Devoured by his own creation

Bridgeman

Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror. By David Lawday. Jonathan Cape; 294 pages; £20. To be published in America by Grove Atlantic at the end of 2010. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

A SUCCESSFUL 27-year-old barrister in King Louis XVI's Paris council in 1787, Georges-Jacques Danton possessed a loving wife and a good income, plus a doting mother in Arcis-sur-Aube, his native home in north-eastern France. His contentment would be short-lived. France was bankrupt, and its monarchy an affront to the Enlightenment. By 1789 revolution was in the air and bourgeois gentlemen such as Maître d'Anton (as he called himself at the time) needed to take sides. Imbued with liberal and classical ideals, he joined the revolutionaries. “I saw an irresistible tide sweep by,” he explained.

Three years later Danton had led the overthrow of the French monarchy, been appointed first minister of France and was the dominant voice in the National Convention. In 1793 he voted for the king's execution and was directing the war against disgusted European powers. For the sans-culottes of Paris, he was the embodiment of the revolution. But by the following year he was dead, sentenced to the guillotine by his own tribunal (our lithograph shows him at his trial, together with his friend, Camille Desmoulins).

What drove the ugly and dyslexic Danton, suckled by cows in rural Champagne, to rise and fall so dramatically? This is not an easy question. Despite his impact, Danton is enigmatic: his appalling penmanship meant he wrote practically nothing.

David Lawday, whose previous book was a life of Talleyrand and who used to be a journalist at The Economist, provides a gripping story, beautifully told. Yet the subtitle of his biography—“The Gentle Giant of Terror”—perhaps heralds a too sympathetic portrayal. Danton never killed anyone personally, and by the standards of the merciless Maximilien de Robespierre he was doubtless an angel. But the “marriage of boiling patriotism and moderation” that he promised electors in 1791 had deserted him when he instigated the Revolutionary Tribunal and Committee of Public Safety in 1793. He said he wanted to “create terror to save the people from doing so.” In fact he created the political machinery to execute thousands.

Danton was a headstrong firebrand, a swashbuckling political showman with a prodigious memory, whose spectacular oratory held audiences in thrall. Atop the rostrum he would impugn his enemies, excite crowds to action and deflect his detractors' barbs. He would make audiences wait, even for a day, for his stirring perorations, laced with classical allusions. He was the revolution's unrivalled mouthpiece.

But his rousing words brought collateral damage. He gave the speech of his life on September 2nd 1792. Paris was threatened by foreign armies, people were petrified and Danton implored them to be “ever bolder”. That same day, frenzied sans- culottes massacred 1,600 prisoners. Moral culpability would plague him to the end. Was Danton a dangerous demagogue? He was routinely likened to Cromwell.

At the same time Danton was a jovial family man. He adored his wife and children and the company of his friends, especially the skilled pamphleteer, Desmoulins. He eschewed Robespierre's yearnings for “moral virtue”, preferring pragmatic paths to national rejuvenation. He had a genuine connection with common people.

But his passions had a macabre side. In early 1793, when he was in Belgium, mired in delicate negotiations with a renegade French general, a messenger from Paris told him that his wife, Gabrielle, had died giving birth to their fourth child. Emotionally crippled, he sped back to Paris at once, but was too late for the funeral. Undeterred, he crept into the cemetery under cloak of darkness with a bemused sculptor in tow. The trembling grave-keeper obeyed the people's champion and exhumed Gabrielle's body, and the sculptor set about his grisly task. Four months later, in a ceremony conducted by the outlawed Roman Catholic church, Danton married the 16-year-old nanny of his children.

Fear of invasion and counter-revolution made Robespierre's extreme politics more appealing and Danton lost control of events. His connection to the Paris masses waned. From the middle of 1793 the revolution took a more bloodthirsty turn. Danton's terror became a murderous rampage. He spoke out against the indiscriminate killing and urged restraint on Robespierre. “If we cannot get together to slow this down it will kill us both,” he prophesied.

The carnage and injustice made Danton declare he was “sick of men”. In October he retired to the country and, in his absence, Robespierre consolidated power. Danton returned to Paris to face the Revolutionary Tribunal he had created: the rebel had become the reactionary. On April 5th 1794, after a trial without evidence or witnesses, he was guillotined.