Every character he possesses is apparent in the struggle that follows. He carries it on with something of the diplomacy that later was matched against all Europe: he secures his allies and isolates his enemies: he pleads to convince and to obtain official support, not (as do so many of his contemporaries) in order to follow a line of thought. In a word, he is habile, and practically he succeeds.

Observe the quality of this action. When the district meets on the 17th (while the Commune was dismissing Croharé), Danton sees the importance of keeping its debate in bounds. That gathering, which is so enamoured of abstract rights, is suddenly bound down by the superior ability of its chairman: the discussion is made to follow points of legal technicality, and Danton imposes upon the Cordeliers so strict a discipline for one day, that two points alone emerge from the speeches, and they are precisely the two which could be used as arguments. (1.) That the Commune was provisional, and its raison d’être was the formation of a new municipal system: in such cases (say the Cordeliers) the subjects of the experiment must remain masters, and it would be absurd to take away the power of control, that later would have to be readmitted when the new municipal constitution should be sent to the districts for acceptance or rejection: in a word, they argued on the vice de raisonnement—the want of logic—in the Commune’s action. (2.) They appealed to the Assembly—that is, they recognised and submitted to the centre of national power.[62] The Assembly was in a dilemma. It was in full sympathy with the Moderates with Bailly and with Lafayette; on the other hand, it could not, without a great loss of prestige, deny the very principles upon which its own power rested. Their committee on the subject desired a complete admission of the Cordeliers’ claim; the Assembly rejected this, and tried to compromise by saying that both parties should go back to “the state of things of November 10th”—that is, to the state of things before the oath and before the whole trouble. The compromise would not hold. The deputies thus legally reinstated all resigned (except Croharé) on account of the feeling in their district, and the Cordeliers then, with full legality, re-elected their popular champions of the Mandat Imperatif.

The Commune took its defeat ill. They tried to prove that the old members had not really resigned. They sent a committee to interview them, but the committee came back with proof that the resignation was voluntary, and finally, on November 28, the little company of democrats were sworn in to a very ungracious and unwilling Assembly, and Danton had won.

My readers must excuse so detailed an account of an event which is empty of picturesque detail and which is so small a part of that fertile winter. From the point of view of general history it is the first appearance of the Mandat Imperatif in action; and from the point of view of Danton’s rôle in the Revolution it is of the utmost importance, though it is so insignificant a catalogue of quarrels. It was Danton’s first victory, and it was decisive. It put a wedge, as it were, into the gate that he was forcing open by persistent effort; and though his final position in the administration of Paris is won after many further failures, it is a direct consequence of this success in 1789. At the same time it showed that a young, loud-voiced lawyer of the middle class could have that one necessary quality of skill lying under the coarse exterior; he could play the game with the subtlety of appreciation which was so necessary in the terrible year of invasion, the keen aptitude of the mind which the visionaries were too unpractised, the demagogues too brutal to attain. That aptitude had appeared in Danton’s pleading, and was to make him during the war a man necessary to France.

It was a month or six weeks after these events, on some date in January which we can only fix by indirect evidence, that Danton was himself elected to represent the district. The restless society had caused a further resignation, and five new members came to the Hotel de Ville.[63] He came unimportant, effaced, known merely as a demagogue, into that municipal assembly which contained the most dignified, the most learned, and the most representative of the noblesse and higher bourgeoisie, to sit under the frowns and endure the silence, and at first the contempt, of Condorcet, of D’Espagnac, of the academicians Laharpe and Suard, the astronomer De Cassini, Lavoisier, De Moreton-Chabrillant captain of the guard, Bailly and Lafayette themselves. And in the very first hours of his presence, before he had taken the oath, an incident occurred which clinched, as it were, the disfavour in which he was regarded, and which for a year put him in the background of a council which he was destined ultimately to master. I refer to what is known as the incident of Marat.

Marat was more of a gentleman than Danton; it is also fair to say that he was nearly mad. No two men could have been more different than the learned, irritable, visionary physician and the young, healthy country lawyer who was for a moment his champion. The one has met continually the ruling class, and has suffered from its insolence and privilege; the other has known professional friends indeed of the first rank, but has passed his life with the trading middle class, and has entered perhaps during all his career in Paris not one salon, nor met perhaps one of the brilliant women of his time.

