Organziational Behaviour, 7ce

Chapter 5: Motivation in Action

Test Bank for Organizational Behaviour

Concepts Controversies Applications Canadian
7th Edition Langton Robbins Judge 0134097858
9780134097855
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Chapter 5 Motivation in Action

5.1 Multiple-Choice Questions

1) Thinking of money as a motivator, expectancy theory mainly suggests that

A) money plays no part in motivating employee behaviour.
B) money is the only extrinsic motivator.
C) individuals need to value the reward, whether it is money or something else, or it won't be
motivational.
D) individuals care little about the value of the reward but appreciate the gesture.
E) the mere suggestion of more money will motivate employees.
Answer: C
Diff: 1 Type: MC Page Ref: 166
Skill: Recall
Topic: From Theory to Practice—The Role of Money
Objective: 1

2) Money is probably the most emotionally meaningful object in contemporary life. Only
A) sex and ambition are its close competitors.
B) ego and ambition are its close competitors.
C) shelter and ambition are its close competitors.
D) food and sex are its close competitors.
Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 5-1
 Organziational Behaviour, 7ce
Chapter 5: Motivation in Action

E) food and shelter are its close competitors.

Answer: D
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 166
Skill: Recall
Topic: From Theory to Practice—The Role of Money
Objective: 1

3) When using bonuses, managers should be mindful of

A) the amount, so that the bonus does not negatively effect the profits of the company.
B) not recognizing friends within the company.
C) the size of the bonus in relation to the event recognized.
D) potential unexpected behaviours arising when employees try to ensure they will receive
bonuses.
E) very little, the bonus is just so effective.
Answer: D
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 170
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 5-2

 Organziational Behaviour, 7ce
Chapter 5: Motivation in Action

4) One strength of a variable-pay program is that it

A) encourages individuals to work together effectively.
B) increases the skill levels of employees.
C) motivates task performance.
D) can reduce the number of employees needed.
E) can cause unhealthy competition among employees.
Answer: C
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 168
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

5) Profit sharing plans

A) focus on past financial results.
B) are company-established benefit plans in which employees acquires stock as part of their
benefits.
C) give employees the right to buy stock in the company at a later date for a guaranteed price.
D) focus on future financial results.
E) give employees the right to buy stock in the company at a later date for the market price at
that time.
Answer: A
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 172
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

6) Skill-based pay is attractive to organizations because it tends to create a

A) flexible workforce with interchangeable skills.
B) responsive workforce to management requests.
C) lower cost base or starting point for all employees.
D) single-pay system that is easy for everyone to understand.
E) focus on past performance.
Answer: A
Diff: 3 Type: MC Page Ref: 172
Skill: Applied
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 5-3

 Organziational Behaviour, 7ce
Chapter 5: Motivation in Action

7) Taylor Inc. has different benefits plans for employees who are single parents as compared to
those for single employees with no dependents. Specifically, single parents get additional
disability insurance as well as life insurance. This type of benefit plan is known as
A) core-plus.
B) modular.
C) flexible spending.
D) cafeteria.
E) secondary.
Answer: B
Diff: 3 Type: MC Page Ref: 173
Skill: Applied
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

8) Gainsharing is a variable-pay program that is an incentive plan for

A) individuals, where improvements in an individual's productivity, from one period to another,
determine the amount awarded.
B) all employees of the company, where employees gain when the company gains market share.
C) workplace groups or departments, where improvements in group productivity, from one
period to another, determine the amount shared.
D) all employees of the company, where every employee gains when the company increases
productivity.
E) individuals, where an individual who accomplishes specific goals, receives a percentage of
company profit.
Answer: C
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 172
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

9) Variable-pay or pay-for-performance programs operate reward programs at three levels

A) individual, group and organizational.
B) individual, departmental and organizational.
C) individual, departmental and community.
D) individual, group and community.
E) individual, group and managerial.
Answer: A
Diff: 1 Type: MC Page Ref: 168
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 5-4

 Organziational Behaviour, 7ce
Chapter 5: Motivation in Action

10) Research on pay found organizations paying more attracted better-qualified, more motivated
employees who stayed with the organization longer; these organizations have
A) higher employee morale.
B) higher customer satisfaction.
C) higher employee productivity.
D) higher employee productivity and higher customer satisfaction.
E) higher employee morale, higher employee productivity and higher customer satisfaction.
Answer: E
Diff: 3 Type: MC Page Ref: 180
Skill: Applied
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

11) Pay for performance means employees must

A) share only in the rewards of a company.
B) share in the risks as well as the rewards of their employer's business.
C) share in the risks at the expense of the rewards of their employer's business.
D) share all aspects of a company's business.
E) share very little yet gain from any success the company might achieve.
Answer: B
Diff: 2 Type: MC Page Ref: 168
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 2

12) Studies have shown that the most powerful workplace motivator is
A) a company dinner.
B) promotion.
C) time in lieu.
D) money.
E) recognition.
Answer: E
Diff: 3 Type: MC Page Ref: 175
Skill: Recall
Topic: Creating Effective Reward Systems
Objective: 3

