But I think that historians have been seduces also. Danton was a wonderful opportunist (and I mean this in a good way) at every stage of the revolution. And the worse thing that the Committee of Public Safety did to hurt itself and the radical forces of the revolution was to kill Danton. But if Danton had lived he would have inspired the Thermidor... It was simply the logic of the situation. Perhaps Robespierre would have saved his own neck in that case....
Excuse me for the speculative "what if" history.
My main point about Danton is that he always followed the logic of the situation... unless of course he was too tired. It was his brilliance that where ever the revolution went, he ran out in front of it and articulated its logic. One never gets a feeling that Danton ever had many political principles, except the revolution itself. Danton is the lovable rogue; brilliant, forceful, articulate. I have read two biographies of him and he seems to me a recognizable character.
That is not so with Robespierre. Perhaps he had too many principles and not enough time to acknowledge that the people who carried them out were not as scrupulous as he was. But even now it is hard for me not to sympathize with him, not to think of him as the model of a revolutionary; not to see in him a man both lost in abstraction and always understanding the good and bad tendencies of mass movements and revolution. I do not agree with Jaures. It was not conceited pride, but simple self-identification with himself and what he thought was the very movement of revolution. He did not seek higher office. He did not even want his seat on the Committee of Public Safety. He had no power base outside simple moral leadership in the Jacobin club and among revolutinaries. How he became a leader of the revolution was only through his ability to articulate the necessity of the next step even when the next step was that of "terror."
I have read 5 biographies of Robespierre and I still don't get him. With his personality, today he would either be a corporate attorney or a computer nerd trying to write a little science fiction on the side. Where exactly did he come from? How exactly did he become so insightful in thinking through the implications of each step of the revolution, and, also, so paranoid that the enemies of the revolution were all in conspiracy together? And why was he so loved by so many of the Paris crowd? That Danton was loved by the crowd, is understandable. A great orator and the kind of lovable scarred lion, who has star quality. But Robespierre? Why should he be cheered so? He could hardly be heard when he spoke; he was stodgy, and watchful, so damn bourgeois. And yet there were masses of people who trusted him, who cheered hiim. Wonderfully strange, if you ask me.
Jerry
>
> Mathiez, Levebvre, and Soboul (I don't know about Rud´e) were all
> members of the Stalinist PCF, and so had an enormous ideological bias
> in favor of Robespierre, that forerunner of the Moscow trials. Daniel
> Gu´erin and Jaur`es (not to mention Buchner) had very different
> views, though of course siding with Robespierre and Danton against
> their fellow Jacobins, the "Brissotins" ("Girondists").
>
> Jaur`es: "Yes, there was much in him of the religious sectarian, of
> the priest, an intolerable claim to infallibility, conceited pride in a
> narrow virtue, the tyrannical habit of judging everything by the
> measure of his own opinions, and toward the sufferings of others
> he had the terrible hardness of heart of a man obsessed by an Idea,
> a man who gradually has come to confuse his ego and his faith, to
> confuse the interests of his ambition and those of his cause."
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not
> consent to be called
> Zeus."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/