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Translation of "On Wajda’s Danton: The Revolution Is Not a ‘Madness’", by Michel Vovelle.
Wajda’s Danton: a film that some of you must have seen. I believe the annoying voice of the historian must be heard, once again: this film is no sheer amusement, it is politics. And, whenever politics are involved – especially more so with the French Revolution – it demands sufficient information from every point of view in order to participate to the creation of critical sense.
This said, I post my translation of Michel Vovelle’s review of Wajda’s Danton. I prefer to let him speak and to describe the film, considering I am much more insulting and find it repulsive in all aspects – especially since the watching of that movie made me ill for a week. The only way in which I found that movie good is how it did prove Wajda’s mental trauma caused by Polish communism. Nevertheless, I shall stop here. Because Vovelle is more neutral, where I completely fail to be. He also enlightens us greatly with the summary of the historiographical debates around Danton and Robespierre, as well as why the Enragés and Hébertistes could be ignored in Wajda's film.
Also, forgive my translation: it's very likely far from being perfect but, again, I tried to translate it with some sense, while keeping as close as possible to the original text...
“On Wajda’s Danton: The Revolution Is Not a ‘Madness’”, in Combats pour la Révolution, 1993.
By Michel Vovelle.
The movie that Andrzej Wajda just dedicated to Danton, even if it wasn’t accompanied by an important promotion campaign, could not remain unseen: Danton appears like his hero, monumental.
This is an ample fresco with superb images, often composed as if they were paintings, it is a non precipitated movement, yet powerful. This is a work that calls for your attention and could not leave you indifferent.
It’s as a historian that I will attempt to reflect on this movie, as a historian of the French Revolution: not as an expert to formulate academic or erudite judgement, but rather to attempt to say how I perceived it: I could not perceive it peacefully, for I believe no historian can, since more than one century and a half, speak of Danton’s case without passion. No author, should I say, since for me, like for many others, the starting point of Danton’s posthumous adventure, of his life through common memory, really began in 1835, when a young man aged of twenty-two years old, Georges Büchner, wrote this admirable Mort de Danton which was only played and discovered one century later. Büchner, both a romantic and a revolutionary, first posed the problem through the antagonist couple Danton-Robespierre. This is not to depreciate Andrzej Wajda’s work to say that the best scenes of his film were already found in Büchner.
But during this 19th century of revolutions, it was unavoidable that Danton would be chosen to become the hero of romantic revolutionary historiography. Michelet was fascinated by him, Louis Blanc, more reserved, faced him too. Significantly, the positivist era witnessed the creation of the myth of Danton with Auguste Comte, or with Robinet, the author, in 1865, of a mémoire on the private life of Danton. Then, the Third Republic, the one with the school manuals and the statues in the public places, celebrated the heroes, putting an emphasis, for obvious reasons, on the patriotic figure of the one who proclaimed against the enemies of the Republic: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”
But erudite or university history also contributed and, at the end of the previous century, Alphonse Aulard, first holding the chair of the history of the Revolution at the Sorbonne, became the champion and defender of Danton. Defender because, already then, the tribune’s image was at the centre of a larger polemic, opposing Danton and Robespierre through historian fights. The figure of Robespierre had, also, evolved through the century, though differently. Between the absolute anathemas of all those who saw through him the incarnation of the Terror and of the blood-thirsty Revolution and our tradition, which goes from Buonarotti to the first revolutionary socialists, and then from the thinkers of the socialist and revolutionary movement at the end of the century, Albert Mathiez became, in the first decades of our century, the historian of Robespierre, the way Aulard was Danton’s, opposing an image of the Revolution fostered by socialist thought to the dantonian interpretation, elaborated by Aulard, and used by the radical Republic. Bitter polemic from which I read the pages for the occasion, at least partially, since it rebounds on years and years of articles and clarifications.
Back in the time when the socialist movement interrogated itself on the ways and means to subdue the ancient world through the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre became, in the always traditional frames of history of events, the quivering symbols of two choices. This is how Jaurès perceived the debate in his Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française and, significantly, in 1907, that the French historians of the Revolution regrouped under the Société d’études robespierristes.
