Dantons Tod

Pourquoi cette œuvre compte

Dantons Tod is a four-act drama and Georg Büchner’s first play, set in Paris in the spring of 1794, during the lull between the first and second terrors. Georges Danton, who according to Wikipedia created the Revolutionary Tribunal, now wants the killing to stop, but he is tired, fond of wine and gaming, and doubtful about his own cause. Robespierre’s allies move against him and his friends. In the Conciergerie the prisoners argue about God, life and death as often as they plot. The play still feels alive because it shows a revolution as a machine that devours its own makers, and it gives ordinary people lines of their own, not only the orators.

Büchner’s method was new. He drew on many historical sources and quoted real political speeches at length, and in the twentieth century the play was read as a forerunner of documentary theatre, according to Wikipedia. He wrote the first full version in five weeks, from mid-January to mid-February 1835, while he feared arrest. That year a version appeared in Eduard Duller’s Phönix literary paper, edited by Karl Gutzkow, and a book edition carried a subtitle Duller invented to soothe the censor. The printed text was heavily cut. It is the only Büchner play published in his lifetime. No theatre dared stage it for decades; the first performance came on 5 January 1902 at the Belle-Alliance-Theater in Berlin.

Notice how often the scenes slide into talk: the prisoners debate God and death in the third act, a drunken citizen in the first act complains that his daughter must sell herself to feed the family, and Danton swings between resignation and the belief that the Convention will not dare act against him. Notice too that Robespierre is shown with a social conscience as well as a readiness to kill. Büchner’s own programme appears in a letter of 28 July 1835, quoted by German Wikipedia: the dramatist’s highest task is to come as close as possible to history as it really happened. This page uses a nineteenth-century engraving of an execution scene, not a stage picture from the play.

Présentation rédigée pour LitMundi avec l’aide de l’IA et vérifiée d’après les sources ci-dessous.