Marat presented from the outset the first problem to be faced by a people who are testing liberty. He was a journalist and pamphleteer of unbridled license, one of those who cannot find in themselves that control which, when it is absent in public writers, can only be supplanted by the cumbersome, dangerous, and necessary machinery of the Censor. Not for money, of course, nor for any unworthy motive, but for the excellent end of attaining freedom, this morbid mind poured out the wildest, the most sensational, and the most dangerous appeals.

Now the courts were in process of transition; rapidly as the reform had marched since the summer, much of the old judicial procedure necessarily remained, and among the rest a body known as the Châtelet, whose removal was already planned, but which had to be maintained until the new system could be put in working order. It was very typical of the old regime. A body of privileged lawyers, many of them young and ignorant, holding their places by inheritance or purchase, and charged with what we may call the police of the capital. They had formerly possessed (and it had not yet been abolished in detail) the power of arbitrary arrest. They drew their name from the heavy fortress which had once defended the Pont au Change when Paris was confined to the island of the Cité; some of its walls dated at latest from the Norman siege of the tenth century, and beneath it were cellars which had for centuries been the prisons of those arrested in Paris by the city guard. It stood gloomy and strong on the site of the modern place that bears its name, dominating the close streets of the Boucherie, and possessing in its associations and its waning power all the qualities that had made the Bastille odious to the people. It may be imagined how the jurisdiction which it contained was bound to attract the chief efforts of the reformers; it could not, however, cease to exercise its functions until there was some more liberal institution to supply its place, and it came of necessity into violent collision with that spirit which was determined to break down by force what the resolutions of the Assembly had abolished in theory, but had not yet supplanted in fact.

The principal object of Marat’s tirades was the moderate town council, and especially Bailly. Moreover, the worthy astronomer was an admirable butt. He assumed a livery, and put a fine coat-of-arms on his carriage, and, while he weakly opposed the rising democracy of Paris, he was very strong in the matter of pomposity. Marat was called to the bar of the Commune to answer for these attacks upon the mayor on the 28th of September. A warrant for his arrest was made out by the Châtelet on the 6th of October, but the day was too critical for an action of police against an individual. On the 8th another warrant was sent out, and Marat fled to a hiding-place up on Montmartre, from which, like a mad prophet on a hill-top, he pamphleteered the city at his feet. His quarrels, therefore (though very different in kind) were contemporaneous with the important struggle between the Cordeliers and the Municipality which are detailed above. The two attacks began to merge in December.

Marat, on the 12th of that month, was hunted out of his retreat, and brought before a lower court, but so confused were the powers of the Châtelet in this period of its reform and extinction that the prosecution was dropped. Emboldened by this failure on the part of his opponents, he came to live and print his sheet openly in the Rue des Fossés St. Germains—that is, in the midst of the district of the Cordeliers. What followed is well known. At a moment when the struggle between the district and the Hotel de Ville is at its height, just after the scene in which Danton’s deputation had protested against the mayor’s commission to the militia officers, while the insulting irony of the term “my lord” was still ringing in Bailly’s ears, and when Danton himself had been actually elected for the district, and was present in the Municipality on the point of taking the oath—when all these causes of quarrel were, so to speak, met in one date, the Moderates determined to strike. Marat was pouring out his impossible diatribes from the territory of the rebellious district, and no opportunity could be more favourable. The Châtelet issued once more the warrant for his arrest, and this time it was supported by Lafayette, who promised to lend four thousand of the National Guard.

Now note the importance of what follows. Neither side in the struggle of the autumn had definitely won. The National Assembly had temporised, the advantage of the Cordeliers in the matter of the disputed elections had been achieved by a trick, and in the dead-lock between two principles, the central power of the Municipality and the local autonomy of the district, neither of the two theories was based upon tradition, neither even (in the confusion of rapid reforms) could justify itself by a definite pronouncement of the law. On the one side was the theory of a highly restricted suffrage, government by a class socially refined and lying with the nobility rather than with the people; this side was determined to form an army to support their politics, and it was they who, when they did act at last, achieved—but much too late—the sharp and sanguinary reaction of July 1791. On the other side was the desire for a wide, later for a universal, suffrage; a determination to emphasise in the development of the Revolutionary theory, equality and the general will, rather than order and the practical working of new laws; a political attitude which was to lead the Revolution into the intense idealism of 1792, and to end by declaring the Republic. And all this was represented in the demand which, of its nature, is the expression of extreme democracy—I mean the demand for local autonomy, the idea that an act of government is most just when it emanates not even from representatives, but from the lips of the governed themselves.