The debate, bitterly renewed in the years 1920s by a Russian Revolution – which erected statues to Danton, but baptised one of its battleships Robespierre – continued beyond the circle of scholars: Anatole France or Romain Rolland, the closest writers to revolutionary left, both reflected on it. And this is also in the context of the years 1920s to 1930s that was written the Polish play of Przybyszewska, which gave to Wajda and to his scenario-writer Jean-Claude Carrière the argument of their film.
Some may judge that our digression through history and historiography may have been a little long to understand and to appreciate the work that is proposed to us in 1983. Yet I believe it was essential, especially nowadays, when all basic historical culture, especially on the French Revolution, has disappeared.
Today, Danton will appear, to nearly everyone, as a new hero to discover in his totality. It is to erase the whole stratified heritage that I just mentioned and, to be brief, I will summarise the debates awaiting us in the 1990s through these two complementary, and yet contradictory, images: what does Danton represent today through history and legend? In the eyes of the legend, eroded or simplified by forgetfulness, Danton won the hit-parade of public places, plaques at the corner of streets, as well as in vulgarisation literature. This straightforward and powerful hero with weaknesses, most often ignored, which humanise the figure, was forgotten everything by a republican bourgeoisie who recognised itself in him. On the contrary, Robespierre wasn’t lucky: it is true that a statue was erected to him very lately in Saint-Denis and that only one metro station – in a banlieue which, Andrzej Wajda precises in the presentation of his film, is communist – honours the tribune. I want to believe it was naively that Wajda took his argument from this successful concealment, from this silence too well preserved not to be suspect and, to conclude, that Robespierre was never popular and that is it in the figure of Danton that the people “finds himself”. Doesn’t he know that the bourgeoisie could never forgive Robespierre for being the speaker and the most consequent, the most radical representative of ITS democratic revolution? But not everybody has been mistaken. I participated, some time ago in Nîmes, at a meeting on the Revolution and the image that lives on in this country of strong republican tradition. The republicans of 1848-1849 and those who were imprisoned and deported in 1851 for defending liberty against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had circles and in their clandestine groups, heroes they worshiped. But would you believe it, Andrzej Wajda? It is not “Vive Danton!” that they screamed, but “Vive Robespierre!”…
But it is impossible to hide that, on the level of national legend, the tenacious disgrace of Robespierre in the rank of fetish hero of the political tradition; however, in the domain of history, it is no doubt the opposite that happens. If we go back to the great debates of the beginning of the century, Danton vs. Robespierre, it is Danton who lost, no doubt, and, in my opinion, he lost twice. On the level of erudite history, which is far from being obsolete, the demythification of Danton, the “rotten idol”, in Robespierre’s words, was confirmed in an irrefutable way and it is no longer the case, nowadays, of historians contesting the ambiguous aspects of the character, both a popular leader capable of dazzling intuitions and bold initiatives, and a politician of incontestable duplicity.
Yes, it is true that Danton, almost at the beginning of his career, had, let’s say, negotiated with Mirabeau and the Court, with Dumouriez on the edge of treason, with the factions of Orléans, with England… It is true that he had a big need for money and that he received it, and that he could never justify the use of credits for his ministry: far from being a false file, the report established commonly by Robespierre and by Saint-Just for his trial was, no doubt, short of the truth, since a part of the intuitions and intimate convictions of his prosecutors proved to be later confirmed. We could even add more on the cynicism of the popular tribune towards the crowded people, this “whore” he scorned, or on his fickleness, even cowardice, as with how he let Camille Desmoulins down, in extremis, to save his head would be a less than glorious example. But in fact, yes, why add more? I believe, on the contrary, that we now must, in a less bitter historiography, distribute the good and bad points, try to understand, to put Danton back into the complex group of the dantonistes, emanation of the environments born from the Revolution, greedy of enjoying and profiting from it. A bourgeoisie which cannot be confused with the more structured and established one from which was formed the Gironde. In those environments, which we must keep from judging like the robespierristes did, Danton was not, like Andrzej Wajda wrote, artificially blended with those “economical offenders” for the needs of a fabricated trial: he bathed in it, he was, through the person of his most intimate collaborator, Fabre d’Églantine, totally submerged in it.
