CLEMENCEAU

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

1918

CLEMENCEAU
THE MAN AND HIS TIME

BY H · M · HYNDMAN

GRANT RICHARDS, LTD.
ST. MARTIN’s STREET, LONDON, W.C.2

First Printed 1919
Printed in Great Britain by W. H. Smith & Son.
The Arden Press, Stamford Street, London.

[CONTENTS]

[INTRODUCTION]

I began to write this book in June. We were then holding our breath as we looked on, after the disasters of Cambrai and St. Quentin, upon the British troops still fighting desperately against superior numbers and defending the Channel Ports “with their backs to the wall” and barely left with room to manœuvre. The enemy was at the same time seriously threatening Amiens and Epernay, and the possible withdrawal of the French Government from Paris was being again discussed. It was a trying four months on both sides of the Channel. But England and France never despaired of the future. Both nations were determined to fight on to the last.

In July came the second great victory of the Marne, followed by the wonderful triumphant advance of the Allied Armies all along the line, side by side with our brethren of the United States, who were pouring into France at the rate of 300,000 men a month. And now I finish when the all-important matter of discussion is what shall be the terms of permanent peace imposed upon Germany, what shall be the punishment inflicted upon her and, so far as is possible, the compensation exacted from her for her unforgivable crimes against our common humanity. The transformation scene of the huge world war within four months has been one of the most astounding episodes in the history of mankind, and the tremendous struggle on the West Front has proved, as it was bound to prove from the first, the crisis of the whole conflict.

Throughout the terrible period from November, 1917, when for the second time in his long political career he took office as Premier of the French Republic, Georges Clemenceau has borne the full burden of political responsibility in his war-worn and devastated country. It has been no light task for any man, especially for one within easy hail of eighty years of age. When he became President of Council and Minister of War the prospect of anything approaching to complete success seemed remote indeed. It was a thankless post he assumed, and neither friends nor enemies believed at first that physically, mentally or politically could he bear the strain and overcome the intrigues which were at once set on foot against him. But those who had the advantage of knowing Clemenceau well took a much more hopeful view of his chances of remaining Prime Minister until the close of the war. His mind as well as his body has been in strict training all his life. The one is as alert and as vigorous as the other. In the course of his stirring career his lightness of heart and gaiety of spirit, his power of taking the most discouraging events as part of the day’s work, have carried him triumphantly through many a difficulty. Personally, I felt confident that nothing short of unforeseen disease, or a bomb from the foreign or domestic enemy, would bring him down before he had done his work. For below his exterior vigour and his brilliancy of conversation he possesses the most relentless determination that ever inspired a human being. Moreover, a Frenchman may be witty and light-hearted and very wise at the same time. The world of the Middle Ages found that out.

I read, therefore, with some amusement in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s recent book of Victorian Recollections that, having met Clemenceau at dinner, in the ’eighties, she came to the conclusion that he was “too light a weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy.” A very natural mistake, no doubt, for one of us staid and solemn Victorians to make, according to the young cynics and jesters of to-day who gird at us! It is precisely this inexhaustible fund of animal spirits and his never-failing cheerfulness and brilliancy which have given Clemenceau the power over France which he possesses to-day. Frenchmen have felt the more assured confidence in themselves and their future when they saw, day after day, their own representative and ruler full of go and of belief in himself at the time when the issue for them all was hanging in the balance. No real leader of men can ever afford to be a pessimist. He must assume a certitude if he have it not. There was no need for Clemenceau to assume anything. It was all there.

I have known this great Frenchman at many critical stages in his exciting life. What I most admire about him, is that he is always the same man, no matter what his personal position at the moment may be. Never excessively elated: never by any chance cast down. Good or bad fortune, success or failure, made no difference to him. The motto of the Tenth Legion might well be taken as his own. “Utrinque paratus” has been the watchword of this indefatigable and undaunted political warrior throughout. It is well to recall, also, that he has invariably told his country the full truth about the situation as it appeared to him at the time, alike in opposition and in office, as deputy, as senator, and as journalist at large.

Beginning his political career as the intimate friend and almost pupil of the out-and-out Radical Republican, Etienne Arago, a sympathiser with the nobler men of the Commune, whom he endeavoured to save from the ruthless vengeance of the reactionaries headed by Thiers, he had previously voted at Bordeaux in the minority of genuine Republicans who were in favour of continuing the war against Germany when all but enthusiastic patriots held that further resistance was hopeless. Many a time of late those events of l’Année Terrible must have come back to his mind during these still more terrible four years. His attitude now is but the continuation and fulfilment of the policy he advocated then. Thereupon, five years devoted to service on the Municipal Council of Paris and to gratuitous ministrations as a doctor to the poor of one of the poorest districts of the French metropolis: a continuous endeavour to realise, in some degree, by political action, the practical ends for which the Communards had so unfortunately and injudiciously striven. Then political work again on the floor of the Assembly at one of the most stirring periods of French history: supporting Gambetta vigorously in his fight as the head of the Republican Party against the dangerous reactionism of the Duc de Broglie and Marshal MacMahon, and opposing and denouncing the fiery orator whom he succeeded as the leader of the Left, when that statesman adopted trimming and opportunism as his political creed.

The long fight against colonisation by conquest, the exposure of shameless traffic in decorations, the support and overthrow of Boulanger, the Panama scandal, the denunciation of the alliance with despotic Russia, the advocacy of a close understanding with England. In each and all of these matters Clemenceau was well to the front. Then came the crash of exclusion from political life, due to the many enemies he had made by his inconvenient honesty and bitter tongue and pen. Once more, after the display of almost unequalled skill and courage as a journalist, exceptionally manifested in the championship of Dreyfus, a return to political life and unexpected acceptance of office.

From first to last Clemenceau has been a stalwart Republican and a thoroughgoing democratic politician of the advanced Left, with strong tendencies to Socialism. These tendencies I begged him more than once to turn into actual realities and to join, or at least to act in complete harmony with, the Socialists. This seemed possible towards the close of the Dreyfus affair. But I must admit here that, much as I regret that Socialism has never enjoyed the full advantage of his services, Clemenceau, as an avowed member of the Socialist Party, could not have played the glorious part for France as a whole which he has played since the beginning of the war. It was far more important, at such a desperate crisis, to carry with him the overwhelming majority of his countrymen, including even the reactionaries, than to act with a minority that has shown itself at variance with the real sentiments of the Republic, when France was fighting for her existence.

That Clemenceau has, at one time or another, made great mistakes is beyond dispute. It could not be otherwise with a man of his character and temperament. But this, as he himself truly writes me, is “all of the past.” At no moment, in any case, has he ever failed to do his best for the greatness, the glory, the dignity of France as they presented themselves to his mind. This is incontestable. In the following pages I have endeavoured not to write a biography of the statesman who has been constantly in public life for more than fifty years, but to give a study of the growth of a commanding personality, who is an honour to his country, and of the surroundings in which his great faculties were developed.

[Translation]

Le Président du Conseil,
Ministere de la Guerre.

Paris, July 1st, 1918.

Dear Mr. Hyndman,

I can really only thank you for your too flattering letter, inspired by our old friendship. I have nothing to say about myself, except that I am doing my best, with the feeling that it will never be enough. France is making incredible sacrifices every day. No effort will be considered too high a price to ensure the triumph of a nobler humanity. Success is certain when all free peoples are in array against the last convulsions of savagery.

In so vast a drama, my dear friend, my personality does not count. Whether I was right or wrong at this time or that interests me no longer, since it all belongs to the past. I have kept nothing of what I have said or written. It is impossible for me to furnish you with details or to mention anyone who would be able to do so. I can but express to you my gratitude for your friendly intention. I desire only to witness the day of the great victory, then I shall be rewarded far beyond my merits, especially if you add thereto the continuance of your fraternal feelings towards myself.

Very affectionately yours,

G. CLEMENCEAU.

[This letter was written seventeen days before the commencement of the great Franco-British offensive.]

[CHAPTER I]

EARLY LIFE

We are all accustomed to think of La Vendée as that Province of France which is most deeply imbued with tradition, legend and religion. Even in this period of almost universal scepticism and free thought, the peasants of La Vendée keep tight hold of their ancient ideas, in which the pagan superstitions of long ago are curiously interwoven with the fading Catholicism of to-day. Nowhere in France are the ceremonies of the Church more devoutly observed; nowhere, in spite of the spread of modern education, are the people as a whole more attached to the creed of their forefathers. Here whole crowds of genuine believers can still display that fervour of religious enthusiasm which moved masses of their countrymen to such heroic self-sacrifice for a losing and hopeless cause more than four generations since. Even men who have little sympathy with either theological or social conventions of the past are stirred by the simple piety of these people, uplifted for the moment out of the sordid and monotonous surroundings of their daily toil by the collective inspiration of a common faith.

Here, too, in the Bocage of La Vendée amid the heather and the forest, interspersed with acres of carefully tilled soil, the fays and talismans and spirits of days gone by delightedly do dwell. But below all this vesture of fancy and fable we find the least pleasing features of the life of the small proprietors and labourers on the land and fishermen by the sea. Their feelings of human sympathy are stunted, and even their family relations are, in too many instances, rendered brutal by their ever-present greed for gain. The land is a harsh taskmaster, when its cultivation is carried on under such conditions as prevail in that portion of France which abuts on the Bay of Biscay. The result is a harsh people, whose narrow individualism and whole-hearted worship of property in its least attractive guise seem quite at variance with any form of sentiment, and still more remote from the ideals of poesy or the dreams of supernatural agencies which affect the imagination. But there is the contrast and such are the people of the Bocage of La Vendée.

Here, on September 28th, 1841, at the village of Mouilleron-en-Pareds, near Fontenay le Comte, on the Bay of Biscay, Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was born. His family came of an old stock of La Vendée who had owned land in the province for generations. His father was a doctor as well as a landowner; but his practice, I judge, from what his son told me, was confined to gratuitous services rendered to the peasants of the neighbourhood. M. le Dr. Clemenceau, however, was scarcely the sort of man whom one would expect to find in a remote village of such a conservative, not to say reactionary, district as La Vendée. A thorough-going materialist and convinced Republican, he was the leader of the local party of extreme Radicals.

But he seems to have been a great deal more than that. Science, which took with him the place of supernatural religion, neither hardened his heart nor cramped his appreciation of art and poetry. Philosopher and philanthropist, an amateur of painting and sculpture, inflexibly devoted to his political principles, yet ever ready to recognise ability and originality wherever they appeared, this very exceptional medical man and country squire had necessarily a great influence upon his eldest son, who inherited from his father many of the qualities and opinions which led him to high distinction throughout his career. Hatred of injustice, love of freedom and independence of every kind, brought the elder Clemenceau into conflict with the men of the Second Empire, who clapped him in prison after the coup d’état of December 1851. Liberty in every shape was, in fact, an essential part of this stalwart old Jacobin’s political creed, while in the domain of physiology and general science he was a convinced evolutionist long before that conception of the inevitable development of the universe became part of the common thought of the time.

With all this the young Clemenceau was brought into close contact from his earliest years. A thoroughly sound physique, strengthened by the invigorating air of the Biscayan coast, laid the foundations of that indefatigable energy and alertness of disposition which have enabled him to pass triumphantly through periods of overwork and disappointment that would have broken down the health of any man with a less sound constitution. Georges Clemenceau owed much to the begettings and surroundings, to the vigorous country life and the rarefied mental atmosphere in which his earlier years were passed. Seldom is it possible to trace the natural process of cause and effect from father to son as it is in this case. From the wilds of La Vendée and the rough sea-coast of Brittany circumstances of the home and of the family life provided France with the ablest Radical leader she has ever possessed.

At first, it appeared little likely that this would be so. Clemenceau, entering upon his father’s profession, with the benefit of the paternal knowledge and full of the inculcated readiness to probe all the facts of life to the bottom, took up his medical studies as a serious business, after having gone through the ordinary curriculum of a school at Nantes. It was in the hospital of that city that he first entered as a qualified student. After a short stay there he went off to Paris, in 1860, at the age of nineteen, to “walk the hospitals,” as we phrase it, in the same capacity. It was a plunge into active life taken at a period in the history of France which was much more critical than it seemed.

The year which saw Clemenceau’s arrival in Paris saw also the Second Empire at the height of its fame and influence. As we look back to the great stir of 1848, which, so far as Paris and France were concerned, was brought about by the almost inconceivable fatuity of Louis Philippe, we marvel at the strange turn of events which got rid of Orleanist King Log in order to replace him by a Napoleonist King Stork. But we may wonder still more at the lack of foresight, capacity and tact of Louis Philippe himself, who had been in his youth the democrat Citoyen Egalité, and an excellent general, with all the hard experience of his family misfortune and personal sufferings in exile as a full-grown man, possessed, too, of a thorough knowledge of the world and an adequate acquaintance with modern thought in several departments of science and literature. Yet, enjoying all these qualifications for a successful ruler, Louis Philippe failed to understand that a democratic monarchy, and a democratic monarchy alone, could preserve France from a republic or a military dictatorship. This was astounding. He refused to agree to the democratic vote claimed by the people, and then ran away. So the House of Orleans joined the House of Bourbon in the array of discrowned Heads of the Blood Royal. The short-lived Republic of 1848 existed just long enough to scare the bourgeoisie by the installation of the National Workshops, which might well have succeeded but for their unintelligent opposition, and the peasantry by the fear of general Communism, into a demand for a ruler who would preserve them from those whom they considered the maniacs or plunderers of Paris.

It is one of the ironies of history that the French Revolution which promulgated ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that shook the whole civilised world should have been unable to furnish France herself with a democratic republic for well-nigh a hundred years after the overthrow of Louis XVI. For scarcely had the Republic of 1848, with Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, Albert, and others as its leaders, been founded than the Buonapartist intrigues were successful. Louis Napoleon, who just before had been the laughing-stock of Europe, with his tame eagle at Boulogne that would persist in perching on a post instead of on his head, with his queer theories of Imperialist democracy and his close association with the Italian Carbonari, was elected President of the French Republic.

This was the outcome of an overwhelming plebiscite in his favour. There could be no doubt about the voice of France on this occasion. Paris may possibly have been genuinely Republican at that time. The Provinces, whose antagonism to Paris and the Parisians was very marked, then and later, were undoubtedly Buonapartist. From President to Emperor was no long step. Louis Napoleon, though a man of no great capacity, did at any rate believe in himself, in his democratic Imperialism and his destiny. The set of adventurers and swindlers around him believed only in full purses and ample opportunities for gratifying their taste for luxury and debauchery. Having obtained control of the army by the bribery of some and the imprisonment of others of the Republican generals, all was ready for the infamous butchery of peaceful citizens which cowed Paris and established the Empire at the same time. Once more the plebiscite was resorted to with equal success on the part of the conspirators. The hero of the coup d’état, with his familiar coterie of Morny, Flahault, Persigny, Canrobert and other rogues and murderers of less degree, became Napoleon III and master of Paris and of France in December, 1852.

The French threw their votes almost solid in favour of the Empire, and thus tacitly condoned the hideous crime committed when it was established. Whenever the Emperor’s right to his throne was challenged he could point triumphantly to that crushing vote of the democracy constituting him the duly elected Emperor of the French and hereditary representative—however doubtful his parentage—of that extraordinary Corsican genius who, when Chateaubriand and other detractors sneered at his origin, boldly declared, “Moi je suis ancêtre.”

From that day to this, democrats and Republicans have had a profound distrust of the vote of the mass of the people as recorded under a plébiscite, or a referendum, of the entire male population. This lack of confidence in the judgment of the majority, when appealed to on political issues, though natural under the circumstances, is obviously quite illogical on the part of men who declare their belief in popular government. It amounts to a permanent claim for the highly educated and well-to-do sections of an intellectual oligarchy, on the ground that they must know better what is good for the people than the people know for themselves. This might conceivably be true, if no pecuniary interests or arrogance of social superiority were involved. But as this state of things cannot be attained until production for profit, payment of wages and private property cease to exist, democrats and Republicans place themselves in a doubtful position when they denounce a reference to the entire population as necessarily harmful. All that can be safely admitted is that so long as the mass of men and women are economically dependent, socially unfree and very imperfectly educated, the possibility of their being able to secure good government by a plébiscite is very remote. But this applies as well to universal suffrage used to obtain parliamentary elections, and the argument against reposing any trust in the mass of the people may thus be pushed to the point of abrogating the vote altogether save for a small minority. And this would land us in the position of beginning with an autocracy or aristocracy and ending there.

At the time I am speaking of it is indisputable that a considerable majority of intelligent and educated Frenchmen were Republicans. What they meant by a Republic comprised many different shades of organised democracy. But Republic, as Republic, in opposition and contradistinction to Monarchy or Empire, was a name to conjure with among all the most distinguished Frenchmen of the time. How did it come about, then, that this minority, which should have been able to lead the people, was distrusted and voted down by the very same populace whose rights of self-government they themselves were championing on behalf of their countrymen? There was nothing in the form of a Republic, as was shown little more than twenty years afterwards, which was of necessity at variance with the interests or the sentiments of Frenchmen. Even the antagonism between Paris and the Provinces, already referred to, was not so marked as to account for the fact that twice in succession Louis Napoleon should have obtained an overwhelming personal vote in his favour as the man to be trusted, above all other Frenchmen, to control the destinies of France.

It is by no means certain that Paris herself was hostile, before the coup d’état, to the Napoleonic régime with its traditions not only of military glory but of capable civic administration. For the double plébiscite was more than a vote of acquiescence: it was a vote of enthusiasm: first for Louis Napoleon as President, and then for Louis Napoleon as Emperor. It is not pleasing to have to admit this; but the truth seems to be that, as Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, great masses of men are much more easily led by a personality than they are roused by a principle. That the plébiscite had been carefully worked up by assiduous propaganda; that many of the ignorant peasants believed they were voting for the Napoleon of their childhood in spite of the impossible; that there was a great deal of bribery and not a little stuffing of the ballot boxes by officials with a keen sense of favours to come; that the army was imbued with Napoleonic sympathies and helped to spread the spurious ideals of Imperialism—all this may be perfectly true. Yet, when all is said and every allowance is made, the fact remains that, even so, the success of the Napoleonic plébiscites is imperfectly explained. The main features of the vote were obvious: The French people were sick of hereditary monarchy: the Republican leaders were out of touch with the people: the ideals of the past overshadowed the hopes of the future: Napoleon was a name to conjure with: the Republicans had no name on their side to put against it: the “blessed word” Republic had no hold upon the peasantry of rural France. So plébiscite meant one-man rule. That is not to say, as so many argue nowadays, that the complete vote of the democracy on such an issue must of necessity be wrong; but it does affirm that a thoroughly educated, responsible democracy, accustomed to be appealed to directly on all matters of importance, is a necessity before we can have any certainty that the people will go right. Even if they go wrong, as in this case of Napoleon III, it is better in the long run that they should learn by their own errors than that the blunders of the dominant classes should be forced upon them. Great social and political problems can rarely be solved even by the greatest genius. And the genius himself, supposing him to exist, cannot rely upon providing his country with a successor. On the whole, consequently, it is less dangerous to human progress that we should risk such a reactionary vote as that which seated Napoleon III at the Tuileries than give no peaceful outlet whatever to popular opinion.

But the democrats and republicans, radicals and socialists of Paris, who saw all their most cherished ideals crushed by the voice of the people whom they were anxious to lead to higher things, and beheld a travesty of Napoleonic Imperialism suppressing all freedom of political thought and writing, were not disposed to philosophise about the excuses for a popular decision which led to such unpleasant results for them. They had welcomed the abdication of Louis Philippe and the installation of the Republic as the beginning of a new era not only for Paris but for all France, after the reactionary clericalism of Louis XVIII and Charles X, followed by the chilly middle-class rule of the Orleanist monarch. But now a pinchbeck Napoleonism, with much sterner repression, weighed upon all that was most progressive and brilliant in the capital city. It was a bitter disappointment, not to be softened by the reflection that France herself was still far from the economic and social stage where their aspirations could be realised.

Thus Napoleon III was master of France and, feeling that war was advisable in order to strengthen his position at home, gladly joined with Great Britain in a joint campaign against Russia. This was wholly unnecessary, as has since been clearly shown. But, by promoting a better feeling between France and England than had previously existed, some good came out of the evil brought about by the treacherous suppression of the Emperor Nicholas’s agreement with the English Cabinet. The foolish bolstering up of Ottoman incapacity and corruption at Constantinople when the Western Powers could easily have enforced a more reasonable rule was a miserable result of the whole war. But that the Crimean adventure helped to consolidate the position of the Emperor there is no doubt.

When also the affair of the Orsini bomb, thrown by one of his old Carbonari fellow-conspirators, impelled Louis Napoleon into the Italian campaign which won for Italy Lombardy and for France Savoy and Nice, the French people felt that their gain in glory and in territory had made them once more the first nation in Europe. Magenta and Solferino were names to conjure with. The Army had confidence in the Emperor and his generals. So the prospect for republicans and the Republic eight years after the coup d’état was less promising than it had been since the great revolution. Napoleon III was generally regarded as the principal figure in Europe. He was delivering those New Year proclamations which men awaited with bated breath as deciding the question of peace or war for the ensuing twelvemonth. His Empress dominated the world of fashion as her consort did the world of politics. Every effort was made to render the Court as brilliant as possible, and to attract to it some of the old nobility, who were, as a whole, little inclined to recognise by their presence the power of the man whom they both despised and hated. But the Second Empire was for a time a success in spite of the reactionists and the republicans alike.

[CHAPTER II]

PARIS UNDER THE EMPIRE

Paris of the early sixties was a very different city from the Paris of to-day. It was still in great part the Paris of the old time, on both banks of the Seine. Its Haussmannisation had barely begun. The Palais Royal retained much of its ancient celebrity for the cuisine of its restaurants and the brilliancy of its shops. But to get to it direct from what is now the Place de l’Opéra was a voyage of discovery. You went upstairs and downstairs, through narrow, dirty streets, until, after missing your way several times, you at last found yourself in the garden dear to the orators of the French Revolution, and since devoted to nursemaids and their babes. Much of Central Paris was in the same unregenerate state. Even portions of famous streets not far from the Grands Boulevards, which were then still French, could scarcely be described as models of cleanliness. The smells that arose from below and the water of doubtful origin that might descend upon the unwary passerby from above suggested a general lack of sanitary control which was fully confirmed in more remote districts.

