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Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

DANTON'S DEATH

          In Danton's Death, Buechner presents the events more or less as they actually unfolded in the reports and histories of the French Revolution, with hardly any other connectedness between them than their chronological sequence.   Of course, Robespierre and his allies cause the death of Danton and his allies, but the play is not interested in analyzing, making coherent, understanding, the process of this causation.   There are confrontations (e.g. the superb one between Danton and Robespierre).   And the action can be said to hinge on them: but the play is not shaped around them but, instead, focuses on the reactions to the events by Danton and his circle.   The confrontations occur, they have their consequences, but then the dramatic focus shifts: to Danton's vacillating, to the unrelated episode of the crowd in the street, to other scenes of vacillation, to Danton with Julie. This focusses our attention on the effects of historical circumstances rather than their causes .   It is curious that the Marxist Brecht should do the same, for Marxism has a Schillerian belief in dialectic evolution.    Brecht's Galileo has much the same structure as Danton's Death.   The effect is to create a panoramic dispersion of attention instead of focus on a dramatic center.

       The year before Buechner published Danton's Death he published a revolutionary pamphlet The Hessian Courier (1834) calling on the poor, the peasants and working class to rise up against their corrupt masters, the government and nobility - men like Danton himself.   The pamphlet proclaims "Freedom for the huts!   War on the palaces!" and then goes on to an almost Marxian analysis of the economics of injustice in Buechner's the Duchy of Hesse where "whoever speaks the truth will be hanged."   Buechner himself was hounded by the police.   The pamphlet reminds the peasants how, in 1789, the people of France rose up "and crushed the trairors and destroyed the mercenaries of the king..." and so on.

          The pamphlet, then, is an unequivocal call for revolution and sees the French Revolution as a glorious model to be followed.   So the usual practice of directors (and editors of the play)to identify with the hedonistic Danton and make him the sympathetic hero of the play must be wrong .   Danton is one of the 'traitors' Buechner attacks.    Buechner presents Danton as human and believable, but he betrays the revolution and the people as much as do Robespierre and St. Just - perhaps more so.   His world-weariness, his whoring (taking advantage of starving working class girls) is as heinous as the cold fanaticism of his opponents.

          This seems even more true when we realize than the fanatic Robsepierre and the hedonistic Danton re-appear in Woyzeck as Woyzeck's tormentors:   Robespierre the cold social engineer re-apperas as the Doctor, the cold experimenter; and Danton, the hedonist becomes the Captain.  The Doctor and the Captain are caricatures of their counterparts in Danton's Death    In a letter answering objections to his method in Danton's Death, Buechner told his parents "I can't make Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into virtuous heroes!   To show their dissoluteness, I had to let them be dissolute, to show their godlessness I had to let them speak like atheists.....As far as the so-called idealistic poets are concerned, I find they have produced hardly anything besides marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected pathos, but not human beings of flesh and blood, whose sorrow and joy I share and whose actions fill me with loathing or admiration.   In a word, I think much of Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little of Schiller."

      Danton and his friends are “bandits of the revolution”, but they also part of our humanity - as are Robespierre and St. Just. Danton's repugnance, in this play, at the blood-letting, is, to us, the 'sympathetic'   attitude.   However,, Buechner's accusations in the Hessian Courier are similar to Robespierre's complaints against Danton.   In Woyzeck the Doctor, like Robespierre, is a fanatic determined to effect change upon humanity, here represented by Woyzeck.   Like Danton, the Captain is narcissistically sentimental about his own situation and indifferent to the suffering he is causing by his taunts to Woyzeck about Marie's infidelities.   Who, in Danton's Death corresponds to Woyzeck?   It is, I think, the poor and starving working class of Paris, especially the tragi-comic Simon and his wife who seem a preview of Woyzeck and Marie.

         Buechner was a radical, the author who called upon the masses to rise against their oppressors. This was the year before he completed Danton's Death and the two texts correspond closely.     This would warn us not to think Buechner endorsed Danton's frivolous misuse of the Revolution or his inability to rouse himself sufficiently to save himself and his companions.   Danton's is the more 'sympathetic' consciousness in the play, but it is not the representative one.  The people of Paris are caught between Danton's irresponsible hedonism and Robespierre's fanaticism just as Woyzeck is caught between Captain's self-pitying indifference and the lunatic scientific experiments of the Doctor.   If Robespierre and St. Just and the Assembly pose as Romans, Danton and his circle pose as Greeks - which is just as much an evasion of the realities of modern life.   Danton's world-weary cynicism is a form of posing and play-acting too.   He is living off his past fame as a revolutionary hero and popular orator.  