As far as I’m concerned, however, it changes nothing to the role he played, many times, in the Revolution.
But if I wish to take my distance from this history that judged and condemned and which was still the one of Albert Mathiez, that is because it is no longer ours. Let’s understand that historiography of the French Revolution took, since then, gigantic steps. Beyond the actors who take the front of the scene, attention was turned to the popular masses, towards those men and women who lived the Revolution: the sans-culottes of Paris, of the towns and of the countryside. They were studied in their recruitment, their ideology and their mentality. Is it necessary to remind the monumental work of the regretted Albert Soboul on Les Sans-culottes parisiens...? This work was started and is still only at its early developments. But we understand how, in this new perception which has for goal to give back the Revolution to the masses who made it, how the problematic of the old days may appear to be obsolete. Wajda’s film starts with the images of Danton’s return from Arcis-sur-Aube, between October and November 1793. The film is set during the four months of winter, at the dawn of spring 1794, and this is for me, and for many others, the crucial era when was played all the drama of this grand democratic revolution. To formulate it fully is to relativise the duel Danton-Robespierre instead of presenting the true goal, for this is the moment when the alliance between the bourgeoisie montagnarde, which animated the Committee of Public Safety and the popular movement of the sans-culottes, an union which permitted the triumph when the Revolution was besieged from all sides, this alliance froze and cracked. “The Revolution is frozen”, would soon say Saint-Just. This happened when the popular movement was brought to heel from fall 1793 to spring 1794, through the trial of the hébertistes, before the one of Danton.
But it is not the leader of this popular movement which was struck in Danton who was, already at this era, the “rotten idol” of which will speak Robespierre. The real leaders were others, they were in the ranks of those individuals, sometimes anonymous, sometimes more known: the “enragés”, the first to be quelled, then the movement channelled by the journalist Hébert, with Le Père Duchesne. Andrzej Wajda doesn’t know those individuals; the 1920s sources on which he based his movie didn’t know them either. It wouldn’t be very dramatic – and it is far from being strict historical nit-picking – to note that the movie confuses the enragés with the hébertistes. But, because of this ignorance, the fundamental problem vanishes, and not only for historians: how did this Revolution freeze? How did the rupture occur, or rather, how could the formidable impulsion of the masses, in need of democracy and liberty, agree with the iron discipline of an assaulted Revolution, acquiring ruthless structures for its own survival?
Don’t make me say that, if I switch Danton’s case in this immense interrogation with some aspects still very actual to the French Revolution, Andrzej Wajda took the wrong subject. It would be very impertinent and I do not have the ambition to rewrite his scenario. No more that I underestimate the importance of the problem which remains, even more fundamental if there is one in this adventure, and which goes beyond the simple connection of the People and the Revolution to the revolutionary violence and its justification. This problem was already perceived by those who opened the way of history in this domain. But I know, on this subject, no other text than Jaurès’ to explain as strongly the fall of the hébertistes and dantonistes factions in the name of the necessities of the revolutionary fight:
“In calm and slow periods of the life of societies, parties who do not answer to present necessities are simply kept away from power. The evicted parties can thus prepare their slow revenge without paralysing the party leading the country. But when a grand revolutionary country fights both against the inner armed factions and against the world, when any hesitation or any fault can compromise for, perhaps, many centuries the destiny of the new order, those who lead this immense project don’t have enough time to rally the dissidents, to convince their opponents. They cannot grant a large place to the spirit of dispute or compromises. They must fight, they must act, and to keep all this action and strength intact, to be sure it doesn’t scatter, they demand the help of Death to bring around them the immediate unanimity they need.”
I read Jaurès’ text again, I understand not only all its strength and penetration, but also all the dangers and all the interrogations, tumultuously reminded to us through our own experiences. I would have liked Andrzej Wajda to meditate on this text. His problematic sends us back to romantic historiography, it belongs to the tradition of Büchner, which is far from a small compliment. But it is a simplified Büchner he brings to us, not popularised, but weakened.
