Simon Schama Hate Page

Average day in the Comitee:

Things are real tense in Paris tonight, eh?

Fifteen days ago, a delegation of Jacobins went, at one o'clock in the morning, to express to the counter-revolutionary general their desire to see him abandon the Club of 1789 and return to the Jacobin Club, from which he had cowardly deserted. “No, gentlemen,” replied the soothsayer Mottié, “I am committed to the Club of '89, and I will remain faithful to it.” “Why then have you given your allegiance to both sides and thus betrayed your honor?” Danton told him. “Come now, General, you wish to be a great man; so be it, but for that you need character. Stop whoring yourself out.” l’Ami du Peuple, number 298 (December 2 1790)

Grandpré, who, by his position, is bound to render an account to the Minister of the Interior of the state of the prisons, had found their sad inhabitants in the greatest terror on the morning of September 2 [1792]. […] This estimable citizen, back at the Hôtel de Ville, awaits the ministers at the end of the council: Danton appears first; he approaches him, talks to him about what he has seen, recounts the steps, the requisitions made to the armed force by the Minister of the Interior, the lack of regard that seems to be there, the alarms of the prisoners and the care that he, as minister of justice, has to take for them. Danton, bothered by the unfortunate description, exclaims with his bellowing voice and a gesture appropriate to the expression: I don’t give a fuck about the prisoners or what happens to them! — and he goes away with temperament. It was in the second antechamber, in the presence of twenty people, who all shuddered to hear such a harsh Minister of Justice.  Appel à l’impartiale postérité (1795) by Manon Roland (written somewhere between her arrest in June and execution in November 1793)

Tuesday 22 — […] I went to Robert’s house. Danton came there. His jokes are as boorish as he is. Despite this, he is a good devil. Lucile Desmoulins’ diary, January 22 1793

When I showed to Danton the system of calumny of Roland and of the Brissotins, promoted in all the public writings, Danton answered me: “What do I care! Public opinion is a whore, posterity is a folly!” The word virtue made Danton laugh; he didn’t have a more solid virtue, he said amusingly, than the one which he did every night with his wife. How could a man, to whom every idea of morality was foreign, be the defender of liberty?   Robespierre’s notes against the dantonists, written somewhere in March 1794 and published in 1841

…Vadier happened to pass near him. Danton, deeply stirred by the man’s presence — and gripping David’s arm tightly while fixing a blazing stare upon him — said in a tone made terrible by rage: “That man passing by says of me: ‘And that fat stuffed turbot, we’ll gut him too!’ Tell that scoundrel” — and at this point his voice sounded like a roll of thunder — “that the day I have cause to fear for my life, I shall become more cruel than a cannibal; I shall eat his brain and shit in his skull.” Notes et souvenirs de Courtois de l’Aube, député à la Convention nationale, cited in La Révolution française: revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1887) page 813. Anecdote portrayed as taking place a few days before Danton’s arrest on March 30 1794.

One day I told Danton: ”Your carelessness surprises me, I understand nothing of your apathy. Don’t you see Robespierre is conspiring to lose you? Won’t you do anything to prevent it?”  ”If I thought that he has so much as thought about it,” [Danton replied], ”I would eat his entrails!” Five or six days later, this man so terrible allowed himself to be arrested like a child and slaughtered like a lamb.  Mémoires sur la Convention et le Directoire (1827) by Antoine-Clair Thibaudeau, page 60.

Danton in the chamber of the accused: Me a conspirator? I fuck my wife everyday. My name is attached to all revolutionary institutions, the revolutionary army, revolutionary committee, Committee of Public Safety, Revolutionary Tribunal.   Notes de Topino-Lebrun, juré au Tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris sur le procès de Danton et sur Fouquier-Tinville, written during Danton’s trial in 1794 and published for the first time 1875.