Georges Danton

A single planet sits in air. Water takes four of his ten planets, fire three and earth two, with four of the ten fixed. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record calls Danton one of the great orators of the Revolution, says he turned against the Terror and was guillotined for it, and that he told the executioner to show his head to the people because it was worth seeing.

One planet in air, in one of the great orators of his age, is as flat an inverse as this project produces. Air is the element of what gets said, compared and circulated, and oratory is the trade built entirely out of it. This chart has one planet there and four in water. A reader who expected the opposite is right to expect it, and the count simply does not oblige.

Mars sits in easy contact with Pluto at under half a degree, power under command: strategic effort, surviving what would stop most people, and strength that does not need to be demonstrated. He did not survive. He was tried and executed at thirty four by a process he had helped build and then opposed, and a reading about surviving what would stop most people is wrong about the one fact the record ends on. The reading describes a temperament under pressure. What happened was a tribunal.

Jupiter sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at under a fifth of a degree, the tightest usable contact here, fortunate change: being in the right place when something shifts. For a man whose timing put him at the centre of one upheaval and then on the wrong side of the next, fortunate change is accurate for about four years and then stops. His Moon sits on the third degree of Capricorn at noon with Sagittarius still possible, so it is left out. Venus, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. He was guillotined at Paris on 5 April 1794, at thirty four. The transiting Sun stood square his natal Jupiter at under a fifth of a degree that day and Mars in easy contact with his natal Saturn at a third. The Moon was a crescent at thirty two per cent.