France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who
now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take
their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination,
as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to
repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to
take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in
France since 1789. [18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the
real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate
courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a
successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be
paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons
suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of
September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by
gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not
disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of
the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and
by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the
multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the
patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin,
the war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war
against a privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust
advantages that they had not been able to maintain, a war against the
foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own
government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so
rooted in the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it.
Every soldier who joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own
free will. No conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier. Men left
their homes in order that the fruit of the poor man's labour should be his
own, in order that the children of France should inherit some better
birthright than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of