The Days of The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert [Hibbert, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, French History, French Revoution
ISBN: 9781439502112
Publisher: Paw Prints
Published: 2008-06-25T23:00:00+00:00

6.

THE DAYS OF THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES AND THE EXECUTION OF THE KING

2-7 September 1792 and 21 January 1793

’

The people of Paris administer their own justice and I am their prisoner ’

PETION

Like most of the other leading revolutionaries, Danton came from a respectable middle-class provincial family. His father, who died when he was three, was a lawyer; one of his uncles a canon at Troyes. He was born near Troyes, at the little town of Arcis-sur-Aube, on 28 October 1759, and from his earliest years his character seems to have been as carefree and lively as the sparkling wines of the district. His grandfather was a farmer and it was in the country where most of his days were spent and where the accidents, which marred his features for life, took place. His scarred and twisted lip, so it was said, was the result of his being gored by an angry bull when he was sucking the teat of a cow; his squashed nose was also the consequence of an encounter with a bull; the scars on his cheeks and eyelids were caused by the hooves of a herd of pigs. The skin around them was badly disfigured by smallpox.

Quite undeterred by these misfortunes and deformities, the young Danton continued to enjoy life, to make friends easily, to do well at his school at Troyes where his oratorian masters provided the lazy but clever boy with a wider and more liberal education than he could have expected at many another establishment. This enabled him to read and enjoy the English books which, as well as the classics of the Enlightenment, including scores of volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau, were to fill the shelves of his sitting-room in Paris.

He arrived in Paris when he was twenty-one to enter a lawyer’s office and, having obtained a legal degree from the University of Rheims and borrowed a good deal of money from, among others, the father of the girl he intended to marry - the daughter of a prosperous restaurateur - he bought the remunerative office of avocat aux Conseils du Roi. Thus, at the age of twenty-seven, he established himself in a far more promising position than so many of his impecunious contemporaries who, coming up from the provinces to swell the ranks of an overcrowded profession and finding success in it difficult to achieve without money, took to ill-paid journalism and other literary pursuits while idly hoping for, or actively working for, the overthrow of an order that so circumscribed their talents and ambition.

Danton, who at this time chose to call himself d’Anton, did not share their disgruntlement, though he joined in their discussions at the Cafe Procope. He seems to have worked conscientiously, earning over 20,000 livres a year according to a friend, and taking on any cases that came his way without too scrupulous a regard for the justice of his clients’ claims. While preparations were being made for the election of the Estates General in 1789, for example, d’Anton

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