London, April to September 1822
THE SCENES of the Club des Cordeliers, which I witnessed three or four times, were dominated and presided over by Danton. A Hun with the stature of a Goth, a squashed nose, windward nostrils, and scarred cheeks, Danton had the face of a gendarme crossed with that of a slippery and ruthless attorney. Inside the shell of his church, as though inside the carcass of the centuries, he organized the September Massacres with the help of his three male Furies: Desmoulins, Marat, and Fabre d’Églantine. Billaud de Varennes proposed setting fire to the prisons and burning everyone within; another member of the Convention suggested drowning all the detainees; Marat declared himself in favor of a general massacre. “I don’t give a f——about the prisoners,” replied Danton. In his capacity as author of the Commune circular, he invited friends of Liberty to reproduce in their various départements the enormities perpetrated at the Carmelite Convent and L’Abbaye.
But let us take heed of history. Sixtus V said that Jacques Clément’s devotion was equal, for the salvation of mankind, to the mystery of the Incarnation, just as Marat was compared to the Savior of the World.[14] Charles IX wrote to the governors of the provinces to imitate the Saint Bartholomew Massacres, just as Danton ordered patriots to copy the September Massacres. The Jacobins were plagiarists; they even plagiarized the sacrifice of Louis XVI from the execution of Charles I. As crimes have been found mixed in a great social movement, it has been imagined, quite wrongly as it happens, that these crimes yielded the Revolution’s greatness, of which they are no more than a horrible pastiche. Passionate and systematic minds have admired only the convulsions of the Revolution’s beautiful but sickly nature.
Danton, more frank than the English, said, “We shall not judge the King; we shall kill him.” He also said, “None of these priests or nobles is guilty, but they must die because they are out of place: they are impeding the progress of events and waylaying the future.” These words, under the semblance of a sort of horrible profundity, show no real understanding or genius: for they suppose that innocence is worth nothing and that the moral order may be subtracted from the political order without annihilating it, which is false.
Danton was not convinced of the principles he defended; he merely wrapped himself in the Revolutionary mantle to make his fortune. “Come and holler with us,” he told one young man. “When you’re rich, you can do whatever you please.” He confessed that he had refused to go over to the Court’s party only because they hadn’t agreed to pay him what he asked. Such was the effrontery of a mind that understood itself and of a corruption that proclaimed itself with the sluice gates wide open.
Inferior to Mirabeau even in ugliness, Danton was superior to Robespierre, even if he did not bequeath his name to his crimes. He preserved some sense of religion: “We have not,” he said, “destroyed superstition in order to institute atheism.” His passions may have been good for the simple reason that they were passions. We should pay some mind to the role a man’s character plays in his deeds. Criminals like Danton, who are guilty in imagination, seem, by reason of their exaggerated words and gestures, more perverse than cold-blooded criminals, but in fact they are less perverse. This observation applies equally well to a people. Taken collectively, the people are a poet, at once author and ardent actor of the part they play, or the part they are made to play. Their excesses come not so much from instinctual or inborn cruelty as from the unpredictable delirium of a crowd intoxicated by spectacles, especially when the spectacles are tragic: a thing so true that, in the popular horror shows, you will always find something superfluous added to the scenery and the emotion.
Danton was caught in the trap he himself had set. It did him no good to flick bread-balls at the judges’ noses, or to answer their questions with nobility and courage, or to make the tribunal hesitate, or to make the Convention fear for its life. It was no use rationalizing the crimes that had given power to his enemies, or crying out, seized by a barren fit of repentance, “It was I who instituted this infamous tribunal, and now I ask pardon for the deed from God and man!”—a phrase that has been pillaged more than once. He ought to have betrayed the infamy of the tribunal long before he was called to its bar.
There was nothing left for Danton but to show himself as pitiless toward his own death as he had been toward the deaths of his victims, to hold his head higher than the suspended blade. So he did. In the open theater of the Terror, where his feet stuck to the clotted matte of yesterday’s blood, he cast a look of contempt and superiority over the crowd and said to the executioner, “You shall show my head to the people; it is worth the trouble.” Danton’s head thus remained in the executioner’s hands, even as his acephalous shade went down to join the decapitated shades of his victims. This, too, was equality.
Danton’s deacon and sub-deacon, Camille Desmoulins and Fabre d’Églantine, perished in the same manner as their priest.
In those days when a pension was paid to the guillotine; when one wore in the buttonhole of his carmagnole, as he might have worn a flower, either a small gilt guillotine or a small bit of flesh from the heart of one of its victims; when one shouted Long Live Hell!; when one celebrated the joyous orgies of blood, steel, and rage, and drank himself to nothingness; when one danced the Bloody Waltz of the Dead all night, completely naked, to avoid the inconvenience of undressing to go and join them; in those days, sooner or later, everyone had to arrive at the last banquet, at the last sorrowful joke. When Desmoulins was summoned to Fouquier-Tinville’s tribunal, the President asked him his age. “The same age as the sans-culotte Jesus,” Camille said in jest. A vengeful obsession compelled these butchers of Christian throats to utter the name of Jesus Christ incessantly.
It would be unjust to forget that Camille Desmoulins dared to defy Robespierre and redeemed some of his debauchery with his courage. He gave the first signal for the wider reaction against the Terror. A young woman, charming and full of life, made him capable of love, sacrifice, and even virtue. Fierce indignation inspired the eloquent, fearless, bawdy irony he displayed before the tribunal: he openly condemned the scaffolds he had helped to raise, and he conformed his conduct to his words. He did not submit to his punishment. He grappled with the executioner in the tumbrel and arrived at the brink of the final chasm half torn to pieces.
Fabre d’Églantine, the author of a play that will last, showed himself, the very reverse of Desmoulins, to be a man of remarkable weakness. Jean Roseau, the executioner in Paris under the Holy League, was sentenced to be hanged for offering his services to the murderers of President Brisson; he could not bring himself to face the rope. It seems that no one learns how to die by killing others.
The debates I witnessed at the Club des Cordeliers made it clear to me that society was in a stage of most rapid transformation. I had seen the Constituent Assembly beginning the massacre of the royalty in 1789 and 1790; in 1792, I found the still warm carcass of the old monarchy, handed over to the gut-working legislators: they disemboweled it and dissected it under the low ceilings of their clubs, as halberdiers once dismembered and burned the body of Henri Le Balafré in the tunnels beneath the Château de Blois.[15]
Of all the men I here recall—Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d’Églantine, Robespierre—not one is alive today. I encountered them for a moment on my journey, between a nascent society in America and a dying society in Europe, between the forests of the New World and the solitudes of exile: I had been on foreign soil only a few months when these lovers of Death grew weary of her embraces. At the distance from which I gaze back at their apparitions, it seems to me that, having descended into hell in my youth, I retain a confused memory of the wraiths I glimpsed wandering along the banks of the Cocytus. They add something to the varied dreams of my life, and they are now inscribed on these tablets from beyond the grave.