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CHAPTER 1
Bullfights
A countryman born is a countryman for life, and this may be truer of the people of France than of most anywhere on earth. Georges-Jacques Danton was reared in a flat, chalky tract of the Champagne region, and no matter how large a part of his heart he put into driving the great city of Paris to revolution, a still larger part was yoked to his rural birthplace. It was an attachment that would cost him dear.
He was born on 26 October 1759, the fifth child and first son of a couple from the provincial petty bourgeoisie. His father, Jacques Danton, had fairly recently stepped up a class from the peasantry, and peasant roots still clutched at the Dantons as the little market town where they lived, Arcis-sur-Aube, sleepwalked into the turbulent final third of the eighteenth century. The land stretching flat around Arcis was the backside of the wine country to the north and was known as the Champagne badlands, though it was bad – 'flea-ridden' was the description used in cartographic tradition and indeed by the king's provincial administrators – only by the bountiful standards of France's countryside, for it grew wheat and barley aplenty and helped keep Paris, the metropolis 100 miles to the west, in bread. Moreover, its plainness was alleviated by the river Aube which looped across it in a rich green ribbon, hidden by willows and sycamores from strangers passing through. If local eyes were at all open to the outside world, it was due to the tranquil Aube, which was navigable in those days and flowed into the Seine some thirty miles yonder, so that travellers with time on their hands could ride a barge straight from Arcis to Paris, thence to the English Channel if so inclined.
Still, country people knew where best to congregate and the population around Arcis was as thin as its chalky soil. Only within the little town, where the Dantons made their way better than most, did the population multiply. Not many years before Danton's birth, stocking-makers had set up looms in Arcis thanks to a local grandee with influence at the Bourbon court in Versailles, which decided where industries were permitted to set up in France. Arcis' good fortune, then, was to hold a royal charter for the manufacture of woollen and cotton hose, and while its peasantry sowed and reaped, its spinning machines hummed and clacked in local cellars from dawn to dusk.
Even so, the song of the stocking looms failed to break the town's deeper slumber. At the time of Georges-Jacques' birth few in this corner of France profonde sensed that the nation at large was alive with discontent, girding for change as never before. Yet in respect of timing the gladiators of social change fairly hovered over the Danton boy's cradle. In the very year that he was born the philosophical bomb that freethinkers called the Enlightenment went off with a great bang: the notorious Voltaire, at his malicious best in exile, published Candide; the determined philosopher Denis Diderot relaunched his banned Encyclopédie, questioning each and every truth that monarchy held dear; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was completing his Contrat Social, a trumpet call for reform of the French state.
War was declared that year on the old order and on the absolute rule of kings.
In looks, Danton was closer to the barnyard than to the Enlightenment. He was a robust child, an exception in the family. Two of his four older sisters died in childhood, true to a high mortality rate set by five siblings from his father's first marriage, which ended with his wife's death in labour. Danton's own mother, though sturdy of constitution, was unable to provide him with the mother's milk he required and took to having him suckled by a cow from the barn, a common expedient in the countryside. The infant Georges-Jacques was equal to the test until a jealous bull entered the barn and gored his face, splitting his top lip. He carried the vivid scar all his life. A further encounter with a bull at the age of seven crushed his nose, compensating for the first atrocity in so far as it gave his face a certain misshapen balance.
Rural life thus left its harsh tattoo on the Danton boy even as his father, the son of a peasant farmer, moved away from it. Having broken with the family history of tilling the land and turned instead to law, Jacques Danton was edging through the provincial legal orders. From court bailiff and below he rose to prosecutor – still a relatively minor post but one which carried weight in Arcis, combining as it did the duties of justice of the peace and country solicitor; he spent a good deal of his time stamping documents and registering ownership of fields and copses. Prior to his own abrupt death at the age of forty, not a hint of dissent or rebelliousness, not a shadow of political contrariness, marked Jacques Danton's career in the king's service. The one reforming move he made, if such it was, was the break with his peasant class that enabled him to install his second family in a large house backed by a barn and several acres of land on the edge of Arcis where the town's weathered stone bridge spanned the Aube.
Georges-Jacques held no memory of his father, who died when he was three. Parental influence came from his mother, née Madeleine Camut, who had married down, at least in economic terms. Her own father was a building contractor commissioned to keep the king's roads and bridges in running order in the Champagne badlands. His income gave the Camut family a comfortable living and opened up prospects for the younger generation. Madeleine's brother was a village curate, soldiering in the most conservative corps of the kingdom; her two sisters found worthy husbands in the bourgeois class – one was the postmaster in Troyes, the provincial capital situated a morning's coach ride away, the other a merchant in the same city.
