “He went to Belgium to augment his wealth, and dared to admit a fortune of 1,400,000 francs, to assume luxury,” &c. &c.

Sixthly (if it is worth quoting), among the papers that Robespierre left, in the notes that formed the basis of St. Just’s report, are the words—“Danton owed an obligation to Mirabeau; it was Mirabeau who got him repaid the price of his practice. It has even been said that he was paid twice. I heard him admit to Fabre certain thefts of shoes belonging to the army.”

Such are the contemporary accusations. There are the following points to be noted with regard to them. No one says that he himself paid money; the sums of money are very various. They are paid, according to some, on a few definite occasions; according to others, upon all occasions. Finally, every accusation that has any definite basis at all pivots round the name of Montmorin. “Montmorin held the receipt,” “Montmorin told me,” and so forth. Now, if we remember that Montmorin held the receipt for a legitimate and open reimbursement (see Appendix VI.), and then compare the accusations with what we know of the men and of the time, if we then proceed to check these merely general conclusions by matters of absolute knowledge drawn from the valuations upon Danton’s estate at various moments of his life, we shall agree with the more modern authorities who have worked with the documents before them, that Danton is innocent of actions to the charge of which his uncertain temper and his lack of solid social surroundings laid him open.

In the first place, let us consider the words of the accusations which appear above, and which include all those of any importance.

That of Mirabeau is what you would expect from such a man; it is quiet, contemptuous, treating of Danton as something on the very last level of the time. But if we take the specific accusation and separate it from all general points of view, we find this much: that Montmorin has been talking to him with regard to what “those fellows” were doing. “In connection with this,” says Mirabeau, “Danton got 30,000 yesterday” to work such and such a political move. The grave feature in the quotation is the way in which Mirabeau, who understood men and who had a good grasp of Paris, treats Danton’s venality as being something well known, gives a particular example of it, and passes at once to other things. But the specific accusation is hearsay from Montmorin, and, as I have said, it is always Montmorin’s name which crops up when this gossip is on foot.

I would, therefore, sum up the value of Mirabeau’s accusation somewhat as follows:—If we could prove that Danton was a spendthrift, and that large sums of money passed through his hands for his personal pleasures, then Mirabeau’s chance remark, while it would be worthless in a court of law, ought to have some small weight before history. Mirabeau was (on a higher plane) a _bon viveur_ such as Danton was reputed to be, and the circles in which the men moved touched each other especially in the point of their good living; but if we can find that Danton did not, as a fact, spend nor invest great sums of money, then the accusation is simply a common error based upon a remark of Montmorin’s, suited to the current impression of Danton’s character, but disproved by the known facts of Danton’s life.

Bertrand de Molleville’s accusation is of particular value to any one who is concerned, as I am, in attempting to get to the truth in this matter. It is the only one which is perfectly categorical and detailed. In proportion as it is categorical and detailed it is untrue. If you wish to know whether a man has committed a certain crime, and you hear a number of witnesses against him, one of whom only gives careful evidence with dates, details, and so forth, and if you can then prove that this witness has lied upon all the points which supported his principal accusation, you are in a fair way to winning your case.

De Molleville begins by making the sum 500,000 francs. It seems enormous. It is a sum which no man could receive and spend in a few days’ debauch without attracting the attention of the whole city, which no man could invest without leaving some obvious accession of property, and he puts the receipt of this sum as coming under Montmorin’s ministry—that is, at a time when public order was secured, when the course of the registries, the transmission of property and so forth, were in the fullest light.

He gives the name of the man who handed him the sum, and calls him Durand. On this point it is impossible to say yes or no, but we can say with absolute certitude that the incident of the letter upon which Bertrand de Molleville makes the whole matter turn, is an untruth added to an untruth. In the first place, he makes Danton “violent in his demands against the king.” This accusation is absolutely false.

When the trial of the king was mooted, Danton did speak (notably on the 6th of September), with some decision in favour of the king’s being brought to trial upon particular points. He expressed himself in that speech with very great energy upon this particular feature of the trial, that the king merited condemnation because he had obviously and openly betrayed the nation,—a thing which nobody doubted, which nobody denied, and which Louis himself and his advisers would simply have met by saying (at a later epoch of course), “We called in the foreigner as a necessary police in the time of anarchy; we desired to save France by its betrayal.” So far, however, from Danton being a leader of the attack on Louis or of the demand for his trial, that attack and that demand were as spontaneous as anything the Convention ever did; and Danton followed rather than led, as a glance at the _Moniteur_ can prove.

