Georges Danton - Rise

Rise

In the provisional executive government that was formed between the king's dethronement and the opening of the National Assembly (the formal end of the monarchy), Danton found himself allied with Jean Marie Roland and other members of the Girondist movement. Their strength was soon put to the test. The alarming successes of the Austrians and the surrender of two important fortresses caused panic in the capital; over a thousand prisoners were murdered. At that time, Danton was accused of directing these September Massacres, but no evidence of this is available from modern research. However, he apparently did insist that his colleagues should remain firm at their posts.

The election to the National Convention took place in September 1792; after which the remnant of the Legislative Assembly formally surrendered its authority. The Convention ruled France until October 1795. Danton was a member; resigning as minister of justice, he took a prominent part in the deliberations and proceedings of the Convention.

In the Convention, according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, "He took his seat in the high and remote benches which gave the name of "the Mountain" to the revolutionists who sat there. He found himself side by side with Marat, whose exaggerations he never countenanced; with Maximilien Robespierre, whom he did not regard very highly, but whose immediate aims were in many respects his own; with Camille Desmoulins and Philippeaux, who were his close friends and constant partisans." As for his foes, the Girondists, they were "eloquent, dazzling, patriotic, but unable to apprehend the fearful nature of the crisis, too full of vanity and exclusive party-spirit, and too fastidious to strike hands with the vigorous and stormy Danton." Dreading the people who had elected Danton, and holding Danton responsible for the September Massacres, they failed to see that his sympathy with the vehemence and energy of the streets positioned him uniquely to harness on behalf of the defense of France that insurrectionary spirit that had removed the monarchy. Danton saw radical Paris as the only force to which the National Convention could look in resisting Austria and its allies on the north-east frontier, and the reactionaries in the interior. "Paris," he said, "is the natural and constituted centre of free France. It is the centre of light. When Paris shall perish there will no longer be a republic."

Danton voted for the death of Louis XVI in January 1793. After the execution had been carried out, he thundered "The kings of Europe would dare challenge us? We throw them the head of a king!" Danton had a conspicuous share in the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which on the one hand took the weapons away from the disorderly popular vengeance of the September Massacres, but which would become the instrument of the institutionalized Terror. When all executive power was conferred upon a Committee of Public Safety (6 April 1793), Danton had been one of the nine original members of that body. He was dispatched on frequent missions from the Convention to the republican armies in Belgium, and wherever he went he infused new energy into the army. He pressed forward the new national system of education, and he was one of the legislative committee charged with the construction of a new system of government. He tried and failed to bridge the hostilities between Girondists and Jacobins. The Girondists were irreconcilable, and the fury of their attacks on Danton and the Mountain was unremitting.