Danton's Death Book by Georg Buchner - Essay Example

05 November 2008 What is the relation between terror and virtue according to Robespierre and according to other characters Danton's Death is a play written by Georg Buchner in 1834. The play is devoted to the events of the French revolutions and portrays virtues and understanding of terror by revolutionaries. Buchner depicts that Maximilien Robespierre had appeared among the deputies of 1789 as an aggressive and charismatic person who promulgated liberal ideas. He was poor, discontented, and suspicious; but Robespierre was shaped by a little man's ambition to play a big role in life of the nation. He educated himself trying to acquire second-class talents. The only unique skills he had were carefully composed speeches. Buchner underlines that his mastery of revolutionary technique, the bourgeois respectability, and the touch of aristocracy given to his dress and manners, made him the leader of middle-class Jacobinism. Thesis Virtue is seen as an outcome of terror and the terror is the only possible way to build a virtuous society and maintain strict moral laws. Robespierre supposed that terror is the only possible tool to control society. Buchner depicts that tradesmen and artisans relied on his leadership of their rights. Their women-folk found his speeches as comforting as sermons. His limited outlook and mind has reverted the virtues which had built up their small businesses. They did not foresee that selfflattery and the need of power would turn his liberalism into a norm, his cult of virtue into an Inquisition, and his shrinking from violence into the regime of the Terror. Depicted as a cold, enigmatic, unattractive man, Robespierre repeated within the limits of his study and of his soul the experiments of the revolution, and received nothing from them but anger and devastation. Robespierre made it his mission in the autumn of '91, to save the country from dangers which he saw gathering round it, and especially from the threat of war. The first six months of the Legislative Assembly may well seem the most difficult period of the whole revolution. "Vice must be punished. Virtue must rule through the Terror" (Buchner 22). It was a time of reaction and not like what contemporary writers describe as succeeding of the great Reform Bill. But the legislators of 1791 were in a less fortunate position than those of 1832. They were handcuffed to a defective constitution, which the king's treachery made impossible to work with, and the selfishness of their predecessors impossible to revise. They were discredited by their association with the anti-republican reaction succeeding July 17th. They were decried by the very men whose faults they were expiating. They were faced by the most dangerous moment of any revolution - the back-wash of the first great wave of progress. It lies between revolution and counter-revolution. The capital-city showed its feeling about the affair of July 17th by rejecting Lafayette and electing the popular and democratic Ption as its new mayor. Danton did not support all the ideas of Robespierre, questioning his idea of virtue and terror. Danton laughed at the men discussing his venality and his vices. It is most certain, that he took bribes than that he did not do anything to earn them. It is most certain, that he had vices and that he was enslaved by them. Danton improvised, where Robespierre planned ahead; Danton scoffed, where Robespierre sermonized; Danton trusted and understood where Robespierre idealized and intrigued; Danton piloted the country to victory, whilst Robespierre pointed it to virtue. How could Robespierre's sleek Puritanism fail to be offended at every turn by Danton's Rabelaisian honesty Mirabeau, had the two met, would have recognized a rival in him - a man with the same virility, the same arresting ugliness, the same power of leadership. But Danton had something Mirabeau could never match for - a natural sympathy with the people and heroism of the man in the street. "The weapon of the republic is terror; the strength of the republic is virtue - because without it terror is corruptible" (Buchner 14). Those who appointed Danton must have hoped that his reputation as a democrat and a demagogue would have Paris reconcile the decidedly dull virtues and dimmed prestige of his colleagues in the ministry. There is little evidence, that his part in the insurrection of August had made him a popular hero. He played an uncertain part in the proceedings of the commune which took its place early the next morning. It is a choice between the right and wrong ideas of public happiness, between a life of idleness and intrigue, or an active and austere cooperation in the Republic of virtue. Indiscipline and immorality are the twin forms of 'federalism,' that attempt to break the disciplined unity of the country. Both in its origin and in its functions the National Convention was well suited to be the main instrument of a 'revolutionary' government. Its members were freely elected by all Frenchmen of the discretion age. Under the Directory the place gradually returned to political convalescence. It remained for Bonaparte to restore, under careful supervision, a municipality which had proved so unfit for self-government, and a mayoralty which had been the cause of such bitter strife. With the re-erection of the buildings which had been pulled down came a revival of the industries upon which alone the peace and prosperity of the town relied. During the last three months of the Terror, indeed, the aristocratic victims exceeded the ecclesiastical, but without equaling those of the official class, whilst they were far outstripped by members of the middle and lower classes. Discontent in the country-side was less due to political controversy, which did not interest the peasantry, but more due to economic troubles, exploited by royalist and clerical counter-revolutionaries. True, land-purchase became easier every day. Yet there were complaints of the profits made by bourgeois speculators in real estate, not without the connivance of the official vendors and of the disproportionate share of the land that fell to prosperous town-dwellers. Again, the Jacobins made little attempt to enforce agricultural reforms, which they knew to be expedient, upon a peasantry stubbornly attached to old-fashioned individualistic methods; so the country-side benefited less than it might have from the freeing of the soil. Yet, politically speaking, the solid advantages that the revolution had won for the farmers gradually prevailed over the loyalties of the old regime, and created that wide basis of proprietorship upon which French prosperity has rested ever since. As to inflation, and its accompanying depreciation, sufficient evidence is now available to set out the diagrammatic monthly variations in the value of the banknotes throughout the revolution, and even to note the local aberrations which, as in the price-diagrams of the eighteenth century, illustrate the lack of a financial control-centre in the political body. In sum, the rule of terror and virtue, Robespierre thought, was almost destroyed; philosophy had banished priest craft; and the only virtues still present in the human mind were those that supported moral ideas, such as 'the sublime and touching doctrine of virtue and equality that was taught of old by the son of Mary to his fellow-citizens.' Soon the gospel of reason and liberty would overrun the world. But that day would only be retarded by attacks on Catholicism. 'If people are, on the whole, emancipated from superstition, they do not, for that reason, regard religion with indifference, or admit that it can be a matter of political calculation. Belief in God is deeply engrained: it is a dogma that the nation connects with its traditional worship, and, through this worship, with its scheme of moral values. To attack Catholicism is to attack popular morality. Robespierre had abandoned the views he held so clearly in November, '92. But he may well have come to think that the dissolution of the old religion was now so far advanced that a non-Christian might be gently substituted for a Christian theism, and a non-Catholic for a Catholic worship. Works Cited Buchner, G. Danton's Death in Danton's Death, Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999, p. 1-72. Read More