As has been said above, Danton was not elected. The electoral college, of which he was a member, chose Moderates for the most part, such as Pastoret and De Quincy, and the narrow suffrage represented the true drift of Parisian feeling only in the case of a few—De Séchelles, Brissot, Condorcet, and a handful of others. But though Danton did not sit in the Legislative he was free for action in two other directions, which (as it turned out) were the commanding positions in the great changes that came with the war. He was free to attain an administrative position in the municipality of Paris, and he was free to use his power of oratory at the Jacobins.

As to the first, it came with his moderate but important success in the municipal elections at the close of the year. Bailly, frightened out of place, half-regretting his action of the Champ de Mars, had resigned, and Pétion, on November 16th, was elected in his place. Only ten thousand voted, and he obtained 6700 votes. On the same day the Procureur of the new Commune was to be elected. A Procureur under the new system was a position of the greatest importance. He was, so to speak, the advocate of the town, its tribune in the governing body, and with his two substitutes (who aided and occasionally replaced him) was meant to form a kind of small committee whose business was to watch the interests and to define the attitude of the electorate whenever those interests were in jeopardy or that attitude was opposed to the policy of the elected body. These three positions were dangerous, but would lead to popularity, and perhaps to power, if they were directed by a certain kind of ability. It was precisely such a power, the quality of a tribune, that Danton knew himself to possess.

His candidature for the principal position was cordially supported by the Cordeliers, but the Jacobins were divided, and they hesitated. Manuel was elected, and Danton obtained only the third place. This vote, however, was not decisive, and there was a second ballot on December the 2nd. In this Manuel was definitely elected.

Cahier de Gerville (the second substitute) was made Minister of the Interior, and Danton, on December 6th,[107] was elected to his place by a majority of 500 over Collot d’Herbois. It was from this position that he prepared the 10th of August, and it was still as substitute that he remained side by side with the insurrectionary commune, and lending it something of legal sanction when the King was overthrown.

Let me, before leaving this point, define exactly the position in which his new dignity placed him. Three men were charged with the advocacy of public opinion, the Procureur and his two substitutes. Manuel, who was elected to the principal position, was energetic, kindly, and conscientious, but a man of no genius; he was good to Madame De Staël in the days of September, as is apparent from her rather contemptuous description of how she appealed to him for safety; he did his very best (with no power in his hands) to stop the massacres at that same time. He was fond of work, and a little pompous in his idea of office; he was, therefore, a man who would only leave his substitutes the less important work to do, and, from close by, would have been the dominating member of the three. On the other hand, his lack of decision and of initiative effaced him in moments of danger or of new departures, and it is thus his second substitute who seems to lead when seen from a distance, from the point of view of the people, who only look round when there is a noise.

The first substitute was Desmousseaux. He had not resigned, and had therefore not been re-elected. Forming part of the old Commune, and in office since the winter of 1790, he was a Moderate by preference and long tradition.

As for Danton himself, standing third in the group, it was for him a position of honour and of dignity. That part of him which was so capable of high office and so desirous of an opportunity to act was well served by the election. It seemed to put a term to the misconceptions which his person, his faults, and the course of the Revolution had created. But the great stream of events moved him at their will. This office wherein he desired to appear settled at last, to show himself an administrator rather than a leader of unreasoning men, was precisely suited in case of danger to call out those other qualities which had made him despised by many whom he himself respected, and had aroused against him hatred—a passion which he himself had never allowed to arise from anger.

If the spirit of 1791 had been kept, and if after so many false promises the Revolution had been really accomplished, then the official, or, if you will, the statesman, would have appeared in him. I can see him in the difficulties which even a settled kingdom would have had to meet, convincing his contemporaries as he has convinced posterity. He was the man to impress on others the true attitude of Europe—the only diplomat among the patriots. His disadvantages were of the kind that are forgotten in the constant proof of ability; and his learning, which was exactly of the kind to be used in the new regime (a knowledge of languages, of law, of surrounding nations, a combination of detail and of comprehension)—this learning would have made necessary a man so popular with the people to be ruled, and, in the matter of the heart, so honestly devoted to his country. Had France, I say, by some miracle been spared her Passion, and had she been permitted to be happier and to do less for the world, then as the new regime settled into the lower reaches of quiet and content, I believe Danton would have remained for us a name, perhaps less great, but certainly among the first. England has been permitted. She has been given good fortune, and no fate has asked her to save civilisation with her blood, and therefore in England we are accustomed to such careers; men whose origin, whose exterior, and whose faults might have exiled them, have yet been seen to rise from the municipal to the imperial office, because they were possessed of supreme abilities, and because they devoted those abilities to the service of England. They have died in honour.

