Terror The Shadow of the Guillotine France 1792-1794

Chapter One Rebellion To prevent a Revolution, one must want a Revolution and set about making it oneself. Le Comte de Rivarol Georges Jacques Danton was born in 1759 at Arcis-sur-Aube, in the lush countryside of the Champagne region. He grew up a boisterous farm boy and remained a countryman at heart: sucking milk straight from the cow's udder, he was attacked, when he was two, by an irate bull who gashed his face with a horn it gave Danton the pug face and lip carved into what looked like a permanent sneer. He played truant from school, swam in the river, ran wild in the fields, got a good education, came to love Latin and French literature. Of the great French tragedian whose lofty drama greatly inspired Charlotte Corday, Danton said: 'Corneille was a thoroughgoing republican.' Danton, a man of bustling energy, high animal spirits and acute intelligence, typifies the kind of men who made the Revolution: a coalition of the educated and the ambitious, shunted into limited and trivial careers, their considerable gifts cheated of wider recognition by the exclusive protocols of old-regime France, the France of an absolute monarchy bolstered by intransigent belief in the divine right of kings. Voltaire had cautioned against the injudicious franchise of those not equipped mentally or socially to cope with it. 'All is lost,' he wrote, 'once the people entangles itself in reasoning', but the indignant frustrations of men like Danton were, one might almost say, generic, a crucial spur to revolution. 'The old regime,' he said, 'made a crucial error. I was educated by it as an exhibitioner at the College du Plessis. I studied there with great nobles who . . . lived with me on equal terms. My studies over, I was left high and dry . . . my former schoolfellows turned their backs on me. The Revolution came: I and all those like me threw ourselves into it. The old regime drove us to it by giving us a good education without opening any opportunity for our talents.' He studied law and was called to the Bar at Reims, where the necessary certificates were cheap to buy. After moving to Paris he drank and played dominoes at the Cafe du Parnasse, on the right bank by the Pont Neuf, and married Gabrielle Charpentier, the wealthy proprietor's daughter. With her dowry and loans, he bought the legal practice and entree to the law courts of Maitre ['Master', the honorific title of a lawyer] Huet and was launched. He and Gabrielle lived in the Cour du Commerce, in the Latin Quarter, very near the old Franciscan convent, by then disused, in the rue des Cordeliers. In its large refectory took place the meetings and debates of one of the foremost political clubs in the city, the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Men and Citizens, attended by all the patriots of the district: the Cordeliers, after the nickname of the Franciscan friars. This district of Paris, just south of the river, part of the old medieval city, an ill-lit, poky labyrinth of narrow vennels and criss-cross streets no wider than alleys, was a known hotbed of anarchists, a nest of truculent revolutionaries, intransigently opposed to all authority. The Cordeliers were predominantly publishers, journalists, writers, booksellers and people of the theatre, among their most outspoken partisans men who played a central role in the Revolution: Fabre d'Eglantine, playwright, author of the revolutionary calendar; Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, men of the theatre, both future members of the Committee for Public Safety; Jacques-Rene Hebert and the radical popular leader of the Commune Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette (whoFife, Graeme is the author of 'Terror The Shadow of the Guillotine France 1792-1794', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312352240 and ISBN 0312352247.