In fact, it is the Revolution itself that is questioned, like a fatality, a madness, some of our historians would say: this Revolution which, like Saturn, ate its children. In this point of view, the temptation was to return, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the inner fight that can be felt all through the film, to a black and white opposition: on one side Danton, or the Revolution with a human face, on the other Robespierre, or the cold-hearted and dehumanised Revolution. And this is what troubles me when I watch this very beautiful film which will be, for thousands of people, the discovery of the French Revolution. I could not like or admire those courageous scenes superbly treated: the scene in David’s studio or the dinner of Danton and Robespierre at the Palais-Royal, or many others. But if the beauty and the creative spirit didn’t succeed at bringing away my embarrassment in front of this shift of History – not strictly on the plain level of the facts, no matter if the last scene is pure fiction – but in a general sense. Danton, the passive hero even in his weaknesses, becomes the incarnation of a muzzled people, the voice of the people progressively vanishing through the movie. We regret Büchner who had known how to represent both cynicism and remorse (in this beautiful nocturnal scene of the play, in which the memory of the September Massacres comes back).
On the contrary, Robespierre was silenced, a worrying and tortured sphinx, we perceive almost only through the games of his looks or his agonic sweating the feelings that shake him from the inside. In this trial of Danton, morphed into Robespierre’s, the latter wasn’t granted the right to speak. Still there, we admire Büchner’s brilliance who, confronted with the same problem, had chosen to let Robespierre pronounce his own speeches.
The Committee of Public Safety was even more mistreated, if it were possible: Saint-Just, the archangel of death in the Jacobin tradition, becomes a worrying and equivocal little guy, while Couthon becomes a hysteric on wheels. Collot, Billaud-Varenne, wine-laden drunks with their bottles… I do not scream at the crime of revolutionary lèse-majesté, but did the needs of dramatisation invoked by Wajda justified such a biased vision?
(Original version, because it’s too funny: Saint-Just, l’archange de la mort dans la tradition jacobine, devient un petit mec inquiétant et équivoque, Couthon un hystérique à roulettes. Collot, Billaud-Varenne, des pochards avinés qui litronent…)
However, there is one character that I miss most of all, the people: reduced to the passive role of spectator, starving and terrorised in queues on the streets. Where are the Jacobins, perceived under the caricatured traits of brutes and policemen? Danton identified himself so much, in his loneliness, to the people, that he pumped all its substance. Reduced to a prison universe, to starvation, to police and to denunciation, this Revolution of Year II is deprived of its heroic dimension and of its soul. We are left on the ambiguity of the final scene, where the author reveals his trouble, wishing to share it with us. At the feet of Robespierre’s bed, now a revolutionary messiah anticipating his own passion, Éléonore Duplay brings in a kid: she put into his mouth, as she treated him harshly, the Declaration of rights, which she makes him recite in a mechanical fashion: the looks of the Incorruptible imperceptibly brighten. We are left on our dismay: is this really the strong emancipation idea of the Grand Revolution that is expressed as the final point of this road of blood and violence? Is this the expression of a successful and despairing normalisation?
Andrzej Wajda wished, and said it in his interviews, that we avoid all transposition with the drama that happens nowadays in his country, even if, during some moments of the film, the parallel is obvious. I will respect this wish, since I believe that such parallels (others will do it, but without care or delicacy or historical spirit) can only be detrimental to both the French Revolution and Poland, this Poland which still searches its way through suffering and on rough roads. This Poland we cannot forget and which we hold dearly to our heart.
But this is because I think of it that it is important for me to tell Andrzej Wajda – no matter if I am considered as an old Jacobin of the old age: no, Andrzey Wajda, the Revolution was not a fatality, a “madness”, or an abyss. The Revolution, we are the ones who must dream it, who must build according to the image of our time, of our country, with our needs of democracy, which must be as immense as the memory of those we invoke.
You invoked the memory of Danton, I wish Robespierre will find, in the years to come, a creator as talented as you. Because, if you allow me to quote, once more, Jaurès:
“I am with him and it is next to him that I will sit at the Jacobins’.”
Je suis avec lui et c'est à côté de lui que je vais m'asseoir aux jacobins.