Napoleon III was a man of mediocre ability. His entourage was extravagantly disreputable. But he and his did clear out and clean up Paris. The new quarters since built owe their existence in the first instance to the initiative of the Emperor’s chief edile, Baron Haussmann, and his compeers. The great broad streets which now traverse the slums of old time were due to the same energetic impulse. Whether such spacious avenues and boulevards were constructed in order to facilitate the operations of artillery and enable the new mitrailleurs more conveniently to massacre the “mob,” whether the architecture is artistic or monotonous, Clemenceau the doctor must for once be at variance with Clemenceau the man of politics, and admit that the monarch who, as will be seen, imprisoned him in 1862, did some good work for Paris during his reign of repression. At any rate Napoleonic rule at this period represented general prosperity. Business was good and the profiteers were doing well. The bourgeoisie felt secure and international financiers enjoyed a good time. Nearly all the great banking and financial institutions of Paris had their origin in the decade 1860-1870. Law and order, in short, was based upon comfort and accumulation for the well-to-do.

But the peasantry and the workers of the cities were also considered in some degree, and the reconstruction of the capital provided, directly and indirectly, both then and later, for what were looked upon as “the dangerous classes”—men and women, that is to say, who thought that the wage-slave epoch meant little better for them and their children than penal servitude for life. Constant work and decent pay softened the class antagonism, conciliating the proletariat without upsetting the middle class or bourgeoisie. Such a policy, following upon two fairly successful wars, was not devoid of dexterity. A curbed or satisfied Paris meant internal peace for all France. Neither the miserable fiasco in Mexico nor the idiotic abandonment of Austria to Prussia had yet shaken the external stability of the Empire. Napoleon III and his Vice-Emperor Rouher were still great statesmen. There was little or nothing to show on the surface that the whole edifice was even then tottering to its fall. The keen satire of Rochefort, of the Duc d’Aumale, and the full-blooded denunciations of Victor Hugo failed to produce much effect. Some genuine and capable opponents were beguiled into serving the Government under the impression that the Empire might be permanent, and in this way alone could they also serve their country. Nor can we wonder at such backsliding.

Such was the Paris, such the France that saw the young medical student, Georges Clemenceau, enter upon his preparation for active life as doctor and physiologist. He devoted himself earnestly to his studies in the libraries, to his work in the hospitals, and to careful observation of the social maladies he saw around him, which made a deep and permanent impression on his mind. But, determined as he was to master the principles and practice of his profession, the bright, active and vivacious republican from La Vendée brought with him to Paris too clear a conception of his rights and duties as a democrat to be able to avoid the coteries of revolt who maintained the traditions of radicalism in spite of systematic espionage and police persecution. Clemenceau shared his father’s opinions in favour of free speech and a free press.

That was dangerous in those days. La Ville Lumière was obliged to hide its light under a bushel. Friends of democracy and anti-imperialistic speakers and writers were compelled, in order to reach their public, to adopt a style of suppressed irony not at all to the taste of the vivacious republican recruit from Mouilleron-en-Pareds. Then, as ever thereafter, he spoke the truth that was in him, regardless of consequences. In this course he had the approbation and support of his father’s friend, Etienne Arago, brother of the famous astronomer. Arago the politician was also a playwright, an ardent republican who had taken his full share in all the agitations of the previous period, an active and useful member of the Republican Government of 1848 as Postmaster-General, and a vigorous opponent of the policy of Louis Napoleon. He was sent into exile prior to the coup d’état. Both then and nearly a generation later this stalwart anti-Imperialist was exceedingly popular with the Parisians, and, having returned to Paris, was able to aid Clemenceau in forming a correct judgment of the situation, at a time when a less clear-sighted observer might have striven to cool his young friend’s enthusiasm.

As it was, Clemenceau contributed to some of the Radical fly-sheets and then fêted the 24th of February. No date dear to the memory of Republicans could be publicly toasted without conveying a reflection upon the Empire, and as all important events in French history, from July 14th onwards, are duly calendared according to the month and day of the month, Clemenceau’s crime in celebrating February 24th by speech and writing was obvious. He therefore fell foul of the Imperial police. The magistrate could admit no point in his favour, and there was in fact no defence. Consequently Georges Clemenceau, interne de l’hôpital, had the opportunity given him of reflecting for two months upon the advantages and drawbacks of his political creed, during a period of Buonapartist supremacy, in the prison of Mazas. This was in 1862.

Three years later he took his doctor’s degree. His formal essay on this occasion gained him considerable reputation. It was entitled De la Génération des Éléments Anatomiques, and proved not only that he had worked hard on the lines of his profession but that he was capable of taking an original view of the subjects he had mastered. This work has been throughout the basis of Clemenceau’s medical, social, political and literary career. I got the book not long ago from the London Library, and on the title-page of this first edition I read in the author’s own bold handwriting, “A Monsieur J. Stuart Mill hommage respectueux de l’auteur G. Clemenceau“: a tribute to that eclectic philosopher and thinker which he followed up shortly afterwards by translating Mill’s study of Auguste Comte and Positivism into French. Clemenceau was no great admirer of Comte, and specially disapproved of the attempt of some of that author’s pupils and followers to limit investigation and cultivate agnosticism on matters which they considered fell without the bounds of their master’s theories and categories.

“We are not of those,” writes Clemenceau, “who admit with the Positivist that science can give us no information on the enigma of things.” This seems scarcely just to the modern Positivists, for although Comte himself wished to restrict mankind from the study of astronomy, for example, outside of the solar system, they have been as ready as the rest of the world to take advantage of discoveries beyond that system which throw light upon some of the difficult material problems nearer at hand. And Clemenceau, too, appears to fall into the line of reasoning with which he reproaches Comte; for, as will be seen later, he views nature as a mass of matter evolving and differentiating and organising and vivifying itself with the interminable antagonisms and mutual devourings of the various forms of existence on this planet, and possibly on other worlds of the infinitely little, and then, when the great suns die out, disappearing and beginning all over again as two of these huge extinguished luminaries collide in space. This material philosophy, when carried to its ultimate issue, still answers no question and furnishes no clue to the strange inexplicable movement of the universe in which man is but a sentient and partially intelligent automaton. What explanation does this give of any of the problems of social or individual ethic, or of the impulse which led Clemenceau the doctor to treat his patients in Montmartre gratuitously, instead of building up a valuable practice in a rich quarter? and urged Clemenceau the politician to pass the greater part of his life in an uphill fight against the domination of the sordid minority and the timid acquiescence of the apathetic masses rather than accept the high positions which were pressed upon him time after time?

Such reflections would be out of place at this point, but for the fact that Clemenceau has invariably contended that his career has been all of a piece, maintaining that the vigorous young physiologist and doctor of twenty-four and twenty-five held the same opinions and was moved by the same aspirations that have guided the mature man throughout. Whether heredity and surroundings fully account in every particular for all that he has said, done and achieved is a question which Clemenceau also might decline to answer with the definiteness he considers desirable in general philosophy. But that his doctor’s thesis of 1865 did in the main give the scientific basis of his material creed can scarcely be disputed.

The following year, 1866, was the year of the Prusso-Italian war against Austria. The success of Prussia, which would quite probably have been a failure but for the incredible fatuity of the Imperial clique at Vienna, was one of the chief causes, unnoted at the time, of the downfall of Napoleon III. Few now care to recall the manner in which the Austrian Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Benedek, was compelled to abandon his entire strategy in deference to the pusillanimous orders of the Emperor, or how Benedek, with a loyalty to the House of Hapsburg which it has never at any period deserved, took upon himself the blame of defeats for which Francis Joseph, not himself, was responsible. But Louis Napoleon was equally blind to his own interests and those of France when he stood aside and allowed the most ambitious and most unscrupulous power in the world to become the virtual master of Central Europe. It was a strange choice of evils that lay before the Radical and Republican parties in all countries during this war. None could wish to see upheld, still less strengthened, the wretched rule of reactionary, tyrannous and priest-ridden Austria; yet none could look favourably on the growth of Prussian power.

The further conquest by Italy of her own territory and the annexation of Venice to the Italian crown were therefore universally acclaimed. But those who knew Prussia and its military system, and watched the nefarious policy which had crushed Denmark as a stage on the road to the crushing of Austria, even thus early began to doubt whether the substitution of Prussia for Austria in the leadership of the old Germanic Bund might not speedily lead to a still more dangerous situation. Either this did not suggest itself to Napoleon III and his advisers, or they thought that Austria might win, or, at worst, that a bitterly contested campaign would enable France to interpose at the critical moment as a decisive arbiter in the struggle. Probably the last was the real calculation. It was falsified by the rapid and smashing Prussian victories of Königgratz and Sadowa, and Napoleon could do nothing but accept the decisions of the battlefield. But from this moment the Second Empire was in serious danger, and any far-seeing statesman would have set to work immediately to bring the French army up to the highest possible point of efficiency and prepare the way for alliances that might help the Empire, should help be needed in the near future. Neither Louis Napoleon nor his councillors and generals, however, understood what the overthrow of Austria meant for France. They turned a deaf ear then and afterwards to the warnings of their ablest agents abroad, and thus drifted into the crisis which four years later found them without an ally and overwhelmed them.

[CHAPTER III]

DOWNFALL AND RECONSTRUCTION

Early in 1866, Clemenceau, after a visit to England, crossed the Atlantic for a somewhat prolonged stay in the United States. He could scarcely have chosen a better time for making acquaintance with America and the Americans. The United States had but just emerged from the Civil War, which, notwithstanding the furious bitterness evoked on both sides during the struggle, eventually consolidated the Great Republic as nothing else could; though, owing to the behaviour of “society” in England, the tone of our leading statesmen and the action of the Alabama, the feeling against Great Britain was naturally very strong. This animosity—it was no less—of course did not extend to the young French physician of republican views who had already suffered for his opinions in Paris, and whose sympathies were with the North against the South throughout. He was well received in the Eastern States, and wrote several letters to the Temps on the industrial and social conditions of America which were then of value, and still serve to show how marked is the contrast between the self-contained nation of fifty years ago and the Anglo-Saxon world power that has successfully tried her strength in the international struggle against Germanic infamy to-day. What is not so easy to comprehend is M. le Dr. Clemenceau, as we know him, acting as professor of French in a young ladies’ college at the village of Stanford, in the neighbourhood of New York. His record in that capacity is amusingly described by one of his friends[A] in a bright little sketch of his early experiences.

“An admirable horseman, the young Frenchman accompanied the still younger American misses in their rides. There were free and delightful little tours on horseback, charming excursions along the shady roads which traverse the gay landscape of Connecticut. Such years carried with them for Clemenceau ineffaceable memories of a period during which his temperament accomplished the task of gaining strength and acquiring refinement. At the same time that he enriched his mind with solid conceptions of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and perfected his general cultivation, he took his first lessons in the delicacies of American flirtation. It was in the course of these pleasing jaunts, where the fresh laughter of these young ladies echoed through the bright scenery, that it was his lot to become betrothed to one of them, Miss Mary Plummer. Henceforth, in consequence of the sound, independent and many-sided education which he had, so to say, imposed upon himself, Clemenceau had completed the last stage of his intellectual development. He was ripe to play great parts. For the rest, events were not destined long to delay the throwing into full relief his versatile, intrepid and powerful characteristics.”

And so Clemenceau, thus prepared to meet what the future might have in store for him, returned to Paris. There are cities in the history of the human race which have taken unto themselves a personality, not only for their own inhabitants, but for succeeding ages, and for the world at large. Babylon, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, Bagdad, Florence, each and all convey to the mind a conception of chic individuality and collective achievement which brings them within the range of our own knowledge, admiration and respect, which raises them also to the level of ideals of culture for men living in far different civilisations. They are still oases of brightness and greenery amid the wilderness of unconscious growth. The wars of old time, the cruelty of long-past days, the records of brutality and lust are forgotten: only the memory of greatness or beauty remains.

Among the great cities of the past which is still the present Paris takes her undisputed place. In youth, in maturity, in age, the charm of intellectual and artistic Paris ever affects not merely her own citizens, but the strangers within her gates. And the young Vendéen Clemenceau was from the first a Parisian of Parisians. The attraction of Paris for him was permanent. From his arrival in 1860 until the present time practically his whole life has been spent in the French capital. Many years afterwards he gave expression to the influence Paris had upon him. Paris for Clemenceau is the sun of the world of science and letters, the source of light and heat from whose centre art and thought radiate through space. “Intuition and suggestion spreading out in all directions awake dormant energy, sweep on from contact to contact, are passed on, dispersed, and finally exhausted in the inertia of material objects. Here is the radiance of humanity, more or less powerful, more or less durable as time and place may decree.”

It is this impatience of Paris with results already achieved, this desire to reach out and to embrace new forms in all departments of human achievement, which give the French city her position as an indispensable entity in the cosmos of modern life. “Boldness and boldness and boldness again” was Danton’s prescription for the orator, and it might be taken as the motto of intellectual and artistic Paris. There is no hesitation, no contentment, no waiting by the wayside. New ideas and new conceptions must ever be replacing the old. Experience may teach what to avoid: experiment alone can teach what to attempt. And this not incidentally or as a passing phase of endeavour, but as a principle to be applied in every region of human effort. “The Rights of Man,” “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Property is robbery” are as thought-provoking (though they solve no problem) in the domain of sociology as Pasteur’s achievements in physiology and medicine. Whatever changes the future may have in store for us, we who are not Frenchmen cannot dispense with the leadership and inspiration that come to us from Paris.

On his return to France from America Clemenceau renewed his acquaintance and friendship with those who shared his political and social opinions, especially Etienne Arago, now an old man, and practised as a doctor in the working-class district of Montmartre. Here, by his gratuitous medical advice to the people and his steady adherence to his democratic principles, he gained an amount of popularity and personal devotion from the men and women of Montmartre which, in conjunction with Arago’s advice and support, prepared the way for the positions which he afterwards attained. Meanwhile the Second Empire was going slowly downhill. The change which had already taken place was not generally recognised. Nevertheless, the failure of the ill-fated Mexican Expedition with its Catholic support, its sordid financial muddling and the degrading system of plunder carried on in Mexico itself by Marshal Bazaine, the effect on Paris of the murder of Victor Noir by a member of the Buonaparte family, and the Government’s growing incapacity to handle domestic and foreign affairs all told against the prestige of Napoleon. Only a successful diplomatic stroke or a victorious war could rehabilitate the credit of the Empire. The time had gone by for either. Bismarck’s disgraceful forgery at Ems was as unnecessary as it was flagitious. Sooner or later the Second Empire would have collapsed from its own incompetence. But that waiting game did not suit the grim statesman of Berlin. He knew that the French army by itself could not hold its own against the Prussian and other German forces; he felt convinced also that Austria would not move without much clearer assurances of success than Napoleon could supply; while Italy was still tied to her Ally of 1866, and England was devoted to a policy of profitable non-intervention. So Napoleon was half driven, half tricked into a hopeless campaign, and every calculation on which Bismarck relied was verified by the results. Nay, the plébiscite which Louis Napoleon risked eighteen years after the coup d’état went entirely in his favour, and it was in reality quite unnecessary, from the point of view of internal politics, that any risk of war should be run. The Empress, however, has always had the discredit of not having been of that opinion. Hence steps were taken which played into Bismarck’s hands.

At first, as I have heard Clemenceau say himself, it was almost impossible for a patriotic Republican to desire victory for the French armies. That would only have meant a new life for the decadent Empire. Sad, therefore, as was the long succession of disasters, and terrible the devastation wrought by German ruthlessness, not until the culminating defeat of Sedan, the surrender of Napoleon and the decree of Imperial overthrow pronounced by the people of Paris, could men feel that French soldiers were really fighting for their country. Thenceforward the struggle was between democratic and progressive France and autocratic and reactionary Prussia. The Empire for whose humiliation the King of Prussia had gone to war existed no longer. A Republic was at once declared in its place. Any fair-minded enemy would directly have offered the easiest possible terms for peace to the new France. But that was not the view of Prussia. France, not merely the Second Empire, was to be defeated and crushed down, because she stood in the way of that permanent policy of aggression and aggrandisement to which the House of Hohenzollern, with its Junker supporters, has always been devoted. This was the moment when England should have interfered decisively on the side of her old rival. It was not only our interest but our duty to do so, and the whole nation would have enthusiastically supported the statesmen who had given it a vigorous lead in the right direction. Unfortunately Queen Victoria, then as ever bitterly pro-German, was utterly unscrupulous in enforcing her views upon her Government: the men then in office were essentially courtiers, who combined servility at home with pusillanimity abroad: the laissez-faire school of parasitical commercialism which regards the accumulation of wealth for the few as the highest aspiration of humanity held the trading classes in its grip. Consequently, the monarch and the ruling class of the day thought it was cheaper, and therefore better, to leave France to her fate, and make a good cash profit out of the business, rather than courageously to withstand the beginnings of evil and uphold the French Republic against the brutality and greed of Berlin. It is sad, nearly fifty years later, to reflect upon the results of this mistaken and cowardly policy. The war was continued, owing chiefly to English indifference, until France lay at the feet of the conquerors.

No sooner did the news of the defeat and surrender of Sedan reach Paris than a general shout for the overthrow of the Empire went up from the people throughout the French capital. The collapse of the Second Empire was in fact even more sudden and dramatic than its rise. The whole imperial machinery fell with a crash. There was not a man in Paris among the friends of the Emperor in good fortune who had the courage and capacity to come to the front in the time of his distress. The bigoted Catholic Empress, against whom Parisians cherished an animosity scarcely less bitter than that which their forbears felt for Marie Antoinette, was with difficulty got safely out of the city, and Paris at once took control of her own destinies. A Republic having been proclaimed, Republicans, Radicals and Socialists, harried and proscribed the day before, rushed to the front the day after, and forthwith became masters of the city. Clemenceau as one of them was immediately chosen Mayor of Montmartre, at the instance of his old friend Etienne Arago.

It was a period for action, not for argument, or reflection, or propaganda. Clemenceau understood that. In his capacity as Mayor of Montmartre, by no means an easy district to manage, he exhibited marvellous energy, as well as sound judgment, in every department of public affairs. Everything had to be reorganised at once. There was no time to respect the inevitable details of democratic authorisation and delay. Clemenceau with his natural rapidity of decision was the very man for the post. Patriotic and revolutionary excitement seethed all round him. Society seemed already to be in the melting-pot. The enthusiasm evoked by eloquent orations in favour of Socialism was accompanied by the discharges of cannon and the rumbling of ammunition-wagons. But public business had to be carried on all the same. Clemenceau was indefatigable and ubiquitous. He prevented the priests from intriguing in the municipal schools, he established purely secular education, hurried on the arming of the battalions and kept a sharp eye on the defences of the city. Simultaneously he set on foot a series of establishments for giving warmth, food and general help to the number of people who had sought refuge on the heights. He acted throughout practically as municipal dictator, raising, arming and drilling recruits for the new republican army, as well as organising and administering all the local services.

It was a fine piece of work. Having been so closely in touch with the bulk of the population of Montmartre, he was able to act entirely in their interests and with their concurrence throughout. They therefore warmly supported him against the reactionists and religionists who, then as always, were his most virulent enemies. It was no easy task to maintain order and carry out systematic organisation at this juncture. The downfall of the Empire occurred on September 4th, the Republic, with General Trochu—the man of the undisclosed strategical “plan”—as President and Jules Favre as Vice-President, being declared the same day. On September 19th Paris was invested by the Germans. Seeing that there were then no fewer than 400,000 armed men, at various stages of training, in the capital, with many powerful forts at their disposal, while the Germans could spare at the beginning of the siege no more than 120,000 men for the attack, the French having still several armies in the field, successful resistance by the Republic seemed by no means hopeless. Paris might even have had her share in turning the tide of victory. Clemenceau was of that opinion.

But it was not to be. France failed to produce a great general, and the “bagman Marshal,” as Bazaine was called in Mexico, by shutting himself up with 175,000 men in Metz, rendered final defeat certain; though if Marshal MacMahon’s advice had been followed, and if General Trochu had later sufficiently organised the forces at his disposal in Paris to break through the German lines, a stouter fight might have been fought. As it was, one French army after another was defeated in the field, and Paris and Metz were forced to surrender by literal starvation. On January 28th, 1871, an armistice was signed between Bismarck and Jules Favre and the revictualling of the famine-stricken Parisians began, the siege having lasted a little over four months. A National Assembly was summoned to decide the terms of a definite peace or in what manner it might be possible to continue the war.

So well satisfied were the voters of Montmartre with the conduct of their Mayor during all this trying time that they decided to send him as their representative to Bordeaux and polled just upon 100,000 votes in his favour. To Bordeaux, therefore, Clemenceau went, on February 12th, as deputy for one of the most radical and revolutionary districts of Paris. Though neither then nor later an avowed Socialist, no Socialist could have done more for practical democratic and Socialist measures than Clemenceau had done. That, of course, was the reason why he was elected by so advanced a constituency.

He found himself strangely out of his element when he took his seat in the National Assembly. Perhaps no more reactionary body had ever met in France. The majority of the members were thorough-going Conservatives who at heart were eager to restore the monarchy. They were royalists but slightly disguised, dug up out of their seclusion, from all parts of the country, who thought their time had come to revenge themselves not so much upon the Buonapartists who had governed France for twenty years as upon Paris and the Parisians who had chased Charles X and Louis Philippe out of France. They well knew that the capital would never consent to the restoration of the candidate of either of the Bourbon factions. These fitting champions of a worn-out Legitimism or Orleanism were old men in a hurry to resuscitate the dead and galvanise the past into fresh life. Their very heads betrayed their own antiquity. So much so that a favourite pastime of young ladies of pleasure in the Galleries, who had flocked to Bordeaux, was what was irreverently called “bald-headed loo.” This consisted in betting upon the number of flies that would settle within a given period upon a devoted deputy’s hairless occiput. Unfortunately these ancient gentlemen found in M. Thiers a leader who could scarcely have been surpassed for ingenuity and unscrupulousness. He deliberately traded upon prejudices, and his main political assets were the fear and distrust which he awakened in one set of his countrymen against another. In modern as in ancient society there is an economic and almost a personal antagonism between country and town.

