Danton, GEORGES-JACQUES, was born of good farmer-people, at Arcis-sur-Aube, 28th October 1759. The outbreak of the French Revolution found him a quiet and studious man, practising as an advocate in Paris, but ere long its fever filled his veins. It was not till 1792, however, that he became a great leader, as we find no trace of his influence in such movements as the destruction of the Bastille and the forcible removal of the court from Versailles to the Tuileries. Mirabeau quickly detected Danton's genius, and hastened to attach him to himself, but his death in the spring of 1791 removed the last stay to the speedy downfall of the monarchy and the onward progress of a turbulent and infatuated democracy. Along with Marat and Camille Desmoulins, Danton instituted the Cordeliers' Club, which soon became the rallying-point of all the hotter revolutionists. There the tall brawny man—a born Tribune—with harsh and daring countenance, beetling black brows, and a voice of enormous power, thundered with vehement eloquence against the aristocrats, till the passions of the populace rose into ungovernable fury. Meantime the unhappy king stumbled into ever new blunders—most fatal, the attempt to flee from Paris (June 1791), and the affair of the Champ de Mars (July 2, 1791). Assertions have been made that Danton was after these events corrupted by the court, but there is no trustworthy evidence of this, and it is certain that his hostility to the monarchy remained as implacable as ever. 'The Mirabeau of the Sansculottes' was, indeed, says M. Claretie, 'a kind of bourgeois Mirabeau, equally powerful, but neither dissolute nor venal.' Danton's share in the insurrectionary march on the Tuileries (10th August 1792) is very doubtful, but it is certain that immediately thereafter he appears as Minister of Justice. And now the gigantic personality of the man seemed to overshadow all the surrounding figures. He stood forth as the incarnate spirit of the Revolution, manifesting alike its heroic audacity in the presence of danger from without, and its mad suspicion and terror of danger from within. The advance of the Prussians seemed for a moment to strike a panic to the heart of France. On the 2d of September Danton mounted the tribune, and addressed the Legislative Assembly in a speech of tremendous power, which closed with the famous words regarding the enemies of France: 'Pour les vaincre, pour les atterrer, que faut-il? De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.' The heart of Paris was moved with resistless enthusiasm: she poured forth army after army of her sons, whose fiery valour quickly drove the invaders from the sacred soil of France. But the excitement of Paris was not all heroic—the September murders in the prisons were merely an outburst of cowardice and fear. Danton had no share in this atrocity, for which Marat was mainly responsible, but he admitted that such excesses were incidental to a revolution, and condoned them as merely morbid and passing ebullitions of forces that would yet flow freely in healthy channels.
Danton voted for the death of the king (January 1793), was one of the nine original members of the Committee of Public Safety, and frequently went on missions to Dumouriez and other republican generals. In the Convention he now bent all his giant strength to crush the Girondists, or moderate party, on whose fall the extremists found themselves supreme. But he could not restrain the forces he had created, and his heart filled with ineffectual pity when the heads of opponents against whom he had thundered in debate fell under the merciless guillotine of the triumphant Mountain (October 1793). Danton was chiefly instrumental in setting up a strong central authority in the Committee of Public Safety and investing it with dictatorial powers, but he elected not to belong to it himself. Henceforth all his energies were devoted at once to fire the hearts of Frenchmen against the foreign enemy, and to conciliate domestic hatreds. He strove with all his might to abate the fanatical and pitiless severity of the revolutionary tribunal, but although Hébert and his party were cut off, Danton's policy of clemency failed to commend itself to the Mountain, whose ferocious instincts saw a more promising leader in the narrow and acrid Robespierre. A fruitless attempt was made to reconcile the two, but their interview left them worse friends than before. Meantime Danton was strangely careless of his fate. He went awhile for rest to his native Arcis, and forgot all the machinations of his enemies in the quiet of domestic happiness with the wife he had just married. 'I prefer being guillotined to guillotining,' he said to a friend—a great saying which history will remember. Soon his friends summoned him to return to Paris. When news was brought him that the warrant for his arrest was made out, he said merely, 'They dare not,' and calmly went to sleep as usual. Arrested at last, he carried his head high until his doom:—'I leave the whole business in a frightful welter. Not one of them understands anything of government. Robespierre will follow me; I drag down Robespierre. Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with governing of men.'
On the 2d April 1794 he was brought with Camille Desmoulins and a group of his friends before the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal he had formed a twelvemonth before. Asked his name formally by Fouquier-Tinville, the attorney-general, he replied with more than his customary greatness of phrase: 'My name is Danton: a name tolerably known in the Revolution; my abode will soon be annihilation; but I shall live in the Pantheon of history.' His defence was sublime in its audacity, its incoherence, its mixture of heroism and magnificent buffoonery. 'I sold to the enemy!' he exclaimed, 'A man of my stamp is priceless.' 'Do I look like a hypocrite?' was his only answer to one of the absurdest of the charges. The first two days of his trial his mighty voice and passionate eloquence moved the people so greatly that the Committee of Public Safety in terror hastily concocted a decree that the mouths of men who had 'insulted Justice' should be shut; and only with this shameful outrage upon justice were his enemies able to send to his doom the greatest figure that fell in the Revolution (April 5, 1794). At the foot of the scaffold the thought of his much-loved wife filled his heart, but with the words, 'Danton, no weakness,' he nerved his heart to die as he had lived. To the headsmen he said, 'Thou wilt show my head to the people; it is worth showing.'
The outlines of the Titan of the Revolution in Carlyle's glowing pages are none too heroic; his story is written large on the annals of his time.
See also French works by Robinet and Bougeart, and English works by Belloc (1899) and Beesly (1899).