Pale and rather stout, with thick black hair, thin lips, a pock-marked nose, jutting chin and small, glittering eyes, he had thus suddenly become a powerful and dreaded figure. Invariably dressed in black, he was known to be as incorruptible as Robespierre himself; but, provided the processes over which he presided were conducted in an orderly fashion and with a proper regard for a show of legality, he was perfectly willing, indeed eager, to carry out the wishes of the authorities without too close an inquiry into the conduct of those whom they wished to destroy, even when he had cause to be grateful to them for past favours.
There were difficulties with Danton and Desmoulins, though. They both still enjoyed much popularity in the sections, and he had been given scarcely any time to prepare his case against them. Press censorship would ensure that the proceedings would be both briefly and tendentiously recorded, but the public would have to be admitted into the courtroom, as was customary, so that accounts of what passed there would spread rapidly throughout the city. Moreover, there could be no doubt, as Danton charged through the doors like an angry bull, that he was determined not to be a passive victim. He defended himself with such vehemence, indeed, that his bellowing voice could be heard through the open windows of the court on the far side of the Seine.
It is clear from the fragmentary records of the proceedings that at the outset he had little hope of being acquitted. When asked for his address by the Tribunal he gave it as ‘soon in oblivion…in the future in history’s pantheon’. And later he said, ‘The court now knows Danton. Tomorrow he hopes to sleep in the bosom of glory. He has never asked for pardon and you will see him go to the scaffold with the calm of a clear conscience.’ There were times during the course of the trial when both the President, Nicolas-François-Joseph Herman, and the Prosecutor were obviously rattled. The jury seemed impressed by Danton’s loud defiance, and the spectators often cheered his stirring words. The President rang his bell in vain. ‘Do you not hear my bell?’ he asked. ‘Bell!’ Danton shouted back at him. ‘Bell! A man who is fighting for his life pays no attention to bells…My voice, which has often been heard speaking in the people’s name,’ he continued more calmly but no less loudly, ‘will have no difficulty in thrusting these vile charges aside. Will the cowards who have slandered me dare to meet me face to face? Let them show themselves and I will cover them with shame…I demand that the Convention establish a commission to hear my denunciation of the present dictatorship. Yes, I, Danton, will unmask the dictatorship which is now revealing itself in its true colours…You say I have sold myself. A man such as me has no price…Let the men who have proof step forward…Neither ambition nor greed has ever found a victim in me…I shall now speak to you about three plats-coquins [presumably Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois and Saint-Just] who have been the ruin of Robespierre…I have vital evidence to reveal. I demand an undisturbed hearing…’
The President interrupted him again, furiously ringing his bell. But Danton’s voice boomed on while Fouquier-Tinville looked more and more alarmed, his countenance, in the words of his clerk ‘depicting both rage and terror’. He was passed a note from the President which read, ‘I am going to suspend Danton’s defence in half an hour.’ Yet even when he did so the prisoner refused to sit down until promised that he would be allowed to continue his speech the next day.
Terrified that the jurors might be persuaded to deliver the wrong verdict, Herman and Fouquier-Tinville now decided to write to the Committee of Public Safety:
A fearful storm has been raging since the session began. The accused are behaving like madmen and are frantically demanding the summoning of their witnesses. They are denouncing to the people what they say is the rejection of their demand. In spite of the firmness of the President and the entire court, their repeated requests are disrupting the session. They say that, short of a decree, they will not be quiet until their witnesses have been heard. We ask you what to do about their demands since our judicial powers give us no authority for rejecting it.
Rather than read out this compromising letter to the Convention, Saint-Just gave the deputies a false version of it, and informed them that the prisoners were in revolt against the Tribunal. He then produced a letter, allegedly written by a prisoner at the Luxembourg, which ‘proved the existence’ of a plot organized by Lucille Desmoulins and an aristocratic friend, to rescue the accused and murder the entire Revolutionary Tribunal. ‘No further proofs are needed,’ Saint-Just declared. ‘The very resistance of these scoundrels proves their guilt.’ He demanded and obtained a decree that ‘every accused person who resisted or insulted the national justice should be forbidden to plead’.
Amar of the Committee of General Security hurried over to the courtroom with this decree which he handed over to Fouquier-Tinville with the words, ‘This should make the job easier for you.’ Fouquier took it from him with a smile of relief. ‘Indeed we needed it,’ he said.
‘You are murderers,’ shouted Danton when the decree was read out. ‘Murderers! Look at them! They have hounded us to our deaths!…But the people will tear my enemies to pieces within three months.’
The next day the trial was resumed an hour and a half earlier than usual, so few spectators were present to witness the final scenes. Fouquier-Tinville opened me proceedings by asking the jurors in an intimidating way if they had now heard enough against all the accused. They said they had and, on returning from their retirement, brought in the required verdicts.
That same day eighteen condemned men – Danton, Desmoulins, Delacroix and Fabre d’Églantine among them, as well as Hérault de Séchelles, who had been falsely accused of passing secrets to me enemy – were transported in three red-painted tumbrils to the guillotine. As with the Girondins, they were nearly all young men. Fabre d’Églantine was forty-three; Danton and Hérault de Séchelles both thirty-four; Desmoulins was also thirty-four, though he told the Revolutionary Tribunal that he was thirty-three, ‘the same age as the sans-culotte, Jesus Christ, when He died’.
Desmoulins who had to be dragged from the courtroom to prison screaming, ‘They are going to murder my wife’, became so agitated in the cart that, though his hands were bound, he managed to tear the clothes from his body in a frenzy of protest as he shouted at the spectators. Danton, who had comforted him tenderly in prison, now lost patience with him and said, ‘Be quiet! Leave the rabble alone.’ But Desmoulins continued to rage and he arrived at the scaffold with his chest and shoulders scratched and bare. The sight of the guillotine seemed to calm him though. He looked at it for a moment then turned away ‘with a contemplative expression on his face’. He waited for the end murmuring the name of Lucille.