The man of the Provinces, living always in the rural districts, the tiller, the producer, the indefatigable toiler, the parsimonious accumulator of small gains, the respecter of ancestral traditions and the devotee of old-world methods and well-tried means of gaining a poor livelihood, profoundly affected likewise by his inherited religion, has, in most cases, a deep-seated contempt, strangely enough not wholly divorced from fear, for the man of the town, and especially for the man of Paris. This animosity, which has by no means wholly disappeared to-day, was keenly in evidence forty and fifty years ago. There is an economic cause at the bottom of the antipathy, but this does not account for its many-sided manifestation. The countryman naturally desires to sell his produce at as high a price as possible. It is for him almost a matter of life and death to do so. The townsman, on his side, the artisan or labourer or even the rentier of the great cities, is naturally anxious to obtain the necessaries of life which he gets from the rural districts at as low a rate as he may be able to buy them having regard to his wages or his income. Hence any expenditure which tends to benefit the country is regarded with suspicion by the townsman and contrariwise as between town and country, except such outlay as cheapens the cost of transportation, where both have an identical interest.

But this general divergence of economic advantage, which has existed for many centuries does not wholly account for the ill-feeling which too often appears. There is a psychological side to the matter as well. Thus the peasant, even when he is getting satisfactory prices for his wares, despises his own customers when they pay too much for small luxuries which they could easily do without. Moreover, he considers the cleverness of his fellow-countrymen of the city, their readiness to change their opinions and adopt new ideas, their doubts as to the super-sanctity of that individual property, property which is the small landowner’s god, as evidences of a dangerous disposition to upset all that ought to be most solemnly upheld. The townsman, on the other hand, too often looks down upon the peasant and the rural provincial generally as an ignorant, short-sighted, narrow-minded, grasping creature, full of prejudices and eaten up with superstition, who, out of sheer obstinacy, stands immovably in the way of reforms that might, and in many cases certainly would, benefit them both.

It is the task and the duty of the true statesman to bridge over these differences as far as possible, to try to harmonise interests and assuage feelings which under existing conditions are apt to conflict with one another. Thus only can the whole country be well and truly served. M. Thiers pursued precisely the contrary course. In order to foster reaction and to strengthen the position of the bourgeoisie, he and his supporters set to work deliberately to excite the hatred of the country-folk against their brethren of the towns. They were willing to accept the Republic only on the distinct understanding that it should be, as Zola expressed it, a bourgeoised sham. The bogey of the social revolution was stuck up daily to frighten the timid property-owners. Above all, Paris was pointed out as the danger spot of order-respecting France. Paris ought to be muzzled and kept under even more strictly by the self-respecting Republic than by the Empire. That way alone lay safety. Thus the dislike of the provincials for the capital was fanned to so fierce a heat that the very title of capital was denied to her. As a result of this unpatriotic and traitorous policy Paris herself was unfortunately forced to the conviction that the reactionists of Bordeaux were determined to deprive her of all her rights, and that the great city which founded the Republic would be made to suffer dearly for her presumption. Nearly all that followed was in reality due to this sinister policy of provocation, adopted and carried out by M. Thiers and his bigoted followers.

Clemenceau’s position was a difficult one. Knowing both peasants and Parisians intimately well, he saw clearly the very dangerous situation which must inevitably be created by such tactics of exasperation. As one of the deputies of Radical Republican Paris, he did his utmost at Bordeaux to maintain the independence of his constituents and to resist the fatal action of the majority. As the son of a landowner in La Vendée, he understood clearly the views of the provincials and how necessary it was that they should be thoroughly informed as to the aims of the Parisians. But Paris had first claim on his services. He therefore associated himself with Louis Blanc, voted with him against the preliminaries of peace and in favour of the continuance of the war. There was a strong opinion at this time that many of the Buonapartists in high military command, as well as in important civil posts, were traitors to the Republic and had acted, as Bazaine unquestionably did, in the interest of the Imperial prisoner instead of on behalf of France. These factionists too were hostile to Paris, and a demand was made, in which Clemenceau joined, for a full investigation of the conduct of such men during the siege. Unfortunately, affairs in the capital were now becoming so critical and the probability of another revolution there seemed so great that Clemenceau felt his duties as Mayor of Montmartre were still more urgent than his votes and speeches at Bordeaux, as deputy for that district. Consequently, after less than a month’s stay at Bordeaux, he returned to Paris on the evening of March 5th. The Commune of Paris was set on foot within a fortnight of that date, on March 18th, 1871.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE COMMUNE

Unquestionably, the revolt was brought about by the ill-judged and arbitrary conduct of the agents of the National Assembly. To attempt to seize the guns of the National Guard as a preliminary to disarming the only Citizen force which the capital had at its disposal was as illegal as it was provocative. It was virtually a declaration of civil war by the reactionaries in control of the national forces. The people of Paris were in no humour to put up with such high-handed action on the part of men who, they knew, were opposed even to the Republic which they nominally served. They resisted the attempt and captured the generals, Lecomte and Thomas, who had ordered the step to be taken.

So far they were quite within their rights, and Clemenceau at first sympathised wholly with the Federals. The Parisians had undergone terrible privations during the siege, they were exasperated by the denunciations that poured in upon them from the provinces, they saw no hope for their recently won liberties unless they themselves were in a position to defend them, they had grave doubts whether they had not been betrayed within and without during the siege itself. It is no wonder that, under such circumstances, they should resent, by force of arms, any attempt to deprive them of the means of effective resistance to reactionary repression.

There was also nothing in the establishment of the Commune itself which was other than a perfectly legitimate effort to organise the city afresh, after the old system had proved utterly incompetent. But the attempt to disarm the population of Montmartre roused passions which it was impossible to quell. Clemenceau, as Mayor of the district, did all that one man could do to save the two generals, Lecomte and Clément Thomas, from being killed. With his sound judgment he saw at once that, whether their execution was justifiable or not, it would be regarded as murder by many Republicans whom the cooler heads in Paris desired to conciliate. As was proved afterwards, he exerted all his power to check even the semblance of injustice. But his final intervention to prevent the tragedy of the Château Rouge came too late, and Lecomte and Thomas, who had not hesitated to risk the massacre of innocent citizens on behalf of a policy of repression, were regarded as the first victims of an infuriated mob.

The outcome of Clemenceau’s own endeavours to save these misguided militarists was that he himself became “suspect” to the heads of the Central Committee of the Commune sitting at the Hôtel de Ville, which had taken control of all Paris. He was the duly elected and extremely popular Radical-Socialist—to use a later designation—Mayor of perhaps the most advanced arrondissement in the capital, he had been sent to Bordeaux by a great majority of his constituents to sit on the extreme left, and, in that capacity, had stoutly defended the rights of Paris; he was strongly in favour of most of the claims made by the leaders of the Commune. But all this went for nothing. The new Committee wanted their own man at Montmartre, and Clemenceau was not that man.

So Mayor of Montmartre he ceased to be, but earnest democrat and devoted friend of the people he remained. Unfortunately, having a wider outlook than most of those who had suddenly come to the front, he could not believe that mere possession of the capital meant attainment of the control of France by the Parisians, or the freeing of his country from German occupation. For once he advocated prudence and suggested compromise. A reasonable arrangement between the administrators of Paris with their municipal forces and the National Assembly with its regular army seemed to Clemenceau a practical necessity of the situation. He therefore urged this policy incessantly upon the Communists. It was an unlucky experience. Pyat, Vermorel and others so strongly resented his moderate counsels that they issued an order for his arrest, with a view to his hasty, if judicial, removal. Failing to lay hold upon Clemenceau himself, they captured a speaking likeness of the Radical doctor in the person of a young Brazilian. Him they were about to shoot, when they discovered that their proposed victim was the wrong man. Possibly these personal adventures in revolutionary democracy under the Commune may have influenced Clemenceau’s views about Socialism in practical affairs in after life.

It is highly creditable to Clemenceau that a few years later one of his greatest speeches was delivered in the National Assembly to obtain, the liberation and the recall from exile of the very same men who would gladly have silenced him for good and all when they were in power. However, he escaped their well-meant attentions, and, leaving Paris, went on a tour of vigorous Radical propaganda through the Provinces.

This was a most important self-imposed mission. Clemenceau, as he showed by his vote at Bordeaux, was strongly in favour of continuing the war and bitterly opposed to any surrender whatever. At the same time he was a thoroughgoing Republican who did not forget that the mass of Frenchmen must have voted for the Empire a few months before, or Napoleon’s plébiscite, of course, could not have been so successful, even with the whole of the official machinery in the hands of the Imperialists. Differing from Gambetta afterwards on many points, the coming leader of the advanced Radicals was at this period entirely at one with the man who had not despaired of France when all seemed lost. But in order to carry on the war with any hope of success and to keep the flag of the Republic flying, it was essential that the people of the provincial towns and the peasants should be kept in touch with Paris and be convinced that the only chance of safety and freedom lay in sinking all internecine differences for the sake of unity. No man, not even Gambetta himself, was better qualified for this service. Throughout his tour he kept the independence, welfare and freedom of France as a whole high above all other considerations. But the risks he ran were not trifling. The local reactionists were by no means ready to accept his views. The police was set upon his trail, with great inconvenience to himself. But at no period of his life has Clemenceau considered his personal safety of any account. He had set himself to accomplish certain work which he deemed to be necessary, and he carried it through without reference to the dangers around him. Nor must the success of this propaganda be measured by its immediate results. The great thing in those days of defeat and despair was to keep up the national spirit and to declare that, though the French armies might be beaten again and again, the France of the great Revolution and the Republic should never be crushed down. Believing, as Clemenceau did, in the religion of patriotism and the sacred watchwords of the eighteenth-century upheaval, he spoke with a sincerity that gave to his utterances the value of the highest oratory. The speeches produced a permanent impression on those who heard them, and their effect was felt for many years afterwards.

But this was quite as objectionable to Thiers and the case-hardened reactionists as his previous conduct had been to Pyat and the extremists of the Commune. Men of ability and judgment are apt to be caught between two fires when prejudice and passion take control on both sides. It was, in fact, little short of a miracle that the future Prime Minister of France did not complete his services to his country by dying in the ditch under the wall of Père-la-Chaise at the early age of thirty-one.

Few movements have been more grotesquely misrepresented than the Commune of Paris. For many a long year afterwards almost the whole of the propertied classes in Europe spoke of the Communists as if they had been a gang of scoundrels and incendiaries, without a single redeeming quality; while Socialists naturally enough refused to listen to virulent abuse of men most of whom they well knew were inspired by the highest ideals and sacrificed themselves for what they believed to be the good of mankind. At the beginning Paris assuredly had no intention whatever of courting a struggle with the supporters of the Republic at Bordeaux, however reactionary they might be. Such men as Delescluze, Courbet, Beslay, Jourde, Camélinat, Vaillant, Longuet, to speak only of a few, were no mere hot-headed revolutionaries regardless of all the facts around them. Paris was admirably administered under their short rule—never nearly so well, according to the testimony of two quite conservative Englishmen who were there at the time. One of these was the famous Oxford sculler and athlete, E. B. Michell, an English barrister and a French avocat; the other was my late brother, Hugh, a Magdalen man like Michell. They both knew Paris well, and both were of the same opinion as to the municipal management under the Commune. Michell in an article in Fraser’s Magazine, then an important review, wrote as follows:

“It is extremely important that the serious lesson which the world may read in the history of the Revolution should not be weakened in its significance or interest by any ill-grounded contempt either for the acts of the Communal leaders or for the sincerity of their motives. We have seen that the army on which the Revolutionists relied, and by means of which they climbed to power, was not, as certain French statesmen pretended, and some English papers would have had us believe, a ‘mere handful of disorderly rebels,’ but a compact force, well drilled, well organised, and valiant when fighting for a cause that they really had at heart. It is equally false and unfair to regard the Communal Assembly as a crew of unintelligent and mischievous conspirators, guided by no definite or reasonable principle, and seeking only their own aggrandisement and the destruction of all the recognised laws of order. Yet it is certain that such an idea respecting the Commune is very generally entertained by ordinary English readers. It may be shown that the policy of this Government, though defaced by many gross abuses and errors, had much in it to deserve the consideration, and even to extort the admiration, of an intelligent and practical statesman. . . .

“Foreign writers have delighted to represent the purposes of the Commune as vague and unintelligible. Even in Paris and at Versailles writers and talkers affected at first to be ignorant of the real projects and principles entertained by the Revolutionists. But the Commune of 1871 has itself destroyed all possibility of mistake upon the subject. It has put to itself and answered the question in the most explicit terms. The Journal Officiel (of Paris) contained, on April 20th, a document worthy of the most careful perusal. It appears in the form of a declaration to the French people, and explains fully enough the main principles and the chief objects which animated the men of the Commune. Without bestowing on this address the ecstatic eulogies to which certain Utopian philosophers have deemed it entitled, we may credit it as being a straightforward, manly, and not altogether unpractical exposé of the ideas of modern Communists.

“. . . ‘It is the duty of the Commune to confirm and determine the aspirations and wishes of the people of Paris; to explain, in its true character, the movement of March 18th—a movement which has been up to this time misunderstood, misconstrued, and calumniated by the politicians at Versailles. Once more Paris labours and suffers for the whole of France, for whom she is preparing, by her battles and her devoted sacrifices, an intellectual, moral, administrative, and economic regeneration, an era of glory and prosperity.

“‘What does she demand?

“‘The recognition and consolidation of the Republic as the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the regular and free development of society; the absolute independence of the Commune and its extension to every locality in France; the assurance by this means to each person of his rights in their integrity, to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and capacities as a man, a citizen, and an artificer. The independence of the Commune will have but one limit—the equal right of independence to be enjoyed by the other Communes who shall adhere to the contract. It is the association of these Communes that must secure the unity of France.

“‘The inherent rights of the Commune are these: The right of voting the Communal budget of receipts and expenditure, of regulating and reforming the system of taxation, and of directing local services; the right to organise its own magistracy, the internal police and public education; to administer the property belonging to the Commune; the right of choosing by election or competition, with responsibility and a permanent right of control and revocation, the communal magistrates and officials of all sorts; the right of individual liberty under an absolute guarantee, liberty of conscience and liberty of labour; the right of permanent intervention by the citizens in communal affairs by means of the free manifestation of their ideas, and a free defence of their own interests, guarantees being given for such manifestations by the Commune, which is alone charged with the duty of guarding and securing the free and just right of meeting and of publicity; the right of organising the urban defences and the National Guard, which is to elect its own chiefs, and alone provide for the maintenance of order in the cities.

“‘Paris desires no more than this, with the condition, of course, that she shall find in the Grand Central Administration, composed of delegates from the Federal Communes, the practical recognition and realisation of the same principles. To insure, however, her own independence, and as a natural result of her own freedom of action, Paris reserves to herself the liberty of effecting as she may think fit, in her own sphere, those administrative and economic reforms which her population shall demand, of creating such institutions as are proper for developing and extending education, labour, commerce, and credit; of popularising the enjoyment of power and property in accordance with the necessities of the hour, the wish of all persons interested, and the data furnished by experience. Our enemies deceive themselves or deceive the country when they accuse Paris of desiring to impose its will or its supremacy upon the rest of the nation, and of aspiring to a Dictatorship which would amount to a veritable attack against the independence and sovereignty of other Communes. They deceive themselves or the country when they accuse Paris of seeking the destruction of French unity as established by the Revolution. The unity which has hitherto been imposed upon us by the Empire, the Monarchy, and the Parliamentary Government is nothing but a centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and burdensome. Political unity as desired by Paris is a voluntary association of each local initiative, a free and spontaneous co-operation of all individual energies with one common object—the well-being, liberty, and security of all. The Communal Revolution initiated by the people on the 18th of March inaugurated a new political era, experimental, positive, and scientific. It was the end of the old official and clerical world, of military and bureaucratic régime, of jobbing in monopolies and privileges, to which the working class owed its state of servitude, and our country its misfortunes and disasters.’”

The two Englishmen, coming straight to my house from Paris, gave me a favourable account of the administration of municipal Paris, especially at the time when Cluseret held command.

Others who were there at the same time were similarly impressed. Paris ceased even to be the Corinth of Europe, since all prostitutes had been ordered out of the city. The leaders set an example of moderation in their style of living, which was the more remarkable as they had no authority but their own sense of propriety to limit their expenditure. How little they regarded themselves as relieved from the ordinary rules of the strictest bourgeois social order is apparent, also, from the fact that Jourde and Beslay, who were responsible for the finances of the Commune, actually borrowed £40,000 from the Rothschilds in order to carry on the ordinary business of the Municipality. Yet at the time not less than £60,000,000 in gold, apart from a huge store of silver, was lying at their mercy in the Bank of France; enough, as some cynically said, if judiciously used, to have bought up all M. Thiers’ Government and his army to boot. The fact that the Communists left these vast accumulations untouched proves conclusively that they were the least predatory, some might say the least effective, revolutionists who ever held subversive opinions. In all directions they showed the same spirit. Every department was managed as economically and capably as they could organise it. But always on the most approved bourgeois lines. Many of the reforms they introduced, notably those by Camélinat at the Mint, are still maintained.

How, then, did it come about that people of this character and capacity were regarded almost universally as desperate enemies of society, from the moment when they came to the front in their own city? It is the old story of the hatred of the materialist property-owner and profiteer for the idealist who is eager at once to realise the new period of public possession and co-operative well-being. The fact that such an indomitable anarchist-communist as the famous Blanqui, who spent the greater part of his life in prison, took an active part in the Commune and that others of like views were associated with the rising scared all the “respectable” classes, who regarded any attack upon the existing economic and social forms as a crime of the worst description. A tale current at the time puts the matter in a humorous shape. A number of communists, when arrested, were put in gaol with a still larger number of common malefactors. These latter greatly resented this intrusion, boycotted the political prisoners, and, it is said, would have gone so far as to attack their unwelcome companions but for the intervention of the warders. Asked why they exhibited such animosity towards men who had done them no harm, the ordinary criminals took quite a conservative, bourgeois view of their relations to the new-comers. “We,” they said, “have some of us taken things which belonged to other people; but we have never thought for a moment of abolishing the right of property in itself. Not having enough ourselves, we wanted more and laid hands upon what we could get. But these men would take everything and leave nothing for us.” So even the gaolbirds embraced the bourgeois ethic of individual ownership.

Moreover, the International Working Men’s Association had been founded in London in 1864, just seven years before. Although the late Professor Beesly, certainly as far from a violent revolutionist as any man could be, took the chair at the first meeting and English trade unionists of the most sober character constituted the bulk of the members in London, the terror which this organisation inspired in the dominant minority all over Europe was very far indeed in excess of the power which it could at any time exercise. But the names of Marx, the learned German-Jew philosopher, and Bakunin, the Russian peasant-anarchist, were words of dread to the comfortable classes in those days. Marx with Engels had written the celebrated “Communist Manifesto,” at the last period of European disturbance, in 1848, analysing the historic development and approaching downfall of the entire wage-earning system, with a ruthless disregard for the feelings of the bourgeoisie. Its conclusion appealing to the “Workers of the World” to unite was not unnaturally regarded as a direct incitement to combined revolt. Though, therefore, few had read the Manifesto this appeal had echoed far and wide, and the organisation of the International itself was credited with the intention to use the Commune of Paris as the starting-point for a world-wide conflagration. Thus the movement in Paris, which at first had no other object than to secure the stability of the democratic Republic, was regarded as an incendiary revolt, and the brutal outrages of M. Thiers, aided by the mistakes of the Communists themselves, gradually forced extremists to the front. Some were like Delescluze, noble enthusiasts who knew success was impossible, and courted death for their ideal as sowing the seed of success for their great cause of the universal Co-operative Commonwealth in the near future; others were such as Félix Pyat, a furious subversionist of the most ruffianly type, who mixed up personal malignity and individual hatred with his every action, and brought discredit on his own comrades. Victory for the Socialist ideals, with the Germans containing one side of Paris and the Versailles troops attacking the other, was impossible—would have been impossible even if the Communists had suppressed their truly fraternal hatreds and had developed a military genius. They did neither. Cluseret showed some inkling of the necessities of the case, but Dombrowski, Rossel and other leaders exhibited no capacity. The wonderful thing about it all was that during the crisis, which lasted two months, Paris was so well administered. The sacrifice of the hostages and the tactics of incendiarism pursued at last, not by the Communist leaders, but by the Anarchist mob broken loose from all control, have hidden from the public at large, who read only the prejudiced accounts of the capitalist press, the real truth about the Commune of Paris.

But whatever may have been done in resistance to the invasion of M. Thiers’ army of reaction, nothing could possibly justify the horrible vengeance wreaked upon the people of Paris by the soldiery and their chiefs. It was a martyrdom of the great city. The coup d’état of Louis Napoleon was child’s play to the hideous butchery ordered and rejoiced in by Thiers, Gallifet and their subordinates. There was not even a pretence of justice in the whole massacre. Thousands of unarmed and innocent men and women were slaughtered in cold blood because Paris was feared by the bloodthirsty clique who regarded her rightly as the main obstacle to their reactionary policy. It was but too clear evidence that, when the rights of property are supposed to be imperilled, all sense of decency or humanity will be outraged by the dominant minority as it was by the slave-owners of old or the nobles of the feudal times.

But the Commune itself, as matters stood, was as hopeless an attempt to “make twelve o’clock at eleven” as has ever been seen on the planet. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was not more certainly foredoomed to failure than was the uprising of the Communists of Paris in 1871. But the Socialists of Europe, like the abolitionists, have celebrated the Commune and deified its martyrs for many a long year. The brave and unselfish champions of the proletariat who then laid down their lives in the hope that their deaths might hasten on the coming of a better day hold the same position in the minds of Socialists that John Brown held among the friends of the negro prior to the great American Civil War. It was an outburst of noble enthusiasm on their part to face certain failure for the “solidarity of the human race.” But those who watched what happened then and afterwards can scarcely escape from the conclusion that the loss of so many of its ablest leaders, and the great discouragement engendered by the horrors of defeat, threw back Socialism itself in France fully twenty years.