Such were the two forces opposed to one another in the affair of Marat—forces which, if not in all France, were in Paris at least the two great camps of the Revolution. Already the district had declared its intention to protect the liberty of the press within its boundaries,[64] and had been wise enough to specially condemn Marat’s violence; already had it named a committee of five to see that no arbitrary arrest should take place in its territory,[65] when Lafayette sent his militia, cavalry and infantry, on the 22nd of January to help the arrest of Marat. Not content with the 3000 men thus employed, he clinched the matter with cannon, placing a couple of pieces at the end of the Rue des Fossés St. Germains.[66] He was determined to settle things by force, and beat the extremists with their own weapons. His effort did not find force opposed to it, as he had hoped; it broke itself in the most unexpected manner upon the legal ability of Danton.

The district might have raised, all told, 1500 men, and it possessed two pieces of artillery; but Danton was far too wise to use them in such a cause as that of defending Marat. A street fight, and one in which the Cordeliers would have been infallibly beaten, would have ruined the future chances of their politics. He armed no one, and did not add a single man to the small guard which each district kept permanently drilled, but he assigned them as their guard-room for the week the ground-floor of Marat’s house. Then he went there himself with his four companions on the newly elected committee, and awaited developments.

The great body of the National Guard were massed in their blue and white at the end of the street, their two pieces sweeping it, and there was opposed to them nothing but a small crowd and few arguments. Through their ranks, and accompanied by a small detachment, came the two officers or policemen of the Châtelet.[67] They presented their writ, and Plainville, the commander of the little detachment that accompanied them, asked to be allowed to place sentries at the door. The commissioners gave them leave with the greatest pleasure in the world, but when the officers presented their warrant, the opportunity which Danton had been waiting for with some anxiety presented itself. With a slovenliness that was part and parcel of the old regime, the Châtelet had not made out a new warrant, but had issued the old one which had done duty on the 8th of October.

Now, since that date the Assembly had passed several important changes in the criminal law, notably one in the same month October which declared that “no warrant for arrest can be issued against a householder save in case of those charges which, if proved, would lead to imprisonment.”[68] A very obvious principle; but in France of the old regime to seize a man, hold him, and even to let him go without trial, merely for some purpose of the police, was permitted, and the Châtelet may have acted upon this tradition. Add to this the fact that the Assembly had created elective councils in each district to watch the interest of every inhabitant arrested in criminal cases,[69] and it is easily apparent that the Châtelet had committed a great blunder, the value of which a man trained in the courts and quick to seize an error in procedure immediately recognised.

Danton affirmed that the writ was illegal, offered to prove it, and led the officers of the Châtelet to the hall of the district. There he had the new procedure read to them, compared it with the date of their warrant, and so confused the minds of those simple men that they signed a procès-verbal which declared that, after hearing such reasons, they doubted how they should act. They came back escorted by Fabre d’Eglantine through an angry crowd, and were received by the officers of the National Guard with some heat. They stood firm, however, and refused to pursue the arrest until they could consult with those who sent them, and finally the difficulty was removed by Danton’s promising to appeal to the National Assembly and to abide by its decision. The terms were accepted, the sentries left Marat’s door, and the troops withdrew.

All this debate and turmoil had taken up the morning and the luncheon-hour, the Rue des Fossés St. Germains was evacuated in the early afternoon, and by four o’clock of that day, 22nd of January 1790, Danton and his companions were pleading their cause at the bar of the House. It was the old policy of resorting to the National Assembly as the last place of appeal, and of using this principal result of the Revolutionary movement as a weapon against the Parisian Moderates. The Assembly found itself in the old dilemma, and adopted the old compromise. By its theory it was democratic; all its phrases and many of its decrees were based on the “Contrat Social,” but by its personnel and its connections it was naturally allied to the high professional class, to the Baillys and the Lafayettes. It instructed Target (the President of the fortnight) to write to the district; he condemned the attitude of the Cordeliers, but Parliament “relied upon their patriotism to execute the will of the Assembly.” The district, true to its policy, at once submitted. They sent Legendre and Testulat to tell the commander of the forces (who had re-entered the Rue des Fossés) that they had no longer the right to prevent the arrest; whereupon he sent in the police and awaited Marat in the street below. The house was empty, and Marat was on his way to England, a country with which he was not unfamiliar, and the vices of whose constitution had already furnished a theme for his too facile pen.