I will not discuss what it was that made the war. There are no causes. Burke raved like a madman, but then so did Marat. The King was alienated by the clerical laws, but nothing is an excuse for treason. Pilnitz was an affront and even a menace, but it was not a declaration of war. There were peoples behind the kings, as Mayence tragically proved; and if France fought intolerable evils, she also seemed the iconoclast when she put out the altar-lamp, which she is lighting again with her own hand. There are no causes. Only, if you will look and see how Europe has lived, and how our great things have been done, you will find nothing but armies upon armies marching past, and our history is an epic whose beginning is lost, whose books are Roncesvalles and Cortenuova and Waterloo, and whose end is never reached. The war came, and with it a definite necessity to choose between France and the Crown. In that crisis Danton is thrown back upon insurrection. He, who desired men to forget the days of October, was compelled to the 10th of August because he was aroused. Even the massacres were attached to his name, and there still trails after him an easy flow of accusation, only a little less sordid or less terrible.

To follow his action during the first months of 1772, to hear his speeches on the war, and to note his policy, we must leave him at his post in the Commune (where we shall find him again when Paris rises in the summer), and see how he stands for the Mountain at the Jacobins.

This club was now definitely the organ of the left. It was after Danton had been elected, but before he was definitely installed in office,[108] on the 14th of December, a week after the former and five weeks before the latter event, that the debate on the war was begun at the Jacobins,—a debate of the first importance, because it opened the breach between the Girondins and the Mountain, between the orators who insisted on going to meet Europe, and even on a war of propaganda, and the reformers who wished Europe to take the first step, who dreaded war or who thought a war of aggression immoral. At the head of these last was Robespierre. But it is not too much to say that in the first months of the year Danton was more important at the Jacobins than Robespierre. What was his attitude? It was part of the general policy upon which he had determined: he compromised. In his first motion on the 14th of December, he attacked the idea of declaring war. On the 16th he still attacked it, but in other terms. “I know it must come. If any one were to ask me, ‘Are we to have war?’ I would reply (not in argument, but as a matter of fact), ‘We shall hear the bugles,’” But the whole speech is taken up with an argument upon its dangers, and especially upon “those who desire war in the hope of reaction, who talk of giving us a constitution like that of England, in the hope of giving us, later, one like that of Turkey.”

In March and April, the months when the war was preparing and was declared, he was silent. And we can understand his silence when we turn to his speech in the Commune when he was given office. He alludes to the false character given him; he speaks of the reputation which his past actions in Paris had given; he says things that indicate a determination to play the part of a Moderate, and to see whether in his case, as in that of so many others, there would not be permanence in the compromise of the last six months. But there rankled in his mind the insults of the men with whom he sat, Condorcet’s disavowal in his paper of so much as knowing Danton, and he made a peroration which at the time offended, but which possesses for us a certain pathos. “Nature gave me a strong frame, and she put into my face the violence of liberty. I have not sprung from a family which was weakened by the protection of the old privileges; my existence has been all my own; I know that I have kept and shown my vigour, but in my profession and in my private life I have controlled it. If I was carried away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, have I not atoned for it? Have I not been ostracised?... I have given myself altogether to the people, and now that they are beyond attack, now that they are in arms and ready to break the league unless it consents to dissolve,[109] I will die in their cause if I must, ... for I love them only, and they deserve it. Their courage will make them eternal.”

This outburst is the one occasion of his public life in which Danton spoke of himself, and it has the ring of genuine emotion; for in all his harangues he preserved, both before and after this, an objective attitude, if anything too much bent upon the outward circumstances.

