Posted on 04/04/2021 10:20:03 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
....Like many before him, most especially the Girondins who had (fatally to both parties) scorned an alliance with the Dantonists, Danton sought to arrest the revolution where he stood. The confrontation that finished him was precipitated by Danton’s attempt — with the assistance of his longtime confederate Camille Desmoulins, the most notable of the other men to lose their heads this day — to apply the brake to the excesses of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, that lethal organ he himself established as a pillar of order for a time of peril now abated. With the worst of the very real dangers to the Revolution checked, Danton in the Convention and Desmoulins in his fiery journalistic writings proposed to rein in the bloodbath and overturn the power of the sans-culottes.
The time was not yet ripe for the former, although the far-left Hebertist party preceded Danton to the guillotine by a few weeks. In this clip from the 1983 film Danton (review | another | still another (pdf)), Robespierre — who had long resisted denouncing Danton, but did it with characteristic gusto once he committed to the course — turns the terrified Convention against the title character...
Danton’s action in those last days seems vacillating, uncertain; fate devours him. For Georg Buchner in Danton’s Death (here it is free in the original German), he’s paralyzed by the contradictions and uncertainties of an unknown new world in its birth pangs, despairing as all his good-natured philosophies drench themselves in gore.
He roused himself one last time for a ferocious and hopeless defense before the Revolutionary Tribunal, coming near enough to swinging the mob in his favor that the Convention felt obliged to vote a measure to gag him.*....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
He regretted going to the big haircut machine before “that rat” Robespierre
Robespierre was not all that far behind them; he held a gathering, but as he proceeded up to bed, the others there heard him say “just one more weeding”.
He attempted suicide after his arrest and after the jailor refused to lock him up (sounds familiar...), but only managed to blow off his own jaw, so that as the crowd cheered the next subject of the guillotine’s blade, he was unreconizable. The cheering crowd wasn’t that fussy though. He and over a hundred of his devoted allies were beheaded.
Revisionists both for and against have been active for two centuries. He was a mealy-mouthed two-faced demagogue at best, pursuing a society with no dissent and absolute in its punishments for those who demurred.
Robespierre — executed July 28, 1794.
He also had a sense of humor about it — as he was being taken through the streets of Paris, in response to some demmented catcall from the crowd, he suggested they all come down to watch his execution, because “it will be worth a look”.
There are condign warnings in this for the Jacobins of our day.
There is a lesson here that can be used today...
Eventually, the revolution feeds upon itself...
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