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 5-5

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staked the success of his effort, and, with the reverses, he soon
discovered that the forces which he had let loose were going beyond
him. It may be that he thought the results of the 2nd of June would be
more immediate than they were. As a fact, it took many months to
recover the position which the supineness of the Girondins had lost. In
those months the Revolutionary Government crystallised, as it were,
became permanent, and fell into the hands of the extremists.
On the very day that the Norman insurrection was crushed at Vernon,
a Norman girl stabbed Marat. It is not within the scope of this book to
deal at any great length with the fate of the man whom Danton had called
“l’individu.” That most striking and picturesque episode concerns us
only in this matter, that it was a powerful impetus to the system of the
Terror, and such an one as Danton, with all his judgment, could not
possibly have foreseen. Moreover, on the very day that Marat was killed,
the allied forces entered Warsaw, and there can be no doubt that the
success of this infamy gave them a freer hand morally, at least upon the
French frontier. Mayence fell, and its fall cost the life of Josephine’s first
husband. The Allies had crossed the Rhine. Five days later, on the 28th
of July, Valenciennes fell. At the same moment the Spaniards were
pouring in east and west of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese had
crossed the Alps. From a little press in Newcastle (the family of the
printer yet remain to tell the tale), Pitt was drawing the thousands of
forged assignats to ruin the Republic. Five foreign armies were
occupying the territory of France, and late in the following month the
Spanish and English fleets were admitted to the harbour and arsenal of
Toulon. Let it then be granted that, with the possible exception of the
Roman power after Cannæ, no power in history was ever so near
destruction as was Revolutionary France in that summer.
Let us see how the misfortunes of the country reacted upon the
position of Danton. Already, with early July, he felt himself pressed and
constrained by the growing power of the Jacobin doctrine and of its high
priest. His system of conciliation, his attempts (in large part successful)
to coax rather than to defeat the insurrection, were violently criticised in
the debate of the 4th. The anger against the Girondins, which the death
of Marat was to increase to so violent a degree, produced the report of St.
Just upon the 8th of July, which, though history has called it moderate,
yet mentions the accusation of Vergniaud and of Gaudet, and to this
Danton was forced reluctantly to put his name. Two days afterwards the
old Committee to which he had belonged was dissolved and a new one
was elected.
It would be an error to regard this as a mere resignation on the part of
Danton; it would be equally an error to regard it as a violent censure on
the part of the Convention. It is certain that he chose to withdraw
because the fatal necessity of things was giving power to men of whom
he had no opinion. Thus Robespierre joined the Committee on the 27th
of July—Robespierre, of whom Danton could say in private, “The man
has not wits enough to cook an egg.” Yet this was the man who was so
worshipped by the crowd, that, once within the Committee, he was
destined to become the master of France. It may be remarked in passing
that something fatal seemed to attach to the date on which a man entered
and began to lead the Committee. On the day that Danton entered in ’93,
on that day was he guillotined in ’94. On the day that Robespierre
entered in ’93, on that day in ’94 he fell.
Danton remained, for a little longer than a month, more and more
separate from the management of affairs, more and more out of
sympathy with the men who were conducting the government.
Nevertheless, he stands almost as an adviser and certainly with pure
disinterestedness throughout the month of August. He was alone.
Desmoulins was more with Robespierre than with him at that moment.
Westermann, his great friend and ally on the 10th of August 1792, was
under censure for his defeat in Vendée. But standing thus untrammelled,
Danton for the moment appears with an especial brilliancy. Indeed there
is no act of his public life so clear, so typical of his method, or so
successful as his great speech on the 1st of August. It was as though,
divorced from the pre-occupations of political intrigue and free from the
responsibility of executive power, he was able for the first time in his
whole life to speak his mind fully and clearly. The speech is a précis, as
it were, of all his pronouncements on the necessity for a dictatorship and
the methods it should employ. It turns round this sentence, “I demand
that the Committee of Public Safety should be erected into a Provisional
Government.” He said openly that while he asked for absolute powers
for the Committee, he refused ever to join it again. He pointed out to
them the necessity of uniting all power in the hands of one body, of
making a unique command for a nation at war. To men who had been
lost for so long in the discussion of constitutional checks and guarantees,
he talked of the necessities as a general would to his staff. If you will
read this speech through, you will find it to be the clearest exposition in
existence of the causes and of the methods of the action of France in all
her dangers from that day to our own. This speech, which is the climax
of his career, and which stands at the fountain-head of so much in the
modern nation, was followed throughout the month by many a piece of
practical and detailed advice. He talks always quietly, and always with a
specific object in view, on the educational proposals, on the great
conscription (14th of August), on the enforcement of an absolute military
discipline (15th of August), and so forth. But while he is still in this
position, of which the brilliancy and success have deceived some into
thinking that it was the centre of his career, two things were at work
which were to lead to the strange crisis in which he lost his life. First, the
Terror was beginning to be used for purposes other than those of the
National Defence. Secondly, there was coming upon him lethargy and
illness. He seems to have remained for a whole month, from the middle
of September till the middle of October, without debating. There had
come a sudden necessity for repose into his life, and until it was satisfied
he gave an impression of weakness and of breaking down.
This was emphasised by a kind of despair, as he saw the diplomatic
methods abandoned in dealing with foreign nations and the personal
aims of the mystics, the private vengeance of the bloodthirsty, or the
ravings of the rank madmen capturing the absolute system which he had
designed and forged at the expense of his titanic powers. It was during
this period that Garat saw him, and has left us the picture of his great
body bowed by illness, and his small deep eyes filled with tears, as he
spoke of the fate that was following the Girondins, and of how he could
not save them. It was then also that, walking slowly with Desmoulins at
sunset by the Seine, he said with a shudder that had never taken him
before, “The river is running blood.”
With October the Terror weighed on all France by the decree of the
month before. The suspects were arrested right and left, and the country
had entered into one of those periods which blacken history and leave
gaps which many men dare not bridge by reading. He broke down and
fled for quiet to his native place. From thence the Great Mother, of
whom in all the Revolution he had been the truest son, sent him back to
fulfil the mercy and the sanity of Nature as he had up till then fulfilled
her energies.
This book is the life of a man, and a man is his mind. Danton, who has
left no memoirs, no letters even—of whose life we know so little outside
the field of politics—can only be interpreted, like any other man, by the
mind. We must seek the origin, though we have but a phrase or two to
guide us. What was that meditation at Arcis out of which proceeded the
forlorn hope of the “Vieux Cordelier” and of the “Committee of
Indulgence”?
He was ill already; the great energies which had been poured out
recklessly in a torrent had suddenly run dry. Garat saw him weak,
uncertain, refusing to leave his study, troubled in the eyes. The reins
were out of his hands; all that he thought, or rather knew, to be fatal to
the Republic was succeeding, and every just conception, all balance, was
in danger. This, though it was not the cause of his weariness, coincided
with it, and made his sadness take on something of despair. There had
always been in his spirit a recurrent desire for the fields and rivers; it is
common to all those whom Nature has blessed with her supreme gift of
energy. He had at this moment a hunger for his native place, for the
Champagne after the harvest, and for the autumn mists upon the Aube. It
was in this attitude, weary, despairing, ill, and needing the country as a
parched man needs water, that he asked and obtained permission to leave
the Convention. It was upon the 12th of October, just as the worst phase
of the Terror was beginning, that he left the violence and noise of the city
and turned his face eastward to the cool valley of the Marne.
Starting from this point, his weariness and his longing for home, we
can trace the movement of his mind during the six weeks of his repose.
He recovered health with the rapidity that so often characterises men of
his stamp; he found about him the peaceable affection, the cessation of
argument and of self-defence which his soul had not known since the
first days of 1789. His old mother was with him, and his children also,
the memories of his own childhood. The place refreshed him like sleep;
he became again the active and merry companion of four years before,
sitting long at his meals, laughing with his friends. The window of the
ground-floor room opened on to the Grande Place, and there are still
stories of him in Arcis making that window a kind of little rendezvous
for men passing and repassing whom he knew, his chatting and his
questions, his interests on every point except that political turmoil in
which the giant had worn himself out. The garden was a great care of his,
and he was concerned for the farm in which he had invested the
reimbursement of his pre-revolutionary office. He delighted to meet his
father’s old friends, the mayor, the functionaries of the place. This man,
whom we find so typical of his fellow-countrymen, is never more French
than in his home. The little provincial town, the amour du clocher, the
prospect of retirement in the province where one was born—the whole
scene is one that repeats itself upon every side to-day in the class from
which Danton sprang.
Moreover, as quiet took back its old place in his soul, he saw, no
longer troubled, but with calmness and certainty, the course that lay
before the Republic. The necessity of restraint, which had irritated and
pursued him in his days of fever in Paris, was growing into a settled and
deliberate policy; he began to study the position of France like a map; no
noise nor calumny was present to confuse him, and his method of action
on his return developed itself with the clearness that had marked his first
attitude in the elections of Paris. How rapidly his mind was working
even his friends could not tell. One of them thought to bring him good
news, and told him of the death of the Girondins. Danton was in his
garden talking of local affairs, and when this was told him, the vague
reputation which he bore, the “terrible Danton,” and the fear he had
inspired, led them to expect some praise. He turned as though he had
been stabbed, and cried sharply, “Say nothing. Do you call that good
news? It is a terrible misfortune.... It menaces us all.” And no one
understood what was passing in his mind. It was the note that Garat had
heard, and later Desmoulins: “I did my best to save them; I wish to God I
could have saved them!”
Whatever other news reached Arcis in those terrible months served
only to confirm him more strongly in his new attitude. Had he been
tinged in the slightest degree with the mysticism that was common to so
many in that time he would have felt a mission. But he was a
Champenois, the very opposite of a mystic, and he only saw a task, a
thing to be planned and executed by the reason. Perhaps if he had had
more of the exaltation of the men he was about to oppose he might have
succeeded.
It was upon the 21st of November that he returned to Paris. His health
had come back, his full vigour, and with the first days of his
reappearance in politics the demand for which the whole nation was
waiting is heard. And what had not the fanatics done during the weeks of
his silence! Lyons, the Queen, the Girondins, Roland’s wife—the very
terms of politics had run mad, and he returned to wrestle with furies.
Let me describe the confusion of parties through which Danton had to
wade in his progress towards the re-establishment of liberty and of order.
As for the Convention itself, nominally the master, it was practically of
no power. It chose to follow now one now another tendency or man; to
be influenced by fear at this moment, by policy at that, and continually
by the Revolutionary formulæ. In a word, it was led. Like every large
assembly, it lacked initiative. Above it and struggling for power were
these: First, the committees, that of Public Safety, and its servant, that of
General Security—the Government and the police. It was Danton, as we
know, who desired to make the committees supreme, who had raised
them as the institution, the central government. But by this time they
were a despotism beyond the reach of the checks which Danton had
always desired. To save so mighty an engine from the dangers of
ambition, he had resigned in July. His sacrifice or lethargy did not
suffice. The Committee which had once been Danton was now the
Triumvirate—Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just. It pursued their personal
objects, it maintained by the Terror their personal creed. Still Danton did
not desire to destroy it as a system. He wished to modify its methods and
to change its personnel, to let it merge gradually into the peaceable and
orderly government for which the Revolution and the Republic had been
made. By a strange necessity, the workers, the men who were most like
Danton in spirit, the practical organisers on the Committee, such as
Carnot, Prieur, and Lindet, could not help defending it in every
particular. They knew the necessity of staying at their post, and they
feared, with some justice, that if the Robespierrian faction was
eliminated their work might be suddenly checked. It was because they
were practical and short-sighted that they were opposed to the practical
but far-sighted policy of Danton. They feared that with the cessation of
the Terror the armies would lack recruits, the commissariat provisions,
the treasury its taxes.
Against the Committee was the Commune. Hébert at its worst; Clootz
at its most ideal; Pache at its most honest. This singular body represented
a spirit very close indeed to anarchy. It preached atheism as a kind of
dogma; it was intolerant of everything; it was as mad as Clootz, as filthy
as Hébert. It possessed a curious mixture of two rages—the rage for the
unity and defence of France, the rage for the autonomy of Paris. In the
apathy that had taken the voters this small and insane group held
command of the city. But the Committees were not what the Girondins
had been. You could not bully or proscribe Carnot, St. Just, Cambon,
Jean Bon. With the fatal pressure of the stronger wrestler the Committee
was pressing the Commune down. The Terror remained in either case.
But with the Committee supreme it was a Terror of system striking to
maintain a tyranny, a pure despotism working for definite ends. Had the
Commune succeeded, it would have meant the Terror run mad, the
guillotine killing for the sake of killing—and for ever.
The third party in the struggle was Robespierre. He also desired the
Terror, but he intended to use it, as he did every power in France,
towards a definite end—a certain perfect state, of which he had received
a revelation, and of which he was the prophet. Of his aims and character
I shall treat when I come to his action after the fall of Danton. It suffices
to point out here that of the three forces at work Robespierre alone had
personality to aid him. He had a guard, a group of defenders. They were
inside, and led the Committee itself; they were the mystics in a moment
of strong exaltation, and unreal as was the dream of their chief, the
Robespierrians were bound to succeed unless the force of the real, the
“cold water” that came with Danton’s return, should destroy their hopes.
Therefore, as a fact, though no one, though Danton himself, did not see
it, it was between him and Robespierre that the battle would ultimately
be fought out.
For what was Danton’s plan? He put into his new task the ability, the
ruse, the suppleness that he had only lost for a moment in the summer.
First, Hébert and the “enragés” must go—they were the vilest form of
the spirit that he perceived to be destroying the Republic. Then the
Committee must be very gradually weakened. In that task he hoped,
vainly enough, to make Robespierre his ally. And finally, the end of all
his scheme was the cessation of the Terror. He had created a dictatorship
for a specific purpose; that purpose was attained. Wattignies had been
won, Lyons captured; soon La Vendée was to be destroyed, and even
Toulon to fall. It was intolerable that a system abnormal and extreme,
designed to save the State, should be continued for the profit of a few
theorists or of a few madmen. How much had not his engine already
done?—this machine which, to the horror of its creator, had found a life
of its own! It had killed the Queen after a shocking trial; it had alienated
what was left of European sympathy; it had struck the Girondins, and
Danton was haunted by the inspired voice of Vergniaud singing the
“Marseillaise” upon the scaffold; it had run to massacre in the provinces.
He feared (and later his fears proved true at Nantes) that September
might be repeated with the added horror of legal forms. The Terror
finally had reopened the question that of all others might most easily
destroy the State. A handful of men had pretended to uproot Catholicism
for ever, and what Danton cursed as the “Masque Anti-Religieuse” had
defiled Notre Dame. This flood he was determined to turn back into the
channels of reason; he was going, without government or police or
system, merely by his voice and his ability, to realise the Revolution, to
end the dictatorship, and to begin the era of prosperity and of content.
The first steps taken were successful. On the very night of his return,
Robespierre was perorating at the Jacobins against atheism and on the
great idea of God, but within twelve hours, on the morrow, Danton’s
voice gave the new note. It was in the discussion upon the pension to be
paid to the priests whom the last decree had thrust out of their regular
office and of its salary. Danton spoke with the greatest decision on this
plain matter, and the Convention heard with delight the fresh phrases to
which it had so long been a stranger. He says virtually, “If you do not
pay this sum you are persecutors.” There are in this speech such
sentences as these: “You must appreciate this, that politics can only
achieve when they are accompanied by some reason.... I insist upon your
sparing the blood of men; and I beg the Convention to be, above all, just
to all men except those who are the declared and open enemies of the
Republic.” Four days later he went a little further, and the Convention
still followed him. On the question which he had most at heart he spoke
plainly. Richard complained of Tours. He said that the municipality of
that town were arresting “suspects” right and left, and had even attacked
himself. Danton said in a speech of ten lines: “It is high time the
Convention should learn the art of government. Send these complaints to
the Committee. It is chosen, or at least supposed to be chosen, from the
élite of the Convention.” Later in the same day he spoke on a ridiculous
procession such as the violence of the time had made fashionable. It was
a deputation of Hébertists bringing from a Parisian church the ornaments
of the altar. Already, it will be remembered, the Commune had ordered
the churches in Paris to be closed, and the attempt to enforce such scenes
were being copied in all the large towns of France. He said: “Let there be
no more of these mascarades in the Convention.... If people here and
there wish to prove their abjuration of Catholicism, we are not here to
prevent them ... neither are we here to defend them.... The Terror is still
necessary, the Revolutionary Government is still necessary, but the
people does not demand this indiscriminate action. We have no business
save with the conspirators and with those who are treating with the
enemy.” There was a protest from Fayan, who cried, “You have talked of
clemency!” for all the world as though such talk was blasphemy. But
Danton was getting back his old position and was leading the
Convention. His success seemed certain. On the 3rd of December (14th
Frimaire) he was violently attacked at the Jacobins, but he managed to
hold his own. Robespierre defended him in a speech which has been
interpreted as a piece of able treachery, but which may with equal justice
be regarded as an attempt to hold himself between the opposing parties;
and within a fortnight after his return Danton, who had in him a
directness of purpose and a rapidity of action that prefigured Napoleon,
had gained every strategic point in his attack.
Events helped him, or rather he had foreseen them. The Vendeans,
moving more like a mob than an army, were caught at Le Mans on the
13th of December. On the 7th of December the genius of Bonaparte had
driven the English and Spanish from Toulon. On the 26th the news came
to the army of which Hoche had just been given the command, and, as
though the name Bonaparte brought a fate with it, the lines of
Wissembourg were carried, Landau was relieved, the Austrians passed
the Rhine.
All these victories were the allies of the party of indulgence. The men
who said, “The Terror has no raison d’être save that of the national
defence,” found themselves expressing what all France felt. After such
successes it only remained to add, “The nation is safe; the Terror may
end.” Already Danton had called up a reserve, so to speak, in the shape
of the genius of Desmoulins. The first issue of “Vieux Cordelier” had
appeared, and the journal was read by all Paris.
That club, in which we saw the origin of Danton’s fame, was now the
Hébertists, and nothing more. The pamphlets which Camille issued
under the leadership of Danton were given a name that might recall its
position and its politics of the old days. And indeed the two men most
concerned in the new policy of clemency had been, from their house in
the Cour du Commerce, the heart of the “République des Cordeliers.”
There are not in the history of the Revolution, in all the passages of its
eloquence and genius, any words that strike us to-day as do the words of
these six pamphlets which spread over the winter of the year II. It is a
proof of Danton’s clear vision, of his strong influence, that a distant
posterity, far removed from the passions of 1793, should find its own
expression in the appeals which his friend wrote, and which form the
Testament of the Indulgents.
The first two numbers were an attack upon the Hébertists alone.
Robespierre, from his position in the Committee of Public Safety, from
the spur of his own ambition, was willing to agree. He himself corrected
the proofs. But on the 15th of December appeared the famous Numero
III., which ran through Paris like a herald’s message, which did for
reaction something of what the great speeches had done for liberty in
clubs during the early days of the Revolution. Few men cared to vote,
but every man read the “Vieux Cordelier.” To those who had never so
much as heard of Tacitus the pen of Tacitus carried conviction. A crowd
of women passed before the Parliament crying for the brothers and
husbands who filled the prisons; the “Committee of Clemency” was
within an ace of being formed; and, coinciding with the victories and
with Danton’s reappearance, the demand of Desmoulins was dragging
after it, not France only (for France was already convinced), but even the
capital. It was then that the Committee, who alone were the government,
grew afraid. Robespierre still hesitated. He could only succeed through
the committees; but Desmoulins was his friend; there was an appeal to
“the old college friend” in the “Vieux Cordelier” that touched his heart
and his vanity; they had sat together on the benches of the Louis le
Grand, and Robespierre seems to have made an honest attempt to aid
him then. A fourth number had appeared on the 20th, a fifth (written on
Christmas Day) appeared on January 8th.
The Jacobins denounced Camille, and Robespierre, the eyes of whose
mind looked as closely and were as short-sighted as the eyes of his body,
grew afraid. The men determined on rigour had warned him in the
Committee; now when he tried to defend Camille he saw the Jacobins
raging: what he did not see was France. Perhaps, had his sight been
longer, he would not have been dragged six months later to the
guillotine. He attempted a compromise and said: “We will not expel
Camille, but we will burn his journal, punishing his act but not himself.”
Camille answered with Rousseau, “Brûler n’est pas repondre.” He
would not be defended.
The battle was closely joined. Desmoulins was pushing forward his
attack with the audacious infantry of pamphlets; Danton, from the
Convention, was giving from time to time the heavy blows of the
artillery; the advance was continuous; when there was felt a check that
proved the prelude to disaster and that showed, behind the opposing
lines, the force of the Committees. In the middle of January, just after
Desmoulins’s defence at the Jacobins, Fabre D’Eglantine, the friend and
old secretary of Danton, was arrested. It was in vain that Danton put into
his defence all the new energy which he had discovered in himself. It
was in vain even that he called for “the right of the deputy to defend
himself at the bar of the house.” Like all organised governments, the
Committee could give reasons of State for this silent action. Danton was
overborne, and the Convention for the first time since his return deserted
him.
He had yet seven weeks to live. Desmoulins still attacked, but Danton
knew that the action was lost. He knew the strength of that powerful
council whose first efforts he himself had moulded, and when he saw it
arise in support of continuing the Terror, when he saw it and Robespierre
allied, he lost hope. The policy of the Committee grew more and more
definite. One member of it, (Hérault de Séchelles) was Danton’s friend:
they expelled him. Silently, but with all their strength, they disengaged
the government from either side. The Committee and Robespierre
determined to strike at once, when the occasion should arise, both those
in the Commune who desired to turn the Terror to their own ends and
those of the Convention—the Dantonists, who desired to end it
altogether.
Danton still speaks in the tribune, but the attack is no longer there. He
defends modestly and well the practical propositions that appear before
the Parliament on education, on the abolition of slavery, on the
provisions for the giving of bail under the new judiciary system, and so
forth. But there is in his attitude something of expectancy. He is waiting
for a sudden attack that must come and that he cannot prevent. He holds
himself ready, but the Committee is working in the dark, and he does not
know on which side to guard himself. A last personal interview with
Robespierre failed, and there was nothing left to do but to wait and see
whether they feared him so much as to dare his arrest. It was with
Ventose, that is, with the first days of March, that the blow fell.
The Hébertists, chafing under three months of growing insults—
insults which their old ally the Committee refused to avenge—broke out
into open revolt. Carrier was back from his truly Hébertist slaughtering
at Nantes, and it was felt at the Cordeliers that the public execration
would destroy them unless they rose. In the autumn they would have had
the Committees on their side, but the strong action of the Indulgents had
broken the alliance. They determined on insurrection. The Commune this
time was, once and for all, to conquer the government. The decision was
taken at the Cordeliers on the 4th of March—within ten days they were
arrested. The Committee pushed them through the form of a trial. Less
than three weeks after the first talk of revolt, Hébert, Clootz, and the rest
were guillotined.
 There were many among the Dantonists who thought this the triumph
of their policy. “The violent, the enragés are dead. It is we who did it.”
But Danton was wiser than his followers. He knew that the Committee
were waiting for such an opportunity, and that a blow to the right would
follow that blow to the left. Both oppositions were doomed. Only one
chance remained to him—they might not dare.
On the occasion of the arrest of the Hébertists he made a noble speech
on the great lines of conciliation and unity, which had been his constant
policy—a speech which was all for Paris, in spite of the faction.
But that week they determined on his arrest and that of his friends.
Panis heard of it, and sent at once to warn him. He found him in the night
of the last day of March 1794 sitting in his study with his young nephew,
moody and silent. His wife was asleep in the next room. On the flat
above him Camille and Lucille were watching late. The house was silent.
Panis entered and told him what the Committee had resolved. “Well,
what then?” said Danton. “You must resist.” “That means the shedding
of blood, and I am sick of it. I would rather be guillotined than
guillotine.” “Then,” said Panis, “you must fly, and at once.” But Danton
shook his head still moodily. “One does not take one’s country with one
on the soles of one’s boots.” But he muttered again to himself, “They
will not dare—they will not dare.” Panis left him, and he sat down again
to wait, for he knew in his heart that the terrible machine which he
himself had made, and which he had fought so heroically, could dare
what it chose. They left him silent in the dark room. From time to time
he stirred the logs of the fire; the sudden flame threw a light on the ugly
strength of his face: he bent over the warmth motionless, and with the
memories of seven years in his heart.
 CHAPTER VII
THE DEATH OF DANTON

In the night the armed police came round to the Passage du

Commerce; one part of the patrol grounded their muskets and halted at
the exits of the street, the other entered the house.
Desmoulins heard the butts falling together on the flagstones, and the
little clink of metal which announces soldiery; he turned to his wife and
said, “They have come to arrest me.” And she held to him till she fainted
and was carried away. Danton, in his study alone, met the arrest without
words. There is hardly a step in the tragedy that follows which is not
marked by his comment, always just, sometimes violent; but the actual
falling of the blow led to no word. Words were weapons with him, and
he was not one to strike before he had put up his guard.
They were taken to the Luxembourg, very close by, a little up the hill.
We have the story of how Danton came with his ample, firm presence
into the hall of the prison, and met, almost the first of his fellow-
prisoners, Thomas Paine. The author of “The Rights of Man” stepped up
to him, doubtless to address him in bad French.[140] Danton forestalled
him in the English of which he was a fair master.
“Mr. Paine,” he said, “you have had the happiness of pleading in your
country a cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.” He remembered
Paine’s sane and moderate view on the occasion of the king’s trial, and
he envied one whose private freedom had remained untrammelled with
the bonds of office; who had never been forced to a 2nd of June, nor had
to keep to an intimate conversation his fears for the Girondins. Then he
added that if they sent him to the scaffold he would go gaily. And he did.
There was the Frenchman contrasted with his English friend.
Beaulieu, who heard him, tells us that he also turned to the prisoners
about him and said, “Gentlemen, I had hoped to have you out of this, and
here I am myself; I can see no issue.”
So the prisoners came in, anxiously watched by reactionaries, to
whom, as to many of our modern scribblers, one leader of the Revolution
is as good as another—Lacroix, Westermann (the strong soldier with his
huge frame overtopping even Danton’s), and Desmoulins. As they
passed to their separate cells, for it was determined to prevent their
communication, a little spirit of the old evil[141] used the powerful
venom of aristocracy, the unanswerable repartee of rank, and looking
Lacroix up and down, said, “I could make a fine coachman of that
fellow.” He and his like would have ruined France for the sake of turning
those words into action.
Till the dawn of the 11th Germinal broke, they were kept in their
separate rooms. But the place was not built for a prison. Lacroix and
Danton in neighbouring rooms could talk by raising their voices, and we
have of their conversation this fragment. Lacroix said, “Had I ever
dreamt of this I could have forestalled it.” And Danton’s reply, with just
that point of fatalism which had forbidden him to be ambitious,
answered, “I knew it;” he had known it all that night.
There was a force stronger than love—private and public fear. It is a
folly to ridicule, or even to misunderstand that fear. The possessions, the
families of many, the newly-acquired dignity of all, above everything,
the new nation had been jeopardised how many times by a popular idol
turned untrue. The songs of 1790 were all for Louis, many praised
Bailly; what a place once had Lafayette! Who had a word to say against
Dumouriez eighteen months before? The victories had just begun—
barely enough to make men hesitate about the Terror. The “Vieux
Cordelier” had led, not followed opinion, as it was just that the great
centre of energy should lead and not follow the time. And, men would
say, how do we know why he has been arrested, or at whose voice? How
can we tell where the sure compass of right, our Robespierre, stands in
the matter? and so forth. Nothing then was done; but Paris very nearly
moved.
There were thus two gathering forces; one vague and large, one small
but ordered, and on the result of their shock hung the life of Danton—
may one say (knowing the future) the life of the Republic?
Now the struggle with Europe had taught the Committee a principal
lesson. Perhaps one should add that the exuberant fighting power of the
nation and of the age had forced the Committee to a certain method,
apparent in the armies, in the measures, in the speeches: it was the
method of detecting at once the weakest spot in the opposing line, and of
abandoning everything for the purpose of concentrating all its strength
and charging home. So their descendants to-day in their new army
practise the marvellous massing of artillery which you may watch at
autumn in the manœuvres.
What was the opposing line? A vague ill-ordered crowd—Paris; the
undisciplined Convention, lacking leaders, ignorant of party rule. Where
was its weakness? In the want of initiative, in the fact that, till some one
spoke, no one could be sure of the strength of the corporate feeling. Also,
on account of the public doubt, during that time men were grains of dust;
but the dust was like powder, and speech was always the spark which
permitted the affinities of that powder to meet in fierce unity and power.
A sudden blow had to be struck and the fire stamped out before it had
gathered power; this is how the check was given.