In the much more important debates wherein the life of Louis was first implicitly and then explicitly at stake, Danton was absent, and in the days of November there is no question at all but that Danton’s one preoccupation was to reconcile the Mountain with the Girondins.

De Molleville goes on to give his letter a date—such things are done on purpose, as a rule, in order to give a special character of legal evidence to one’s accusations. He says that he wrote the letter on the 11th of December, that Danton on receiving the letter was frightened, and without replying to it got himself put upon the mission to the army of the North.

Now Danton left for the army of the North on the 1st of December, and if the letter was written at all (which I doubt), it was written at a time when Danton, being absent, could not possibly have acted as De Molleville said he did. He could not have “asked” to go on a mission (he did not ask, but was sent), and have started on the 1st in consequence of a letter written on the 11th.

Finally, De Molleville says he came back to vote on the punishment of the king, but had been coerced by the letter into merely voting for death without giving his opinion. This again is a lie. If there is anything remarkable to the historian in the vote Danton gave on the 16th January 1793, and in the speech which he made before his vote, it is that he, by nature so wary, should have discovered in this crisis a violent manifestation of opinion and motive. I have amply shown in the text that we could only reconcile those abnormal days in Danton’s life by some extreme shock to the emotions. Some represent him as suffering a violent rebuff from his political opponents; some consider the scene of misery and impending death which he found in his home on returning from his long journey. He demanded a simple majority vote; he spoke violently against the appeal to the people; and when he voted for the death of the king he turned to the Right and said, “I am not a statesman; I am not one of those who are ignorant of the duty of not compromising with tyrants, and who do not know that kings can only be struck on the head, who do not know that we can expect nothing from the kings of Europe save by force and by arms. I vote for the death of the tyrant.”

If these are the words, and if that is the action of a man terrorised by a letter into a silent and furtive vote, then evidence has no meaning.

De Molleville, I think, can in this, as in nearly all his historical evidence (with the exception of that which turns upon the personal habits of the king, where he has the details of a valet), be dismissed.

With Lafayette, again, we have that half-truth and half-lie which runs through all his accusations. “The receipt for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin.” This was true. The sum was not quite 100,000, it was 61,000 (Appendix VI.); but the receipt did exist, and to any one who did not know that all the men occupying positions on the Council had been reimbursed, it might look like a receipt for a bribe, or might be twisted into meaning such. It is impossible for us to discover whether Lafayette meant to tell an untruth, as we can prove De Molleville did; he may in this matter have been perfectly loyal, for there was a note found among his papers after his death (Memoirs, iii. 84-85), saying that “a position on the Councils was only worth 10,000, and had been reimbursed at 100,000 as a bribe.” We now know from the discovery of so many receipts that from 60,000 to 80,000 was the regular price of reimbursements, but Lafayette might easily have been ignorant of this, and have jumped to a false conclusion.

As to his mention of Madame Elizabeth’s having told the man who told him that Danton had been paid before the 10th August, the old man’s memory is certainly turning to the remark which many witnesses heard from the lips of that saintly woman just before the attack on the Tuilleries, when she said with simplicity (she knew nothing at all of the characters of the Revolution save what she might hear from the courtiers), “Well, we can count on Danton; he has been paid.” That is not evidence. If Danton was paid to make the 10th of August turn in favour of the monarchy, and if, as Lafayette hints, he had attempted to make it so turn, he certainly took the most extraordinary way of defending his employers. One might as well say that Lord Chatham’s principal object in the taking of Quebec was the defence of the French power in Canada. For the 10th of August was openly and directly an attack upon the ancient crown of France, to overthrow it and to substitute in its place a new regime, and Danton worked at it as indefatigably as a general before a battle would work.

The remark, “General, I am more monarchist than you,” reads to me like truth; it is exactly what Danton would have said. He despised Lafayette as much as any one man can despise another. He believed right up to the moment of the war that the existing fact of the monarchy was worth all the theories in the world as a nucleus for the new regime, and he saw the emptiness of Lafayette’s vanity. He may quite probably have met it upon some occasion as direct as that which Lafayette has given us, and Lafayette, in the abundance of his folly, may quite easily have misunderstood the meaning of his criticism.

Brissot is an admirable example of how the false rumours arose. He says: “I have myself seen the receipts which Montmorin held from Danton.”

Now, as we have seen, that receipt (to any one who did not know the details of the transaction) might quite honestly appear a damning piece of evidence, and it is without question the document round which the great mass of accusations have been built.