Madeleine was a practical woman, slight but of strong constitution, who overcame her husband's premature death and the shock it caused her and her expanding tribe (she bore two more boys after Georges-Jacques) by taking a new husband – an Arcis clothmaker named Jean Recordain – just as soon as the niceties of Catholic Church doctrine allowed. Practical though she was, she was also loving and affectionate towards her children, a combination that rubbed off on Georges-Jacques. He adored his mother and was always close to her, though like her first husband she too was no agitator. By provincial class ratings the Dantons remained a good deal closer to the eternal peasant smallholder than to the occupant of the princely Arcis chateau that rose above the trees across the Aube from their home. Their modest rung of the bourgeoisie manned the king's administrative services – magistrates, lawyers, inspectors, notaries, doctors and civil servants who kept the wheels of the Ancien Régime turning. Only on the bourgeoisie's upper rungs – a wealthy elite of bankers, industrialists and landlords – was the middle class on something of a level with the nobility, for all it lacked was enjoyment of the king's favour, which exempted those of blueblood birth and the high Catholic clergy from paying taxes. Nor were the Dantons within earshot of that most energetic bourgeois breed of the day, the men and women of letters – the educated elite of the French masses – who appointed themselves to goad and rattle the monarchy into doing what their hearts told them was fair and right.
If peasant roots tugged at Georges-Jacques through such bourgeois layers it was because in his case they were overpowering. As he grew up, the rural masses indeed began scenting change in the air. But there was something that lulled and pacified peasant minds, something as old as the land itself, and this was the eternal bounty yielded by the French soil. The food. The wine. Who could imagine such marvels ever ceasing?
* * *
The boy Danton ate like a horse. He was as big and strong for his age as he was ugly, which granted him protection against the taunts of Arcis boys. To keep her first son from running wild on the banks of the Aube, his mother placed him in the charge of a neighbouring spinster who offered rudimentary instruction in reading and writing and used a stick pouched in her apron to discipline him, when she was able to catch him. Much of the time Danton hid from her and splashed about in the Aube, regardless of his mother's concern for his safety. He tested himself against the powerful current that ran beneath the bridge, for the water there came bouncing across a weir created by riverside threshing mills at which barges bumped and manoeuvred to fill up with grain for the trip to Paris.
As Danton turned eight, his mother recognised the need for more authentic schooling; she placed him in the Church-run Arcis grammar school, where he learned the rudiments of Latin. Here too he was unruly. He cut school regularly to spend the morning playing cards in the grass with fellow truants on a quieter reach of the Aube half a mile upstream from the bridge; there they competed to see who could swim from bank to bank the most times without stopping. Danton was a powerful swimmer with a broad chest for his age. Alas, too much time in the water took its toll. At ten, he caught a chest infection that exposed him to a severe bout of smallpox which further blighted his farmyard face, leaving his cheeks as rudely rutted as a pumice stone. The older he became, the more terrible his countenance grew. While his mother's affection wasn't blunted, her tenderness was slow to impose on her oldest boy the education of her class. Only under pressure from his Camut uncle, the priest, was the young smallpox survivor packed off to Troyes to enter a college that prepared boys to enter a Church seminary.
On first sight the provincial capital appeared to Danton to offer temptations greater than the Aube, for the river Seine ran through its heart. Discipline at the new school, which went at its task in all earnestness, at once killed these fancies. Outside the holidays Danton was not permitted to return home. When he did he let his mother know that he couldn't stand the monotony of the place and its strange customs. After two years there he was convinced that he was not cut out for the Church; he would never understand its ways. He hated all the bells. They never stopped ringing. He particularly disliked the one that rang to end recreation time. 'If I have to go on hearing that much longer, it will be my death knell,' he advised his mother, employing ecclesiastical terminology to convince her. She accepted the advice, though coming from her twelve-year-old it sounded over-defiant; to his pre-seminary teachers it was plain refusal to accept authority.
The following year he entered a lay boarding school in Troyes where pupils took most of their instruction at a next-door college run by Oratorian fathers. This suited him better. The Oratorians were liberal Catholic priests sceptical of hoary Church tradition, who kept abreast of public opinion. They were a renegade part of the Church, cramming Enlightenment thinking into their pupils' heads along with the Latin and Greek classics that were the core of their teaching. Furthermore, they had a progressive constitution – superiors in the order were obliged to take account of novice priests' views – so that Danton, with hindsight, was able to see his Oratorian schooling as a clerical probing shot before the full blast of revolution.