Recent experience in several directions has shown the world that enthusiasm and idealism for the great cause of human progress, and the co-ordination of social forces in the interest of the revolutionary majority of mankind, cannot of themselves change the course of events. Unless the stage in economic development has been reached where a new order has already been evolved out of the previous outworn system, it is impossible to realise the ideals of the new period by any sudden attack. Men imbued with the highest conceptions of the future and personally quite honest in their conduct may utterly fail to apply plain common sense to the facts of the present. Dublin, Petrograd and Helsingfors, nearly forty years later, did but enforce the teachings of the Commune of Paris.

[CHAPTER V]

CLEMENCEAU THE RADICAL

All this Clemenceau, though not himself a Socialist, saw by intuition. His powers of organisation and capacity for inspiring confidence among the people might have been of the greatest service to Paris at that critical juncture in her history—might even have averted the crash which laid so large a portion of the buildings of the great city in ruins and led to the infamous scenes already referred to. This was not to be, and Clemenceau was fortunate to escape the fate of many who were as little guilty of terrorism or arson as himself.

The trial of the men responsible for the death of Generals Lecomte and Thomas was held on November 29th, 1871. Clemenceau himself was accused of not having done enough to save their lives. He was in no wise responsible for what had occurred, was strongly opposed to their execution, and, as has been seen, did all that he could do to prevent the two assailants of his own friends and fellow-citizens from being killed. That, however, was no security that he would have escaped condemnation if the evidence in his favour had not been so conclusive that even the prejudiced court could not decide against him. He was completely cleared from the charge by the evidence of Colonel Langlois, and given full credit for his efforts on behalf of the militarists who certainly could be reckoned among his most bitter enemies. Scarcely, however, was his life relieved from jeopardy under the law than he was compelled to risk it, or so he thought, on the duelling ground. Here Clemenceau was quite at home. He used his remarkable skill in handling the pistol with moderation and judgment, being content to wound his adversary, Commandant Poussages, in the leg. None the less, the result of his encounter was that he was fined and committed to prison for a fortnight as a lesson to him not to act in accordance with the French code of honour in future.

But the truth is, M. Thiers did not wish to make a peaceful settlement with the people of the capital of France. Conciliation itself was branded as a crime as much by the political leaders and military chiefs on his side as it was by the Communist extremists on the other. The Versaillais aimed at the conquest of Paris by force of arms: they did not desire to enter peacefully by force of agreement. And having won, Paris was treated by the Republican Government as a conquered city. All sorts of exceptional laws, such as Napoleon III himself never enacted, were registered against the liberties of her inhabitants, and she was deprived of her fair share of representation in the National Assembly. The capital of France was a criminal city.

Clemenceau on March 21st, 1871, had brought into the National Assembly at Versailles a measure which established the Municipal Council of Paris with 80 members. This was a valuable service to the capital and one of which the man himself was destined to take advantage. For, having failed to bring about a reasonable compromise between the Versailles chiefs and the leaders of the Commune, and having also lost his seat for Montmartre in the Assembly as well as the Mayoralty of that district, he gave up general politics and after the fall of the Commune accepted his election as Municipal Councillor for Clignancourt. He devoted the next five years of his life to his doctor’s work, giving gratuitous advice as before to her poor around him, and to constant attendance as a Municipal Councillor, where he was the leader of the radical section. He thus gained a knowledge of Parisian life and the needs of Parisians which no other experience could have given him.

As one of the municipal representatives he never ceased to protest against the shameful legislation which deprived Paris of its rights. But he did more. The man who is regarded by many, even to-day, as essentially a political destroyer with no idea of a constructive policy in any department made himself master of the details of municipal administration and was a most valued colleague of all who, acting on the extreme left of the Council, endeavoured, while upholding the dignity of the city against the repressive policy of the Government, to improve the management of city affairs in every department. In this he was as successful as the circumstances of the time permitted. He became in turn Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Council.

Though this portion of Clemenceau’s career is little known, the continuous unrecognised municipal service he rendered to Paris during those eventful years gave him a hold not only upon Montmartre but upon the whole city which has been of great service to him at other times. He had, in fact, become a thorough Parisian from the age of nineteen onwards, which can by no means always be said of men who have afterwards taken a leading part in French politics. It is very difficult to say what qualities are those which entitle a man to this distinguished appellation. I have myself known Frenchmen able, witty, brilliant and original, good speakers and clever writers, who somehow never seemed to be at home with Parisians and Parisian audiences. Critical and cynical, though at times enthusiastic and idealist, the Parisian crowd takes no man at his own valuation and is no less fickle than crowds in cities generally are. But Clemenceau has never failed to be on good terms with them. I attribute this to the fact that in addition to his other higher qualities, which impress all people of intelligence, Clemenceau has in him a vein of sheer humorous mischief that savours of the Parisian gamin rather than of the hard-working student from La Vendée. There is something in common between him and the young rogues of the Parisian streets who are not at all averse from enjoying life at the cost of poking fun at other people and even at themselves. This spirit of Paris early got hold of Clemenceau and he of it.

However this may be, on February 26th, 1876, he was again elected deputy to the National Assembly. He now began the active and continuous political life which had been broken off at its commencement by the second revolution followed by the gruesome tragedy just recounted.

That he had never lost his sympathy for the men and women of the Commune, little reason as he personally had for good feeling towards them, was, proved by his delivery of his speech in favour of the Amnesty of the Communists, some of whom had been so eager to get rid of him for good and all when they had been in power for a short time themselves. The speech at once put Clemenceau among the first Parliamentary orators of the day. At this time a man of such capacity was greatly needed on the extreme left. Others, who had lost much of their energy and fervour in the long struggle against repression, were little inclined to run further risks for the sake of a really democratic Republic, still less for a set of people who in their misguided efforts for complete freedom had endangered the establishment of any Republic at all. They were content with what they had done before and with the positions they occupied then. It was greatly to Clemenceau’s credit that he did not hesitate a moment as to the line he should take. Popular or unpopular, fair play and freedom for all were his watchwords.

When the Amnesty question came up again in 1879 Clemenceau’s speech in favour of the release of the indefatigable Communist Blanqui was, like his appeal for the amnesty of the members of the Commune generally, very creditable to him, for it was an unpopular move and gained him little useful political support from any party. Perhaps no man in the whole history of the revolutionary movement ever devoted himself so entirely and with such relentless determination to the spread of subversive doctrines as Auguste Blanqui. He began early and finished late. He was first imprisoned at the age of twenty-one and spent more than half of his seventy-six years of existence in gaol or exile. He was a strong believer in organised violence as a means of bringing about the realisation of his communist ideals. Insurrection against the successive French Governments he regarded as a duty. It was a duty which he faithfully fulfilled. In 1827 he was an active fighter in the insurrection of the Rue St. Denis. It was suppressed and Blanqui was wounded. He was one of the leaders of the successful rising against Charles X in 1830, in which he was again wounded. In the reign of Louis Philippe, which followed the failure to establish a Republic, he speedily went to work again. Insurrection, conspiracy, establishment of illegal societies, accumulation of weapons and explosives for organised attacks, attempts to constitute a communist republic, were followed by the usual penalties, and after his participation in the insurrection of the Montagnards, by condemnation to death commuted to imprisonment for life. Such was Blanqui’s career up to 1848. Then the revolution of that year set him free again. No sooner was he released than he began afresh, forming a revolutionary combination which led to another three days of insurrection, with the result that he was sentenced to a further ten years of imprisonment. In 1858, under the Second Empire, he returned to Paris, his birthplace, but was soon ejected and passed eight years more in exile. In 1870 and 1871 Blanqui took part in the overthrow of Napoleon III, and in the Commune which followed, was captured by the Versaillais troops and sentenced to transportation to New Caledonia, after the Communards had offered to exchange for him the Archbishop of Paris, then held by them as a hostage. Instead of being shipped off to New Caledonia he was imprisoned at Clairvaux, where he remained until 1880, when he was elected, while still in gaol, deputy for Bordeaux, was not allowed to take his seat but was released, and died in Paris in 1881.

This brief summary gives but a poor idea of Blanqui’s activities and sufferings. At the period when Clemenceau pleaded for his release he was still, at seventy-one, the most dangerous revolutionary leader in France. From the first and throughout he was absolutely uncompromising in his adherence to his communist theories, and, being at the same time of dictatorial tendencies, he was an extremely difficult man to work with. None the less Blanqui represented the highest type of educated anarchist. He never considered himself for a moment. So long as he was able to keep the flag of revolution flying, and thus to prepare the way, by constant attempts at direct action, for the period when the people would be strong enough and well-organised enough to achieve victory for themselves, he was satisfied. A leader of his knowledge and capacity must have known and did know that his views could not possibly be accepted and acted upon, even if scientifically correct for a later date, at the stage of evolution which France had reached in his day. But, like Raspail, Delescluze, Amilcare Cipriani, Sophie Perovskaia, and more than one of the French dynamitical anarchists, he deliberately sacrificed his whole career, as he also risked his life time after time, in desperate efforts to uplift the mass of the people from their state of economic and social degradation. Nothing daunted him. His courage was of that exceptional quality which is strengthened by defeat. Even his bitterest enemies respected his devotion to his cause, his disregard of danger and the spirit he maintained, in spite of years upon years of confinement. He hated and despised the bourgeoisie, with their capitalist wage-earning, profit-making system, even more than he did monarchy and aristocracy. He revolted against the slow processes of social evolution, as he did against the inherited wrongs of class repression. No weapon of agitation came amiss to him. Journalist, pamphleteer, author, orator, organiser, conspirator, he covered in his own person the whole of the ground open to a convinced revolutionist. The suppressive order of to-day must be smashed up to give an outlet to the liberative order of to-morrow. Such a programme was in direct opposition to the ideas of Clemenceau, who, individualist as he is, has always regarded political action and trade organisation of a peaceful nature as the best means of attaining thorough reform and social reconstruction without running the risk of provoking monarchist or imperialist repression. Blanqui to him was an idealist who, by his very honesty and singleness of purpose, played into the hands of reaction, when he spent so much of his life as he lived outside of a prison in one broken but relentless effort to overthrow the existing society of inequality and wage-slavery by the same forcible methods that capitalist society itself uses to maintain the system in being. On the other hand, the right to freedom of person and freedom of expression was erected by the Radical leader into something not far from an intellectual religion. On this ground, therefore, he argued strongly in favour of Blanqui’s release, though quite possibly, and indeed probably, Blanqui’s freedom, had it been secured, would have been vigorously used against Clemenceau and his party—whom the great Anarchist-Communist would have regarded as mere trimmers—to the advantage of the reactionists themselves. But in this case as in that of the amnesty to the Communists, the Clemenceau of the Rights of Man and Liberty, Equality and Fraternity overcame Clemenceau the practical politician. That he failed to get Blanqui out of prison could only have been expected, having regard to the character of the Assembly to which his appeal is addressed.

His Amnesty speech made a fine beginning for Clemenceau’s active Parliamentary life. It put him on a very different level from that occupied by the mere political adventurers and intriguers whose main objects were either to help on the reconstitution of some form of monarchy or to secure for themselves posts under the Republic of much the same kind as existed under the Empire. Men who but yesterday had been champions of a genuine Republic in which the interests of the majority of the French people should be considered first, foremost and all the time had now become mere plotters for reaction, or opportunists anxious never to find an opportunity. They were Republicans in name but not in spirit. They were convinced that the most important portion of their policy consisted henceforth not in organising the factor of democracy for general progress but in reassuring their conservative opponents and the propertied classes generally, from the plutocrat to the peasant proprietor, that the Republic meant only a convenient form of government, in which all classes should agree harmoniously together to stand at ease for the next few generations. Their arguments in favour of such a scheme of permanent repose were unfortunately only too striking. They had but to recall the downfall of the Commune and to point to the ruins of fine public buildings to appeal effectively to the feelings of a large and influential portion of the people. Enthusiasm had become suspect, idealism the antechamber to violent mania, even Radicalism a vain thing.

Gambetta himself, regarded in England as the most eloquent and capable leader of the Republican party, invented an excuse for the existence of the Republic which he had taken an active part in creating, by the formula, “It is that which divides us the least.” Indifference on every important question except colonial expansion became the highest political wisdom. It was, in fact, hesitating opportunism and cowardly compromise which then dominated France. Such tactics evoked no loyalty and solved no problem. The old became cynical, the young contemptuous. To attack such flabby consistency in doing nothing seemed as bootless an enterprise as entering into conflict with a feather-bed. The early years of the French Republic constituted a period of apathy led, with one or two exceptions, by mediocrity. Even the scathing sarcasm and biting irony of Rochefort failed to produce any serious effect upon the smug stolidity of the rest-and-be-thankful representatives of the French middle class. Hence arose “a divorce between politics and thought,” and men of capacity became disgusted with the form of government itself. All this played directly into the hands of reaction and was preparing the way for a series of attempts against the Republic.

It was at this unhopeful period of stagnation, compromise and mediocrity that Clemenceau came to the front as leader of the Left in the National Assembly. He at once showed that he had every qualification for this important position—never more important than when there was a conspiracy afoot to prove to the world that there was no Radical Left at all. At the time he entered the Assembly in 1876 Clemenceau was thirty-five years of age, with an irreproachable past behind him and the full confidence of the Republicans of Paris around him. In his work in Montmartre and on the Municipal Council the people had come to know what manner of man he was. Without their steady support it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for him to carry on the uphill fight he fought for so many years. His principles upon every subject of public policy were from the first clear and well defined.

Freedom of person, of speech and of the press were cardinal points in his programme. He demanded that Paris should be released from all exceptional measures of repression inflicted by the so-called Conservatives upon the whole of the inhabitants of the capital as revenge for the rash action of a small number of fanatical idealists and as a means of keeping down any agitation against their own corruption and incompetence. He claimed also that no perpetual disability, in the shape of imprisonment and exile, should attach to the members of the Commune of Paris, and he called for the fullest pardon and freedom even for the irreconcilable Anarchist, Blanqui. On questions of political rights, universal secular education, the separation of Church and State, the generous treatment of the rank and file of the army, the prevention of the intrigues of the Catholics, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, Clemenceau took the line of an out-and-out democrat. So, likewise, in regard to the treatment of the working classes. Though not really a Socialist, the Radical leader recognised clearly the infinite hardships suffered by the wage-earners under the capitalist system, and proposed and supported palliative legislation to lessen and redress their wrongs. In foreign affairs he was a man of peace, never forgetting the outrages committed by the German armies in the war nor the territory seized and the huge indemnity exacted by the German Government at the peace; but hoping always that the friendly development of the peoples of both France and Germany might avert further antagonism and eventually lead to a full understanding which would assuage the hatreds of the past and lay the foundations of mutual good feeling in the future. To colonisation by conquest and colonial adventures generally Clemenceau was steadfastly opposed. The entire policy of expansion he regarded as injurious to the true interests of the country, diverting to doubtful enterprises abroad resources which were required for the development of Republican France at home. Such colonial schemes also were apt to create difficulties and even to risk wars with other nations which could in no wise benefit the people, while they might strengthen the financiers whose malefic power was already too great.

Such in brief was the general policy which Clemenceau set himself to formulate and put to the front on behalf of the only party which at that moment could exercise any serious influence in the political world. The whole programme was closely knit together, and for many years stood the brunt of the bitterest Parliamentary warfare conceivable. It was a conflict of ideas that Clemenceau entered upon. He conducted it throughout on the most approved principle of all warfare: Never fail to attack in order to defend. The advice of the American banker, “David Harum,” might have been enunciated as the motto of Georges Clemenceau the French statesman: “Do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first.”

But the main point of all, that which assured and confirmed and strengthened his leadership under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances, was his resolute opposition to compromise. This was contrary to all the ideas of political strategy and tactics which then prevailed in France. “Men became Ministers solely on condition that they refused when in power to do that which they had promised when in opposition”—quite the English method, in fact. He himself never failed to denounce nominal Republicans who set themselves stubbornly against reform and progress in every shape, as mere reactionists in disguise. They were, in fact, the staunch buttresses of that bourgeois Republic of which Clemenceau not long afterwards said to me, “La République, mon ami, c’est l’Empire républicanisé.” It was indeed a republicanised Empire which best suited the leading French politicians of that day. For at first bourgeois domination of the narrowest and meanest kind, leading, so the reactionaries hoped, to the restoration of the monarchy, had its will of Paris and all that Paris at its best stood for. As we look back upon that period of pettifoggery in high places, the wonder is that the Royalists were not successful. If they had had a king worth fighting for they might have been; for more than one President was certainly not unfavourable to the monarchy or empire. Prime Ministers were similarly tainted with reaction, and the army was none too loyal to the Republic.

[CHAPTER VI]

FROM GAMBETTA TO CLEMENCEAU

Medici, Mazarin, Riquetti-Mirabeau, Buonaparte, Gambetta—these names recall the great influence which Italians have had upon French affairs. Few, if any, nations have allowed persons of foreign extraction to lead them as France permitted the five recorded above. Much, too, as these Italians were affected by their French surroundings, there is something in them all quite different from what we regard as distinctively French intelligence and general capacity. Possibly that gave them their power of control. They had that faculty of detachment, of looking at the situation from without, which is so invaluable to anyone who has to play a great part in the world. Some of them could so far survey, as well as enter into, the peculiarities of the French mind that they could play upon its weaknesses as well as call forth its strength. Yet, with all their genius, the four men named failed to accomplish what they set out to achieve, and none left behind him amid his own immediate followers those who were capable of carrying on his work.

Léon Gambetta had but fourteen years of active political life, and during only eleven of those years was he in a position to make himself seriously felt. But what an amazing career this was of the grocer’s boy of Cahors who stirred all France to enthusiastic support or ferocious denunciation between 1871 and 1882! When William Morris died, the doctor who attended him was asked what he died of. “He died of being William Morris,” was the reply. Although Gambetta’s death was due to a pistol-shot received under circumstances never fully explained, it may be said that he also died of being Léon Gambetta. For his inner fires had burnt the man out. He crowded all the excitement and passions of a long lifetime into those stormy eleven years, and without some account of him and his efforts for the foundation of the Republic the story of Clemenceau is not complete.

Born in 1848 and enabled to come to Paris by the touching self-sacrifice of a maiden aunt who believed that her nephew’s confidence in his destiny to do great things would be realised, Gambetta was soon regarded as a leader among the young men of the Quartier Latin, who were in full revolt against the Empire. He distinguished himself by his easy-going, rough-and-tumble mode of life, his carelessness about study of the law which was to be his means of earning a livelihood, and his perfervid eloquence in the political circles which he frequented. Lawyer, journalist, bohemian orator of the clubs, strongly anti-Imperialist, he had much personal magnetism, but was not generally recognised as a man of exceptional ability. The few cases he had had in the Courts did not give him any considerable standing. Such was Gambetta when a number of Republican journalists were arrested on November 12th, 1868, for starting a subscription to erect a monument to M. Baudin, the Republican deputy who had been shot down in cold blood during Louis Napoleon’s massacre of the people of Paris on December 2nd, 1851—seventeen years before. Among these prisoners was the famous Delescluze, then editor of the Réveil. His counsel was Léon Gambetta. Gambetta’s speech was not merely a defence of his client, it was a scathing indictment of the Empire, from its foundation on the ruin of the Republic of 1848 by the coup d’état onwards. “Who,” the advocate asked, “were the men who ‘saved’ France at the cost of the death or transportation or exile of all her most eminent citizens? They were, to quote Corneille, ‘un tas d’hommes perdus de dettes et de crimes.’ These are the sort of people who for centuries have slashed down institutions and laws. Against them the human conscience is powerless, in spite of the sublime march-past of the martyrs who protest in the name of religion destroyed, of morality outraged, of equity crushed under the jackboot of the soldier. This is not salvation: it is assassination.” And this was no longer a press prosecution: it was the Emperor and his set of scoundrels who were now on their trial before the people of France and Europe.

The speech gave Gambetta great popularity and the opening into public life he desired. The cause itself was lost before the trial began. Delescluze was fined and imprisoned. “You may condemn us, but you can neither dishonour us nor overthrow us,” cried Gambetta. From that time forward he was regarded as a new force on the side of the Republic. His behaviour in the Corps Législatif, to which he was soon afterwards elected, justified this opinion. When the disasters of the Empire came Gambetta was one of the first to cry for Napoleon’s abdication and the establishment of the Republic, taking an active part in the foundation of the new order in Paris. It may be said that he worked side by side, though never hand in hand, with Clemenceau.

But those scenes of the downfall of the Empire in the capital, dramatic and exciting as they were, could bear no comparison with his bold escape from beleaguered Paris in a balloon and the magnificent effort he made to rouse the Provinces against the invaders. He failed to turn the tide of German victories, but he prevented the shameful surrender without a fight for the French Republic which many would have been glad to accept, and he, more than any other man, kept the flag flying, when Legitimists, Orleanists and Buonapartists were all doing their utmost to set on foot a reactionary government against the best interests of France. All this is part of the common history of the time. But we are apt, in looking back over that period of his activities, to underrate the almost superhuman energy he displayed, to attach too much importance to the mistakes he inevitably made, and to forget that his own countrymen were among his worst enemies in the work he undertook. Also, if the Empire had left the Republic one single really first-rate general at the disposal of France, the result might have been very different from what it was. There is such a thing as luck in human affairs, and luck was dead against Gambetta. All the more credit to him for never losing heart even in the face of continuous disasters and even betrayals. First as leading member of the Government of Defence, and then as virtual Dictator of France, Gambetta bridged over for the time being the bitter antagonism which separated Paris, the besieged seat of government, from the rest of France. Immediately on his arrival at Tours he created a new National Government out of the unpromising elements gathered together almost accidentally there. The fall of Metz and the threatened starvation of Paris, which might lead to surrender at any moment, made Gambetta’s own position desperate. The Paris Government, which apparently looked only to Paris, had failed to make a resolute effort to break through the lines of the German investment before Metz fell, and then lost heart altogether, refusing even to listen to any remonstrance from outside against a humiliating peace. Gambetta never gave way. Arrived at Bordeaux, he stuck to his text of carrying on the war, having in the meantime vigorously denounced the Government in Paris for its weakness. He and his fellow-delegates were deaf to the counsels of despair brought red-hot by members of the Government; but at last, overwhelmed by circumstances he could not control, the young Dictator resigned. After Paris had surrendered there was really no further hope, and those who voted in the new Assembly, as did Louis Blanc, Clemenceau and others, for the continuance of the war, did so more by way of protest against the apathy which pervaded the whole Assembly, and because foreign intervention in favour of France and against Germany seemed possible even thus late in the day, than because they saw at the moment any prospect of success.

