Georges Danton

A lawyer from Champagne

Georges Jacques Danton was born on 26 October 1759 in Arcis-sur-Aube, a small town in Champagne, the son of a court official who died when he was a child. He was schooled by the Oratorian fathers in Troyes and came to Paris in 1780 to work as a lawyer's clerk. In 1787 he bought a post as lawyer to the King's Councils and married Gabrielle Charpentier, the daughter of a café owner.

He was tall and heavily built, with a face scarred in childhood and pitted by smallpox, and a voice that could fill a hall. Enemies and admirers alike remembered him as a man of large appetites and easy warmth.

The voice of the Cordeliers

In 1789 Danton made his name in the assembly of the Cordeliers district, on the Left Bank, and in 1790 he was among the founders of the Cordeliers Club, more radical and cheaper to join than the Jacobins. Its members, Camille Desmoulins and Jean-Paul Marat among them, called for a republic long before most deputies would.

After the massacre on the Champ de Mars in July 1791, when the National Guard fired on petitioners demanding the king's removal, Danton spent some weeks in England. In December he was elected deputy prosecutor of the Paris Commune. Suspicions of venality followed him all his life: contemporaries accused him of taking money from the court, and many historians believe they were right.

Audacity

Minister of Justice in the summer the monarchy fell

When the Tuileries was stormed on 10 August 1792 and the king suspended, the Legislative Assembly made Danton Minister of Justice in the new Provisional Executive Council. He became at once its dominant figure. Prussian troops had crossed the frontier and taken Longwy; Verdun, the last fortress on the road to Paris, was besieged. On 2 September he rose in the Assembly to call the country to arms.

That same day mobs began killing prisoners in the Paris jails; by 6 September more than a thousand were dead. The Minister of Justice did nothing to stop the September Massacres, and it was held against him ever after. Elected to the National Convention as a deputy for Paris, he gave up the ministry in October.

From the Committee to clemency

In the Convention Danton sat with the Mountain and voted for the king's death in January 1793. On a mission to the army in Belgium he lost his wife, Gabrielle, who died in February while he was away. In March he pressed for a Revolutionary Tribunal, arguing that the state should be terrible so that the crowds need not be, and in April he became a member of the first Committee of Public Safety. He sought a negotiated peace abroad and was left off the Committee when it was renewed in July.

That year he married the young Louise Gély, and in the autumn he withdrew for some weeks to Arcis. By the time he returned to Paris in November the Terror was in full force. He sided with those who wanted it to ease, the Indulgents, whose voice was Desmoulins's newspaper Le Vieux Cordelier, launched in December 1793; within weeks it was calling for a committee of clemency.

Trial and death

The Committee struck first at the left: Hébert and his followers were guillotined on 24 March 1794. A week later, on the night of 30 to 31 March, Danton, Desmoulins and their friends were arrested. They were tried alongside men accused of fraud in the affairs of the French East India Company, so that the charge of corruption would touch them all. Danton's voice carried from the courtroom to the crowd outside, and the Convention passed a decree allowing the tribunal to silence defendants who showed it disrespect.

On 5 April 1794 he was taken to the Place de la Révolution with Desmoulins and the others condemned with them. He was thirty-four. Robespierre, who had let him fall, followed him to the guillotine less than four months later.