Danton: A Study By Hilaire Belloc a Study (Classic Reprint)

An historian of just pre-eminence in his university and college, in a little work which should be more widely known, has summed up the two principal characters of the Revolution in the following phrases: the cold and ferocious Robespierre, the blatant Danton. The judgment is precipitate and is tinged with a certain bias. An authority of still greater position prefaces his notebook on the Revolution by telling us that he is going to describe the beast. The learned sectarian does not conceal from his readers the fact that a profound analysis had led to a very pronounced conviction. So certain Ls he of his ground, that he treats with equal consideration the evidence of printed documents, of autograph letters, and of a chance stranger speaking in a country inn of a thing that had happened forty years before. The greatest of French novelists and a principal poet has given us in Quatre-vingt-treize a picture moving and living. Yet even in that work much is admitted, for the sake of contrast and colour, which no contemporary saw. The dialogue between Danton and Marat, with its picturesque untruths, is an example. If facts so conflicting be stated as true by men of such various calibre, it would seem a very difl Scult task to write history at all. Yet there is a method which 1C. W. Oman, History of England, p. 581. Taine, La Revolution, preface. Victor Hugo, Quatre-vingt-treize. Illustrated edition of 1877. Paris, pp. 136-150.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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