In the morning of the 12th Germinal the Convention met, and each
man looked at his neighbour, and then, as though afraid, let his eyes
wander to see if others thought as he did. At last one man dared to speak.
It was Legendre the butcher;[142] he vacillated later before a mixture of
deceit in others and of doubt in himself, but it should be remembered to
his honour that he nearly saved the Revolution by an honest word. “Let
Danton be heard at the bar of the Convention,” was his frank demand;
common-sense enough, but it fatally opened his guard, and gave an
opportunity to the thrusts most dangerous in the year II.—an accusation
of desiring privilege, and an accusation of weakening that government
which was visibly saving the state on the frontiers.
Tallien was President that day, and he gave the reply to Robespierre.
Now Robespierre was no good fencer. The supreme feint, the final
disarming of opinion, was left to an abler man. He had gone home from
the Committee to Duplay’s house in the early morning; a monomaniac
hardly needing sleep, he reappeared at the early meeting of the
Convention. But, poor debater as he was, he could take advantage of so
easy an opportunity. In a speech which was twice applauded, he asserted
that Legendre had demanded a privilege. He struck the note which above
all others dominated those minds. “Are we here to defend principles or
men? Give the right of speech to Danton, and you give rein to an
extraordinary talent, you confuse the issue with a hundred memories, you
permit the bias of friendship. Let the man defend himself by proofs and
witnesses, not by eloquence and sentiment.” Yet he did not add—perhaps
he hardly knew—that the memories and friendship would but have
balanced a direct enmity, and that witnesses and proofs would be denied.
Again he used that argument of government—had not they saved
France? were they not the head of the police? did not they know in the
past what they were doing? He assured them that a little waiting would
produce conviction in them also. It did not, but time was gained; already
half the Convention doubted.
Legendre, bewildered, faltered a reply; he admitted error, and begged
Robespierre not to misunderstand. He could have answered for Danton
as for himself, but the tribunal was of course to be trusted. It was almost
an apology.
On that changing, doubtful opinion came with the force of a steel
mould the hard, high voice of St. Just.
St. Just spoke rarely. There has been mention in an earlier part of this
book of the speech against the Girondins. There will be mention again of
a vigorous and a nearly successful attempt to save Robespierre. That he
should have been given the task of defending the Committee’s action that
day is a singular proof of the grip which they had of the circumstances.
Barrère could never have convinced an unsympathetic public opinion.
Robespierre could meet a rising enthusiasm with nothing but dry and
accurate phrases. But St. Just had the flame of his youth and of his
energy, and his soul lived in his mouth.
The report, even as we read it, has eloquence. Coming from him then,
with his extreme beauty, his upright and determined bearing, it turned the
scale. The note of the argument was as ably chosen as could be;
moreover it represented without question the attitude of his own mind: it
was this. “The last of the factions has to be destroyed; only one obstacle
stands between you and the appreciation of the Republic.[143] Time and
again we have acted suddenly, but time and again we have acted well and
on sufficient reasons—so it is now. If you save Danton you save a
personality—something you have known and admired; you pay respect
to individual talent, but you ruin the attempt in which you have so nearly
succeeded. For the sake of a man you will sacrifice all the new liberty
which you are giving to the whole world.” There follows a passionate
apostrophe in which he speaks to Danton as though he stood before him,
as striking as the parallel passage in the fourth Catiline Oration.[144] Had
Danton been present he would have been a man against a boy: a loud and
strong voice, not violent in utterance, but powerful in phrase and in
delivery, a character impressing itself by sheer force of self upon
vacillating opinion. Had Danton spoken in reply, his hearers would have
said with that moral conviction which is stronger than proof, “This man
is the chief lover of France.”
But such is rhetoric, its falsity and its success—the gaps of silence
grew to a convincing power. The accusations met with no reply; they
remained the echo of a living voice; the answers to them could be framed
only in the silent minds of the audience. The living voice won.
And there was, as we have said, intense conviction to aid St. Just. He
was a man who would forget and would exaggerate with all the faults of
passion, but he believed the facts he gave. Not so Robespierre.
Robespierre had furnished the notes of St. Just’s report,[145] and
Robespierre must have known that he had twisted all to one end.
Robespierre was a man who was virtuous and true only to his ideal, not
to his fellow-men. Robespierre had not deceived himself as he wrote, but
he had deceived St. Just, and therefore the young “Archangel of Death”
spoke with the added strength of faith, than which nothing leaps more
readily from the lips to the ears. Can we doubt it? There is a phrase
which convinces. When he ends by telling them what it is they save by
sacrificing one idol, when he describes the Republic, he uses the phrase
common to all apostolates, the superb “les mots que nous avons dits ne
seront jamais perdus sur la terre”—the things which they had said would
never be lost on earth.
It ended. No one voted; the demand of the Committee passed without
a murmur. The Convention was never again its own mistress; it had
silenced and condemned itself.[146]
Meanwhile at the Luxembourg the magistrate Dénizot was making the
preparations for the trial. Each prisoner was asked the formal question of
his guilt, and each replied in a single negative, but Danton added that he
would die a Republican, and to the question of their defence replied that
he would plead his own cause. Then, at half-past eleven they were
transferred to the Conciergerie.
From that moment his position becomes the attitude of the man
fighting, as we have known it in the crisis of August 1792 and of the
calling up of the armies. Ready as he had always been to see the real
rather than the imaginary conditions, he recognised death with one
chance only of escape. He knew far better than did poor Desmoulins the
power of a State’s machinery; he felt its grasp and doubted of any issue.
The people, for Desmoulins, were the delegators of power; for Danton
the people were those who should, but who did not rule. To live again
and enter the arena and save the life of the Republic the people must hear
his voice, or else the fact of government would be more strong than all
the rights and written justice in the world.
He was like a man whose enemy stands before him, and who sees at
his own side, passive and bewildered, a strong but foolish ally. His ally
was the people, his enemy was Death.
Therefore we have of his words and actions for the next four days two
kinds: those addressed to death and those to his ally. Where he desires to
touch the spirit of the crowd—in what was for their ears—we have the
just, practical, and eloquent man apologising for over-vehemence, saying
what should strike hardest home—an orator, but an orator who certainly
uses legitimate weapons.
But there is another side. In much that he said in prison, in all that he
said on his way to the scaffold, he is simply speaking to Death and
defying him. The inmost thing in a man, the stock of the race, appears
without restraint; he becomes the Gaul. That most un-northern habit of
defiance, especially of defiance to the inevitable and to the strongest, the
custom of his race and their salvation, grows on his lips.
He insults Death, he jests; his language, never chaste or self-
conscious, takes on the laughter of the Rabelaisian, and (true Rabelaisian
again) he wraps up in half-a-dozen words the whole of a situation.
Thus we see him leaning against the window of his prison and calling
to Westermann in the next cell, “Oh! if I could leave my legs to
Couthon[147] and my virility to Robespierre, things might still go on.”
And again when Lacroix said, “I will cut my own hair at the neck, so that
Sanson the executioner shall not meddle with it,” Danton replied, “Yet
will Sanson intermeddle with the vertebræ of your neck.” So he meets
death with a broad torrent of words; and that a civilisation accustomed
rather to reticence should know what this meant in him, my readers must
note his powerful asides to Desmoulins and to Hérault, coinciding with
the fearful pun in which he tried to raise the drooping courage of
D’Eglantine.
Also in his prison this direct growth of the soil of France “talked often
of the fields and of rivers.” Shakespeare should have given us the death
scenes of so much energy, defiance, coarseness, affection, and great
courage.
 In the Conciergerie they spent the rest of the day waiting for the trial,
and this time Danton was next to Westermann, to whom and to
Desmoulins he said, “We must say nothing save before the Committees
or at the trial.” It was his plan to move the people by a public defence,
but his enemies in power had formed a counter-plan, and, as we shall
see, forestalled him.
Desmoulins, “the flower that grew on Danton,” was still bewildered.
So he remained to the end; at the foot of the scaffold he could not
understand. “If I could only have written a No. VII. I would have turned
the tables.”[148] “It is a duel of Commodus; they have the lance and I
have not even a reed.” To that man, his equal in years,[149] but a boy
compared with him in spirit, Danton had always shown, and now
continued to show, a peculiar affection. He treated him like a younger
brother, and never made him suffer those violent truths with which all
France and most of his friends were familiar in his mouth. So now, and
in the trial, and on the way to the scaffold, his one attempt was to calm
the bitter violence and outburst of Camille.
There are two phrases of Danton’s which have been noted on this first
day passed at the Conciergerie, and which cannot be omitted, though in
form they have not his diction, yet in spirit they might be his; they are
recollections presumably of something of greater length called to
Westermann.
The first: “On such a day[150] I demanded the institution of the
Revolutionary tribunal. I ask pardon of God and of man.”
The second: “I am leaving everything at sixes and sevens; one had
better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the art of governing men.”
There you have the real Danton—a reminiscence of some strong and
passionate utterance put into this undantonesque and proverbial form. A
real sentiment of his—all of him; careless of life, intense upon the
interests of life, above all upon the future of the Revolution and of
France, knowing the helpless inferiority of the men he left behind. And
in the close of the phrase it is also he; it is the spirit of great weariness
which had twice touched him, as sleep an athlete after a day of games. It
was soon to take the form of a noble sentence: “Nous avons assez servi
—allons dormir.”
On the 13th (April 2, 1794), about ten in the morning, they were led
before the tribunal.
 The trial began.
It must not be imagined that the Dantonists alone came before the
tribunal to answer for their particular policy. There had originated under
Robespierre (and later when he alone was the master it was to be terribly
abused) the practice of confusing the issues. Three groups at least were
tried together, and the Moderates sat between two thieves—for