His mother had at last found the place for her son to shine, though bad writing pulled down his average marks. He had an explanation for her about the writing which he was not sure she understood: he remembered the sound of words perfectly, but not the sight of them. (Dyslexia was not yet part of the physician's vernacular, let alone a schoolroom excuse.) To compensate, he excelled in Latin. His recitations from Cicero had his classmates clapping and his master at times joined in the applause. They enjoyed his performances; his forte was to turn around the most striking words and phrases to give them a still bolder twist. He revelled in Ancient Rome and its republic, memorising whole chunks of Cicero and reeling them off without a stumble. The pure, frightening justice of it all was riveting. The part played by plebeians. The outlandish conspiracies. The personal power struggles. And behind it all the unblinking regard for democracy. Furthermore, pagan antiquity was in fashion: recent discoveries of extraordinary ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum excited freethinkers, encouraging the republican urge. All this enthralled the adolescent Danton. From his second year with the Oratorians, the prize for Latin discourse was his.
Rhetoric was a second strongpoint, or so he fancied, for when it came to arguing things out it most likely occurred to him that his physique and his alarming face gave him an edge. Rhetoric meant sounding off. Oratorian friars did not discourage speechifying, but what they wanted more from their wards was sounding off on the written page – a logical written argument. Writing again! How it irked Danton. His teachers said he was lazy. They said he could not be bothered to submit to the intellectual grind of written prose. But his fingers just didn't seem to operate with a pen between them. His hand betrayed him. Once a pen held command, even the spelling of words escaped him, words that were perfectly clear in his mind and which he had no trouble using when answering a question in class.
Why was writing so important? Why didn't speech count for more? Speech was the first link between human beings. Danton tested his theory in class one day when a novice teacher rebuked another pupil for not preparing his written work. The offender was a friend of his named Jules Paré, who made things worse by appearing unapologetic. The rhetoric teacher ordered Paré to fetch the rod from a junior classroom for a beating, which brought Danton to his feet. Now aged fifteen, he argued in a shaky adolescent baritone that it was morally wrong to consider inflicting on pupils of their age a punishment meant for minors. The proposition lit a heated debate, which soon brought in Oratorian fathers from around the college. It was a glorious dispute for this liberal establishment to throw itself into, and in the end, while the youthful teacher was somehow saved from humiliation, Paré was spared the rod. Alas, Danton's aptitude for oral argument went unrewarded: he came close to bottom of the rhetoric class that term. There was gratitude, though, from one quarter. Paré, who was no dunce and was to become a government minister at the height of the Revolution, gave Danton his undying loyalty.
Before turning sixteen Danton took a larger risk. When King Louis XV fell ill and died in 1774, his eldest son set 11 June of the following year to take the crown as Louis XVI in the magnificent cathedral at Reims, as tradition demanded. It promised to be a sumptuous occasion attended by the mightiest figures in France, the high society from Paris and Versailles – the cream of the aristocracy, bishops, statesmen and generals with their elegant ladies and mistresses. The Oratorian fathers in Troyes, both fascinated and perplexed by the coming event, made it the subject for the annual college essay prize.
Reims was not a world away from Troyes. It was situated in medieval glory in the north of the Champagne region, the hub of the sparkling wine trade, and was reachable, Danton calculated, within a day's coach ride. Driven by adolescent bravado, he determined to go there. 'I want to see how a king is made,' he announced to classmates. Once he had declared the intention, there was no letting them down. His bold feats in Latin recitation made them look to him for action. Moreover, it occurred to him that the essay prize could come within reach if he had rich content to compensate for bad handwriting.
Naturally it meant playing truant, for there was no chance that permission would be granted. Paré and a few other confidants pooled their coppers to help pay his way. When the time came he started out for Reims on foot, anxious not to be caught boarding the stagecoach before he was clear of Troyes. Once he was able to pick up a coach, it stopped at Arcis, which lay on the direct route to Reims. During the long stop-over Danton sat huddled against the bare upholstery, shrinking from the window: he wanted to see his mother but he could not take the chance that she would haul him off the coach.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Giant Of The French Revolution"
by .
Copyright © 2009 David Lawday.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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