Yet Robespierre, reluctant as he was to sacrifice him and well aware that Danton’s death would leave him isolated, persuaded himself that the Indulgents were agents of counter-revolution and accepted the unwelcome fact that Danton would have to be arrested and tried with them. His attitude towards Danton had always been equivocaclass="underline" there were times when he expressed his admiration for him and seemed even to like him. But Danton’s patent sexuality and coarse masculinity disturbed him – as it disturbed Madame Roland – and often shocked him. Once, during a heated discussion, Robespierre had exasperated Danton by his constant references to ‘Virtue’. ‘I’ll tell you what this Virtue you talk about really is,’ Danton said to him mockingly, ‘It’s what I do to my wife every night!’ The remark obviously rankled with Robespierre who recorded it in his notebook and afterwards commented, ‘Danton derides the word Virtue as though it were a joke. How can a man with so little conception of morality ever be a champion of freedom?’
On 22 March he met Danton for the last time at a dinner party. ‘Let us forget our private resentments,’ Danton said to him during the course of the evening, ‘and think only of the country, its needs and dangers.’ For a moment Robespierre did not reply. Then he asked sardonically, ‘I suppose a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment.’ ‘I suppose you would be annoyed,’ Danton riposted, ‘if none did.’ ‘Liberty,’ said Robespierre coldly, ‘cannot be secured unless criminals lose their heads.’ Despite this exchange, Danton made as if to embrace Robespierre when he left. But Robespierre pulled away from him in distaste.
A few days later they saw each other at the Théâtre Français.
Robespierre was in a box [an observer who was also in the audience that night recorded]. Danton was in the front stalls. When the words ‘Death to the tyrant!’ were declaimed on the stage [the play being performed was the tragedy, Epicharis and Nero] Danton’s friends burst into wild applause and standing up they turned towards Robespierre and shook their fists at him. Robespierre, pale and nervous, pushed his little clerk’s face forward and then pulled it back in the way a snake reacts. He waved his little hand in a gesture indicative of both fright and menace.
The decision to arrest Danton was taken at a joint meeting of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security on the night of 30 March after Robespierrists had been nominated to all the important posts in the Commune which had been vacated by the defeated Hébertists. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s pale, handsome, cold-blooded disciple, the ‘Angel of Death’–upon whose lucid brain and incisive pen his master had come to depend in times like these – produced a document denouncing Danton which he intended to read out in the Convention the next morning. It was objected that this was too risky a procedure, Danton being still so popular a character in the Convention, and that he and the other leading Indulgents would have to be arrested first, whereupon Saint-Just, displaying some emotion for once, petulantly tossed his hat into the fire. Robespierre agreed with Saint-Just that Danton ought to be denounced in the Convention before his arrest, but he did not press the point after Vadier said, ‘You can run the danger of being guillotined if you like, but I’m not going to.’
The warrant for Danton’s arrest was placed on the table and, one after the other, those present at the meeting took up a pen to sign it. Only two of them refused, Ruhl, an Alsatian who protested that he could not betray an old friendship, and Robert Lindet, the Committee of Public Safety’s hard-working administrator of food supplies, who bluntly said that his job was to ‘feed citizens not put patriots to death’. Carnot afterwards claimed that he warned his colleagues, ‘We must consider the consequences well before we do this. A head like Danton’s will drag down many others after it.’ But he signed the paper with the rest. And so, in the early hours of the following morning, warrants were issued for the arrest of Danton together with several of his associates and some foreigners whose financial crimes would conveniently serve to muddy the issues and discredit the political prisoners.
Warned of his impending arrest, Danton had sat up all night by the fire in his study on the first floor of his house in the Cour du Commerce. He had rejected all suggestions that he should try to escape abroad. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘cannot carry his country away with him on the soles of his shoes.’ Nor would he consider fighting back at his accusers: that would ‘only mean the shedding of more blood’ and there had been ‘far too much blood shed already’. He would ’rather be guillotined than guillotine’. Besides, he was ‘sick of men’, and had not himself been guiltless. ‘It was at this time of year,’ he lamented, ‘that I had the Revolutionary Tribunal set up. I pray to God and men to forgive me for it.’
So, when he heard the sounds of the patrol in the cobbled street outside he stood up with weary resignation and went to put his arms round his wife who was weeping helplessly. ‘They are coming to arrest me,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be frightened.’ He walked down into the street and was taken up the hill to the prison of the Luxembourg.
There were some protests in the Convention later that day when Danton’s arrest was announced but Robespierre, now committed to his downfall, turned angrily upon Legendre who had had the temerity to suggest that the accused was a victim of personal spite and that, having saved France in September 1792 ‘ought to be allowed to explain himself before the Convention’. No, objected Robespierre, he should not. ‘The question is not whether a man has performed any particular patriotic act, but what his whole career has been like…In what way is Danton superior to Lafayette, to Dumouriez, to Brissot, to Hébert? What is said of him that may not be said of them? And yet have you spared them?…Vulgar minds and guilty men are always afraid to see their fellows fall because, having no longer a barrier of culprits before them, they are left exposed to the light of truth. But if there exist vulgar spirits, there are also heroic spirits in this Assembly and they will know how to brave all false terrors. Besides, the number of guilty is not great. Crime has found but few culprits among us, and by striking off a few heads the country will be delivered…Whoever trembles at this moment is also guilty.’
After this speech and another by Saint-Just who read the indictment in a dull, toneless voice – emphasizing his points, so a fellow-deputy recorded, with a threatening, chopping gesture of his outstretched hand, ‘a motion like that of the knife of the guillotine’–objectors were silenced and the trial of Danton, Desmoulins and the other accused was approved.
It opened on 2 April. As Danton well knew, the verdict had already been decided upon, even though most of the charges seemed to be directed more at his character than at any provable crimes, and much of the rest of the indictment might as convincingly have been laid against his accusers. The Public Prosecutor was Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.
Fouquier-Tinville was the son of a rich farmer from the Vermandois who had died when he was thirteen, leaving a widow extremely well provided for but disinclined to provide much financial assistance for her son whose early years were spent as an impoverished clerk in a procurator’s office in Paris. By the time he was twenty-seven, however, Fouquier-Tinville had been able to buy the practice of his employer and, as a clever, conscientious lawyer, was soon successfully established. Married to a cousin who brought him a respectable dowry, he became the tenant of a handsome apartment in the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve as well as of a country house at Charonne, the master of a cook and a valet de chambre, and the father of five children. Having given birth to these five children within seven years, his wife died young and, after only a few months, Fouquier-Tinville married again. His second wife provided him with an even more handsome dowry than the first, as well as three more children. But although he soon afterwards sold his practice for a large sum, by the time the Revolution came, he was, for some unknown reason – his enemies blamed his passion for courtesans and dancing-girls – as needy as he had been in his youth. Claiming to be related to Camille Desmoulins, who had become General Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, he applied to him for an appointment and was thankful to be offered one on the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris.