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Author : Belloc Joseph Hilaire Pierre René
Title : Danton a study
Year : 1911

Link download : Belloc_Hilaire_-_Danton_a_study.zip

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 is 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 imtruths, is an example. ...