Thus France lay prostrate at the feet of Germany, but at least Gambetta and the Republicans who acted with him showed their confidence that she would rise again. They were not responsible for the collapse of the French nation: undismayed by defeat they believed in Republican France of the near future.

Gambetta had created new armies out of disarray and disorder, and he had also aroused a fresh spirit which rose superior to disaster. The victory of the Republic in years to come over all the forces of reaction was largely due to the work done during Gambetta’s four months of dictatorship.

Universal Suffrage, General Secular Education, No Second Chamber, the Republican form of Government: those were the principal measures advocated by the extreme Left of the National Assembly, and these were advocated by Gambetta both at Bordeaux and when he took his seat at Versailles as one of the Deputies for Paris. But the Royalists were still in a majority, and were determined to take every advantage of their position while power still remained in their hands. Their object was to render Republicanism hateful. The object of their opponents was to show that no other form of government was possible and to prevent any other form from being established. Now that the Republic has been maintained for more than forty-seven years, under all sorts of difficult and dangerous circumstances, the obstacles which stood in its way at the start are sometimes under-estimated. Continuous agitation was needed to keep the country fully alive to the intrigues of the Royalists and Catholics. It was essential to put the misdeeds of the Empire and the real objects of the monarchists constantly before the public. No man in France was better qualified for this work than Gambetta, and he did it well, so well that the whole reactionary party was infuriated against him. There was no opportunism about him at this period, beyond the necessary adaptation of means to ends under circumstances which rendered immediate success impossible.

M. Thiers, in consequence of his horrible suppression of the Commune, was by far the most powerful public man in the country. He was acting, though a Constitutional Monarchist, as trustee for a provisional form of government which could not be distinguished from a conservative Republic. The longer this continued the better the chance of obtaining a Government which would not be conservative. It was of great importance, therefore, to keep M. Thiers on the Republican side, and this was made easier by the action of M. Thiers’ own old friends. So antagonistic was their attitude to the former Minister of Louis Philippe that, even when Gambetta supported the ex-Mayor of Lyons, a fervid Radical, M. Barodet, against M. Thiers’ eminent friend and coadjutor M. de Remusat, as representative of Paris, and the former won by 40,000 votes, Thiers never wavered in his decision to keep away from any direct connection with the monarchists. They therefore determined to upset the President, did so by a majority of 26 votes in the Assembly, and elected a President of their own in the person of Marshal MacMahon. This was on May 24th, 1873.

Reaction had won at Versailles. It remained to be seen whether it would win in the country. A “Ministry of Combat” for reaction, headed by the Duc de Broglie, was formed, and a Ministry of Combat it certainly proved to be. They were allowed no peace by their opponents, who never ceased to attack them all round, and they met these persistent assaults by attempts secretly to cajole and suborn public opinion. So the great combat went on. The majority remained a majority and rejected the Republic. It was useless. But in his anxiety to win speedily in conjunction with M. Thiers, Gambetta himself and his followers practised that very opportunism which he had previously denounced. A non-democratic Senate, which had always been opposed by Republicans, was enacted as an essential part of the Republican Constitution, and on February 25th, 1875, the French Republic was firmly established as the legal form of government by the very same majority that, in the hope of rendering any such disaster to monarchy impossible, had made Marshal MacMahon President and the Duc de Broglie Premier.

But it was a truncated Republic that Gambetta had thus obtained. What he had gained by political compromise he had lost in the enthusiasm of principle. A leader who desires to achieve great reforms must always keep in close touch with the fanatics of his party. They alone can be relied upon in periods of crisis, they alone refuse to regard politics merely as a remunerative profession. The compromise—for men of principle compromise spells surrender—of February 25th, 1875, was destined to be fatal to the democratic parliamentary dictatorship which Gambetta might have achieved by common consent of his party, had he pursued his original policy of democratic Republicanism through and through. He stunted the growth of his own progeny by helping to establish a Republicanised Empire. No doubt this averted friction for the time being, but it slackened the rate of progress, placed obstacles in the path of democracy, and destroyed public enthusiasm. By one of the strange ironies of political life, however, it so chanced that, nearly thirty years later, Clemenceau himself owed his return to Parliament to the institution of that same Senate the creation of which he had always resolutely opposed.

But during these years of reconstruction from 1871 to 1875 Clemenceau had been excluded from the Assembly and actively engaged in the work of the Municipal Council of Paris. There he did admirable service in consolidating the organisation of Parisian municipal life to which he had been instrumental in giving expression in legal shape as Deputy for Montmartre. Paris had become the bugbear of all the reactionists and law-and-order men. The capital was constantly referred to by them as if the last acts of despair of the irresponsible extremists of the Commune were the habitual diversions of the Parisian populace when allowed free play for the realisation of their own aspirations. The Parisians, in fact, according to these persons, were burning with the desire to destroy their own city in order to avenge themselves upon their provincial detractors and enemies. It was important to show, therefore, not only that Paris could manage her own affairs coolly and capably, but also that she could take a progressive line of her own which might give the lead to other French cities in more than one direction. This was precisely what the Municipal Council did, and Clemenceau, by his constant attendance and the continuous pressure he exerted as an active member of the Left of that body, prevented the Council from being used at any time as a centre of reactionist intrigue. By this means also he strengthened his personal influence in his own democratic district as well as in Paris as a whole. He took care likewise all the world should know that on the matter of the full restitution of Parisian rights and the return of the Assembly to the capital he was as determined as ever, and that in the affairs of general politics he was and always would be a thoroughgoing Radical Republican. Thus he was building up for himself outside the Chamber a reputation as a capable municipal administrator as well as a fearless champion of the public rights of the great city he had made his home. At the same time his local popularity, due to his thorough knowledge of social conditions and his advocacy of municipal improvements of every kind, added to his gratuitous service as doctor of the poor, gave him an indisputable claim upon the votes of the people when, after having become President of the Municipal Council, he should decide to offer himself for re-election to the Assembly.

And from February 25th, 1875, onwards, matters were taking such a turn that the presence of a thoroughly well-informed, determined, active and fearless representative of Paris became necessary. A leader was wanted on the extreme Left who should loyally support the moderate Republicans when they were going forward and have the courage to attack them when they seemed inclined to hesitate or go back. The success of the conservative compromise in the constitution of the Republic had strengthened the belief of the reactionary majority in the Assembly in their own power under the new conditions. Gambetta’s own moderation deceived them as to the real position in the country. They began to think that the Republicans were afraid not only of how they would fare in the elections to the newly constituted Senate, but that the result of the General Elections which must shortly be held would be unfavourable to their cause. The Prime Minister, M. Buffet, aided and abetted by the President, MacMahon, who never forgot that the members of the Right were his real friends, made full use of the Exceptional Laws and the State of Siege, which was still in force, to show the Republicans plainly what a reactionary majority would mean. The “Conservatives” and Imperialists had things all their own way. Democracy became a byword and Radicalism a vain thing.

With the Ministry at their command and the President in their hands, they needed only to obtain the control of the Senate to have the people of France entirely at their mercy. Then, with the army favourable, with whole cohorts of anti-Republican officials at their service, they might postpone the General Elections, maintain the state of siege permanently, and prepare everything for a monarchical restoration or a Buonapartist plébiscite. L’Empire républicanisé indeed!

M. Buffet, within a few months of the declaration of the Republic as the real form of government of France, spoke quite in this sense. Happily the forces of reaction fell out among themselves. They could not trust one another in any sharing of the booty which might fall to the general lot. Therefore, when the time came for nomination and election of the seventy-five members of the Senate to be elected by the Assembly, their intestine differences lost them the battle: one portion of their motley group even went over to the enemy. So the Republicans actually obtained a majority by the votes of their opponents. In this way the danger of the Senate as a whole being used against the Republic was averted and the Radicals had secured the first point in the political game. Yet, in spite of this preliminary success, the reactionists had a majority of the Senate of 300 when the limited votes of the country had been polled. But the Republicans in revenge gained a surprising majority at the General Elections for the National Assembly, such a majority that it might have been thought any further serious effort on the part of the anti-Republicans would be impossible and even that Gambetta’s previous policy of opportunism was unnecessary.

It was at this election of 1876 that Clemenceau was returned again for the 18th Electoral District of Paris to the National Assembly as a thoroughgoing Radical Republican, and took his seat on the extreme Left under the leadership of Gambetta.

Marshal MacMahon, the President, was a good honest soldier who served his country as well as he knew how, but was quite incapable of understanding the new forces that were coming into action around him. The Parisians were never tired of inventing humorous scenes in which he invariably figured as the well-meaning pantaloon. Everybody trusted his honour, but all the world doubted his intelligence. He was by nature, upbringing and surroundings a conservative in the widest sense of the word. Radical Republicanism was to him the accursed thing which would bring about another Commune of Paris, if its partisans were given free rein. Although, therefore, incapable of plotting directly for the overthrow of the Constitution he had pledged himself to uphold, he was liable to yield to influences the full tendency of which he did not discern. Thus it happened that he allowed himself unconsciously to become the tool of the highly educated and clever Duc de Broglie, who was undoubtedly a monarchist and, what was still worse, a statesman imbued with the ideals of clericalism and of the Jesuits—precisely those powers which the growing spirit of democracy and Republicanism most feared. It was this growing spirit and its expression in the National Assembly that the Prime Minister, M. Jules Simon, who succeeded de Broglie had to recognise and deal with. Gambetta was still the leader of the Republican Party, and with him for this struggle were all the more advanced men, including Clemenceau, who afterwards stoutly opposed his policy of opportunism and compromise. M. Jules Simon, finding the majority of the Assembly in favour of steady progress towards the Left, was quite unable to check the movement in this direction or to refuse the legislation to which the Republican demands of necessity impelled him. The President could not see that an extremely moderate man, such as Jules Simon undoubtedly was, would not have taken this course unless he had been convinced that the Republic had to be in some degree republicanised if serious trouble were to be averted. In short, Marshal MacMahon felt that the floodgates of revolution were being opened, and forthwith knocked down the lock-keeper. In other words, he sent for M. Jules Simon and talked to him in such a manner as gave the Premier no option but to resign. Resign he did. Thereupon France was thrown into that turmoil of peaceful civil war ever afterwards known as the Coup du Seize Mai. The Duc de Broglie, with a trusty phalanx of seasoned reactionaries and devotees of priestcraft, again took office, regardless of the fact that the majority of the Chamber was solid against them all. Even with the most strenuous support of the President of the Republic, the de Broglie Ministry never had a chance from the first. They were in a hopeless minority, and their attempt to govern, on the basis of MacMahon’s reputation and the support of the priests, could not but result in failure, unless the Marshal himself were prepared to risk a coup d’état. This the Duc de Broglie and his followers were ready to attempt, but it was useless to embark upon anything of the kind so long as the President held back.

Then came the famous division, following up a most violent discussion, which for many a long year formed a landmark in the history of the Republic. Three hundred and sixty-three Republicans declared against the President’s Ministry of reaction and all its works. But Marshal MacMahon still would not understand that in his mistaken attempt to override the National Assembly in order to save France from what he believed would be an Anarchist revolution, he himself, with his group of monarchists and clericals, was steadily impelling the country into civil war. The action taken against Gambetta, then at the height of his vigour and influence, for declaring in his famous phrase that, in view of the attitude of the Chamber, the President must either “give in or get out,” made matters still worse. The President’s manifestoes to the Assembly and the country also only confirmed the growing impression that a sinister plot was afoot against the Republic itself, in the interest of the Orleanists.

This was a much more serious matter than appeared on the surface. In the six years which had passed since the withdrawal of the German armies and the suppression of the Commune, France had become accustomed to the Republic and to the use of universal suffrage as a democratic instrument of organisation. Great as were its drawbacks in many respects, the Republic was, as Gambetta phrased it, the form of government which divided Frenchmen the least. The people, who comprised not only the enlightened Radical Republicans of the cities, but the easily frightened small bourgeoisie and the peasantry, could now make the Assembly and the Senate do what they pleased. They were not as yet prepared to push those institutions very fast or very far, but they were unquestionably moving forward and were in no mind whatever to go back either to Napoleonism, Orleanism or Legitimism. France as a Republic was becoming the France of them all.

When, therefore, the 363 deputies who voted against the Duc de Broglie’s rococo restoration policy and Marshal MacMahon’s constitutional autocracy stood firmly together, sinking all differences in the one determination to safeguard and consolidate the Republic, there could be no real doubt as to the result. Those 363 stalwarts issued a vigorous appeal to the country, and the issue was joined in earnest at the General Elections. Gambetta, meanwhile, was the hero of the hour, straining every nerve for victory, exhausting himself by his furious eloquence, and the other advanced leaders did their full share of the fighting. In all this political warfare Clemenceau was as active and energetic as the fiery tribune himself, and as one of the framers and signatories of the great Republican appeal identified himself permanently with the document which recorded, as events proved, the decision of France to be and to remain a Republic.

Although it did not seem so at the time, the President played completely into the hands of the Republicans by the Message he sent to the Assembly and the Senate just before the prorogation he had so autocratically decreed. Here is a portion of it:—

“Frenchmen,—You are about to vote. The violence of the opposition has dispelled all illusions. . . . The conflict is between order and disorder. You have already announced you will not by hostile elections plunge the country into an unknown future of crises and conflicts. You will vote for the candidates whom I recommend to your suffrages. Go without fear to the poll.

(Signed) “Maréchal MacMahon.”

The elections followed. It is difficult to exaggerate the advantage which is given in a French General Election to the party in power at the time. An unscrupulous Minister of the Interior has at his disposal all sorts of devices and machinery for helping his own side to victory. He can bring pressure of every kind to bear upon individuals directly or indirectly dependent on the Government of the day, and the whole official caste may be enlisted on behalf of the administration in control. This is the case ordinarily and in quiet times. But here was a direct stand-up fight between Reaction and Clericalism on the one side and Republicanism and Secularism—for that was at stake too—on the other. Both Marshal MacMahon and the Duc de Broglie honestly believed that they were doing their very utmost to preserve France from rapine and ruin. Every Radical Republican of the old school or the new was to them a bloody-minded Communard in disguise, veiling his instincts for plunder with eloquent appeals for patriotism and humanity. It is easy for the fanatics of conservatism and reaction thus to delude themselves. And once self-deceived they lose no chance of imposing their own wise and sober views upon the misguided people! So it happened in this case. Never were the powers of the Government in office strained to the same extent as in these elections of 1877—the elections which followed on the “Seize Mai” stroke of MacMahon. Not an opportunity for coercing, cajoling and intimidating the voters was missed. In every urban district and rural village throughout France the State, the Church, the Municipality, the Commune were used to the fullest extent possible to obtain a vote favourable to the de Broglie Ministry. Swarms of priests and Jesuits buzzed around the constituencies, and promises of an easy time of it in this life and the next if things went the right way were made in profusion. If the Republic could be beaten by the forces of reaction it would be beaten now! Gambetta had predicted that the 363 would return to the Assembly as 400. This was not to be. But in view of the tremendous efforts made to stem the tide of progress, not only by promises, but by serious threats wherever threats might tell, the wonder is the Republicans were so successful as they proved to be. In spite of all that the President and the Prime Minister and the Catholic Church and the Jesuits—who were fighting for the right to remain in France—and the curés and the State functionaries, and all that the agencies of aristocratic, monarchist and Buonapartist—more particularly Buonapartist—corruption could do, the Republicans returned to the Chamber with a substantial majority of upwards of 100 votes. This victory was universally recognised not only in France but throughout Europe as irrefragable evidence that the French people had finally decided for a Republic, and had dealt at the same time a serious blow to the Church.

But, obvious as this was to everybody else, the respectable old soldier who had been a party to all this reactionary turmoil was still unconvinced of the error of his ways! He repeated the formula of the Malakoff fortress: J’y suis, j’y reste. But the Republicans were more tenacious than the Russians. They resolved to dislodge him, political Marshal though he was. A resolution was passed by the Assembly to inquire into corrupt practices during the election. It was a challenge to battle, and signed by such men as Albert Grévy, H. Brisson, Jules Ferry, Léon Gambetta, Floquet, Louis Blanc and Clemenceau.

A great debate, lasting several days, followed, in which de Broglie defended himself in a high-handed manner against the fervid denunciations of Gambetta. A Committee of Inquiry was nominated and the arena of the struggle changed to the Senate, which presently, as might have been expected from its reactionary character, gave a small vote of confidence in the Marshal and his Ministers. Nevertheless the feeling in the country was such that even MacMahon could not hold on. De Broglie resigned, and the Marshal evolved—almost from the depths of his inner consciousness—an “extra-Parliamentary Cabinet” which might have been called “The Cabinet of Men of No Account.” But these were so unknown and so incompetent that all France made fun of them; and the will of the old Marshal, which nothing else could conquer, was broken by ridicule. In December, 1877, the President of the Republic saw that unless he appealed to the army, as the Buonapartists vigorously incited him to do, an appeal which more than probably the army itself would have rejected, there was no course open to him but the alternative which Gambetta had pointed out as being the Marshal’s inevitable destiny if he kept within the limits of law and order—to give in or get out. The old soldier of the Empire gave in, and did his country a service by accepting the rebuff which he had courted: a moderate Republican Ministry under the Premiership of M. Dufaure took office. MacMahon himself remained President of the Republic until January, 1879 (when he was succeeded by Jules Grévy), but his reactionary power was broken and France entered on a moderately peaceful era of recognised Republicanism. Gambetta was the acknowledged leader of the Republican majority; and Clemenceau, after this first taste of victory, now began that fine career of destructive, anti-opportunist Radicalism and semi-Socialist democracy which made him for many years the most redoubtable politician and orator in the Republic. The Radical-Socialist Clemenceau stood next in succession to the Opportunist Gambetta.

[CHAPTER VII]

THE TIGER

When a political leader in the course of some fifteen years of Parlamentary life has upset, or has helped to upset, no fewer than eighteen administrations and has always refused to take office himself, that leader is likely to have created a few enemies. When, in addition to these feats of destruction, he has during the same period secured the nomination and election of three Presidents of the Republic and has thus proved an insuperable obstacle to the realisation of the legitimate ambitions of the most important public men in France who were not elected, it is clear that personal popularity was not the object he had in view. It is impossible for the ordinary politician or journalist to judge fairly a man of this sort. Politics in modern Europe is an interesting game and, quite frequently, a remunerative profession. Party interests sap all principle and the attainment of personal aims and ambitions in and out of Parliament is, as a rule, quite incompatible with common honesty. Instead of Court intrigues and backstair cabals there are nowadays lobby “transactions” and convenient sales of titles and positions arranged, for value received, at private meetings. That is as far as democracy has got yet. It is all an understood business, often complicated with more flagitious pecuniary dealings outside.

Republican Government, or Constitutional Government, means, therefore, the success or failure of vote-catching and advantage-grabbing schemes, quite irrespective, from the public point of view, of the merits of the proposals which are put forward. Honest enthusiasts, who really wish to get something done for the benefit of the present or the coming generation, are only useful in so far as they act as stokers-up of public opinion for the profit of the political promoter of this or that faction. Steam is needed to drive the machine of State. Men of real convictions furnish that steam. But they are fools for their pains, all the same. Half the amount of energy used in the right direction would gain for them place, pelf, and possibly power, which is all that any man of common sense goes into politics for. Anybody who carries high principle and serious endeavour into political life is not playing the game. Everybody around him wants to know what on earth he is driving at. The only conceivable object of turning a Ministry out is to get in. To turn a Government out in order to keep out yourself is an unintelligible and therefore dangerous form of political mania, or a persistent manifestation of original sin.

Clemenceau was found guilty on both counts. But he was the ablest public man in all France. Moreover, he was successful in the diabolical combinations he set on foot. The thing was uncanny. That he should begin by overthrowing other politicians was all in the way of business. But that he should go on at it, time after time, for year after year, while other and inferior men took the posts he had opened for them, was not to be explained by any known theory of human motives. If he had been a cranky religionist, now, that would conceivably have met the case. He might have been “possessed” from on high or from below. But Clemenceau was and is a free-thinker of free-thinkers: neither Heaven nor Hell has anything to say to him. Clearly it is a case of malignant atavism: Clemenceau has thrown back to his animal ancestry. What is the totem of the tribe which has entered into him, whose instinct of depredation pervades his every political action? We have it! He is of the jungle, jungly. His spring is terrific. His crashing attack fatal. He looks as formidable as he is. In short, he is a Tiger, and there you are. That accounts for everything!

When Clemenceau was re-elected Deputy for the 18th Arrondissement to the National Assembly, on October 14th, 1877, and took the active part in the renewed struggle with Marshal MacMahon already spoken of, Gambetta was the leader at the height of his power and influence, with a solid Republican majority of more than a hundred votes. But from this period he became steadily more and more Opportunist, which gained him great credit in Great Britain, and Clemenceau was thenceforth the recognised leader of the advanced Left. MacMahon having resigned, M. Grévy was elected President with the support of Gambetta.

From the first Clemenceau had vigorously opposed the establishment of a Second Chamber in the shape of a Senate divorced from a direct popular vote. This was a step calculated to hamper progress at every turn, and at critical moments to intensify those very antagonisms which it was Gambetta’s intention, no doubt, to compose entirely, or at any rate to mitigate. Clemenceau did not view the matter from Gambetta’s point of view. The Monarchists and Buonapartists were the domestic enemy, as the Germans had been and might be again the foreign enemy. The only sound policy for strengthening the Republic to resist both was to favour those measures political and social which would make that Republic, which they had established with so much difficulty and at such great cost, a genuinely democratic Republic. Any surrender to the reactionists and the clericals must inevitably dishearten those parties, now shown to be the majority of the whole French people, who were for the Republic and the Republic alone. Opportunism also gave the anti-democrats and intriguers a false notion of their own power, virtually helped them to carry on their underground agitations for a change of the new constitution, and provided them in the undemocratic Senate with a political force that might be turned to their own purpose.

