Danton's Death

Georg Büchner · 1835 CE · Play · German · Romantic

Georges Danton, sick of the guillotine he helped set running, spends his evenings on women and epigrams while Robespierre's committee quietly assembles the case against him. The rhetoric of the revolution goes on sounding in the Convention while the men who made it discover that history is a machine nobody steers. Büchner wrote it at twenty-one straight out of the printed record, lifting whole speeches verbatim, and produced the first modern play about political futility.

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