DAN TOY AS A STATESMAN.* MIRABEAII, Danton, Bonaparte, these are
the three great names of the Revolutionary era, the only men of genius pro- duced by that tremendous upheaval. Of the three, Danton is the least entitled to the praise of statesmanship ; for Mirabeau was foiled only by death in the gigantic effort to prevent the dissolution of social order, and to Bonaparte it was given to establish a new order out of chaos, while Denton destroyed the old order and created in its place an executive which in the hands of others brought the end of civil government in the awful supremacy of the guillotine. Such, at all events, must be the estimate of those who do not place the supposed necessities of national defence, or rather perhaps of national aggression, above every law human or divine. But let us attempt to follow our authors in more detail in their account of Danton's career.
Mr. Belloc truly observes that the sudden rise into prominence of the Revolutionary leaders makes their biographies a vividly concentrated account of action in months rather than in years :—" They come out of obscurity, they pass through the intense zone of a search-light ; they are suddenly eclipsed on its further side." Both he and Mr. Beesly have collected the few known facts of Danton's early life ; his provincial bourgeois extraction.; the escapades, springing from his immense vitality, of his boyhood (such as his tramp to Rheims, seventy miles from his home at Arcis, to see the coronation of Louis XVI.), his love of and later gener- osity to his mother, his apprenticeship to the law, and finally his purchase of a chancery practice and acquisi- tion of a sufficient income, removing him from the class of those who had nothing to lose and everything to gain o (1.) Denton: a Study. By Hilaire Belloc, B.A. London : James Nisbet and Co. Des.]—(2.) Life of Danton.‘-By A. H. Beesly. London: Longmans and Co. [120.114a by revolution, one of the few points in which M. Taine does him an injustice. It is to be observed that the most careful research has failed to reveal a single trace of the personal corruption so freely charged against him. We are tempted to quote Mr. Belloc's description of his personal appearance, well known as that appearance is, but will confine ourselves to what he says of the man's character and aims :- " He is the most French," he says, " the most national, the nearest to the mother, of all the Revolutionary group. He summed up
France As for his politics, he was centred wholly on the outward thing He seems to have lacked almost entirely the meta- physic. Here was France all ruined let her be turned into a place where men should be happy, should have enough to eat and drink, should be good citizens to the extent of making the nation homogeneous and strong. Reform should be practical ; in part it would require discussion, not too much of it At a time when all men had their first principles ready made in words, his were rather that confused instinct which is after all nearest to the truth It is this simplicity which makes him daring, and his concentration on a few obvious points which makes him judicious, unscrupulous, and successful in his choice of means and phrases."
Danton's role in the Revolution really began when the nation was attacked by foreign Powers. It is only, as Mr. Belloc expresses it, "in the saving of France, when the mon of action were needed, that he leaps to the front." The 10th of August, 1792, when, as a counter-move to the Brunswick Manifesto, the Tuileries was stormed and the Monarchy disap- peared as a real force, was organised by him, and he became Dictator as Minister of Justice. His "sombre acquiescence" in the September massacres which followed is the one great blot on his reputation. Of direct complicity in the massacres, however, he stands completely absolved. Mr. Beesly's account of the mad panic in Paris which preceded them, of the universal belief in a counter - revolutionary conspiracy, and in the avenging approach of the allied armies, above all of the anarchy in the city, and the complete absence of police pro- tection, convincingly shows that nothing Danton could do—and what he could do he did—would have prevented them. But from a certain responsibility it is impossible to dissociate him. That he remained connected with the men who planned the massacres, that he profited by the terror inspired by them to organise the Revolutionary tyranny, must place him on a plane below that of civilised statesmanship. In discussing this period of the Revolution and the actors in it a political student must accept this lower level. The earlier leaders of the movement could not have descended to it. They foresaw the logical result of the extreme democratic measures which Danton had engineered. He with his "confused instinct" did not, and that he paid the penalty by becoming their victim is so far sufficient proof of his lack of statesmanship in the higher sense.
