Georges Danton

Georges Danton led the Cordeliers Club (a radical group in France) along with Jean Paul Marat during the late 1700s. Although he was considered a "moderate" Republican, he was no less radical. He was also responsible for orchestrating the mob to kill Princess de Lamballe after the latter refused to denounce her friend, Marie Antoinette, right before the September Massacres.^[1] As the Minister of Justice in revolutionary France he was instrumental in the creation of the Committee of Public Security (CPS) that became a tool of Maximilien de Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. After returning to Paris from a country rest in 1793, he urged the slowing of the Terror and the reduction of the power of the CPS and other committees formed by Robespierre. Although he garnered considerable public support through his fine oratory skills, he was arrested and executed on the 5th of April 1794 along with many of his supporters including Camille Desmoulins. His fall and execution created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion throughout Paris until the fall of Robespierre later that year.

Georges Danton was part of a planned line of statues, the Monumental Propaganda, commemorating various other French Revolutionary figures such as Robespierre, François-Noël Babeuf and Jean-Paul Marat, that were to be made shortly after the October Revolution in Russia, and was the only one of the line besides Robespierre himself to be completed.

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