(November 2 – January 7 1783.)
This said, I post my translation of Michel Vovelle’s review of Wajda’s Danton. I prefer to let him speak and to describe the film, considering I am much more insulting and find it repulsive in all aspects – especially since the watching of that movie made me ill for a week. The only way in which I found that movie good is how it did prove Wajda’s mental trauma caused by Polish communism. Nevertheless, I shall stop here. Because Vovelle is more neutral, where I completely fail to be. He also enlightens us greatly with the summary of the historiographical debates around Danton and Robespierre, as well as why the Enragés and Hébertistes could be ignored in Wajda's film.
Also, forgive my translation: it's very likely far from being perfect but, again, I tried to translate it with some sense, while keeping as close as possible to the original text...
“On Wajda’s Danton: The Revolution Is Not a ‘Madness’”, in Combats pour la Révolution, 1993.
By Michel Vovelle.
The movie that Andrzej Wajda just dedicated to Danton, even if it wasn’t accompanied by an important promotion campaign, could not remain unseen: Danton appears like his hero, monumental.
This is an ample fresco with superb images, often composed as if they were paintings, it is a non precipitated movement, yet powerful. This is a work that calls for your attention and could not leave you indifferent.
It’s as a historian that I will attempt to reflect on this movie, as a historian of the French Revolution: not as an expert to formulate academic or erudite judgement, but rather to attempt to say how I perceived it: I could not perceive it peacefully, for I believe no historian can, since more than one century and a half, speak of Danton’s case without passion. No author, should I say, since for me, like for many others, the starting point of Danton’s posthumous adventure, of his life through common memory, really began in 1835, when a young man aged of twenty-two years old, Georges Büchner, wrote this admirable Mort de Danton which was only played and discovered one century later. Büchner, both a romantic and a revolutionary, first posed the problem through the antagonist couple Danton-Robespierre. This is not to depreciate Andrzej Wajda’s work to say that the best scenes of his film were already found in Büchner.
But during this 19th century of revolutions, it was unavoidable that Danton would be chosen to become the hero of romantic revolutionary historiography. Michelet was fascinated by him, Louis Blanc, more reserved, faced him too. Significantly, the positivist era witnessed the creation of the myth of Danton with Auguste Comte, or with Robinet, the author, in 1865, of a mémoire on the private life of Danton. Then, the Third Republic, the one with the school manuals and the statues in the public places, celebrated the heroes, putting an emphasis, for obvious reasons, on the patriotic figure of the one who proclaimed against the enemies of the Republic: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”
But erudite or university history also contributed and, at the end of the previous century, Alphonse Aulard, first holding the chair of the history of the Revolution at the Sorbonne, became the champion and defender of Danton. Defender because, already then, the tribune’s image was at the centre of a larger polemic, opposing Danton and Robespierre through historian fights. The figure of Robespierre had, also, evolved through the century, though differently. Between the absolute anathemas of all those who saw through him the incarnation of the Terror and of the blood-thirsty Revolution and our tradition, which goes from Buonarotti to the first revolutionary socialists, and then from the thinkers of the socialist and revolutionary movement at the end of the century, Albert Mathiez became, in the first decades of our century, the historian of Robespierre, the way Aulard was Danton’s, opposing an image of the Revolution fostered by socialist thought to the dantonian interpretation, elaborated by Aulard, and used by the radical Republic. Bitter polemic from which I read the pages for the occasion, at least partially, since it rebounds on years and years of articles and clarifications.
Back in the time when the socialist movement interrogated itself on the ways and means to subdue the ancient world through the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre became, in the always traditional frames of history of events, the quivering symbols of two choices. This is how Jaurès perceived the debate in his Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française and, significantly, in 1907, that the French historians of the Revolution regrouped under the Société d’études robespierristes.
The debate, bitterly renewed in the years 1920s by a Russian Revolution – which erected statues to Danton, but baptised one of its battleships Robespierre – continued beyond the circle of scholars: Anatole France or Romain Rolland, the closest writers to revolutionary left, both reflected on it. And this is also in the context of the years 1920s to 1930s that was written the Polish play of Przybyszewska, which gave to Wajda and to his scenario-writer Jean-Claude Carrière the argument of their film.
