While Napoleon's ragged army was beginning its ghost-like march through the Alps, the political landscape of Paris was fracturing under the pressure of its own internal war. Antoine Barnave's brilliant, risky satire campaign had worked too well. The ridicule heaped upon the Committee of Purification had done more than just create a public relations problem for Robespierre; it had emboldened his great rival. Georges Danton, the charismatic titan of the early revolution, the man of the people, had seen the laughter in the salons and the smirks in the Assembly as a sign that Robespierre's icy grip on the revolution's soul was beginning to thaw.
Emboldened, Danton had escalated his challenge from a single joke into a full-blown political rebellion. He had become the rallying point for all the Jacobins who were growing weary of Robespierre's spartan, inquisitorial regime. He gathered around him the indulgents, the men who believed the revolution had gone far enough, the men who had grown rich from the upheaval and now wished to enjoy the fruits of their victory. Men like the brilliant, mercurial journalist Camille Desmoulins, who had once been Robespierre's closest friend and was now horrified by the path he was taking. The Jacobin Club, once a monolithic force, was now split into two warring factions: the fanatical, puritanical Robespierrists, and the corrupt, pragmatic, but still powerfully influential Dantonists.
Robespierre, watching this challenge to his authority grow daily, knew he had to act. He understood that Danton represented an existential threat to his vision of a Republic of Virtue. He could not attack Danton on the grounds of impurity, for Danton practically reveled in his own appetites and vices, wearing his corruption like a badge of honor. He needed a different weapon, a sharper one. He needed to prove not that Danton was impure, but that he was a traitor.
He unleashed his most terrifying weapon: the full, combined power of the Committee of Public Surveillance and the Committee of Public Safety. He tasked them with a single, secret, and urgent mission: to conduct an exhaustive investigation into the source of Georges Danton's immense and largely unexplained wealth. For weeks, Robespierre's agents worked in the shadows, digging through financial records, interrogating disgraced financiers, and turning disillusioned former allies of Danton into informants.
They unearthed a cesspool. They found a clear trail of backroom deals, of bribes taken from military contractors—some of the very men Carnot was now arresting. They found evidence of secret payments from foreign agents seeking to influence the course of the war. They found proof that Danton had speculated on the currency, profiting from the very instability he claimed to be fighting.
The climax came on a cold, tense night at the Jacobin Club. The room was packed, the air thick with anticipation. Everyone knew this was to be the final confrontation. Danton was there, surrounded by his allies, his expression one of defiant confidence, certain that his populist charisma and his legendary status as the "man of August 10th" made him untouchable.
Robespierre took the stage. He was not the fiery orator that Danton was. He did not shout. He spoke in a cold, precise, almost reptilian whisper, a voice filled with a chilling, sorrowful rage that was far more terrifying than any bellowing. He did not speak of rumors or accusations. He presented evidence.
"Citizens," he began, his voice barely audible, yet every ear strained to hear. "For months, we have been told that there are two paths for the revolution. The path of virtue, and the path of… indulgence. We have been told that to be a good patriot, one does not need to be a good man. Tonight, I will show you the end of that path. I will show you where the path of indulgence leads."
For the next hour, he laid out the case against Danton, piece by damning piece. He was not a politician giving a speech; he was a prosecutor delivering his final summation. He produced copies of letters, facsimiles of bank ledgers, and signed witness testimonies. He read them aloud, his voice a relentless, monotonous drone, each fact another nail in Danton's political coffin.
He painted a portrait not of a jovial, life-loving revolutionary, but of a cynical, grasping traitor who had grown rich on the blood of patriots. He was, Robespierre hissed, a man who would sell the revolution to the highest bidder, a festering abscess of corruption at the very heart of the Republic.
Danton, for the first time in his life, was caught completely off guard. He sat listening, his confident smirk slowly dissolving into a look of stunned disbelief. The evidence was too specific, too detailed, too damning. When Robespierre finished, Danton leaped to his feet, trying to respond, trying to summon his famous leonine roar and his populist charm. He tried to laugh it all off as a conspiracy of "blood-drinking puritans."
But his voice, for the first time, seemed to lack its usual thunder. The mood in the room, which just a week ago had been leaning in his favor, had turned against him with shocking speed. The very men who had laughed at his jokes and cheered his defiance now stared at him with cold suspicion and a dawning fear. In a revolution that had come to worship the abstract ideal of Virtue, the accusation of personal corruption was the ultimate, unforgivable sin.
Robespierre, sensing his absolute victory, moved in for the kill. He did not call for Danton's immediate arrest. He was more methodical than that. He demanded that the club vote, here and now, to form a special committee to draft formal articles of impeachment against Citizen Danton and his key allies—Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d'Églantine, Hérault de Séchelles—to be presented to the National Convention for trial.
The vote was taken. It was not even close. The Dantonist faction, which had seemed so powerful just days before, was crushed, its members abstaining or even voting with the majority in a desperate attempt to save themselves.
Danton, the titan of the early revolution, the roaring voice of the people, the man who had overthrown the monarchy, sat down heavily, his face the color of ash. He stared into space in stunned silence as his own club, the source of all his power, voted for his political, and inevitable, destruction. He was a dead man walking.
Antoine Barnave, watching from the shadowy public gallery, felt a wave of icy terror wash over him. He had wanted to weaken Robespierre, and he had instead provoked him into devouring his only serious rival. The last check on Robespierre's absolute power within the radical movement was gone.
He slipped out of the hall and hurried back to his safe house. He immediately penned an urgent, coded message for the King. It contained the stunning news of Danton's fall from grace. But it also contained a new, terrifying, and tantalizing proposition, a last-ditch gamble from a dying faction.
"The Dantonists are broken but not yet arrested," he wrote, his quill scratching furiously. "They are desperate. They know Robespierre will show no mercy. I have just been approached by an intermediary, a friend of Desmoulins. Danton is willing to do anything to survive. For a price—a royal guarantee of amnesty and a significant sum of money to facilitate his escape—he is willing to do the unthinkable. He will use his remaining, considerable influence in the Cordeliers Club and with the commanders of the Paris Commune to launch a coup… not against the Assembly, but against Robespierre and his committees. He will unleash the streets against the Incorruptible."
Barnave paused, the sheer audacity of the idea taking his breath away. "We have a chance, Your Majesty. A chance to eliminate one of our great enemies by temporarily allying with the other. A chance to let the jackals devour each other. The risks are immense, the outcome uncertain. Awaiting Your Majesty's command."
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