It was more important all through, thought Clemenceau, to inspire your own side with confidence than to placate your opponents by half-measures. It was, in fact, not enough to eject officials who were known to be hostile to the Republic; it was still more essential to give such shape to the political forms and so vivify political opinion that even the most unscrupulous officials could not turn them to the account of reaction. Both steps were necessary to carry out a thorough democratic programme. In fact, the whole scheme of administration in France could not be permanently improved merely by substituting one set of bureaucrats for another. Much more drastic measures of a peaceful character were indispensable, and these Opportunism thwarted. Gambetta may not have given up his desire to carry these Radical measures in 1877 and 1878: he still retained and expressed his old opinions upon clericalism and its sinister influence. But he was no longer the vehement champion of the advanced party at Versailles, and the position which he had abandoned Clemenceau took up and pushed further to the front.

There was no matter on which the lines of cleavage between the Republicans and the reactionists were more definitely and clearly drawn than on the question of the Amnesty of the Communists. No man in the Assembly was stronger in favour of their complete amnesty by law than Clemenceau. This he showed in 1876, and in his powerful advocacy of the release of the great agitator and conspirator Blanqui in 1879. Every reactionary and trimming man of moderate views was bitterly opposed to a policy of justice towards the victims of the wholesale measures of repression formulated by M. Thiers and so frightfully carried out by General Gallifet and the Versailles troops in 1871. Even when measures of partial amnesty were passed, their application was nullified as far as possible by Ministers. It was part of an organised policy to frighten the bourgeoisie and peasants into another Empire. The reprisals of the Bloody Week and the transportations to Cayenne and New Caledonia had not by any means fully satisfied the enemies alike of the Commune and the Republic. So Clemenceau and his friends never ceased their attacks upon M. Waddington and others who took the rancorous conservative view of unceasing persecution of the men and women who, after all, were the first to declare the Republic. M. Waddington, as Premier, got a resolution passed by the Chamber in his favour. But this did not silence either Clemenceau’s friends or himself. Here, in fact, was a crucial case of his power of getting rid of an obnoxious Ministry even in the face of a Ministerial majority. The Tiger showed his claws and made ready to spring. But first he gave fair warning of his intentions. Nothing could be plainer than this: “Why has the Minister of Justice demanded a partial amnesty? Because he is anxious that the country should not forget the horrors of the Commune. But then, if you do not wish it to forget the horrors of the Commune, why do you desire that those who have been condemned should forget the horrors of its repression? Because for eight long years we have kept under cover the abominable facts at our disposal, you have thought yourselves in a position to trample on us! You say: We shall not forget the hostages and the conflagrations. Very well. I who speak here tell you: If you forget nothing, your opponents will remember too.”

The speech from which that passage is an excerpt was regarded as a distinct menace on Clemenceau’s part. It was followed up by the extreme Left with a series of interruptions, interrogations and denunciations which ended in the retirement of M. Waddington. He had his majority but he had no Clemenceau. So out went Waddington and his colleagues. In came M. Freycinet—“the white mouse.” “We have had,” said Clemenceau’s organ, La Justice, “in the Waddington cabinet a Dufaure cabinet without M. Dufaure. To-day we have a Waddington cabinet without M. Waddington. It is a botch upon a botch.” A nice welcome for M. Freycinet! A pleasing congratulation for the President, M. Grévy! The administration was regarded as a political monstrosity. It had two heads, M. Freycinet and M. Jules Ferry, one looking to the right and the other to the left. The friends of Freycinet could not stand Ferry: the friends of Ferry abhorred Freycinet. This new political marriage not only began but went on with mutual aversion. It stood at the mercy, therefore, of Clemenceau, who was less inclined to be merciful since the Premier declared himself bitterly hostile to the plenary amnesty proposed by the famous old Republican, M. Louis Blanc. Also on account of clerical tendencies. Out goes Freycinet, therefore, in his turn, and in comes M. Jules Ferry, with various clerical, educational and other troubles of his own hatching to clear up. Ministries, in short, were going in and out on the dial of Presidential favour like the figures of a Dutch clock. Clemenceau was getting his claws well into the various political personages all the time. As none of them had any blood to lose in the shape of principles there was no great harm done—except to the Republic! It was the perpetual immolation of a sawdust brigade. A keen critic of the period said of the Ferry Ministry—which was beaten on its proposal to postpone on behalf of education the reform of the magistracy and all that this carried with it in regard to the amnesty—that it wished to die before it lived. Down it went for the moment, and returned to place out of breath and half-ruined. But there the Ministry still was, and that by itself was something in those days of political topsy-turveydom, with Clemenceau and his party ever ready to assert themselves.

Thus the Republic stumbled rather than marched on, from the date of Marshal MacMahon’s resignation and the installation of M. Grévy as President up to the period of the declaration of July 14th, in remembrance of July 14th, 1789, and the Fall of the Bastille, as the fête day of the Republic after the passage of a practically complete amnesty. This was really a great triumph for all Republicans, as it put the Republic in its true historic relation to the past, the present and the future. With such a national fête day, with the certainty that Republicans, if they chose to keep united, could always command a large majority in the Assembly, the elections of 1881 might well have been a first step towards a thorough political and social reorganisation of the Republic. Unfortunately there were several causes of disunion. President of the Assembly though he was, and therefore excluded by his position as well as by M. Grévy’s prejudice against him from coming into immediate competition with M. Ferry for the Premiership, Gambetta was actively supporting the scrutin de liste, or political appeal to the whole country, against scrutin d’arrondissement, or local elections. This was regarded as a bid on his part for a clear Parliamentary dictatorship. Already on October 20th, 1880, Clemenceau had denounced the hero of the dictatorship of despair of 1871, fine as his effort had then been, as aiming at personal power ten years later. A victory at the polls gained through scrutin de liste would probably ensure him success in this venture.

Nevertheless, in spite of open and secret opposition, Gambetta had sufficient influence to carry the scrutin de liste through the National Assembly. But with the curious irony of fate he was defeated by a majority of 32 in the Senate which he himself had been so largely instrumental in forcing upon the Republic! This was on June 9th, 1881. Three months before, M. Barodet had brought forward a resolution backed by 64 deputies which, if carried, would have abolished the equality of rights between the Senate and the National Assembly, would have withdrawn the right of the former to dissolve Parliament, would have made the Chamber permanent like the Senate, would have modified the system of election of the second House; would have prevented the re-enactment of the scrutin de liste by again making the electoral law for the deputies part of the Constitution; and lastly would have summoned a Constituent Assembly in order to carry out these reforms. This whole project was discussed in the Assembly on May 31st. There was no mistake about Clemenceau’s attitude. He formulated a vigorous indictment against the Constitution of 1875 and attacked the Senate with great violence. The Constitution of 1875 was, he declared, a powerful weapon of war expressly forged for use against the Republic. The Senate with its anti-democratic method of election was a permanent danger to the State. It was not in any sense an element of stability but an element of resistance. “What is the use of talking of a brake on the machine or a weight to counterbalance popular opinion? Does not universal suffrage provide its own brake, its own regulator?” This time, however, Clemenceau missed his coup. M. Barodet’s motion was rejected and the conservative Republic rumbled on comfortably, though Clemenceau shortly afterwards very nearly toppled M. Ferry’s Cabinet over, the Ministers only securing a vote in their favour by a majority of 13 made up by their own votes.

Looking back to that period when the whole Constitution seemed almost certain to go into the melting-pot and come out again in a thoroughly democratic shape, it is remarkable to notice how, in spite of the efforts of Clemenceau, M. Naquet and other democrats, the Republic of compromise has steadily adhered to its old machinery. Why the cumbrous and often reactionary Senate, elected in such wise as to exclude democratic influence, should have been maintained for more than forty years is difficult to explain. But nations, as our own belated and unmanageable Constitution proves, when once they have become accustomed to a form of government, are very slow indeed to adapt it to rapidly changing economic and social developments. This, it may be said, suits the English turn of mind with its queer addiction to perpetual compromise. But the French are logical and apparently restless. Yet their Constitution remains an unintelligible muddle. Their real conservatism overrides their revolutionary tendencies except in periods of great perturbation. Thus the Opportunist Republic of Gambetta, which ought to have been a mere makeshift, has held on, with partial revision, for more than forty years. Fear of the monarchists on one side and of the Communists, afterwards the Socialists, on the other has kept Humpty-Dumpty up on his wall.

The elections of 1881, conducted as they were amid much excitement, gave the Republicans of all parties a crushing majority—a majority in the Assembly greatly out of proportion even to the total vote. There were five millions of votes for Republicans against 1,700,000 for the various sections of monarchists. The Republican deputies in the Chamber, however, numbered 467 to only 90 “conservatives.” According to the returns, this was a victory for the Government and its chief, M. Jules Ferry, especially as the Prime Minister had arrived at some understanding with Gambetta, who at this time had become extremely unpopular with the democracy of Paris. But those who were of this opinion reckoned without the question of Tunis and, above all, without taking account of the difficulty of facing the criticisms of the irreconcilable Clemenceau. Clemenceau had always opposed a policy of colonial adventure. This of Tunis was from his point of view not only adventurous but dangerous. Tunis had been offered to France in an indefinite way at the Peace-with-Honour Congress of Berlin in 1878. But the policy of expansion pushed on by financial intrigues did not take shape at once. When it did it was serious enough, for France not only had to deal with troubles in Algeria itself, with the natural opposition of the Bey of Tunis to French interference and annexation, but Italy took umbrage at the advance, regarding Tunis as specially her business, Turkey was by no means favourable, and there was even a possibility that Germany might stir up trouble for purposes of her own. Moreover the whole business had been extremely ill-managed, not only by the Government itself but by M. Albert Grévy, the brother of the President, who was the Governor-General of Algeria. This personage, on account of his Presidential connections, could neither be censured nor replaced. So credits were asked for, troops were moved, a railway concession granted—everything as usual, in short, when annexation is being prepared.

Clemenceau quite rightly denounced the whole mischievous business as the policy of intriguers and plutocrats, and demanded an inquiry into the affair from the first. He did not measure his phrases at all. French blood and French money, sadly needed at home, were being wasted abroad. M. Ferry, to do him justice, fought hard for his policy of colonisation by force of arms. His attacks upon the extremists who criticised him did not lack point or bitterness. Discharged officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and returned Communards from Noumea who composed the public meetings and irregular assizes that condemned him, M. Ferry, “as is fitting, kicked aside with his boot.” As to Clemenceau, if he had allowed matters to take their own course in Tunis, what a tornado of malediction would have raged around them from that orator! “I can hear even now the philippics of the honourable M. Clemenceau.” Clemenceau did not get the inquiry he demanded. But on November 10th M. Ferry retired, so badly had he been mauled in the fray. It was a win, that is to say, for Clemenceau, who by his speech on November 9th again overthrew the Government in spite of the cordial support of Gambetta. What made this victory of Clemenceau and the extreme Left the more astounding was the fact that the Treaty concluding the “first pacification” of Tunis had been confirmed on May 23rd by a majority of 430 to 1. Clemenceau was that one. Six months later, therefore, he had his revenge. The expédition de vacances, which had developed into a guerre de conquête, cost M. Jules Ferry his Premiership, notwithstanding this unheard-of majority. The Tiger at work indeed!

So now at last, in spite of M. Grévy’s ungrateful conduct towards him, in spite likewise of the rejection of the scrutin de liste, Gambetta became President of the Council instead of President of the Chamber. He was still at this time in the eyes of all foreigners the most eminent living French statesman. In England particularly his accession to office was received with jubilation in official circles. It meant, so said Liberals like Sir Charles Dilke, who were then in power, a permanently close understanding between France and England, a joint settlement of the troublesome and at times even threatening Egyptian question, as well as a fair probability of the arrangement of other thorny problems between the two countries. But in order to accomplish all this Gambetta must carry the Assembly, the Senate and the bulk of his countrymen with him, and control a solid Republican party, even if Clemenceau and his squadrons still hung upon his flank. Gambetta, however, had shaken the confidence of the country. It was no longer Clemenceau and his friends only who accused him of aiming at supreme dictatorial power. The public in general suspected him too. Nor did his immediate friends, either old or young, do much to destroy this unfortunate impression.

Truth to tell, Gambetta was not the man he had been a few years before. He looked fat, even bloated, unhealthy and sensual. His magnificent frame had undergone deterioration. A brilliant French journalist cruelly comparing him to Vitellius, as a man of gluttony and debauchery combined, summed up his career against that of the extraordinary Roman general and Emperor who had played so many parts successfully, as soldier in the field and as courtier in the palace, and wound up in derision of Gambetta with the terrible phrase, “Je te demande pardon, César!” And over against this self-indulgent and fiery man of genius was a very different personage, who had taken up the rôle which had once been that of the great tribune of the French people. Spare, alert, vigorous, always in training, despising ease and never taken by surprise; equal, as he had just shown, to fighting a lone hand victoriously, yet never despising help in his battles even from the most unexpected quarters—what chance had Gambetta against such a terrible opponent as Clemenceau? None whatever. Down he went, after a Premiership of but sixty-six days. Many believe that, finding the situation too complicated, and relying still upon obtaining the scrutin de liste later—as indeed came about some time after his death—Gambetta deliberately rode for a fall. Certain it is that M. Spüller, who had Gambetta’s complete confidence, gave this explanation of his intentions three weeks before his defeat in the Assembly.

Gambetta, with all his great reputation, being overthrown, straightway his old Secretary of 1871, de Freycinet, came again to the front. The affairs of Egypt, always with Clemenceau’s genial assistance, made short work of him. The Anglo-French Condominium having fallen through and England having thought proper to suppress a people “rightly struggling to be free,” de Freycinet was anxious to reassert the claims of France in Egypt after a fashion which threatened unpleasantness with Great Britain. Whatever Clemenceau may have thought privately of English policy at this juncture, he would have none of that. His arguments convinced the Assembly that French intervention in Egypt against England would be dangerous and unsuccessful. France, said Clemenceau, had neither England’s advantages nor England’s direct interests in Egypt. France is a continental, not a great sea power. Her apprehensions are from the East. Do nothing which may drive England into the arms of Germany.

What was much worse, the same colonial expansion which had been carried out in Tunis was now followed up in Tonquin, Annam and Madagascar, at great expense and to little or no advantage. Clemenceau still opposed this entire policy on principle. Ferry thought France would recompense herself for the disasters of 1870-71 by these adventures: Clemenceau was absolutely convinced to the contrary. “Why risk £20,000,000 on remote expeditions when we have our entire industrial mechanism to create, when we lack schools and country roads? To build up vanquished France again we must not waste her blood and treasure on useless enterprises. But there are much higher reasons even than these for abstaining from such wars of depredation. It is all an abuse, pure and simple, of the power which scientific civilisation has over primitive civilisation to lay hold upon man as man, to torture him, to squeeze everything he has in him out of him for the profit of a civilisation which itself is a sham.” There could be no sounder sense, no higher morality, no truer statesmanship than that. Clemenceau had aspirations that France should lead the world, not by unjustifiable conquests over semi-civilised populations, but by displaying at home those great qualities which she undoubtedly possesses. His attacks were inspired, therefore, not by personal animosity against Jules Ferry or any other politician, but against a megalomania that was harmful to his country and the world. Unfortunately, Clemenceau could not, this time, persuade the Assembly or his countrymen to recognise the dangers and disadvantages of expansion by conquest in the Far East, until the disaster of Lang Son and the demand for additional credits enabled him to push the perils of such a policy right home. Then M. Ferry was once more discharged, practically at Clemenceau’s behest.

So matters went on, Clemenceau striving his utmost, in opposition, to enforce the genuine democratic policy of abstention from Imperialism abroad and strengthening of the forces of the Republic at home which the successive Opportunist Administrations in power refused to accept. In each and every case, Tunis, Tonquin, Annam, Madagascar and Egypt, he considered first, foremost and all the time what would most benefit Frenchmen in France, and refused to be led astray by any will-o’-the-wisps of Eastern origin, however gloriously they might disport themselves under the sun of finance. But now came a still more awkward matter close at home. There are not the same facilities for shutting down inquiries into the financial peccadilloes or corrupt malversations of public men in France as there are in England. Monetary scandals will out, though political blunderings may be glossed over, as in the cases of the Duc de Broglie, M. Jules Ferry and M. Albert Grévy. The President, M. Grévy, was very unfortunate in his relations. His brother, the Governor-General of Algeria, had shown himself dreadfully incompetent in that capacity. But M. de Freycinet, M. Jules Ferry and the whole Ministerial set had entered into a conspiracy of silence and misrepresentation, throwing the blame of his mistakes upon anybody but the Governor-General himself, in order to uphold the dignity of the President quite uninjured. Now, however, the President’s son-in-law, M. Wilson, was found out in very ignoble transactions. He was actually detected in the flagitious practice of trading in decorations, the Legion of Honour and the like, not for what are considered on this side of the Channel as perfectly legitimate purposes, the furtherance, namely, of Party gains or Ministerial advantages, but in order to increase his own income. The thing became a public scandal. Those who could not afford to buy the envied distinctions were specially incensed. But out of regard for the President, out of consideration for their personal advancement in the future, because when you start this sort of thing you never know how far it will go, because other Ministers in and out of office had had relations of their own addicted to similar trading in other directions—for all these reasons, good and bad, nobody cared to take the matter up seriously.

Nobody, that is to say, except that tiger Clemenceau. He actually thought that the honour of the Republic was at stake in the business: was of opinion that a President should be more careful than other people in keeping the doubtful characters of men and women of his own household under restraint. And he not only thought but spoke and acted. M. Rouvier, who was then Premier, felt himself bound to stand by the President and exculpated him from any share in the affair. This made matters worse. For M. Grévy, when the whole transaction was fully debated, could not withstand the pressure of public opinion against him; Clemenceau carried his point and the President resigned. Thereupon M. Rouvier thought it incumbent upon him to retire too, though Clemenceau took pains to tell him that this was a concern purely personal to the President and not a political issue at all. There was consequently a Presidential Election and a new Ministry at the same time. So great was Clemenceau’s influence at this juncture that although three of the most prominent politicians in the Republic were eager for the post, he, out of fear of the election of the irrepressible expansionist M. Ferry, persuaded the electors to favour the appointment of the able and cool but popularly almost unknown M. Sadi-Carnot—who turned out, it may be said, quite an admirable President up to his outrageous assassination.

By this time Clemenceau had fully justified his claim to the distinction of being the most formidable and relentless political antagonist known in French public life since the great Revolution. As he would never take office himself and was moved by few personal animosities, he stood outside the lists of competers for place. He had definite Radical Republican principles and during all these years he acted up to them. He was throughout opposed, as I have said, to compromise. He fought it continuously all along the line. Moreover, he had a profound contempt for politicians who were merely politicians. “I have combated,” he said, “ideas, not persons. In my fight against Republicans I have always respected my party. In the heat of the conflict I have never lost sight of the objects we had in common, and I have appealed for the solidarity of the whole against the common enemy of all.”

As, also, he triumphantly declared in a famous oration against those who were engaged in sneering at Parliamentary Government and the tyranny of words, he was ever in favour of the greatest freedom of speech, and even stood up for the commonplace debates which often must have terribly bored him. “Well, then, since I must tell you so, these discussions which astonish you are an honour to us all. They prove conclusively our ardour in defence of ideas which we think right and beneficial. These discussions have their drawbacks: silence has more. Yes, glory to the country where men speak, shame on the country where men hold their tongues. If you think to ban under the name of parliamentarism the rule of open discussion, mind this, it is the representative system, it is the Republic itself against whom you are raising your hand.”

A great Parliamentarian, a great political Radical was Clemenceau the Tiger of 1877 to 1893. He, more than any other man, prevented the Republic from altogether deteriorating and kept alive the spirit of the great French Revolution in the minds and in the hearts of men.

[CHAPTER VIII]

THE RISE AND FALL OF BOULANGER

The relations of Clemenceau to General Boulanger form an important though comparatively brief episode in the career of the French statesman. Boulanger was Clemenceau’s cousin, and in his dealings with this ambitious man he did not show that remarkable skill and judgment of character which distinguished him in regard to Carnot and Loubet, whose high qualities Clemenceau was the first to recognise and make use of in the interest of the Republic. Boulanger was a good soldier in the lower grades of his profession, and owed his first important promotion to the Duc d’Aumale. This patronage he acknowledged with profound gratitude and even servility at the time; but repaid later, when he turned Radical, by what was nothing short of treacherous persecution of the Orleanist Prince. Boulanger went even so far as to deny that he had ever expressed his obligations to the Duke for aid in his profession, a statement to which the publication of his own letters at once gave the lie.

The General was, in fact, vain, ostentatious and unscrupulous. But having gained popularity among the rank and file of the French army by his good management of the men under his command and his sympathy with their grievances, he was appointed Director of Infantry, and in that capacity introduced several measures of military reform and suggested more. A little later, circumstances led him into close political harmony with the Radicals and their leader. At this juncture Clemenceau seems to have convinced himself that good use could be made of the general, who owed his first great advance to Orleanist favour, without any danger to the Republic. Having, as usual, upset another short-lived Cabinet, Clemenceau therefore exercised his influence to secure his relation the post of War Minister in the new Administration of M. Freycinet. This was in January 1886. At first he was true to his Radical friends and carried out the programme of army reforms agreed upon between himself and Clemenceau, thus justifying that statesman’s choice and support. The general treatment of the French conscript was taken in hand. His food was improved, his barrack discipline rendered less harsh, his relations to his officers made more human, his spirit raised by better prospects of a future career. All this was good service to the country at a critical time and should have redounded to the credit of the Radical Party far more than to Boulanger’s own glorification. This, however, was not the case. All the credit was given to the General himself. Hence immense personal influence from one end of the country to the other.

