Georges Danton - Fictionalized Accounts

Fictionalized Accounts

• Danton was given major credit for sparking the revolution and becoming its tempering agent in the 1921 Lillian Gish film Orphans of the Storm.
• Danton is a central character in Romanian playwright Camil Petrescu's play of the same name.
• Danton's last days were made into a play, Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), by Georg Büchner.
• Danton appears in the Hungarian play The Tragedy of Man as one of Adam's incarnations throughout Lucifers illusion.
• Danton's and Robespierre's quarrels were turned into the 1983 film Danton directed by Andrzej Wajda and starring Gérard Depardieu as Danton. They were also the subject of an opera by American composer John Eaton, Danton and Robespierre (1978).
• Danton is extensively featured in La Révolution française (1989), played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.
• In his novel Locus Solus, Raymond Roussel tells a story in which Danton makes an arrangement with his executioner for his head to be smuggled into his friend's possession after his execution. The nerves and musculature of the head ultimately end up on display in the private collection of Martial Canterel, reanimated by special electrical currents and showing a deeply entrenched disposition toward oratory.
• Danton, Madame Roland, and Robespierre, among others, are the main characters in Marge Piercy's rendering of the French Revolution, City of Darkness, City of Light (1996).
• The relationship between Danton and his wife is a central reference in Francine Prose's novella Three Pigs in Five Days (1997)
• The Revolution as experienced by Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins is the central focus of Hilary Mantel's novel A Place of Greater Safety (1993).
• Danton and Camille Desmoulins are the main characters of Tanith Lee's The Gods Are Thirsty—A Novel of the French Revolution (1996).
• Danton appears briefly to initiate a delicate murder investigation in Susanne Alleyn's historical mystery novel Palace of Justice (2010).
• Danton and Maximilien Robespierre are referred to in the book The Scarlet Pimpernel briefly. Danton and Robespierre both applaud a guard for his work in catching aristocrats.
• In The Tangled Thread, Volume 10 of The Morland Dynasty, a series of historical novels by author Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, the character Henri-Marie Fitzjames Stuart, bastard offshoot of the fictional Morland family, allies himself with Danton in an attempt to protect his family as the storm clouds of revolution gather over France.