D’Eglantine on a charge of embezzlement alone, Guzman, the Freys as
common thieves and spies to the Republic, were associated on the same
bench. Fourteen in all, they sat in the following order:—Chabot, Bazire,
Fabre, Lacroix, Danton, Delaunay, Hérault, Desmoulins, Guzman,
Diederichsen, Phillippeaux, D’Espagnac, and the two Freys. D’Eglantine
occupied “the armchair,” and it will be seen that the five—the Moderates
—were carefully scattered.
The policy was a deliberate one; it was undertaken with the object of
prejudicing public opinion against the accused. Nor was it permitted to
each group to be separate in accusation and in its method of defence.
They were carefully linked to each other by men accused of two out of
the three crimes.
Herman was president of the tribunal, and sat facing the prisoners; on
either side of him were Masson-Denizot, Foucault and Bravé, the
assistant-judges. They say that Voullaud and Vadier, of the lower
committee, appeared behind the bench to watch the enemies whom they
had caught in the net. Seven jurors were in the box to the judges’ left, by
name Renaudin (whom Desmoulins challenged in vain), Desboisseaux,
Trinchard, Dix-Aout, Lumière, Ganney, Souberbielle,[151] and to these
we must add Topino-Lebrun, whose notes form by far the most vivid
fragment by which we may reconstruct the scene. The jury of course was
packed.[152] It was part of the theory of the Revolutionary Government
that no chance element should mar its absolute dictatorship. It was
practically a court of judges, absolute, and without division of powers.
At a table between the President and the prisoners sat Fouquier-
Tinville, the public prosecutor; and finally, on the judges’ right was the
open part of the court and the door to the witnesses’ room.
Here was a new trial with a great and definite chance of acquittal, a
scene the like of which had not been seen for a year, nor would be seen
again in that room. The men on the prisoners’ bench had been the
masters, one of them the creator, of the court which tried them; they were
evidently greater and more powerful than their judges, and had behind
them an immense though informal weight of popularity. They were
public men of the first rank; their judges and the public prosecutor were
known to be merely the creatures of a small committee. More than this, it
was common talk that the Convention might yet change its mind, and
even among the jury it was certain that discussion would arise.
By the evidence of a curious relic we know that the Committee
actually feared a decree or a coup-de-main which would have destroyed
their power. This note remains in the archives, a memorandum of a
decision arrived at in the Committee on the early morning of the 13th or
late in the night of the 12th.
“Henriot to be written to, to tell him to issue an order that the
President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal are
not to be arrested.”
Then in another hand:
“Get four members to sign this.”
Finally, the memorandum is endorsed in yet another hand:
“13th Germinal.—A policeman took this the same day.”[153]
It will thus be seen that the Committee was by no means sure of its
ground. It had indeed procured through St. Just the decree preventing
Danton from pleading at the bar of the Convention and permitting his
trial, but it would require the most careful manœuvring upon their part to
carry through such an affair. As we shall see, they just—and only just—
succeeded.
The whole of the first day (the 13th Germinal, 2nd of April 1794) was
passed in the formal questions and in the reading of accusations.
Camille, on being asked his age and dwelling, made the blasphemous
and striking answer which satisfied the dramatic sense, but was not a true
reply to the main question.
Danton gave the reply so often quoted: “I am Danton, not unknown
among the revolutionaries. I shall be living nowhere soon, but you will
find my name in Walhalla.” The other answers, save that of Hérault,
attempted no phrases.
Yet Guzman would have made more point of his assertion if he had
chosen that moment to say, “I am Guzman, a grandee of Spain, who
came to France to taste liberty, but was arrested for theft;” while the two
Freys missed an historic occasion in not replying, “We are Julius and
Emanuel Frey, sometime nobles of the Empire under the title of Von
Schönfeld, now plain Jews employed by the Emperor as spies.”
The public prosecutor read the indictment. First at great length Amar’s
report on the India Company. The details of the accusations which cost
Fabre his life need not be entered into here. Suffice it to say that it was
an indictment for corruption, for having suppressed or altered for money
the decree of the Convention in the autumn before, and being accomplice
in the extra gains which this had made possible—one of those wretched
businesses with which Panama and South Africa have deluged modern
France and England. It is an example of the methods of the tribunal that
Fouquier managed to drag in Desmoulins’s name because he had once
said, “People complain of not being able to make money now, yet I make
it easily enough.”
The second group, the Freys, Guzman, the unfrocked priest
D’Espagnac, and Diederichsen the Dane, were accused of being
foreigners working against the success of the French armies, and at the
same time lining their pockets. In the case of three of them the
accusation was probably true. It was the more readily believed from the
foreign origins of the accused, for France was full of spies, while the
name of a certain contumacious Baron de Bartz made this list sound the
more probable.
Finally, the small group at which they were really aiming (whose
members they had already mixed up with the thieves) was indicted on
nothing more particular than the report of St. Just—virtually, that is, on
Robespierre’s notes. Danton had served the King, had drawn the people
into the place where they were massacred in July 1791, did not do his
duty on the 10th of August, and so forth—a vapid useless summary of
impossible things in which no one but perhaps St. Just and a group of
fanatics believed. With that the day ended, and they were taken back to
prison.
On the next day, the 14th Germinal (3rd of April 1794), Westermann,
who, though already arrested, had only been voted upon in Parliament
the day before, appeared on the prisoners’ bench, and sat at the end after
Emanuel Frey. He was the last and not the least noble of the Dantonists,
with his great stature, his clumsy intellect, and his loyal Teutonic blood.
“Who are you?” they said. “I am Westermann. Show me to the people.
I was a soldier at sixteen, and have been a councillor of Strasbourg. I
have seven wounds in front, and I was never stabbed in the back till
now.”
This was the man who had led the 10th of August, and who had dared,
in his bluff nature, to parley with the Swiss who spoke his language.
It was after some little time passed in the interrogation of the prisoners
who had been arrested for fraud, especially of D’Espagnac, that the
judge turned to Danton.
In the debate and cross-questioning that followed we must depend
mainly upon the notes of Lebrun,[154] for they are more living, although
they are more disconnected, than the official report. We discover in them
the passionate series of outbursts, but a series which one must believe to
have had a definite purpose. There was neither hope of convincing the
tribunal nor of presenting a legal argument with effect. What Danton was
trying to do in this court, which was not occupied with a trial, but merely
in a process of condemnation, was to use it as a rostrum from which he
could address the people, the general public, upon whose insurrection he
depended. He perhaps depended also on the jury, for, carefully chosen as
they were, they yet might be moved by a man who had never failed to
convince by his extraordinary power of language. He carries himself
exactly as though he were technically what he is in fact—a prisoner
before an informal group of executioners, who appeals for justice to the
crowd.
He pointed at Cambon, who had sat by him on the Committee, and
said, “Come now, Cambon, do you think we are conspirators? Look, he
is laughing; he believes no such thing.” Then he turned, laughing
himself, to the jury and said, “Write down in your notes that he laughed.”
Again, he uses phrases like these: “We are here for a form, but if we
are to have full liberty to speak, and if the French people is what it
should be, it will be my business later to ask their pardon for my
accusers.” To which Camille answered, “Oh, we shall be allowed to
speak, and that is all we want,” and the group of Indulgents laughed
heartily.
It was just after this that he began that great harangue in answer to the
questions of the judge, an effort whose tone reaches to this day. It is,
perhaps, the most striking example of a personal appeal that can be
discovered. The opportunities for such are rare, for in the vast majority
of historical cases where a man has pleaded for his life, it has either been
before a well-organised court, or before a small number of determined
enemies, or by the lips of one who was paid for his work and who
ignored the art of political oratory. The unique conditions of the French
Revolution made such a scene possible, perhaps for the only time in
history.
The day, early as was the season, was warm, the windows of the court,
that looked upon the Seine, were open, and through the wide doors
pressed the head of a great crowd. This crowd stretched out along the
corridor, along the quays, across the Pont Neuf, and even to the other
side of the river. Every sentence that told was repeated from mouth to
mouth, and the murmurs of the crowd proved how closely the great
tribune was followed. In the attitude which had commanded the attention
of his opponents when he presented the first deputation from Paris three
years before, and that had made him so striking a figure during the
stormy months of 1793, he launched the phrases that were destined for
Paris and not for his judges. His loud voice (the thing appears incredible,
but it is true) vibrating through the hall and lifted to the tones that had
made him the orator of the open spaces, rang out and was heard beyond
the river.
“You say that I have been paid, but I tell you that men made as I am
cannot be paid. And I put against your accusation—of which you cannot
furnish a proof nor the hint of a proof, nor the shadow nor the beginning
of a witness—the whole of my revolutionary career. It was I who from
the Jacobins kept Mirabeau at Paris. I have served long enough, and my
life is a burden to me, but I will defend myself by telling you what I have
done. It was I who made the pikes rise suddenly on the 20th of June and
prevented the King’s voyage to St. Cloud. The day after the massacre of
the Champ de Mars a warrant was out for my arrest. Men were sent to
kill me at Arcis, but my people came and defended me. I had to fly to
London, and I came back, as you all know, the moment Garran was
elected. Do you not remember me at the Jacobins, and how I asked for
the Republic? It was I who knew that the court was eager for war. It was
I, among others, who denounced the policy of the war.”
Here a sentence was heard: “What did you do against the Brissotins?”
Now Danton had, as we know, done all in his power to save the men
who hated him, but whom he admired. It was no time for him to defend
himself by an explanation of this in the ears of the people who had never
understood, as he had, the height of the men who followed Vergnaud; but
he said what was quite true: “I told them that they were going to the
scaffold. When I was a minister I said it to Brissot before the whole
cabinet.”
He might have added that he had said to Guadet in the November