Practically every family in France was beneficially affected, directly or indirectly, by Boulanger’s measures of military reform, and thanked the brave General for what had been done. Not a young man in the army, or out of it, but felt that his lot, when drawn for service or actually serving, had been made better by the War Minister himself. So it ever is and always has been. The individual who gives practical expression to the ideas which are forced upon him by others is the one who is regarded as the real benefactor: the real workers, as in this instance Clemenceau and his friends, are forgotten.

One of the incidents which helped to enhance Boulanger’s great popularity was what was known as the Schnäbele affair. This person was a French commissary who crossed the French frontier into Alsace-Lorraine to carry out some local business with a similar German official which concerned both countries. He was arrested by the German military authorities as not being in possession of a passport. This action may possibly have been technically justifiable, but certainly was a high-handed proceeding conducted in a high-handed way. At that time France was constantly feeling that she was in an inferior position to Germany, and her statesmen were slow to resent small injuries, knowing well that France was still in no position to make head against the great German military power, still less to avenge the crushing defeats of 1870-71. When, therefore, Boulanger took a firm stand in the matter and upheld in a very proper way the dignity of France, the whole country felt a sense of relief. France, then, was no longer a negligible quantity in Europe. M. de Bismarck could not always have his way, and Boulanger stood forth as the man who understood the real spirit of his countrymen. That was the sentiment which did much to strengthen the General against his opponents when he began to carry out a purely personal policy. He had inspired the whole nation with a sense of its own greatness.

He was then the most popular man in the country. He stood out to the people at large as a patriotic figure with sound democratic sympathies and an eminent soldier who might lead to victory the armies of France.

Thenceforth Boulanger gradually became a personage round whom every kind of social and reactionary influence and intrigues of every sort were concentrated. To capture the imposing figure on the black horse, to fill him with grandiose ideas of the splendid part he could play, if only he would look at the real greatness and glory of his country through glasses less tinted with red than those of his Radical associates, to inspire him with conceptions of national unity and sanctified religious patriotism which should bring France, the France of the grand old days, once more into being, with himself as its noble leader—this was the work which the fine ladies of the Boulevard St. Germain, hand in hand with the Catholic Church, its priests and the cultivated reactionaries generally, set themselves to accomplish. From this time onwards the mot d’ordre to back Boulanger went round the salons. Legitimists, Orleanists and Buonapartists were, on this matter, temporarily at one. Each section hoped at the proper moment to use the possible dictator for the attainment of its own ends. Thus Boulanger was diverted from the Radical camp and weaned from Radical ideas even during his period as War Minister in M. Freycinet’s Cabinet. So subtle is the influence of “society” and ecclesiastical surroundings upon some natures, so powerful the effect of refined and charming conversation and genial flattery delicately conveyed, that men of far stronger character than Boulanger have now and then succumbed to it. Only devotion to principle or ruthless personal ambition can hold its own against such a combination of insidious forces dexterously employed—and women of the world and Jesuits are both very dexterous—when once the individual to be artistically trepanned permits himself to be experimented upon. Boulanger, though not devoid of cleverness, was at bottom that dangerous description of designing good fellow who all the time means well; and he fell a victim to the delightful women and clever adventurers around him. He himself was probably not aware that he had passed over to the enemy until the irresistible logic of events and his changed relations with his old friends proved to him how far he had gone.

M. Rouvier, a shrewd and cynical politician of the financial school, saw through the General, understood how dangerous he might become, and refused to accept the ex-Minister of War into the Cabinet he formed on the fall of Freycinet. But Boulanger had now so far established himself personally that neither a political check nor even general ridicule affected his career. Even his duel with M. Floquet, a farce in which General Boulanger made himself the clown, could not shake him. Floquet was a well-known Radical of those days, who had been a fellow-member of the League of the Rights of Man with Clemenceau at the time of the Commune. Boulanger was a soldier, accustomed to the use of arms all his life, and reported to be a good fencer. Floquet, quite unlike his old friend of years before, scarcely knew which end of his weapon to present to his opponent, so inexperienced was he in this sort of lethal exercise. When, therefore, the duel between the two men was arranged, the only point discussed was how small an injury would Boulanger, in his generosity, deign to inflict upon his Radical antagonist, in order that the seconds might declare that “honour is satisfied.” No doubt Clemenceau himself, who acted as one of Floquet’s seconds on this occasion, took that view of the matter.

What actually occurred was quite ludicrous. Floquet, duly instructed thereto by his own friends, stood, good harmless bourgeois as he was, like a waxwork figure, with his rapier stuck out at arm’s length straight in front of him. No science there. But there was still less on the other side. Boulanger, to the amazement of Clemenceau and everybody on the ground, in what appeared to be a sudden stroke of madness, immediately rushed at Floquet and his rigid skewer and, without any such elaborate foolishness as the laws of fence enjoin, carefully spitted his own throat on the point of Floquet’s weapon. Honour was thus satisfied and ridicule began. But ridicule did not kill.

No sooner was Boulanger cured of his self-inflicted wound than he went on much as he did before. Having ceased to be Minister for War, he was sent down to command an army corps at Clermont-Ferrand. According to all discipline, and regulations duly to be observed by generals at large, this kept the man appointed out of Paris. Not so Boulanger. He visited the capital at least twice. Thereupon he was deprived of his command and his name was removed from the Army List. That, by the rules of war and politics, ought to have finished him. But it didn’t. The Radicals and Republicans had still no idea what an ugly Frankenstein they had created for themselves. True, Clemenceau had declared definitely against his own protégé the moment he saw the line he was taking; but he underrated entirely the position to which Boulanger had attained, not only among the reactionaries but in the hearts and minds of the French people. For Boulanger, now gifted with a free hand, went into the political arena at once, and was a candidate simultaneously for the Nord and the Dordogne: provincial districts with, of course, a totally different sort of electorate from that of the capital, where the brav’ Général with his fine figure on horseback was already the hero of the Parisians. He was elected and sat for the Nord.

Still Clemenceau, far-seeing and sagacious as he generally is in his judgment of political events and personal character, failed to appreciate what his cousin had drifted into rather than had deliberately worked for. Nor perhaps did he estimate highly enough either the cleverness or the unscrupulousness of the men and women who were backing him. Certain it is that, although Boulangism was now becoming a powerful political cult, Clemenceau and other advanced men, such as my old friend Paul Brousse, President of the Paris Municipal Council, were still of opinion that Boulanger was going down rather than up. It was a mistake that might have cost not only the Radicals but the French Republic as a whole very dear. For the General had the qualities of his defects. Agreeable, good-natured, frank, accessible and friendly to all who approached him, with enough ability to gauge fairly well what was going on around him, loving display for its own sake, and ever ready to pose in dignified and pleasing attitude, before a populace by no means averse from well-managed advertisement, while not apparently bent upon forcing his own will or dictatorship upon the country—Boulanger, both before and after his election for the Nord, was much more formidable than he looked to those who only measured his power from the standpoint of wide intelligence. This the rather because there was no lack of money to push his pretensions to high place.

Boulanger came to the front also at a time when the bourgeois Republic (owing to the weakness, incapacity and instability of the bourgeois politicians themselves) was discredited and was believed to be tottering. Clemenceau’s own unceasing campaign against widespread abuses and incapable Ministers was largely responsible for this. There was a general sense of insecurity and unsettlement, engendered by the fall of Administration after Administration, due to political or financial proceedings of doubtful character, exposed and denounced by Clemenceau and the Radicals themselves. Some of the Radicals and intellectuals even now supported Boulanger as an alternative to perpetual upsets. Disgusted with lawyers, professional politicians and place-hunters of high and low degree, the people likewise were again on the look-out for a saviour of France who should secure for them democracy without corruption, and honest leadership devoid of Socialism. The old story, in fact.

At this particular moment, too, the organised forces in Paris, the army and the gendarmerie, were Boulangists almost to a man. The danger, therefore, of the Boulangist agitation now being carried on alike in Paris and in the Departments seemed to a looker-on to be growing more serious every day. This, however, continued not to be the view of Clemenceau and his party. They thought, in spite of the voting in the Nord and the Dordogne and the apparent popularity of the General in Paris, that the whole thing would prove a mere flash in the pan; that the good sense and Republican conservatism of the French people would display itself when peril really threatened the Republic; and that Boulanger would be even less successful than the Duc de Broglie. Then came the General Elections. Boulanger was candidate for Paris. Once more the obvious evidence of his great popularity was overlooked by the Clemenceau group, the Boulangist fervour went on unrecognised, and it seemed that it might depend upon the General himself at any moment—as indeed proved to be the case—whether he should follow in the footsteps of Louis Napoleon and accomplish a successful coup d’état, or fall permanently into the background. But up to the last moment his opponents could not believe that a general with no great military career behind him, a citizen with no great name to conjure with, a politician with no great programme to attract voters, could win Paris or become master of France.

The crisis really was the more acute since there was no rival personality, no Republican of admitted ability and distinction ready to stake his reputation against Boulanger. Though Clemenceau, as the preparations for the election proceeded and Boulanger’s growing strength became manifest, now did his utmost to stem the tide, there was no doubt that, failing a really powerful opponent, Boulanger would hold the winning place at the close of the poll. He took up a bold position. He was the hero of the hour. The whole contest was admirably stage-managed and advertised on his side. He rode through the city on his black horse, a fine figure of a man, full of confidence of victory, the halo of a coming well-earned triumph around him. It was universally felt that the previous votes of the provinces would be quite eclipsed by the vote of the capital. Parisians, peasants and miners, small owners and proletariat would for once be together.

This was the unshaken opinion of his friends and followers, who seemed in those exciting days to have with them the great majority of the people. On the other side a wave of incapacity was actually flooding the intelligence of his opponents. Instead of putting forward a really representative man, either Republican or Socialist, with a fine democratic record behind him, they made an absolutely contemptible choice for their champion. One Jacques, an obscure liquor-dealer, whom nobody ever heard of before the election, or gave a thought to after it, was chosen to fight for Paris against the General. This man had never done or said or written anything that anybody could remember, or would remember if he could. If no Radical Republican was ready to stand, Joffrin, an old member of the Commune and a skilled artisan most loyal to his principles, always returning at once to his trade when he failed to be elected for the National Assembly, would have been a far better and more worthy candidate in every way. The election then would have been a conflict between the enthusiasm of social revolution and the fervour of chauvinist reaction. As it was, the Boulangists could say and did say with truth that the General would represent the citizens of Paris much more genuinely than Jacques. The result of this error of tactics could, have been foreseen from the first. General Boulanger won by a heavy majority.

That evening saw the crisis of the whole Boulangist agitation. Such a victory at such a time called for immediate and decisive action. That was the universal opinion. A political triumph so dramatic and so conclusive could only find a fitting climax in the victor proclaiming himself to be a Cromwell, a Monk or a Napoleon. Nothing less was hoped for by the reactionists: nothing less was feared by the Republicans. The figures of the poll were welcomed with enthusiastic cheering all along the boulevards, and the Boulangist anthem, “En revenant de la Revue,” was played from one end of Paris to the other. The ball was at the General’s feet. He might have failed to win his goal, but all Paris expected he would make a good try for it. This meant that the very same night he should either go straight to the Elysée himself or make some bold stroke for which he had prepared beforehand, that would fire the imagination of the people. Such was the prevailing impression. The General celebrated his election for the City of Paris at dinner at Durand’s famous restaurant, surrounded by his intimate supporters. The excitement outside was tremendous. Hour after hour passed. Nothing was done, nothing apparently had been made ready. The strain of waiting became almost unbearable. The crowd gradually got weary of anticipating the opening of a drama whose prologue had so roused their expectations. At last, instead of staying to watch the first scenes of a revolution, they took themselves off quietly to bed. Boulanger’s chance of obtaining supremacy was gone.

It was always said that, backed by the Radicals, and supported by the President, the Minister of the Interior, M. Constans, a most resolute and unscrupulous man, who was himself in the crowd outside the restaurant, was the main cause of this miserable fiasco. Strong precautions had been taken against any attempt at violence. Powerful forces whose loyalty to the Republic was beyond question had been substituted for brigades of known Boulangist tendencies. That M. Constans would not, under the conditions, have stuck at trifles was well known. He was kept at a distance from France for years afterwards, on account of his ugly character, in the capacity of French Ambassador at Constantinople, a city where at that time such a trifling peccadillo as murder was scarcely noticed. So Boulanger knew what to expect. Moreover, Clemenceau and the Radical Republicans, as well as Jaurès and Socialists of every shade of opinion, had become thoroughly alarmed by what they had heard and seen during the election, and would not have given way without a fight to the death. The jubilant group at Durand’s, intimidated by these assumed facts, and Boulanger with his lack of determination and easy self-indulgence, let the opportunity slip.

All sorts of excuses and explanations were made for the hesitation of the General to provoke civil war. But on that one night he should have made his position secure or have died in the attempt. Success was, so far as a foreigner on the spot could judge, quite possible. It might even have been achieved without any forcible action. There was no certainty that, when the move decided upon was actually made, either troops or the people would have sided against the hero of the day. But that hero failed to rise to the level of the occasion, and the result was fatal to the immediate prospects of himself and his followers. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he ran away from Paris. He now became an object of pity rather than of alarm. He was condemned in his absence, and not long afterwards his suicide on the grave of his mistress, in Brussels, ended his career. Thus the estimate which Clemenceau had formed of his permanent influence was justified. But it was a narrow escape. The three pretenders who had come to France to watch the final development soon found their way across the frontier. Nevertheless, General Boulanger, with all his weakness and hesitation, was for many months the most dangerous enemy the Republic ever faced. His downfall helped also to add to the number of Clemenceau’s bitter enemies, and was partly instrumental in bringing about the political disaster which befell him later. For the Radicals who had been deceived by Boulanger cherished animosity against the Radical leader for reasons which, though quite incompatible, were decisive for them.

[CHAPTER IX]

PANAMA AND DRAGUIGNAN

The great Panama Canal Affair was only one of many financial scandals which seriously damaged the good fame of the French Republic founded upon the fall of the Empire, and consecrated by the collapse of the Commune of Paris. But this Panama scandal was by far the most important and most nefarious, alike in respect to the amount of money involved, the position and character of the people mixed up in it, and the wide ramifications of wholesale corruption throughout the political world that were in the end revealed.

M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the originator and organiser of the Suez Canal, was a man of quite exceptional ability, energy and force of character. He carried through his great project in the face of obstacles, political and financial, that would certainly have broken the heart and frustrated the purpose of a weaker personality. At no period did he show any disposition to keep the canal under harmful restrictions, and the Khedive Ismail Pasha, though a Turk of no scruples, who backed him throughout, also took a very wide view of the services which the canal would render to the world at large. It was to be neutral and open under the same conditions to the ships of all nations. Unfortunately, England, whose commerce has chiefly benefited by the canal, bitterly opposed its construction, going so far at one time as actually to prohibit the Khedive from carrying on the canal works in his own territory, thus occasioning considerable delay. As it happened, however, this delay itself was turned by de Lesseps to the advantage of the Canal Company, as he used the time to create new engines for excavation which in the end expedited the completion of the waterway.

The result of this ignorant British opposition was that the finance of the great enterprise was chiefly provided in France, and, when the canal was first opened in 1869, it was considered, as in fact it was, a triumph of French sagacity and foresight over the obstructionist jealousy of England. This view was accompanied also by natural jubilation at the consequent increase of French influence in Egypt itself. Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, therefore, became a great French hero who, by his capacity, persistence and diplomacy, had not only gained glory for France and extended her power, but had also furnished his countrymen with an excellent investment for their savings, on which British commerce was paying the interest. His popularity in France was well earned and unbounded. The work of de Lesseps was, in fact, regarded as the one great and indisputable success of the French Empire. Anything which he took in hand thereafter was certain to prove of great value to the country and an assured benefit to those who followed his financial lead. He was also a lucky man. He and his set had won against heavy odds.

It is true the cost of the Suez Canal had been more than double his original estimate, even up to the time when it was first opened, and many millions sterling had been expended since; it was likewise the fact that his great idea had taken fully ten years to realise in the shape of a completed enterprise. But this was the larger tribute to his foresight and power of overcoming obstacles due either to natural causes or to the malignity of enemies. Thus Ferdinand de Lesseps, ten years after the Suez Canal had been made available for shipping between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, held an unequalled position in the eyes of French engineers, French bankers and, what was more important, French investors.

Early in the year 1879 M. de Lesseps, following the course adopted by him in the case of the isthmus of Suez, called a Congress of the nations to consider the entire project of a Panama Canal. There was nothing new in the matter. The line of the canal had been surveyed by a capable French engineer nearly forty years before. The Congress estimated the actual cost of the construction of the canal at about £25,000,000, or a little more than the highest sum thought sufficient by the English engineer of the Panama Railroad. But the mere figures are of little importance. That they were quite insufficient, as the business was managed, has since been abundantly proved. But at first there is no reason to believe that de Lesseps was other than quite straightforward. He had bought the concession for the canal from Mr. Buonaparte Wyse, who had acquired it from the United States of Colombia, through whose territory the canal as surveyed ran. That this concession itself had previously been found very difficult to finance in any shape was a matter of common knowledge; that also the canal, when constructed, might prove far less valuable in every way than was calculated for world commerce was the opinion of many skilled engineers. But then the same things had been said about Suez. So the French public rushed in to subscribe the money required for the French Company immediately formed by M. de Lesseps to exploit the concession.

The great name of de Lesseps covered the whole risk and rendered criticism quite useless. But the management of the excavation was wildly incapable and inconceivably extravagant. It was very soon discovered that the original estimates were absurdly at variance with the cost of the real work to be done. The entire enterprise, as undertaken in 1884, was entered upon possibly in good faith, but in a wholly irresponsible and ignorant manner. In spite of warnings as to the certainty of encountering exceptional obstacles, no steps were taken to provide against contingencies, to inform the shareholders as to the position, or to revise the plans in accordance with the facts. The canal was inspected by M. Rousseau at the end of 1885. This engineer gave a most unfavourable report in regard to the excavations and constructions already carried out at vast expense, and the enormous additional sum needed to give any chance of completing the works. Instead of honestly facing this most unpromising situation and disclosing to the shareholders the real state of the case, or declaring that at least three times the amount would be required to bring the project to a satisfactory conclusion, and calling for this huge sum at once, the directors resorted to all the worst tactics of the unscrupulous promoter. This part of the matter went into the hands of M. Jacques Reinach and M. Cornelius Herz, names and persons afterwards covered with obloquy in connection with the whole affair. They set to work systematically, and were restrained by no inconvenient scruples. Strong political influence in both Chambers was needed in order to obtain the passing of the Panama Lottery Bill. Strong political influence was bought, though the Bill itself was not carried. From 1885-86 onwards this wholesale bribery was continued on an enormous scale.

The company was as careless of men’s lives as it was of shareholders’ money. Labourers from all parts of the world had been gathered together in what was then a deadly climate, without proper sanitation or reasonable medical attendance. Some time prior to the financial troubles it was known that such anarchy and horror prevailed on the Isthmus that intervention by the French Government, or even by an international commission, was called for. Nothing but the great reputation of de Lesseps could possibly have upheld such a state of things, or have obtained more and still more money to perpetuate the chaos. Even when the truth as to the frightful mortality of the men employed and the incredible waste, due to incompetence and corruption, must have been known to the President of the Company (M. de Lesseps himself) and his fellow-directors, when, likewise, they must have been convinced that the company was drifting into a hopeless position, they still appealed to their countrymen for more and more and more money to throw into the bottomless quagmire at Panama, and sink of French savings in Paris, to which the whole company had been reduced.

By the year 1888 no less than 1,400,000,000 francs had been expended in one way or another, while not one-third of the necessary work had been done. Of that £55,000,000 nominal amount not a few millions sterling found their way into the pockets of deputies, senators, and even Academicians, to say nothing of commissions and brokerages of more or less legitimate character.

Politicians in France are no worse than politicians in other countries. But the proportion of well-to-do men among them is less than elsewhere. There was consequently a margin of them always on the look-out for an opportunity of adding to their income, and this margin was much larger in the National Assembly before payment of members than it is to-day. For such men the Panama finance was a glorious opportunity. Nobody could suspect de Lesseps of being consciously a party to a fraud. To make a French venture like the Panama a great success, in spite of all difficulties, was a patriotic service. To receive good pay for doing good work was a happy combination of circumstances none the less gratifying that, the work being honestly done, remuneration followed or preceded in hard cash. The extent to which this form of corruption was carried and the high level in the political world to which streams from the Panama Pactolus were forced up is only partially known even now. But so wide was the flow and so deep the stream that, when the outcry against the Company began in earnest, statesmen whose personal honour had never been challenged were afflicted with such alarm, on the facts being laid before them, that they did their very utmost to suppress full investigation.

This, however, was not easy to accomplish. For there were no fewer than 800,000 French investors in the Panama Company. All of these were voters and all had friends. It became a question, therefore, whether it was more dangerous to the Republic and its statesmen—for personal as well as political considerations came in—to compel full publicity, or to hush the whole thing up as far as possible. Meanwhile, the public, and important journals not suspected of Panamism, took the whole thing down from the Cabinet and the Bureaux into the street.

For the opponents of the Republic it was a fine opening. That enormous sums out of the £55,000,000 subscribed had been paid away to senators, deputies and Academicians, for services rendered, was certain. Who had got the money, and under what conditions? Imputations of the most sinister character were made all round. Paris rang with accusations of fraud. That more than a hundred deputies were concerned in Panama corruption is a matter of common knowledge. One who was in a position to know all the facts declared that more than a hundred who were mixed up in other nefarious transactions used Panama to divert attention from their own malfeasances. However that may be, public opinion, excited by the clamour and denunciations of eight hundred thousand shareholders and electors, clove to Panama. It became an instrument of political warfare as well as of personal delation. The obvious determination of Presidents Carnot and Loubet to prevent a clear statement from being issued and the Directors prosecuted only rendered the sufferers more determined to get at the facts and wreak vengeance on somebody.