Thus, when the notes came to go between the Austrian and the French governments, he was silent. He fears that France is unprepared; he fears that the King is betraying the nation. How much he was a traitor was not known till a far later period; but when at least it is proved that something is undermining the French people, that, apart from the defeats and the lack of preparation, there is treason, then he leaves his silence. The policy of the Moderate acting in a settled state is no longer possible to any one; the court and the nation stood one against the other, and one side or the other must be taken by every man. Then he put off the conventions which he respected, and which he regretted to the end; he went back into the street; he headed the insurrection, destroyed the monarchy; for twelve months he took upon himself all the responsibility of errors in his own policy, and of crime in that of his associates. He saved France, but at this expense, that he went out of the world with a reputation which he knew to be false, that he saw his great powers vulgarised, and that he could never possess, either in his own mind or before the world, not even in France, his true name. The whole of this tragedy is to be found in his trial, and here and there in the few phrases that escape him in the speeches or with his friends. If you sum it up, it comes to this paraphrase of a great sentence: Son nom était flétri mais la France était libre.

It was upon April the 18th that the new Girondin ministry received the note from Vienna rejecting the French proposals of a month before. The poor King, who had been protesting his loyalty to the nation in Paris, had been protesting in Vienna the necessity of sending an army to save him, and Austria gave this reply. On April 20th the Assembly declared war with practical unanimity[110] upon “the King of Hungary and of Bohemia.” But the phrase was useless. You might as well put a match into gunpowder and say, “It is the sulphur I am after, not the charcoal.” Prussia joined, and within a year we shall see all Europe at war with France, in a war that outlawed and destroyed.

Danton was right. France was hopelessly unready. She had not learnt the necessary truth that the soldier is a man with a trade. The orators had mistaken words for things; honest and great as they were, they had fallen in this matter into the faults common to small and dishonest verbiage. The rout and panic under De Dillon, his murder by the troops, the occupation of Quiévrain, came one upon the other. Paris was full of terror and anger in proportion to the greatness of the things she had done, which now seemed all destroyed. “We said and did things that should have convinced the world; we were to be a people unconquerable from our love of liberty, and we appear a beaten, panic-stricken lot—volunteers and babblers who cannot stand fire.” The King dismissed the Girondin ministers, even sent Dumouriez away, heard Roland’s remonstrance, knew that the Assembly was more and more against him; but he remained calm. There was a plan of the simplest. There was to be nothing but a few days of monotonous marching between the allies and Paris. Lafayette with his army of the centre was on his side. The Assembly decreed a great camp of 20,000 men under Paris, and the disbanding of the guard; the guard was disbanded, but the King vetoed the decree. Lafayette wrote his letter menacing the Parliament with his army; the reaction seemed in full success and the invaders secure, when Danton reappeared.

On the 18th of June he found the old phrases against Lafayette at the Jacobins. “It is a great day for France; Lafayette with only one face on is no longer dangerous.” He did not make, but he permitted the 20th of June; and as Paris rose, and the immense mob, grotesque, many-coloured, armed with all manner of sharp things, passed before the Assembly and into the Tuilleries, it might have been a signal or a warning. The excited citizen makes a poor soldier, but if Paris moves the whole great body of France stirs. Such giants take long to be fully awake, and it is a matter of months to drill men; still it is better to let great enemies sleep. There was in that foolish, amiable crowd, with its pleasure at the sight of the King, its comic idea of warning him, something serious underlying. Danton will be using it in a very short time; for there are points of attack where mobs are like machine-guns—ridiculous in general warfare, but very useful indeed in special conditions, and in these conditions invincible. This something serious was that vague force (you may call it only an idea) which you will never find in an individual, and which you will always discover in a mass—the great common man which the French metaphysicians have called “Le Peuple;” that, drilled, is called by the least metaphysical an army.

A week later Lafayette appeared. He demanded the right to use the army, and July opened with the certainty of civil war.

July is the month of fevers; the heat has been moving northward, and all France is caught in it. The grapes fill out, and even in Picardy or in the Cotentin you feel as though the Midi were giving her spirit to the north. July made the Revolution and closed it. A month that saw the Bastille fall and that buried Robespierre is a very national time.