Some may judge that our digression through history and historiography may have been a little long to understand and to appreciate the work that is proposed to us in 1983. Yet I believe it was essential, especially nowadays, when all basic historical culture, especially on the French Revolution, has disappeared.
Today, Danton will appear, to nearly everyone, as a new hero to discover in his totality. It is to erase the whole stratified heritage that I just mentioned and, to be brief, I will summarise the debates awaiting us in the 1990s through these two complementary, and yet contradictory, images: what does Danton represent today through history and legend? In the eyes of the legend, eroded or simplified by forgetfulness, Danton won the hit-parade of public places, plaques at the corner of streets, as well as in vulgarisation literature. This straightforward and powerful hero with weaknesses, most often ignored, which humanise the figure, was forgotten everything by a republican bourgeoisie who recognised itself in him. On the contrary, Robespierre wasn’t lucky: it is true that a statue was erected to him very lately in Saint-Denis and that only one metro station – in a banlieue which, Andrzej Wajda precises in the presentation of his film, is communist – honours the tribune. I want to believe it was naively that Wajda took his argument from this successful concealment, from this silence too well preserved not to be suspect and, to conclude, that Robespierre was never popular and that is it in the figure of Danton that the people “finds himself”. Doesn’t he know that the bourgeoisie could never forgive Robespierre for being the speaker and the most consequent, the most radical representative of ITS democratic revolution? But not everybody has been mistaken. I participated, some time ago in Nîmes, at a meeting on the Revolution and the image that lives on in this country of strong republican tradition. The republicans of 1848-1849 and those who were imprisoned and deported in 1851 for defending liberty against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had circles and in their clandestine groups, heroes they worshiped. But would you believe it, Andrzej Wajda? It is not “Vive Danton!” that they screamed, but “Vive Robespierre!”…
But it is impossible to hide that, on the level of national legend, the tenacious disgrace of Robespierre in the rank of fetish hero of the political tradition; however, in the domain of history, it is no doubt the opposite that happens. If we go back to the great debates of the beginning of the century, Danton vs. Robespierre, it is Danton who lost, no doubt, and, in my opinion, he lost twice. On the level of erudite history, which is far from being obsolete, the demythification of Danton, the “rotten idol”, in Robespierre’s words, was confirmed in an irrefutable way and it is no longer the case, nowadays, of historians contesting the ambiguous aspects of the character, both a popular leader capable of dazzling intuitions and bold initiatives, and a politician of incontestable duplicity.
Yes, it is true that Danton, almost at the beginning of his career, had, let’s say, negotiated with Mirabeau and the Court, with Dumouriez on the edge of treason, with the factions of Orléans, with England… It is true that he had a big need for money and that he received it, and that he could never justify the use of credits for his ministry: far from being a false file, the report established commonly by Robespierre and by Saint-Just for his trial was, no doubt, short of the truth, since a part of the intuitions and intimate convictions of his prosecutors proved to be later confirmed. We could even add more on the cynicism of the popular tribune towards the crowded people, this “whore” he scorned, or on his fickleness, even cowardice, as with how he let Camille Desmoulins down, in extremis, to save his head would be a less than glorious example. But in fact, yes, why add more? I believe, on the contrary, that we now must, in a less bitter historiography, distribute the good and bad points, try to understand, to put Danton back into the complex group of the dantonistes, emanation of the environments born from the Revolution, greedy of enjoying and profiting from it. A bourgeoisie which cannot be confused with the more structured and established one from which was formed the Gironde. In those environments, which we must keep from judging like the robespierristes did, Danton was not, like Andrzej Wajda wrote, artificially blended with those “economical offenders” for the needs of a fabricated trial: he bathed in it, he was, through the person of his most intimate collaborator, Fabre d’Églantine, totally submerged in it.
As far as I’m concerned, however, it changes nothing to the role he played, many times, in the Revolution.
