What was Danton’s attitude during this period? It may be summed up as follows: Now that the Revolution was finally established, to keep France safe in the inevitable danger. He put the nation first; he did not subordinate the theory of the Revolution; he dismissed it. The Revolution had conquered: it was there; but France, which had made it and which proposed to extend the principles of self-government to the whole world, was herself in the greatest peril. When discussion had been the method of the Revolution, Danton had been an extremist. He was Parisian and Frondeur in 1790 and 1791; it was precisely in that time that he failed. The tangible thing, the objective to which all his mind leaned, appeared with the national danger; then he had something to do, and his way of doing it, his work in the trade to which he was born, showed him to be of a totally different kind from the men above whom he showed. I do not believe one could point to a single act of his in these three-quarters of a year which was not aimed at the national defence. It is a point of special moment in the appreciation of his politics that Danton was alone in this position. He was the only man who acted as one of the innumerable peasantry of France would have acted, could fate have endowed such a peasant with genius and with knowledge. The others to the left and right were soldiers, poets, or pedants every one. Heroic pedants and poets who were never afraid, but not one of them could forget his theories or his vision and take hold of the ropes. Such diplomacy as there is is Danton’s; it is Danton who attempts compromise, and it is Danton who persistently recalls the debates from personalities to work. It is he who warns the Girondins, and it is he who, in the anarchy that followed defeat, produced the necessary dictatorship of the Committee. Finally, when the Committee is formed, you glance at the names, the actions, and the reports, and you see Danton moving as a man who can see moves among the blind. He had been once “in himself the Cordeliers”—it had no great effect, for there was nothing to do but propose rights; now, after the insurrection, he became “in himself the executive,” and later “in himself the Committee.” So much is he the first man in France during these few months of his activity, that only by following his actions can you find the unity of this confused and anarchic period. It falls into four very distinct divisions, both from the point of view of general history and from that of Danton’s own life. The first includes the six weeks intervening between the 10th of August and the meeting of the Convention; it is a time almost without authority; it moves round the terrible centre of the massacres. During this brief time the executive, barely existent, without courts or arms, had him in the Ministry of Justice as their one power—a power unfortunately checked by the anarchy in Paris.