        The most effective speech in the whole play is an almost convincing justification of revolutionary fanaticism:  St. Just on the mercifulness of the Revolution when contrasted with nature.  This is a transcript of the actual speech and it is brilliant and terrifying.  Though it is chilling in its logic, Buechner, as a scientist, as well as revolutionary probably felt that St. Just was correct:   Economic injustice, like Nature, kills more and causes more suffering than the Terror.   Long after Buechner's death France was to create a hundred times as much bloodshed and massacre in in the days of the Commune as in the years of the Revolutionary Terror: this was the massacre of the Communards in 1871.   But the Communards were working class victims and their killers were the bourgeoosie and so they have not received anything like the attention of the aristocratic victims of the Terror.

          In the list of modern atrocities the Terror is insignificant compared with the over 70 million dead during the two world wars.   Karl Marx who observed the massacre of the Communards produced a theory of history in which, to overcome the colossal violence of capitalism, a class war would be necessary which also would be violent.   Buechner, the writer of The Hessian Courier knew that he was calling for bloodshed. Yet, when he sets out the opposing factions who between them let the Revolution slip between their fingers Buechner does not moralize but remains, I think, impartial .   Productions of the play tend to get us to side with Danton against Robespierre, but this might not have been Buechner's judgment. 

.   Danton's Death takes up the subject of the French Revolution at the point when it is self-destructing: when what seemed the most meaningful event in human history is running out of meaning.   The revolution is collapsing form the division between the cold fanatics, Robespierre and St. Just on one side; and the cynical, hedonistic Danton and his friends on the other.   Both sides betray the people, the starving masses.   In a series of disjointed scenes we watch Danton and his friends moving closer and closer to the guillotine.   The play ends with Danton's beheading.   Soon after, Robespierre and St. Just were to end on the guillotine.

          The theme of the play is of revolutionaries who thought they were making history and steering its course instead drifting helplessly to destruction.   If the Revolution has no meaning, then history itelf has no meaning.   Buechner intensely disliked Schiller's historical dramas, believing Schiller's people were not really human, and their way of representing huge ideological forces was, to Buechner, a falsification of humanity and of history.

BUECHNER AND EPISODIC DRAMA.  

          The model for this kind of dramatic writing was the Stürm und Drang school of Lenz, Klinger and the early Schiller.   In plays like The Soldiers and The Tutor (adapted by Brecht) the action is a series of brief and scattered episodes, passionate, comic, violent.   Lenz represented an alternative for modern drama of episodic, non-linear drama that Buechner adopted and Wedeknd and Brecht took up in the next century. In Danton‘s Death, not only St. Just's powerful speech, but also some of the speeches before the Jacobin Club and the Assembly are transcripts of actual speeches.   (Buechner borrowed from many sources - again like Brecht - as a deliberate method.   Leonce and Lena is made up of innumerable 'quotations' from many other authors.)

          In the play Robespierre, St. Just and the Assembly find themselves ranged against Danton and his companions to seize hold of the dynamics of the French Revolution.    The play, I think, leans more to Danton's view that "we didn't create the Revolution: it created us."and that its dynamics cannot be controlled and are destroying them, like Saturn devouring his own children.   This opposes Friedrich Schiller's Idealist belief that individuals like Don Carlos, Elizabeth or the Marquis of Posa, can shape history in the real world.

Examples of the episodic narrative of the play:  

ACT I

Scene 1.

      The hedonistic circle that has given up on the revolution - "a gaming room with ladies".

The mood is of supercilious boredom expessing detestation of Robespierre's moralism (Camille).   Yet these cynical, world-weary speeches with their ineffectual malice towards Robespierre and his followers are not impressive.   They reveal an inability to return to the cause of the Revolution or to any sense of moral indignation at the suffering of the people.   Robespierre had destroyed the communist Hébertists in the Assembly, and both his and Danton's circle are part of the middle-class's sharing of the spoils of the revolution.   What separates them is not Justice vs. Injustice, but Virtue vs. Hedonism.   The 'people' for Danton is a convenient source of prostitutes.   Buechner does not moralize, but he 'presents' his case.  Buechner's very assured new prose style searching out the expression of a cynicism he did not share.