As to Madame Roland, I cannot imagine what flight of feminine inaccuracy made her put down a fortune of £60,000 to her enemy’s name. If a witness in any other circumstances than revolution should tell one that a young lawyer and politician had secretly and suddenly become possessed of this sum, he would be reputed mad. In such a time, however, anything seems possible to an enemy, and we must rely upon the simple fact that Danton can be definitely proved neither to have spent, invested, nor left a tenth of such a sum. It seems to me that this accusation of Madame Roland’s is on a par with that other extreme remark that she had known “the Dantons living on 16s. a week, which they borrowed regularly from their father-in-law,” and this “at the opening of the Revolution,” a time when we know him positively to have been defending cases involving half a million pounds in the issue of the trial, and when we know him to have had for clients some of the richest men in France.

Now, the papers that prove Danton’s financial position are quite simple. He was cut off suddenly; they were all seized, and they all remain. Unless he spent huge sums in debauch (sums like those of Orleans), or unless he buried the money, he cannot have received much more than what openly appears. He entered his married life with a debt of £2500 secured on his office. He enjoyed a good practice for four years; he was reimbursed to somewhat less than the value of his office, and on his death the sum sequestrated by the State, and later refunded to his sons, tallies with this small fortune.

IV

NOTE ON DANTON’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER

The arguments for and against Danton’s responsibility in this matter must necessarily be of a more general order than those which can be advanced for and against his character in regard to money matters. There are but one or two really definite facts upon either side, and, as the purport of these notes is to deal with actualities, I will treat of these known facts only.

In the first place, it must be clearly understood that Danton did not shrink from, and was not unsympathetic with, the extreme measures of the Revolution. His position with regard to them is perfectly clear in history, and is simply this—his violence was persuaded that an exceptional time required, almost as a method of government, the most exceptional terrors.

But, on the other hand, Danton was a man to whom not only a useless massacre but a useless anything was detestable. Death in itself, the infliction of death on others, even the death to which he himself was led, never seemed to him a matter of vast moment. It is a common fault in courageous men to have this disregard for the life of others and of oneself, but I deny that you will ever discover Danton causing the death of a single human being unless it is in the furtherance of his policy.

In the second place, consider what is actually known to have proceeded from his mouth. (1) Quite early in the Revolution (in June 1791) he demanded the head of Lafayette, and he probably meant it; (2) he boasted of, or confessed to, being the author of Mandat’s death; (3) in the course of speeches which led up to the establishment of the Revolutionary tribunal he speaks in favour of the extreme penalties and of the terror that they would inspire, always as a means to an end, and as a means to be employed without hesitation. Let me quote but one sentence from the speech of the 10th March 1793 to illustrate what I mean:—“I feel to what a degree it is necessary to take judicial measures by which we may punish the counter-revolutionaries. This tribunal should be erected in order to replace for them the supreme tribunal of popular vengeance. It is very difficult to define a political crime, but if a man of the common people for his sort of misdeed gets punished at once, is it not necessary that extreme laws, something out of the common running of our social machinery, should be passed to terrify rebels and to strike the guilty? In this matter the safety of the people demands from you extreme methods and the measures of terror.”

Finally, we know that Danton was, on the whole, the guide of that earlier part of the Terror between May and August 1793, in which (as he thought) the system was doing necessary work without which the nation could not have been saved.

Now, let us set against these what we definitely know of Danton’s character which would lead us to a conclusion that he would not have countenanced massacre.

No one questions the fact that the leading motive in Danton’s mind was the establishment of a strong government around or in the place of a weak monarchy. He was a true descendant of the lawyers of the Code. The massacres of September took place at a moment when he was using the whole of his personal energy in trying as well as may be to supply that Government. He guides the ministry in Paris; he dominates Roland as a man might dominate a woman. It was of supreme importance to such a scheme that the thin ice between government and anarchy in the days that preceded Valmy should not be broken. The massacre of September broke it; there was a week of anarchy in Paris. There is the first great argument against Danton’s complicity with the massacres.

It must, however, be remembered that a theory exists, by no means untenable, which would make Danton argue something in this fashion: “Once let the popular fury have full rein against what it regards as the internal enemy, and I shall have the disappearance of that disturbing factor of royalist reaction in Paris, while on the part of the mob I shall have the lassitude and shame that follow excess; they are not difficult to govern.” It is only a personal opinion, but it seems to me that in a mind of Danton’s type, downright and practical to excess, such a far-reaching and subtle idea as the last would hardly occur, and that the massacres must have produced on him an especial annoyance, because they were the breakdown of a system the support of which occupied his every effort.