Such are the details of the story of the famous Friday in the district of the Cordeliers, events which put Danton’s name into some prominence, but which also showed him to the most educated of his time, and therefore to posterity, in something of a false light. He appears as the friend of Marat, a man for whom he felt no sympathy, to whom he was immeasurably superior, and whom he had supported only because Marat’s quarrel was a tactical opportunity against the Moderates. To have been from the outset admitted by the cultured would have been difficult to him—it would have needed tact, self-effacement, and silence. For he showed by nature just those rough gestures and loud, ill-chosen phrases which should be the sign of a foolish and dangerous man; of what underlay it, of his learning, his patriotism, and his common-sense he was to give plenty of proof; but so violent were the prejudices he had raised that only great length of time has effaced the false impression of his first appearance on the scene of politics. We can see the statesman clearly, but his contemporaries never quite pierced the medium that had gathered round him; here and there a just and noble man, as was Condorcet, would admit his own misconception, but to the bulk of the gentlemen in power he was and remained the demagogue.

Two years of careful action fail to clear him, because, being already one of those whose superficial qualities repel the close attention necessary to a just opinion, he had also the misfortune to enter the arena from the wrong door. Those who were most with him adored him, the great bulk of his district-voters signed a fervent declaration in his favour, and later his immediate friends are willing to die with him. But the class with which at heart he had most in common held aloof; he had succeeded twice in a pitched battle with them; they apologise for his acquaintance, vilify him in their letters, and if his name has emerged from all this error, if he has been given his statue in a time of social order and reconstruction, it is because this man, who never wrote, who left only a confused legend of his personality, saved his country when it was at war with the whole world, and such actions compel history to inquiry and restitution.

On the 23rd, the day after the trouble, he was sworn in to the reluctant Commune, and there follow two long years[70] of patient attempt to gain the place for which he feels himself fitted, but years (on the whole) of disappointment, and in which his real position in Paris (I mean the prominence he held in the thoughts of men) contrasts curiously with the little part he played.

1790 contains so great a portion of the Revolution, and sows the seed of so much future division and civil war, that it seems ridiculous to confine oneself to the description of the restricted action of one man who had not yet even attained power. It will be necessary, however, to make a survey of this restricted action in order that we may comprehend the greater rôle of Danton in the two years that follow.

Danton came, then, with Legendre and the three others into a city Council very much opposed to him and to the district whose spirit he had formed. He was not often heard, and there is no doubt that he deliberately tried to purchase by silence the more just and equable judgment of such men as he respected, but who knew him only by unfavourable report. For the bulk of the Assembly he cannot but have felt contempt; they had no instinct of the revolutionary tide; even when they were attempting to check the movement that Danton represented, they were inefficient and unworthy opponents, from whom his eye must have wandered inwards to the great battles that were preparing.

In the eight months during which he was a member of the Provisional Commune, that is, from January to September 1790, his name appears in the debates but a dozen times.[71] More than half of these are mention of committees upon which his common-sense and legal training were of service; in one only, that of February 4, does he speak on a motion, and that is in support of Barré to admit the public when the oath was taken: one other (that on the 19th of March concerning the formation of a “grand jury”) would be interesting were it not that the whole gist of the debate was but a repetition of the much more significant discussion at the Cordeliers. Finally, there is one little notice which is half-pathetic and half-grotesque: he is one of the committee of twenty-four charged with the duty of “presenting their humble thanks, with the mayor at their head,” to the King for giving the municipality a marble bust of himself. But every entry is petty and unimportant: Danton at the Provisional Municipality of 1790 is deliberately silent—he can do nothing.

If we turn, however, to a field in which he was more at home, we find him during that year more than ever the leader of the Cordeliers, which itself becomes more than ever the leader of Paris.