Scene 2,   The street, and the people disregarded by both Danton and Robespierre who each has a totally opposite 'agenda'.

In a parody of classical models, Simon and   his wife enter.    Simon act out a Roman tragedy of offended virtue e.g. Virginia and Virginius).   He parodies the virtuous stance of Robespierre whereas his wife shares the practical humanity of Danton's circle. The crowd's rage against the aristocrats closely echoes Buechner's words in The Hessian Messenger.

  Enter Robespierre, the incorruptible.   This is a scene of the comic-violent anarchy that Robespierre and St. Just will bring to order.

          The crowd is shown as being not a 'mob', but varied, violent, humorous, tolerant, suffering.   Like Woyzeck and Marie they are the center of the play's sympathy.   And their fate is to be tossed between Danton's languid epicureanism (a return to the aristocracy the revolution is supposed to have displaced) and Robespierre's virtuous fanaticism.   Danton wants to use the people for his sensual appetites, Robespierre for his idealist agenda.

Scene 3. p. 66.   The Jacobin Club.

The opposite of Scene 1.   No longer a cynical and hedonistic classicism, but a rhetorical one as the deputies dramatize themselves as virtuous Romans.    However, we notice that Robespierre's attack on Danton is true: (68)   Robespierre's rhetoric might have lost sight of human reality (it is a form of the Schillerian idealism that Buechner detested) but it is no more disastrous than Danton's attitude.   Buechner does not   give the obvious advantage to either side.

Scene 4. A street.

Lacroix, Legendre , Danton's followers: Danton hunts out the girls of the street to assemble them, limb by limb, in imagination, into the Venus de Medici.(70)   Lacroix is 'witty' but the speech is, I think, Buechner's indictement of Danton and his circle.   Again the tone is of irresponsible cynical weariness.   This tone is continued in the next scene

Scene 5.    A room (the courtesan's.   Danton/Marion

          Danton completely fails to respond to Marion's long self -revelation, seeing in her only an object, a 'beauty' over which he can rhapsodize.   He only   regrets he cannot totally absorb her, as if she were a delectable morsel. As often, he is aware only of his inability to really find in the flesh any form of genuine contact with another human being.   Is Buechner suggesting this condition of isolation is the direct result, or the cause, of his betrayal of the people - of whom Marion is one?

      When his follower Lacroix enters with two prostitutes, the language, in which Danton joins, changes to that of a   coarse and cynical humor about the women which undercuts the existential sorrow of the earlier speech.   The jokes against the prostitutes, who are the poor that Danton and his friends have betrayed, reveal the dismissive class (and gender) attitudes towards 'inferiors' that the previous aristocracy would have felt.   These details by Buechner reveal the decadence and culpability of the Danton camp even while seeing it as less inhuman than the attitudes of Robespierre and St.Just.   See Lacroix's confession.

Scene 6.   Robespierre and Danton

          It is a confrontation, but not an ideological one.   Danton insists each is equally as self-serving, each just as ‘epicurean'.   It's a shrewd argument and its moral relativism is completely anti-revolutionary.  Robespierre's soliloquy portrays him quite 'sympathetically'.   He and especially St. Just have all the decisiveness Danton lacks; they genuinely feel the cause of the Revolution, but the act ends with Robespierre's agonized self-questioning.

       These six scenes of the first Act create the levels of consciousness that the next two Acts will explore.   These levels do not intermesh but are "placed beside" each other, with only a few incidents of overlqap (Scene 6 above)   Danton is the central consciousness and the one who seems most conscious in his group of the futility of trying to make contact through the flesh or by some miracle of transcending the flesh: (p. 72) :thus his speeches again and again revert to this.   His first words are

DANTON:   How little we know about each other.   We're all thick-skinned, we reach for each other, but it's all in vain, we

          just rub the leather off...we are very lonely.

  and his last words in the play are about their severed heads making such contact as the executiner prevents Hérault from embracing him: (p. 121)

DANTON: ( To the Executioner)   Can you prevent our heads from kissing at the bottom of the basket?

          It is this sense of the fundamentally solitary condition of individuals (also explored in Woyzeck, also) that makes Danton our sympathetic centre in the drama.   But we must remember that Buechner himself, in his letter to his parents, described Danton and his circle as "the bandits of the revolution" - those who had betrayed and robbed it.   It is impressive that so young a playwright can humanize a world that he must have seen as close to criminal, ideologically.