But if I wish to take my distance from this history that judged and condemned and which was still the one of Albert Mathiez, that is because it is no longer ours. Let’s understand that historiography of the French Revolution took, since then, gigantic steps. Beyond the actors who take the front of the scene, attention was turned to the popular masses, towards those men and women who lived the Revolution: the sans-culottes of Paris, of the towns and of the countryside. They were studied in their recruitment, their ideology and their mentality. Is it necessary to remind the monumental work of the regretted Albert Soboul on Les Sans-culottes parisiens...? This work was started and is still only at its early developments. But we understand how, in this new perception which has for goal to give back the Revolution to the masses who made it, how the problematic of the old days may appear to be obsolete. Wajda’s film starts with the images of Danton’s return from Arcis-sur-Aube, between October and November 1793. The film is set during the four months of winter, at the dawn of spring 1794, and this is for me, and for many others, the crucial era when was played all the drama of this grand democratic revolution. To formulate it fully is to relativise the duel Danton-Robespierre instead of presenting the true goal, for this is the moment when the alliance between the bourgeoisie montagnarde, which animated the Committee of Public Safety and the popular movement of the sans-culottes, an union which permitted the triumph when the Revolution was besieged from all sides, this alliance froze and cracked. “The Revolution is frozen”, would soon say Saint-Just. This happened when the popular movement was brought to heel from fall 1793 to spring 1794, through the trial of the hébertistes, before the one of Danton.
But it is not the leader of this popular movement which was struck in Danton who was, already at this era, the “rotten idol” of which will speak Robespierre. The real leaders were others, they were in the ranks of those individuals, sometimes anonymous, sometimes more known: the “enragés”, the first to be quelled, then the movement channelled by the journalist Hébert, with Le Père Duchesne. Andrzej Wajda doesn’t know those individuals; the 1920s sources on which he based his movie didn’t know them either. It wouldn’t be very dramatic – and it is far from being strict historical nit-picking – to note that the movie confuses the enragés with the hébertistes. But, because of this ignorance, the fundamental problem vanishes, and not only for historians: how did this Revolution freeze? How did the rupture occur, or rather, how could the formidable impulsion of the masses, in need of democracy and liberty, agree with the iron discipline of an assaulted Revolution, acquiring ruthless structures for its own survival?
Don’t make me say that, if I switch Danton’s case in this immense interrogation with some aspects still very actual to the French Revolution, Andrzej Wajda took the wrong subject. It would be very impertinent and I do not have the ambition to rewrite his scenario. No more that I underestimate the importance of the problem which remains, even more fundamental if there is one in this adventure, and which goes beyond the simple connection of the People and the Revolution to the revolutionary violence and its justification. This problem was already perceived by those who opened the way of history in this domain. But I know, on this subject, no other text than Jaurès’ to explain as strongly the fall of the hébertistes and dantonistes factions in the name of the necessities of the revolutionary fight:
“In calm and slow periods of the life of societies, parties who do not answer to present necessities are simply kept away from power. The evicted parties can thus prepare their slow revenge without paralysing the party leading the country. But when a grand revolutionary country fights both against the inner armed factions and against the world, when any hesitation or any fault can compromise for, perhaps, many centuries the destiny of the new order, those who lead this immense project don’t have enough time to rally the dissidents, to convince their opponents. They cannot grant a large place to the spirit of dispute or compromises. They must fight, they must act, and to keep all this action and strength intact, to be sure it doesn’t scatter, they demand the help of Death to bring around them the immediate unanimity they need.”
I read Jaurès’ text again, I understand not only all its strength and penetration, but also all the dangers and all the interrogations, tumultuously reminded to us through our own experiences. I would have liked Andrzej Wajda to meditate on this text. His problematic sends us back to romantic historiography, it belongs to the tradition of Büchner, which is far from a small compliment. But it is a simplified Büchner he brings to us, not popularised, but weakened.