There are two important features in the part he plays at the assemblies of the district during the spring and summer in which he was a silent member of the Commune. First, the affair of his arrest; secondly, his campaign against what may be called “the municipal reaction.”

As to the first, it is a very minor point in the general history of the Revolution, but it is of considerable influence upon the career of Danton himself. When the affair of Marat was (or should have been) forgotten, the Châtelet, with that negligence which we have seen them display in the business of the warrant for Marat’s arrest, saw fit to launch another warrant, this time for the arrest of Danton himself. Once more that unpopular and moribund tribunal put itself on the wrong side of the law, and once more it chose the most inopportune moment for its action. It was on the 17th of March,[72] nearly two months after the affair—two months during which Danton had been hard at work effacing its effects upon his reputation—that the warrant was issued, and the motive of arrest given in the parchment was of the least justifiable kind. In the district meeting of the day, when the police officers had been taken to the hall of the Cordeliers, and had had the changes in the law read out to them, Danton had made use of a violent phrase: its actual words were not known; some said that he had threatened to “call out the Faubourg St. Antoine, and make the jaws of the guard grow white.” Other witnesses refused to attribute those words to him, but accused him of saying, “If every one thought as I do, we should have twenty thousand men at our back;” his friends admitted that some angry and injudicious speech, such as he was often guilty of, had escaped him, but they affirmed that he had added, “God forbid that such a thing should happen; the cause is too good to be so jeopardised.”

Whatever he said (and probably he himself could not accurately have remembered), the place and the time were privileged. It was a test case, but the logic of such a privilege was evident. Here you have deliberative assemblies to which are intrusted ultimately the formation of a government for Paris: what is said in such a constituent meeting, however ill-advised, must in the nature of things be allowed to pass; if not, you limit the discussion of the primary, and if you limit that discussion you vitiate the whole theory upon which the new constitution was being framed. It must be carefully remembered that we are not dealing with deliberative bodies long established, possessed of the central power, and holding privilege by tradition and by their importance in the State; we are dealing with the elementary deliberative assemblies in a period which, rightly or wrongly, was transforming the whole State upon one perfectly definite political theory—namely, that these primary assemblies were the only root and just source of power. When, therefore, Parisian opinion rose violently in favour of the president of a district so attacked, when three hundred voters out of five signed a petition in Danton’s favour, when he was re-elected president of the district twelve days after the issue of the warrant, it was because the whole body of the electors felt a great and justifiable fear of what was left of the old regime. The Châtelet had acted so, not from a careful appreciation of public danger—to fend off which temporary powers had been given it—but because it was blind with old age; because it dated from a time and was composed of a set of men who hated all deliberative assemblies, and it was justly thought that if such actions were justified, the whole system of revolutionary Paris was in danger.

As though in proof of the false view that the Châtelet took of their man, on the 19th of March, two days after the warrant was issued, Danton was urging the replacement of the Châtelet by a Grand Jury; he had an admiration and a knowledge of the old English system, and it was against a man attempting so wise a reform that the last relic of the old jurisprudence was making an attack.

An appeal was lodged with the National Assembly, and Anthoine read a long report to the Assembly upon May 18. This report was strongly in favour of Danton. It was drawn up by a special committee—not partisan in any way—and after examining all the evidence it came to this conclusion against the Châtelet. Nevertheless the House, a great body of nearly a thousand men, to most of whom the name of Danton meant only a loud Radical voice, hesitated. To adopt the report might have irretrievably weakened the Châtelet, and the National Assembly was extremely nervous on the subject of order in Paris. It ended by an adjournment. The report remained in Danton’s favour; he was not arrested, but the affair was unfortunate for him, and threw him back later at a very important occasion, when he might have entered into power peaceably himself and at a peaceable time.

But while this business was drawing to its close, during the very months of April and May which saw his partial vindication, another and a far more momentous business was occupying the Cordeliers—a matter in which they directed all their energy towards a legal solution, but in which, unfortunately for the city, they failed.

