The King's reply was a single, whispered word, carried on a slip of paper through the dark, nervous streets of Paris. It was delivered not to Danton himself, but to one of his trusted lieutenants in a smoky backroom of a tavern near the Cordeliers Club. The word was "Oui."
Yes.
It was the striking of a match in a powder magazine. The die was cast. Talleyrand, moving with a speed that belied his limp, immediately set the financial machinery in motion. Within hours, a massive sum in gold louis d'or, drawn from the King's secret fund, was delivered in heavy sacks to Danton's pragmatic and deeply corrupt inner circle. The money was the fuel for the inferno to come; Danton's charisma was to be the spark.
The perspective shifts from the quiet, tense opulence of the palace to the raw, seething energy of the Cordeliers Club, Danton's personal power base. This was not the cold, intellectual Jacobin Club of Robespierre; this was a place of roaring passions, of spilled wine and bold proclamations. Danton, a man who just yesterday believed his life was over, was reborn, infused with the King's gold and the intoxicating elixir of a second chance. He took the podium, and it felt as if a primal force of nature had been unleashed upon the room.
He delivered the speech of his life, a masterpiece of populist rage, brilliant self-preservation, and calculated incitement. He did not speak of the King. He did not mention the gold. He spoke to the men in the room—the section leaders, the gang bosses, the hard-faced butchers and brewers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—in the only language they truly understood: survival.
"Citizens! Patriots!" he roared, his voice a thunderclap that shook the rafters. "For months we have been told to be virtuous! To be pure! To be quiet! And while we have been quiet, a tyrant has risen in our midst! A tyrant of virtue! A bloodless, sexless, soulless fanatic who despises you! He despises your wine, he despises your women, he despises your laughter! Robespierre and his committee of spies want to turn France into a monastery, a silent tomb ruled by his icy gaze! I want to keep it a tavern, alive with the sound of freedom!"
A roar of approval went up from the crowd. He had them.
"He has condemned me!" Danton bellowed, pointing a thick finger at his own chest. "And why? For being a man! For loving life! And I tell you now, when he is done with me, he is coming for you! He will come for any man who laughs too loud, who loves his wife too much, who enjoys a good bottle of Burgundy! His Republic of Virtue is a republic of death! We must strike first! We must cleanse the revolution of its own inquisitors! Tonight, we remind them that the heart of the revolution beats not in their committees, but here, in the streets of Paris! Are you with me?"
The room exploded. He had not called them to a political action; he had called them to a gang war. He unleashed them upon the city.
That night, Paris exploded. This was not a popular uprising like the storming of the Bastille, born of a shared, universal grievance. This was something far uglier, more intimate and brutal. It was a factional civil war, fought street by street, house by house.
The narrative cross-cuts, a dizzying collage of localized, savage violence.
In the Marais district, a squad of Danton's men, their faces flushed with cheap brandy and revolutionary fervor, march through the narrow, winding streets. They are led by a giant of a man, a brewer from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Santerre, a close ally of Danton. Their target is a small, unassuming print shop, the press known to produce one of Robespierre's most influential newspapers. They smash down the door with axes. The printers, a handful of pale, thin men in ink-stained aprons, try to defend their press. The fight is brutal, short, and hideously one-sided, a chaotic melee of swinging pikes and cracking skulls in the flickering torchlight. The great machine of propaganda is silenced with crowbars and hammers, its delicate metal type scattered across the bloody floor.
On the Île de la Cité, a member of the Committee of Public Surveillance, a lawyer named Coffinhall who had been one of Danton's chief accusers, is dragged from his elegant home. His wife's screams are drowned out by the roar of the mob. He protests, his voice shrill with terror, screaming about "the law" and "the sanctity of the Republic." The crowd laughs. They are the law tonight. He is beaten senseless on the cobblestones of his own street and left for dead.
The most dramatic confrontation takes place at the Jacobin Club itself. The nightly session is underway, a quiet, orderly affair where a Robespierrist deputy is delivering a monotonous lecture on Roman virtue. Suddenly, the great doors are thrown open. A mob of Danton's armed supporters, men from the Cordeliers and the Paris sections, burst into the hall. They are not here to debate.
A massive, chaotic brawl erupts. The disciplined, puritanical atmosphere of Robespierre's club is shattered by raw, visceral violence. Men who hours before had been calling each other "citizen-brother" are now trying to kill each other. Chairs are broken over heads, knives are drawn, and a pistol shot rings out, shattering a plaster bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that overlooked the podium. The Jacobin church has become a charnel house.
The National Guard, the supposed guardians of order in the city, is largely paralyzed. Their commander, Lafayette, is with the King in the north. His deputies in Paris are receiving frantic, contradictory orders. Some Guard battalions, drawn from the more radical sections, are joining the Dantonist mobs. Others, loyal to the idea of order, set up defensive barricades around the National Assembly and the city hall, but do little to intervene in the factional fighting. Paris is being allowed to bleed.
The main target of the night, the final objective of Danton's desperate gamble, is Robespierre himself. As the chaos spreads, a large, heavily armed mob, personally led by the brewer Santerre, breaks off from the main fighting and marches with grim purpose toward the Rue Saint-Honoré. Their destination is the modest home of the cabinetmaker Maurice Duplay, the house where Robespierre lived a simple, ascetic life as a lodger. They are chanting a single, rhythmic phrase: "À bas l'Incorruptible! Mort au tyran!" Down with the Incorruptible! Death to the tyrant!
Inside the Duplay house, there is no panic. Robespierre, who had been alerted to the night's violence, is awake and dressed. He stands at the window of his small, second-floor room, looking down at the sea of torch-lit, hate-filled faces. His own face is a mask of cold, serene, and absolute contempt. There is no fear in him, only a chilling, intellectual resolve. He is surrounded by a small, fanatically loyal group of his own followers, young men like his devoted disciple Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, all armed with pistols and a willingness to die for their master.
The scene ends as the Dantonist mob, with a great roar, uses a heavy beam as a battering ram to smash down the front door of the house. Splintering wood gives way to a dark, narrow hallway. The first of Danton's men surge inside. From the top of the stairs, a pistol flashes, and the man at the front of the mob crumples to the floor. The battle for the soul of the Jacobin revolution has come to Robespierre's own doorstep.
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