woods on the night before he left for the army, “You are headstrong, and
it will be your doom.”[155]
Then he went back again to the list of his services. “It was I who
prepared the 10th of August. You say I went to Arcis. I admit it, and I am
proud of it. I went there to pass three days, to say good-bye to my
mother, and to arrange my affairs, because I was shortly to be in peril. I
hardly slept that night. It was I that had Mandat killed, because he had
given the order to fire on the people.... You are reproaching me with the
friendship of Fabre D’Eglantine. He is still my friend, and I still say that
he is a good citizen as he sits here with me. You have told me that my
defence has been too violent, you have recalled to me the revolutionary
names, and you have told me that Marat when he appeared before the
tribunal might have served as my model. Well, with regard to those
names who were once my friends, I will tell you this: Marat had a
character on fire and unstable; Robespierre I have known as a man,
above all, tenacious; but I—I have served in my own fashion, and I
would embrace my worst enemy for the sake of the country, and I will
give her my body if she needs the sacrifice.”
This short and violent speech, which I have attempted to reproduce
from the short, disjointed, ill-spelt notes of Lebrun, hit the mark. The
crowd, the unstable crowd, which he contemned as he passed to the
guillotine, moved like water under a strong wind; and his second object
also was reached, for the tribunal grew afraid. These phrases would soon
be repeated in the Convention, and no means had been taken to silence
that terrible voice. The President of the court said to him that it was the
part of an accused man to defend himself with proofs and not with
rhetoric. He parried that also with remarkable skill, saying in a much
quieter tone which all his friends (they were now growing in number)
immediately noted: “That a man should be violent is wrong in him I
know, unless it is for the public good, and such a violence has often been
mine. If I exceeded now, it was because I found myself accused with
such intolerable injustice.” He raised his voice somewhat again with the
words, “But as for you, St. Just, you will have to answer to posterity,”
and then was silent.
 When the unhappy man who had taken upon his shoulders the vile
duty of the political work that day, when Herman was himself upon his
trial, he said, “Remember that this affair was out of the ordinary, and was
a political trial,” when a voice rose from the court, “There are no
political trials under a Republic.” He would have done well, obscure as
he is before history, to have saved his own soul by refusing a task which
he knew to involve injustice from beginning to end.
It was at the close of that day that three short notes passed between
Herman and the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Herman wrote, “In
half an hour I shall stop Danton’s defence. You must spin out some of the
rest in detail.” Tinville answered, “I have something more to say to
Danton about Belgium;” and Herman replied, “Do not bring it in with
regard to any of the others.” This little proof of villany, which has
survived by so curious an accident (it is in the Archives to-day),[156]
closed the proceedings of that hearing.
The next day, the 15th of Germinal (4th April), Danton himself said
little. It was given over mainly to the examination of Desmoulins; and as
with Danton it had been rumours or opinions, so with Desmoulins only
the vague sense of things he had written were brought in to serve as
evidence in this tragic farce.
Fouquier, the distant cousin of Camille, to whom he owed the post in
which he was earning his bread by crime,[157] tried to put something of
complaint against the nation and of hatred to the Republic into his
reading of the Old Cordelier. Even in his thin unpleasant voice there was
only heard the noble phrase of Tacitus, and—it is a singular example of
what the tribunal had become—they dared not continue the quotation
because every word roused the people in the court. But Camille, so great
with the pen, had nothing of the majesty or the strength of Danton. His
defence was a weak, disconnected excuse, and, like all men who are
insufficient to themselves, he was inconsistent.
Hérault made on that same day a far finer reply. Noble by birth,
holding by his traditions and memories to that society which he himself
had helped to destroy, and of which Talleyrand has said, “Those who
have not known it have not lived;” accustomed from his very first youth
to prominence in his profession and to the favour of the court, he
remained to the last full of contempt for so much squalor, and he veiled
his eyes with pride.
 “I understand nothing of this topsy-turvydom. I was a diplomat, and I
made the neutrality of Switzerland, so saving 60,000 men to the
Republic. As for the priest you talk about, who was guillotined in my
absence at Troyes, I knew him well. He was a Canon, if I remember, and
by no means a reactionary. You are probably joking about it. It is true he
had not taken the oath, but he was a good man; he helped me, and I am
not ashamed of my friendship. I will tell you something more. On the
14th of July two men were killed, one on either side of me.” He might
have added, “I was the second man to scale the Towers.”
It was not until the day’s proceedings had been drawn out for a
considerable time that a sentence was spoken, the full import of which
was not understood at the time, but which was, as a fact, the first step in
those four months of irresponsibility and crime which are associated with
the name of Robespierre, and which hang like a weight around the neck
of the French nation. Lacroix had just said with a touch of legal
phraseology, “I must insist that the witnesses whom I have demanded
should be subpœnaed, and if there is any difficulty about this, I formally
demand that the Convention shall be consulted in the matter;” when the
public prosecutor answered, “It is high time that this part of the trial,
which has become a mere struggle, and which is a public scandal, should
cease. I am about to write to the Convention to hear what it has to say,
and its advice shall be exactly followed.”
Both the public prosecutor and the judge signed the letter. The first
draft which Fouquier had drawn up was thought too strong, and it
appears that Herman revised it.[158] “Citoyens Représentants,—There has
been a storm in the hall since this day’s proceedings began. The accused
are calling for witnesses who are among your deputies.... They are
appealing to the people, saying that they will be refused. In spite of the
firmness of the president and of all the tribunal, they continue to protest
that they will not be silent until their witnesses are heard, unless by your
passing a special decree.” [This was false, and was the only part of the
letter calculated to impress the Parliament.] “We wish to hear your orders
as to what we shall do in the face of this demand; the procedure gives us
no way by which we can refuse them.”
But note the way in which the letter was presented to a Parliament in
which there yet remained so much sympathy for the accused, and the
way in which it was received. St. Just appeared in the tribune with the
letter in his hands, and, instead of reading it, held it up before them and
made this speech:—
 “The public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal has sent to tell
you that the prisoners are in full revolt, and have interrupted the hearing,
saying they will not allow it to continue until the Convention has taken
measures. You have barely escaped from the greatest danger which has
yet menaced our new liberty, and this revolt in the very seat of justice, of
men panic-stricken by the law, shows what is in their minds. Their
despair and their fury are a plain proof of the hypocrisy which they
showed in keeping a good face before you. Innocent men do not revolt.
Dillon, who ordered his army to march on Paris, has told us that
Desmoulins’s wife received money to help the plot. Our thanks are due
to you for having put us in the difficult and dangerous post that we
occupy. Your Committees will answer you by the most careful
watching,” and so forth. When the Convention had had laid before them
every argument and every flattery which could falsify their point of view,
he proposed the decree that any prisoner who should attempt to interrupt
the course of justice by threats or revolt should be outlawed.
As they were about to vote, Billaud Varennes added his word, “I beg
the Convention to listen to a letter which the Committees have received
from the police concerning the conspirators, and their connection with
the prisoners.” The letter is not genuine. Even if it were, it depends
entirely upon the word of one obscure and untrustworthy man (Laflotte),
but it did the work. The Committees, as we know, were names to conjure
with. Their secret debates, their evident success, the fact that their
members had been chosen for the very purpose of guarding the interests
of the Republic, all fatally told against the prisoners. The decree passed
without a vote. Robespierre asked that the letter might be read in full
court, and his demand was granted. It was from that letter, from this
obscure and uncertain origin, that there dated the legend of the
“conspiracy in the prisons” which was to cost the lives of so many
hundreds.
It was at the very close of this day, the 4th of April, that the decree of
the Convention was brought back to the tribunal. Amar brought it and
gave it to Fouquier, saying, “Here is what you wanted.” Fouquier smiled
and said, “We were in great need of it.” It was read in the tribunal. When
Camille heard the name of his wife mentioned in connection with St.
Just’s demand he cried out, “Will they kill her too?” and David, who was
sitting behind the judges, said, “We hold them at last.”[159]
The fourth day, the 16th Germinal (5th April), the court met at half-
past eight in the morning, instead of at the ordinary hour of ten. Almost
at once, before the accused had time to begin their tactics of the day
before, the decree was read. The judge, relying on the law which had
already been in operation against others, and which gave the jury the
right to say after three days whether they were satisfied, turned to them,
and they asked leave to deliberate.
Before the prisoners had passed into the prison Desmoulins had found
time to tear the defence which he had written into small pieces, and to
throw them at the feet of the judge. Danton cried out, and checked
himself in the middle of his sentence. All save poor Camille had kept
their self-control. He, however, clung to the dock, determined on making
some appeal to the people, or to the judges, or to posterity. Danton, who
calmed him a few hours later at the foot of the scaffold, could do nothing
with him then, and it was in the midst of a terrible violence that the
fifteen disappeared.
The prisoners were taken back to the Conciergerie, but in their
absence occurred a scene which is among the most instructive of the
close of the Revolution. One of the jury could not bring himself to
declare the guilt of men whom he knew to be innocent. Another said to
him, “This is not a trial; it is a sacrifice. Danton and Robespierre cannot
exist together; which do you think most necessary to the Republic?” The
unhappy man, full of the infatuation of the time, stammered out, “Why,
Robespierre is necessary, of course, but——” “It is enough; in saying
that you have passed judgment.” And it came about in this way that the
unanimous verdict condemned the Indulgents. Lhuillier alone was
acquitted.
Of what passed in the prison we only know from the lips of an enemy,
[160] but I can see Danton talking still courageously of a thousand things;