Ever since the days of October—earlier if you will—there had been arising a strong sentiment, to which I have alluded more than once, and which, for lack of a better name, may be called the Moderate reaction in Paris. It is difficult to characterise this complex body of thought in one adjective, and I cannot lengthen a chapter already too prolonged by a detailed examination of its origin and development. Suffice it to say that from the higher bourgeoisie (generally speaking), from those who were in theory almost Republican, but whose lives were passed in the artificial surroundings of wealth, and finally from the important group of the financiers, who of all men most desired practical reform, and who of all men most hated ideals; from these three, supported by many a small shopkeeper or bureaucrat, came a demand, growing in vigour, for a conservative municipal establishment—one that should be limited in its basis, almost aristocratic in quality, and concerned very much with the maintenance of law and order and very little with the idea of municipal self-government.

It is a character to be noted in the French people, this timidity of the small proprietor and his reliance upon constituted authority. It is a matter rarely observed, and yet explaining all Parisian history, that this sentiment does not mark off a particular body of men, but, curiously enough, is found in the mind of nearly every Frenchman, existing side by side with another set of feelings which, on occasion, can make them the most arrant idealists in the world.

For the moment this intense desire for order was uppermost in the minds of those few who were permitted to vote. In the Cordeliers it was the other character of the Parisian that was emphasised and developed. They were determined on democracy, like everybody else; but, unlike the rest, they were not afraid of the dangerous road. They were inspired and led by a man whose one great fault was a passionate contempt of danger. On this account, though they are taxpayers and bourgeois, lawyers, physicians, men of letters and the like, they do all they can to prevent the new municipal system from coming into play, but they fail.

Now, consider the Assembly. That great body was justly afraid of Paris; indeed, the man who was head and shoulders above them all—Mirabeau—was for leaving Paris altogether. The Assembly, again, had the whole task of re-making France in its hands, and it could not but will that Paris, in the midst of which it sat, should be muzzled. Through all the debates of the Provisional Commune it could easily be seen that Bailly and Lafayette were winning, and that the Parliament would be even more Moderate than they. Three points were the centres of the battle: first, the restricted suffrage which was to be established;[73] secondly, the power which was to be exercised over the new Commune by the authorities of the Department; thirdly, the suppression of those sixty democratic clubs, the districts, and their replacement by forty-eight sections, so framed as specially to break up the ties of neighbourhood and association, which the first of the Revolution had developed. It was aimed especially at the Cordeliers.

Against the first point the Cordeliers had little to say. Oddly enough, the idea of universal suffrage, which is so intimate a part of our ideas on the Revolution, was hardly thought of in early 1790. Against the second they debated, but did not decree; it was upon the third that they took most vigorous action. The law which authorised the new municipal scheme was passed on May the 27th, and, faithful to their policy, the Cordeliers did not attempt to quarrel with the National Assembly, but they fought bitterly against the application of the law by Bailly and his party. The law was signed by the King on June the 27th, and on the same day the mayor placarded the walls, ordering an immediate installation of the new system. The 27th was a Saturday. Within a week the new sections were to be organised, and on the Monday, July 5, the voting was to begin. The very next day, the 28th, the Cordeliers protested in a vigorous decree, in which they called on the fifty-nine other districts to petition the National Assembly to make a special exception of the town of Paris, to consider the great federation of July 14, which should be allowed to pass before the elections, and finally to give the city time to discuss so important a change. All through the week, on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July, they published vigorous appeals. They were partially successful, but in their main object—the reconstruction of the aristocratic scheme and the arousing of public spirit against it—they entirely failed. Bailly is elected mayor on August 2 by an enormous majority—practically 90 per cent. The old districts disappear, and, like every other, the famous Cordeliers are merged in the larger section of the Théâtre Français. It may not sit in permanence; it may not (save on a special demand of fifty citizens) meet at all; it is merely an electoral unit, and in future some 14,000 men out of a city of nearly a million are to govern all. The local club, directing its armed force and appealing to its fellows, is abolished. Danton then has failed.

But, as we shall see later, the exception became the rule. No mechanical device could check the Revolution. The demand for permanent sections is continuous and successful. From these divisions, intended to be mere marks upon a map, come the cannon of the 10th of August, and it is the section of the Théâtre Français, wherein the traditions and the very name of the Cordeliers were to have been forgotten, that first in Europe declared and exercised the right of the whole people to govern.

If I may repeat a common-place that I have used continually in this book, the tide of the Revolution in Paris was dammed up with a high barrier; its rise could not be checked, and it was certain to escape at last with the force and destructive energy of a flood.