Secondly, Danton’s allusions to the massacres of September were always of a more definite and more reasonable nature than those of his colleagues. The attitude which he adopts with regard to them after their occurrence is this: “There was no public force, none of that disciplined government which I postulate as the first necessity of the Revolution; nothing on earth could prevent them, and they occurred in spite of every governing power.” So much for generalities.

Now let us turn to one or two points which have been made the basis of a definite accusation against Danton in this matter.

Firstly: that he knew that the massacres were coming, and withdrew from prison more than one of his friends on the eve of the uprising. This I take to be true, or rather I am certain of it; but one would have to be very ignorant of the time not to know that all Paris expected the massacres, and that those who were at all in touch with the Commune knew two or three days before that anything illegal might be done. To have worked to prevent them, in which Danton might have employed his energy, would, as I have said in the text, have been to risk that which he most desired, and to risk it for the sake of saving the prisoners. Certainly he did not desire to save them as passionately as he desired to remain at the helm and build up a government; he preferred to keep his influence over the city. That accusation is just.

Secondly, it is affirmed with justice that Danton, from the peculiar position of the ministry which he occupied, filled the prisons, which were afterwards gutted. It is true that on Danton, as Minister of Justice, and above all as a general power in the Cabinet, the responsibility of arresting the prisoners rests; but was this action taken with a knowledge of what the consequences would be nearly a month later? Certainly not. It would show a complete ignorance of what happened in the last fortnight of August to say that an action taken just after the 10th was taken with a view to something that would occur on the 2nd of September. The state of public feeling in those four weeks went through a most violent crisis, and one might say that the intensity of the feeling against the Royalists and the foreigners was not only a hundred-fold greater when Verdun was actually falling than it had been just after the success against the Tuilleries, but different in quality as well.

Thirdly, there is one detailed accusation—the circular which Marat sent out to the Departments. If it can be proved that this circular was approved of, that its distribution was aided by Danton, then we shall have a definite piece of evidence which cannot be overridden. Now let me describe what that circular was, and see how far we must blame circumstances, how far the carelessness, and how far the deliberate act of the minister. All the accounts are much the same. Madame Roland says, “Sent out above the signature of the Minister of Justice.” Bertrand de Molleville is also perfectly definite (Memoirs, ix. 310)—“Sent by the minister Danton.”

The examination of the documents seventy years later has given more accurate results to history than the memoirs of contemporaries, whether they are truthful and enthusiastic like Madame Roland, or frankly dishonest like Bertrand de Molleville. Bougeart was at the pains of looking up the original documents at the archives of the police. What appears in this document (Bougeart, pp. 121-122) is a series of signatures, Panis, Sergent, Marat, &c., that is, the Committee of Surveillance appointed by the Commune. There is no trace of any ministerial signature, and even the stamp which was used in the office by the clerks for everything that passed officially through the Ministry of Justice is not attached to the sheet. What did happen was this. The circulars were sent out in envelopes which bore the official mark of the Ministry. It is as though some act of a body in London, let us say, should be distributed to the provinces in the blue envelopes of Her Majesty’s Service. That is all, either for or against Danton, that remains of the incident of the circular.

Now it is certain that Danton had not at that time openly broken with Marat. Moreover, Danton had not actually quarrelled with the Commune, though he certainly treated it with contempt. But Danton had no conceivable object in helping Marat to distribute the circulars unless he himself was openly on Marat’s side. A man of his character would either have signed, or else, had he known that the circulars were going out, he would have forbidden their distribution; he would have taken some definite line. Why? Because the distribution of the circular was bound to condemn him to a very definite position—here is a man who has stood aloof from a very violent conspiracy, a conspiracy whose authors came out at last in the open day and gloried in what they had done. They wrote the most violent of all their manifestoes, containing such phrases as “the ferocious prisoners have been put to death by the people;” “it was an act of justice indispensable to our Committee,” and so forth. It would be quite impossible to send out unwittingly such a circular as that without knowing that one was compromising oneself and definitely entering the most extreme party of the Parisians. It is inconceivable, therefore, that he would have lent official envelopes for the purpose, and have said, “So far I will help you, but I will not help you more than that.” You might as well suppose an English official in India, of the stronger kind, saying, “I will allow you, an unofficial personage, to send out the order for an illegal execution from this office, but I will not put my name to it.”