sitting in his chair of green damask and drinking his bottle of Burgundy
opposite the silver and the traps of D’Eglantine.[161] They were not taken
back to hear their sentence; it was read to them, as a matter of form, in
the Conciergerie itself. Ducray read it to them one by one as they were
brought into his office. Danton refused to hear it in patience; he hated the
technicality and the form, and he knew that he was condemned long ago.
He committed himself to a last burst of passion before summoning his
strength to meet the ordeal of the streets, and followed his anger by the
insults which for days he had levelled at death. Then for a few hours they
kept a silence not undignified, save only Camille, unfitted for such trials,
and moaning to himself in a corner of the room, whom Danton
continually tried to console, a task in which at the very end of their sad
journey he succeeded. It was part of his broad mind to understand even a
writer and an artist, he who had never written and had only done.
It was between half-past four and five o’clock in the evening of the
same day, the 5th of April 1794, that the prisoners reappeared. Two carts
were waiting for them at the great gate in the court of the Palais—the
gate which is the inner entrance to the Conciergerie to-day.[162] About the
carts were a numerous escort mounted and with drawn swords, but the
victims took their seats as they chose, and of the fifteen the Dantonists
remained together. Hérault, Camille, Lacroix, Westermann, Fabre,
Danton went up the last into the second cart, and the procession moved
out of the courtyard and turned to the left under the shadow of the Palais,
and then to the left again round the Tour de l’Horloge, and so on to the
quay. They passed the window of the tribunal, the window from which
Danton’s loud voice had been heard across the river; they went creaking
slowly past the old Mairie, past the rooms that had been Roland’s
lodgings, till they came to the corner of the Pont Neuf; and as the carts
turned from the trees of the Place Dauphine on to the open bridge, they
left the shade and passed into the full blaze of the westering sun within
an hour of its setting.
Early as was the season, the air was warm and pleasant, the leaves and
the buds were out on the few trees, the sky was unclouded. All that fatal
spring was summerlike, and this day was the calmest and most beautiful
that it had known. The light, already tinged with evening, came flooding
the houses of the north bank till their glass shone in the eyes. There it
caught the Café de l’École where Danton had sat a young lawyer seven
years before, and had seen the beauty of his first wife in her father’s
house; to the right the corner of the old Hotel de Ville caught the glow, to
the left the Louvre flamed with a hundred windows.
Where the light poured up the river and came reflected from the Seine
on to the bridge, it marked out the terrible column that was moving
ponderously forward to death. A great crowd, foolish, unstable, varied,
of whom some sang, some ran to catch a near sight of the “Indulgents,”
some pitied, and a few understood and despaired of the Republic—all
these surging and jostling as a crowd will that is forced to a slow pace
and confined by the narrowness of an old thoroughfare, stretched from
one end of the bridge to the other, and you would have seen them in the
sunlight, brilliant in the colours that men wore in those days, while here
and there a red cap of liberty marked the line of heads.