If you overlook France at this moment, you may see the towns stirring as they had stirred three years before; it is from them that the opposition rises—especially from Marseilles. A crowd of young men dragging cannon, the common-place sons of bourgeois, whom the time had turned into something as great as peasants or as soldiers, surged up the white deserts along the Rhone, passing the great sheet of vineyards that slopes up the watershed of Burgundy. As they came along they sang an excellent new marching song. When they at last saw Paris, especially the towers of Notre Dame from where they just show above the city as you come in from Fontainebleau, and as the roads came in together and the suburbs thickened they sang it with louder voices. On the evening of the 30th they came to the gates, and the workmen of the south-eastern quarter began to sing it and called it the “Marseillaise.” No one can describe music; but if in a great space of time the actions of the French become meaningless and the Revolution ceases to be an origin, some one perhaps will recover this air, as we have recovered a few stray notes of Greek music, and it will carry men back to the Republic.

For ten days the insurrection grew. In a secret committee which the Sections formed, men violent like Fournier, or good soldiers like Westermann, or local leaders of quarters like Santerre—but all outside the official body—organised the fighting force, and at their head the one man who held the strings of the municipality—Danton. The Assembly had heard Vergniaud’s angry speech, but it had also confirmed the constitution and the monarchy in the “baiser Lamourette.” Paris had to work alone, and the King, seeing only Paris before him, filled the Tuilleries, and stood by with a small garrison to repress the mere movement of the city—“something that should have been done in ’89.”

It was on a Paris thus enfevered, doubtful, nursing a secret insurrectionary plan, but full of men who hesitated and doubted, having still many who were loyal, that there fell[111] the document which the King had asked of his friends—but which he must, on seeing it, have regretted—the manifesto of the commander of the allies. This extraordinary monument of folly is rarely presented in its entirety. It is only in such a form that its full monstrosity can be appreciated, and I have therefore been at pains to translate for my readers the rather halting French in which Charles William proposed to arrest the movements of Providence. It ran as follows[112]:—

“Their Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia having given me the command of the armies assembled on the French frontier, I have thought it well to tell the inhabitants of that kingdom the motives that have inspired the measures taken by the two sovereigns and the intentions that guide them.

“After having arbitrarily suppressed the rights and the possessions of the German princes in Alsace and Lorraine, troubled and overset public order and their legitimate government, exercised against the sacred person of the King and against his august family violence which is (moreover) repeated and renewed from day to day, those who have usurped the reins of the administration have at last filled up the measure by causing an unjust war to be declared against his Majesty the Emperor, and by attacking his provinces in the Netherlands.

“Several possessions of the German Empire have been drawn into this oppression, and several others have only escaped from a similar danger by yielding to the imperious threats of the dominant party and its emissaries.

“His Prussian Majesty with his Imperial Majesty, by the ties of a strict and defensive alliance, and himself a preponderant member of the Germanic body (sic), has therefore been unable to excuse himself from going to the aid of his ally and of his fellow State (sic). And it is under both these heads that he undertakes the defence of that monarch and of Germany.

“To these great interests another object of equal importance must be added, and one that is near to the heart of the two sovereigns: it is that of ending the domestic anarchy of France, of arresting the attacks which are directed against the altar and the throne, of re-establishing the legitimate power, of giving back to the King the freedom and safety of which he is deprived, and of giving him the means to exercise the lawful authority which is his due.

“Convinced as they are that the healthy part of the French people abhors the excesses of a party that enslaves them, and that the majority of the inhabitants are impatiently awaiting the advent of a relief that will permit them to declare themselves openly against the odious schemes of their oppressors, His Majesty the Emperor and His Majesty the King of Prussia call upon them to return at once to the call of reason and justice, of order, of peace. It is in view of these things that I, the undersigned, General Commander-in-Chief of the two armies, declare—

With that weapon the insurrection was certain of all Paris. Mandat, who had replaced Lafayette at the head of the armed force in the town, was still loyal to the King; he organised, as far as was possible, the forces that he could count upon. The other side also prepared, and the movements had all the appearance of troops entrenching themselves before battle.

Danton went to Arcis and settled an income on his mother in case of his death, came back to Paris, and on the night of August the 9th the Sections named commissioners to act. They met and formed the “insurrectionary commune.” At eight the next morning they dissolved the legal commune, kept Danton, and directed the fighting of the morning.