The modern school, however, base Danton's claim to this supreme quality on his military and foreign policy. It was his spirit, his energy, his practical grasp, which raised the armies and created the Dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety which enabled Carnot to organise victory. Unencumbered by pedantic abstract prejudices, he alone among the Terrorists saw facts as they were, he alone showed the qualities of a diplomatist ; it was he who amid the vociferation of the clubs negotiated the retreat of Brunswick from French soil, he who endeavoured to detach Prussia from the coalition, who desired to change the war from one of propaganda to one of interest, who obtained the alliance of Sweden, who laid down the bases of the subsequent Treaty of Bile. Political aptitude, indeed, as M. Tamil(' observes, he possessed in an eminent degree. Does that, with his admitted energy and patriotism, substantiate the claim made on his behalf to real political greatness I In forming a judgment on such a point it seems to us neces- sary to take into account not only the character and genius of the man, but the general tendency and meaning of the events in which he played his part. Did he succeed in the objects he set before himself, and were those objects such es made for the advantage of his country or of mankind Both his biographers write from the point of view of ardent sympathy with the Revolutionary movement through all its fated course, and excuse its aberrations in the beneficent results which they appear, in the usual vague phrases, to attribute to it. It may be doubted whether history will endorse this somewhat superstitious attitude towards the men and events of the Revolution. It is difficult to trace in the later excesses of the period any idea which was not in existence in the earlier period, or which was not common property among the think- ing classes even before the Revolution broke out, or to believe that under happier auspices such principles of political liberty and social equality as survived could not have been more firmly implanted by a course of comparatively peaceful reform. What the extreme men thrown up by the Revolution were instrumental in doing was to organise a tyranny which went far to crush for ever in France the ideal of political freedom. The philosophic brigandage of the Jacobin regime has con- firmed in the national character the tone of moral cowardice which is always the result of despotic rule or oppressive violence. When we wonder at its manifestation in our own day we call to mind the following words of a contemporary observer of the Terrorist regime :— " The patience with which the French have for fifteen months tolerated a system of imprisonment en masse, and the judicial assassination of hundreds by wholesale, convicts the nation of a moral turpitude which renders them fit subjects for any kind of oppression. In all that long period of murder, not a son dared avenge the execution of his father, not a husband ventured to defend his wife, not a father to rescue his child in a country where swords would once have leapt from scabbards for the sake of a mistress or an epigram 1 " If in domestic matters the policy which was practically the work of Danton, though he may not have foreseen its scope or sympathised with its %philosophic origin and meaning, ended by defeating the very object of the Revolution, still more was this the case with the prosecution of the war and the foreign policy of the Convention and its successors. This is not the place to analyse the objects of the war or apportion the blame for its commencement, nor are we concerned to deny that once begun it was the duty of a patriotic Frenchman, which Danton performed with heroic energy, to organise the national forces in such a way as to secure victory. This object was undoubtedly obtained (quite as much owing to the selfishness and feebleness of the allies as to the strength of the French), and it is Danton's chief title to fame. But at what a cost ! The foreign policy of the Directory, with its philosophic insolence, its spirit of proselytism, its desire of universal revolution, was only the forerunner of Napoleon's struggle for universal empire, of which the present condition of Europe is the direct result ; a condition of exaggerated national antagonisms instead of the hoped-for fraternisation of the peoples ! Here, again, it is probably true, as far as we know anything of Danton's political ideas, that he would have striven with all his strength against the later development of his work. But a man's work must be judged by its results ; and not only did he fail both in domestic and foreign affairs in guiding the policy of the engine of govern- ment which he created, but the policy which was the outcome of his work, if not of his will, was fraught with disaster to his country and to Europe.
We have left ourselves no space to speak of the last few months of Danton's revolt against growing fanaticism and excess. It is a piece of real tragedy, given with admirable restraint and eloquence in Mr. Belloc's pages. Nor can we say more of the two works under review, save that they are both founded on the most recent French research, and tell all there is to know of their hero, Mr. Belloc's with some super- abundance of rather obscure rhetoric, and Mr. Beesly's in fuller detail and with the excellent style at his command ; and that neither author has, to our mind, so far improved upon the few vivid pages in which M. Taine describes the great demagogue as to justify their deprecatory allusions to that historian.
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