In fact, it is the Revolution itself that is questioned, like a fatality, a madness, some of our historians would say: this Revolution which, like Saturn, ate its children. In this point of view, the temptation was to return, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the inner fight that can be felt all through the film, to a black and white opposition: on one side Danton, or the Revolution with a human face, on the other Robespierre, or the cold-hearted and dehumanised Revolution. And this is what troubles me when I watch this very beautiful film which will be, for thousands of people, the discovery of the French Revolution. I could not like or admire those courageous scenes superbly treated: the scene in David’s studio or the dinner of Danton and Robespierre at the Palais-Royal, or many others. But if the beauty and the creative spirit didn’t succeed at bringing away my embarrassment in front of this shift of History – not strictly on the plain level of the facts, no matter if the last scene is pure fiction – but in a general sense. Danton, the passive hero even in his weaknesses, becomes the incarnation of a muzzled people, the voice of the people progressively vanishing through the movie. We regret Büchner who had known how to represent both cynicism and remorse (in this beautiful nocturnal scene of the play, in which the memory of the September Massacres comes back).
On the contrary, Robespierre was silenced, a worrying and tortured sphinx, we perceive almost only through the games of his looks or his agonic sweating the feelings that shake him from the inside. In this trial of Danton, morphed into Robespierre’s, the latter wasn’t granted the right to speak. Still there, we admire Büchner’s brilliance who, confronted with the same problem, had chosen to let Robespierre pronounce his own speeches.
The Committee of Public Safety was even more mistreated, if it were possible: Saint-Just, the archangel of death in the Jacobin tradition, becomes a worrying and equivocal little guy, while Couthon becomes a hysteric on wheels. Collot, Billaud-Varenne, wine-laden drunks with their bottles… I do not scream at the crime of revolutionary lèse-majesté, but did the needs of dramatisation invoked by Wajda justified such a biased vision?
(Original version, because it’s too funny: Saint-Just, l’archange de la mort dans la tradition jacobine, devient un petit mec inquiétant et équivoque, Couthon un hystérique à roulettes. Collot, Billaud-Varenne, des pochards avinés qui litronent…)
However, there is one character that I miss most of all, the people: reduced to the passive role of spectator, starving and terrorised in queues on the streets. Where are the Jacobins, perceived under the caricatured traits of brutes and policemen? Danton identified himself so much, in his loneliness, to the people, that he pumped all its substance. Reduced to a prison universe, to starvation, to police and to denunciation, this Revolution of Year II is deprived of its heroic dimension and of its soul. We are left on the ambiguity of the final scene, where the author reveals his trouble, wishing to share it with us. At the feet of Robespierre’s bed, now a revolutionary messiah anticipating his own passion, Éléonore Duplay brings in a kid: she put into his mouth, as she treated him harshly, the Declaration of rights, which she makes him recite in a mechanical fashion: the looks of the Incorruptible imperceptibly brighten. We are left on our dismay: is this really the strong emancipation idea of the Grand Revolution that is expressed as the final point of this road of blood and violence? Is this the expression of a successful and despairing normalisation?
Andrzej Wajda wished, and said it in his interviews, that we avoid all transposition with the drama that happens nowadays in his country, even if, during some moments of the film, the parallel is obvious. I will respect this wish, since I believe that such parallels (others will do it, but without care or delicacy or historical spirit) can only be detrimental to both the French Revolution and Poland, this Poland which still searches its way through suffering and on rough roads. This Poland we cannot forget and which we hold dearly to our heart.
But this is because I think of it that it is important for me to tell Andrzej Wajda – no matter if I am considered as an old Jacobin of the old age: no, Andrzey Wajda, the Revolution was not a fatality, a “madness”, or an abyss. The Revolution, we are the ones who must dream it, who must build according to the image of our time, of our country, with our needs of democracy, which must be as immense as the memory of those we invoke.
You invoked the memory of Danton, I wish Robespierre will find, in the years to come, a creator as talented as you. Because, if you allow me to quote, once more, Jaurès:
“I am with him and it is next to him that I will sit at the Jacobins’.”
Je suis avec lui et c'est à côté de lui que je vais m'asseoir aux jacobins.
(November 2 – January 7 1783.)
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2) Thank you so much Vovelle! I REALLY don't know the appeal of Danton - he's scum! He's always out for himself and he was so wishy washy! I hate how totally undevoted he was, it was disgusting! Thank you so much Vovelle!
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P.S. Vovelle is awesome.
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<3 agreed!
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(Quite sweet homework, really. :P)
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(Isn't it, eh?)