Meanwhile the King had gathered in the Tuilleries about 6000 men, and depended very largely upon the thick mass of wooden buildings in the Carrousel for cover. The Swiss Guard, whom the decree had removed, were only as far off as Rueil, and were ordered into Paris, over 1500. They were the nucleus, and with them some 2000 of the National Guard, 1500 of the old “Constitutional Guards,” and a group of “Gentilshommes.” Mandat had ordered a battery of the National Guard’s artillery to keep the Pont Neuf; they revolted and joined the people, and Mandat himself, the chief of the defence, was killed on the steps of the Hotel de Ville. Danton, who had not slept, but had lain down in Desmoulin’s flat till midnight, had been to the Hotel de Ville since two in the morning, and he took before posterity—in his trial—the responsibility of Mandat’s death. He did more. He acted during the short night (a night of calm and great beauty, dark and with stars) as the organiser and chief of the insurrection. Especially he appoints Santerre to lead the National Guard. On these rapid determinations the morning broke, and the first hours of the misty day passed in gathering the forces.

Meanwhile all morning the King had waited anxiously in the Tuilleries gardens, and asked Roederer, like a king in comic opera, “when the revolt would begin.”

All night the tocsin had sounded, but the people were slow to gather—“le tocsin ne rend pas”—and it was not till the insurrectionary commune had done its work that a great mob, partly armed, and in no way disciplined, came into the Carrousel.

Westermann (riding, as was Santerre) came up to parley with the Swiss Guard; he asked them in German (which was his native tongue, for he was an Alsatian) to leave the Tuilleries, and promised that if the guard retired and left the palace un-garrisoned the people would also retire. The Swiss—the only real soldiers in Paris—replied that they were under orders, and when Westermann retired to the crowd they opened fire.

Antoinette had said, “Nail me to the Palace,” and even Louis, timid and uncertain, thought that the chances were in his favour. Let only this day succeed, and the city could be kept quiet till the allies should arrive; that had been the boast in the Royalist journal of August 1st; it was Louis’s hope now.

Had the Carrousel been a little more open, the battle might have ended in favour of the garrison, but the numerous buildings, on the whole, helped the attack, and the Swiss, unable to deploy, fought, almost singly, a very unequal fight. There were no volleys except the first. Rapid individual firing from the doors and windows of the palace, the crowd pressing up through the narrowest space (but at a loss of hundreds of lives), and finally, by the end which gave on the “Grande Galerie” the Tuilleries were forced, the garrison killed, and only a small detachment of the Swiss Guard retreated through the gardens, firing alternate volleys, and saving themselves by an admirable discipline.

But while the issue was still doubtful, Louis and his family had gone slowly through the same gardens to the Riding-school, and had taken refuge with the Assembly. The noise of the fusillade came sharply in at the windows, and the event was still uncertain when the Parliament received the King and promised him protection. The president opened for him a small door at the right of the chair, and the King and Queen and their children watched the meaningless resolutions through a grating as they sat in the little dark box that gave them refuge. The debate, I say, lacked meaning, but the battle grew full of meaning as they heard it. The shots were less frequent, the noise of the mob—the roar—was suddenly muffled in the walls of the palace. The crowd had entered it. Then came the few sharp volleys of the retreating guard right under the windows of the Manège, and finally the firing ceased, and the Assembly knew that their oath was of no value, and that the Tuilleries had fallen. Louis also knew it, eating his grotesque roast chicken in the silent and hidden place that was the first of his prisons. He saw in the bright light of the hall many of the faces that were to be the rulers of France, but for himself, in his silence, he felt all power to be gone. He had become a Capet—there was truth in the Republican formula. There had been played—though few have said it, it should be said—a very fine game. The stakes were high and the Court party dared them. They played to win all that the Kings had possessed, and for this great stake they risked a few foolish titles without power. The game was even; it was worth playing, and they had lost. But the man who had been their puppet and their figure-head hardly knew what had happened. Perhaps the Queen alone comprehended, and from that moment found the proud silence and the glance that has dignified her end. In her the legend of the lilies had found its last ally, but now the great shield was broken for ever.

So perished the French monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings. Look up that vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the globe and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There also are the short, strong horsemen of the Robertian house, half-hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them growing in vestment and majesty, and taking on the pomp of the Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip the Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they stand in a widening interminable procession, this great crowd of kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the pride and the achievement of the French nation. But time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of darkness, like a pageant all standing still. You look again, but with the growing light and with the wind that rises before morning they have disappeared.