Danton

A biography of Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading French revolutionary—from his rural upbringing to his death five years after the storming of the Bastille. One of the Western world’s most epic uprisings, the French Revolution ended a monarchy that had ruled for almost a thousand years. Georges-Jacques Danton was the driving force behind it. Now David Lawday, author of Napoleon’s Master, reveals the larger-than-life figure who joined the fray at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and was dead five years later. To hear Danton speak, his booming voice a roll of thunder, excited bourgeois reformers and the street alike; his impassioned speeches, often hours long, drove the sans-culottes to action and kept the Revolution alive. But as the newly appointed Minister of Justice, Danton struggled to steer the increasingly divided Revolutionary government. Working tirelessly to halt the bloodshed of Robespierre’s terror, he ultimately became another of its victims. True to form, Danton did not go easily to the guillotine; at his trial, he defended himself with such vehemence that the tribunal convicted him before he could rally the crowd in his favor. In vivid, almost novelistic prose, Lawday leads us from Danton’s humble roots to the streets of revolutionary Paris, where this political legend acted on the stage of the revolution that altered Western civilization. “A gripping story, beautifully told . . . Danton was a headstrong firebrand, a swashbuckling political showman with a prodigious memory, whose spectacular oratory held audiences in thrall.” —The Economist

This collection of Büchner's three theatrical works includes Danton's Death, his great play about the French Revolution, Leonce and Lena, his "black" romantic comedy and Woyzeck, the unfinished work on which Alban Berg based his famous opera. All three works remained virtually unknown for half a century but today have found an important place in the modern repertory.

This is your rhetoric translated. These wretches, these executioners, the guillotine are your speeches come to life. You have built your doctrines out of human heads... Why should an event that transforms the whole of humanity not advance through blood? 1794: the French Revolution reaches its climax. After a series of bloody purges the life-loving, volatile Danton is tormented by his part in the killing. His political rival, the driven, ascetic Robespierre, decides Danton's fate. A titanic struggle begins. Once friends who wanted to change the world, now one stands for compromise the other for ideological purity as the guillotine awaits. A revolutionary himself, George Büchner was 21 when he wrote the play in 1835, while hiding from the police. With its hair-raising on-rush of scenes and vivid dramatisation of complex, visionary characters, Danton's Death has a claim to be the greatest political tragedy ever written. In his newly-revised translation, Howard Brenton captures Büchner's exhilarating energy as Danton struggles to avoid his inexorable fall.

Mike Jefferson grew up like a lot of Canadian kids, obsessed with hockey and consumed with making it to the NHL. His father, Steve, and his family were determined to do anything and everything to make their son's dreams come true. So how did this promising young man's hockey career turn into a harrowing real-life crime story played out in sensational news reports? Coach and agent David Frost fast-tracked Jefferson's route to the NHL, but at a staggering cost to almost everyone involved. Along the way, the affable young man turned against his parents, changed his name to Danton, and descended into a spiral of paranoia and violence that finally cut short the career he had sacrificed everything for when he was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. In this fast-paced and gripping story, veteran hockey journalist Steve Simmons digs beneath the surface to answer questions that have left Canadians shocked and fascinated. How did Frost get such a grip on Danton and his family? How did his parents allow this to happen? What exactly was Danton's relationship with Frost? And whom did Danton hire a hitman to kill--his father or his agent?

Stanislawa Przybyszewski is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution, of which The Danton Case and Thermidor are the principal parts. The Danton Case depicts the battle for power between two exceptional individuals: the corrupt sentimental idealist, Danton, and the incorruptible genius of the Revolution, Robespierre. Thermidor shows the final playing out of this drama, as Robespierre, left alone with the heroic absolutist Saint-Just, foresees the ruin of himself and his cause, and in his despair predicts that hatred, war, and capitalism will steal the Revolution and corrupt nineteenth-century man.