There were two views as to Count de Lesseps—to give him his title, which had its value in the Affair—and his conduct in the Panama Canal Company. There were those who held that de Lesseps, beginning as an enthusiast, and believing himself perhaps to be inspired in everything he undertook, no sooner found that his carelessness, in disregarding real natural difficulties and in organising the excavations on the spot, must result in failure, unless he could obtain unlimited resources, and doubtful of ultimate success even then, began at once to display the worst side of his character. The successful adventurer became, by degrees, the desperate gambler with the savings of his countrymen. Instead of regarding himself as the trustee of the people who, on the strength of his reputation and character, had risked their money, he deliberately shut his eyes to the real facts. He resorted to all the tricks of an unscrupulous charlatan, misrepresented the truth in every respect and had no thought for any other consideration than to get in more funds. For this purpose he paraded the country, making the utmost use of his personal and social advantages, and losing no opportunity for unworthy advertisement. All this time he knew perfectly well that his enterprise was doomed. Consequently, there was little to choose between de Lesseps and Reinach, Herz and the rest of them, except that he was perhaps the greatest criminal of all. Such was the view of the promoter-in-chief taken by lawyers and men of business who looked upon the whole matter as a venture standing by itself, to be judged by the ordinary rules of financial probity.

On the other side a capable and influential minority regarded de Lesseps as an enthusiast, a man of high character and noble conceptions, quite devoid of the power of strict analysis of any matter presented to him, and destitute of common sense. His financial methods and commercial obliquities were due to his overweening confidence in his own judgment and faith in his good fortune to pull him through against all probabilities. The one great success he had achieved rendered him a man not to be argued with or considered on the plane of ordinary mortals. He saw the object he was aiming at, felt convinced he would accomplish it, regarded all who differed from him as ignorant or malignant, and went straight ahead to get money, not for his own purposes but in order to carry out the second magnificent scheme to which he had committed himself. Corruption and malversation by others were no concern of his.

President Sadi-Carnot, a cold, silent, upright man, little given to allow his feelings to inflame him at any time, warmly took this view of de Lesseps’ character. M. Carnot had been brought into close contact with de Lesseps on another of his vast projects. The President, like many others, refused to look at the Panama matter from the point of view of fraud or imposture. Money was for de Lesseps always a means, never an end. When the whole matter was brought before him, and one of the legal personages whose duty it was to investigate the whole of the facts came to a very harsh conclusion as to de Lesseps’ responsibility for the waste, corruption and malversation, M. Carnot said with some vivacity: “No, no; M. de Lesseps is not a man of bad faith. I should rather consider him punctilious. Only his natural vehemence carries him away; he is a bad reasoner, and has no power of calculation. Hence many regrettable acts on his part, done without any intention of injuring anybody. I knew him well, having seen him very close, when his imagination suggested to him the scheme for excavating an inland sea in Africa. A commission of engineers, of whom I was one, was appointed to hear him and study his proposal. We had no difficulty in showing that the whole thing was a pure chimera. He seemed very much astonished, and we saw that we had not convinced him. Take it from me as a certainty that he would have spent millions upon millions to create his sea, and that with the best of good faith in the world.”

This was probably the truth, so far as de Lesseps himself was personally concerned. Promoters, discoverers and inventors of genius are men of mighty faith in their respective enterprises. As a great anarchist once said of his own special nostrum for regenerating humanity at a blow: “All is moral that helps it, all is immoral that hinders it.” So with de Lesseps. All was moral that got in money to construct his canal: all was immoral that checked the flow of cash to the Isthmus. But an enthusiast of this temper, “without power of calculation,” is a very dangerous man, not only to the subscribers to his shares, but to the Republican politicians who confined their enthusiasm to the acquisition of hard cash for use not in Panama but in Paris.

In 1888 the Panama Canal Company collapsed, and the thing was put into liquidation. But that was not the end of it. All sorts of schemes were afoot for carrying on the works and completing the canal before the concession expired in 1893. Although, however, from the date of the breakdown onwards— when it was stated that fully £70,000,000 would be needed in addition to the amount already expended or frittered away to carry out the canal—most virulent attacks were continually made upon prominent politicians and financiers, as well as upon the Directors of the Company, neither the political nor the legal consequences of the disaster were felt to the full extent until four years later. Judicial investigations, it is true, were going on. But it was an open secret that, in spite of the losses and complaints of the shareholders, and the strong desire of the public that the whole vast transaction should be exposed in every detail, the anxiety of men in high place was to calm down natural feeling in the matter. What made this attitude more suspicious was the fact that the Government had certainly not shown itself unfavourable to the scheme, but on the contrary had helped it, even when the gravest doubts had been thrown upon its practicability, at a cost vastly exceeding anything contemplated by the Company. In fact, an atmosphere of general distrust pervaded Paris and the whole of France. Yet Panama still had its friends, and it was believed that somehow or other the affair would be tided over.

But there was a good deal more to come. Things, in fact, now took that dramatic turn which seems the rule in France with affairs which directly or indirectly influence high politics and high finance. There were people who believed that the entire enterprise could be set on its legs, although parts of the recent excavations were deteriorating and some of them had been covered already with luxuriant tropical growths which one imaginative critic spoke of as “forests.” Either the Government, they thought, could be forced to take up the enterprise itself, or at any rate would think it best, in view of what had already been done, to support de Lesseps in a fresh scheme, should the concession be renewed. This, no doubt, was the opinion of M. Gauthier, who urged the Government in the Assembly to appoint a commission to prepare plans for the completion of the Canal. This, he declared, was the only means of safeguarding the interests of the shareholders and the many hundreds of millions of francs sunk by poor French investors in this great enterprise.

Such a daring proposal necessarily raised the whole question of the responsibility for the serious engineering and financial fiasco. The Government was at once charged from several quarters, not as being answerable for past mistakes in supporting the Panama Company, but with present obliquity in screening and protecting delinquents who should long since have been brought to justice. One deputy vehemently declared that the only reason why no adequate action was taken was that “men possessed of great names and high positions” checked any attempt to handle the scandal boldly. Other deputies declaimed with equal warmth against throwing good money after bad. Meanwhile rumours floated round the Chamber as to the number of deputies who had put their services at the disposal of the Company for money received. Later, this accusation took definite shape as a formal accusation that fifty deputies had received among them the sum of £120,000. Senators and Academicians were in the same galley. Exaggeration was imputed, but the figures were proved afterwards to be less than the truth. Then everybody concerning whose position there could be the slightest doubt was accused of having “touched.”

Even MM. Rouvier and Floquet were taunted with having accepted large sums. The Chamber passed a resolution “calling for prompt and vigorous action against all who have incurred responsibilities in the Panama affair.” This might mean anything or nothing. It was pointed out, however, by a high authority that a judicial inquiry was proceeding all the time. But the public became impatient because nothing was done to stop the campaign of vilification on the one hand or to prosecute the Directors on the other; though de Lesseps was being denounced daily in the press as a fraudulent adventurer. Excitement ran very high. The shareholders and some of the deputies cried aloud for justice.

Matters being thus exceptionally perturbed, Baron Jacques Reinach, the chief agent in the manipulation of political corruption, committed suicide by apoplexy. That was the gruesome explanation given in the press of this financier’s sudden death. His fellow Semite, Cornelius Herz, survived the tragedy. Just at this moment, when everybody thought that something must be done, the Panama Concession was extended for a year. The Panamists took heart again and believed all would blow over. So the ups and downs of public expectation went on.

Then, quite suddenly and without any general notification, all the Directors of the Panama Canal Company, Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, M. C. de Lesseps, M. Fontane, M. Eiffel and M. Cottu were formally charged in court with having resorted to fraudulent methods in order to engender confidence in chimerical schemes, and with obtaining credits on imaginary facts, squandering the money of the shareholders and lending themselves to most nefarious practices. A terrible indictment!

By this time all who cherished a political or personal grudge against any public man of note had no better or surer means of discrediting him than by imputing to him some connection with the Panama affair. Mud of that sort was warranted to stick. Never was there a greater scandal. Never were people more credulous. Never did political feeling run higher, and never certainly was there a keener anxiety to connect leading Republicans with the seamy side of the concern. The more that could be done in this way the better for the Conservatives and anti-Republicans who still constituted a very formidable combination in Parliament and in the press. It was not likely, therefore, that Clemenceau would be able to escape criticism and calumny if he had been in any way connected with men some of whom were then rightly regarded as malefactors.

In a time of so much excitement it was easy to mix up truth and fiction to an extent which would render it extremely difficult for Clemenceau to clear the public mind of allegations made against him, however false they might be. All Clemenceau’s enemies, and he had not a few, took advantage of the situation to try and overwhelm him with obloquy. Now was the opportunity to pay off many old scores; and they set to work to do it with whole-souled zest and vitriolic acrimony. Circumstances aided them. They did not stick at trifles in their efforts to crush the Radical leader who had fought the good fight against reaction and Imperialism with such vigour and success for so many long years. M. Clemenceau was at this time editor of La Justice, a journal founded by himself and written by men of ability, most of whom are still his friends. The tone of the paper and the style of the contributions were no more calculated to bring over recruits from his adversaries than were his speeches and tactics in the Assembly. He was ever a fighter with tongue and with pen. Though he wrote little, if anything, in La Justice himself, the inspiration came from its editor. One thing he lacked, and always has lacked—money. If now they could only get hold of evidence that Clemenceau was contaminated with Panama, the worst foe of French obscurantism would be put out of action and his influence permanently destroyed. So they calculated. And not without good reason, as afterwards appeared.

Cornelius Herz, the co-corrupter of political impeccables, with Jacques Reinach, his “apoplectic” fellow-Jew, had subscribed £1,000 to La Justice in its early days. What could be better? A Semite of Semites, a Panamist of Panamists, he it was who with sinister features and corrupt record stood forth as the dexterous wire-puller of the malignant marionette, Georges Clemenceau. If La Justice had been tainted with the accursed thing, Clemenceau had had his share, and the lion’s share, too, in this wretched swindle. Did anybody really care what a journal of small circulation like La Justice published or stood for? Certainly not. But Clemenceau, the terrible leader of the Left, the upsetter of Ministries, the creator of Presidents, the overthrower of the Church and the enemy of all religion, here was a man worth buying; and beyond all question Clemenceau had been bought—bought by Reinach and Herz, whose tool, therefore, he was and had been! The calumnies were credible; for if senators and Academicians had succumbed to the wiles of the serpents of Old Jewry, why should not the Aristides of Draguignan have fallen a victim to the astute de Lesseps and his “entourage du Ghetto“? Nor did this wind up the indictment. There was more to come. A group of rascals of the Titus Oates type were set to work, to put incriminating facts on record in writing, behind the scenes. They forged the endorsement as well as the bill. Documents of this character proved to the complete satisfaction of all who wished to believe it that Clemenceau was corrupt. The very fact that he was known not to be well-off strengthened the case against him. The empty sack could not stand upright! The Petit Journal, a paper of great circulation, was foremost in all this business, and its editor, M. Judet, distinguished himself by his exquisite malignity amid the crowd of Clemenceau’s detractors.

It was an ugly experience. Panama was dinned into Clemenceau’s ears daily. And there was enough to go upon to make the attacks most galling. Herz had been a large subscriber to the funds of Clemenceau’s organ. Moreover, Reinach and Herz had called upon him, though not he upon them. That was quite enough. The assailants did not stop to inquire when Herz ceased to have anything to do with La Justice, neither did they investigate who sent Reinach and Herz to the Radical leader, nor what passed between Clemenceau and the two Jewish financiers. They were only too glad to be able to take the whole thing for granted and to strengthen any weak links in the chain of evidence by the suborned perjuries of M. Norton and his colleagues.

So it went on. The fact that first the murdered President Carnot, who could not believe that de Lesseps was worse than a misguided enthusiast, and then President Loubet, who wished to deal with the entire matter in a thoroughly judicial fashion, had owed their positions to Clemenceau’s nomination and support rendered the hunting down of their political friend a delightful pastime for the whole reactionary combination. Things had come to such a pass that the common opinion grew that there was “something in it.” People actually believed that Clemenceau really had wrecked his entire career and ruled himself out of public life by taking bribes like the hundred other deputies, when he had refused to accept time after time positions which would have given him control of the national treasury and of France.

Clemenceau was quite unmoved by the storm of detraction which raged around him. He bided his time with a coolness that could scarcely have been expected from a man of his character. At length his chance came. The whole affair was brought up again before the National Assembly. Clemenceau rose to defend himself against this long campaign of successful misrepresentation. So great had been the effect of the attacks upon him that rarely, if ever, has a favourite orator stood up to address a more hostile audience. It seemed as if he had not a single friend in the whole House. Not a sound of greeting was heard. He was met with cold and obviously hostile silence. Clemenceau dealt in his most telling manner with his own personal conduct throughout. He completely immolated his accusers and dissipated their calumnies. When he sat down, the whole Assembly, which had received him as if persuaded of his guilt, cheered him enthusiastically as a much wronged man. A greater triumph could hardly be. The condemnation in open court of the forgers, whose nefarious malpractices had built up the edifice of calumny and misrepresentation upon which Clemenceau’s enemies relied for the proof of their case, cleared the atmosphere so far as his personal integrity was concerned.

But, unfortunately for Clemenceau, there were other charges against him from which he could not hope to clear himself, and would not have cleared himself if he could. Now all his political crimes were recited against him at once. He had been the means of bringing to naught M. Jules Ferry’s great schemes of colonial expansion in the East. He had opposed running the risk of war for the sake of Egypt. He had been largely instrumental in causing the failure of General Boulanger, whom not only reactionists but many vigorous Radicals admired and believed in. He had never lost a chance of pointing to the danger of priestly influence and the anti-Republican attitude of the heads of the Catholic Church. By his action in favour of the strikers at Carmaux, whom he went down himself specially to encourage and support, he had alienated a large section of the bourgeoisie.

Not the least weighty of the charges brought against him, and one which perhaps had as much effect as any in bringing about the crushing result of the poll, was that Clemenceau had steadily opposed the alliance with Russia. This was regarded as still further and more conclusive evidence of downright treachery to France. Those were the days when France felt the need for an ally who could give her powerful military support, and her people were not disposed to inquire too closely into the character of the Czar’s Government. Clemenceau regarded the connection as immoral, injurious, calculated to reduce France’s democratic influence and to lessen the probability of a close Entente with England. But Clemenceau’s adversaries had no concern whatever with the Radical leader’s reasons for his action, which all democrats and Socialists, at any rate, must have cordially approved. All they wanted was another ugly weapon wherewith to discredit and defeat the man who, though he had not gone so far as the extreme Socialists desired, had done enough to hinder and rout reactionaries with their monarchist or Buonapartist restorations. At the moment Clemenceau’s anti-Czarist policy injured him as a politician, but it certainly did him great credit as a man.

But, worse than all, he had steadily pursued his policy of a lifetime as a close and constant friend of England and of the English Entente. That was still more criminal than Panamism or anti-Imperialism. For England at that time was, and to a large extent naturally, very unpopular in France. Clemenceau, therefore, was overwhelmed with charges of being in the pay of Great Britain and working for Great Britain as well as for Panama. Broken English was used to hurl insults at him, which lost none of their fervour by being uttered in a foreign tongue. He had escaped from the obloquy of Panama, but it should go hard if one or other of these counts did not ruin him. The political warfare became more bitter than ever. His persecutors were relentless: la politique n’a pas d’entrailles.

It was at this time that I begged Clemenceau to make some terms with the Socialists, who were gaining ground rapidly and appeared to be the coming party in France. His recent tactics had been decidedly favourable to Socialist views. And again I express my surprise that Clemenceau, while holding fast to his opinions as to the necessity for maintaining “law and order” in every sense, should never have seen his way to adopting the definite Socialist view as to the necessary and indeed inevitable policy of collective social progress. But his strong personal individualism has prevented him from embracing our principles.

The statesman may quite honestly accept the theories of economists and sociologists, while compelled to adapt their application to the circumstances of his time. No really capable Socialist who has taken an active part in public life has ever attempted to do anything else. In France the Guesdists, who are certainly the most thoroughgoing Marxists in the country, have always proceeded on these lines in their municipal, and not unfrequently in their State, policy. Jaurès was a specially fine example of the opportunist in public affairs; so much so that he was taunted by more extreme men with being a Ministerialist before he was a Minister. Vaillant the Blanquist, in theory at least an advocate of a physical force revolution where possible, was in favour of an eight-hour law, compensation for injury to workmen, and so on. One and all, that is to say, were ready to use the social and political forms of to-day in order to prepare the way for the complete revolution tomorrow. All Clemenceau’s speeches and writings, before and after the Panama crash and its consequences to him, contain many passages which every convinced Socialist would accept. I always felt, nevertheless, that I was arguing with a man deaf of both ears when I put forward my well-meant suggestions. Socialism, Clemenceau then declared—this, of course, was now nearly a generation ago—would never become an effective political power in France. France, and above all rural France, which is the real France, constituting the bulk of Frenchmen, is and will always remain steadfastly individualist—“founded on property, property, property.” That was their guiding principle in every relation in life, and, he added, “I have seen them close at every stage of existence from birth to death. It is as useless to base any practical policy upon Socialist principles as it is chimerical to repose any confidence in Socialist votes.” “But,” I urged, “extremes meet: the Catholics and Socialists, both of whom are your opponents, may combine with the men whose minds have been poisoned by the Panamist and Anglophobe imputations of the Petit Journal and turn you out of your constituency in the Var for which you now sit as deputy.” He laughed at the very idea of such a defeat.

But the persistence and malignity of monarchists and men of God of the Catholic persuasion are hard to beat. Socialists with an anarchist twist in their mental conceptions are not far behind them. So the fight for the constituency of Draguignan, which Clemenceau had chosen in preference to a Paris district at the previous election, developed into a personal tussle unequalled in bitterness at that period. Every incident of the candidate’s life was turned to his discredit. The Panama scandal and his relations with Semitic masters of corrupt practices were only a portion of an atheist record unparalleled for infamy. All the Ministries he had destroyed, all the true lovers of France whom he had gibbeted, all the patriotic colonial policies he had frustrated were brought up against him, embroidered with every flaming design the modern votaries of the Inquisition could invent! He had been guilty, in fact, of the unpardonable offence of making too many enemies at once. What might have been counted to him for righteousness by one faction was blazoned forth as the blackest iniquity by another. His anti-Imperialism with his friendly attitude to the strikers incensed the reactionaries. His refusal to make common cause with them in an out-and-out programme against bourgeois Republicanism infuriated the extremists. All his energy, all his oratory, all his genuine love for and services to France in days gone by went for nothing. The friends of Jules Ferry, too, were eager for their revenge. Clemenceau had thought his loss of the seat was impossible. Nevertheless the impossible occurred. He was thrown out of Draguignan at this General Election of 1893, and after more than seventeen years of arduous and extremely useful service was compelled to retire from Parliamentary life. It was a complete break in his career.

Clemenceau at this period was fifty-two, and still in the prime of a vigorous life. He looked what he was, active, alert, capable and highly intelligent. His face was an index to his character. It gave an impression of almost barbarous energy, which induced his Socialist detractors, long afterwards, to speak and write of him as “The Kalmuck.” But this was merely caricature. Refinement, mental brilliancy, deep reflection and high cultivation shone out from his animated features. A teetotaller, abstemious in his habits, and always in training, Clemenceau, with his rapidity of perception, quickness of retort and mastery of irony combined with trenchant wit, was a formidable opponent indeed. Add to this that he was invariably well-informed—très bien documenté—in the matters of which he treated. It is quite inconceivable that he should refer to or deal with any speech, or convention, or treaty which he had not thoroughly studied. It was hopeless to catch Clemenceau tripping on any matter of fact or political engagement. Moreover, as remarked before, his rule in politics was based upon the soundest principle in all warfare: Never fail to attack in order to defend.

As an orator he was and is destitute of those telling gestures, modifications of tone and carefully turned phrases which we associate with the highest class of French public speaking. His voice rarely rises above the conversational level and, as a rule, he is quiet and unemotional in his manner. But the directness of his assaults and the dynamitical force of his short periods gain rather than lose on that account; while his power of logical, connected argument, marshalling with ease such facts and quotations as he needs, has never been surpassed. His famous Parliamentary encounter with my friend and comrade Jean Jaurès was a remarkable example of his controversial ability. My sympathies were, of course, entirely with the eloquent and able champion of Socialism, whose power of holding even a hostile audience was extraordinary, as was shown in that same National Assembly many a time. I was of opinion then, and I believe now, that Jaurès had much the stronger case. He spoke then, as he always did, with eloquence, fervour and sincerity. As an oratorical display it was admirable. But I am bound to admit that, as a mere question of immediate political dialectics, the Radical Premier got the better of the fray. It is possible, of course, that had Jaurès followed Clemenceau instead of having preceded him, that might have made a difference. But Jaurès’s style, with its poetic elevation and long and imposing periods, was not so well suited as that of Clemenceau to a personal debate on immediate practical issues before such an audience as the French National Assembly.

In private conversation Clemenceau is the most delightful yet unartificial talker I ever had the pleasure of listening to. Others who possess great gifts in this direction are apt to work up their effects so that you can hear, as it were, the clank of the machinery as their pyrotechnic monologues appeal to your sense of cleverness while they balk your desire for spontaneity. There is none of this with Clemenceau. He takes his fair share in any discussion and leaves nothing unsaid which, from his point of view, can elucidate or brighten up the friendly discussion. Never was any man less of a brilliant bore.

Another quality he possesses, which proved exceedingly useful to him at more than one stage of his adventurous career. Clemenceau was, and possibly is even to-day, at the age of seventy-seven, the most dangerous duellist in France. A left-handed swordsman and a perfect pistol-shot, no one who valued the integrity of his carcase was disposed to encounter with either rapier or pistol the leader of the extreme Left. Even the reactionary fire-eater, Paul de Cassagnac, who himself had killed three men, shrank from meeting his quietus from Clemenceau. His power of work also is extraordinary. In this he was only equalled by Jaurès. Even an English barrister of exceptional physique, striving to make his mark or endeavouring to keep the place already won, could scarcely surpass the inexhaustible energy and endurance of either of these great Frenchmen. It is doubtful whether the generation of younger men keep abreast with the pace set by their elders in this respect. Both Jaurès and Vaillant complained to me more than once that, to use an English expression, the younger deputies did not “last over the course,” and thus frequently lost in the Committees what they had gained in the set debates. Certainly, few of the French politicians of to-day, at half Clemenceau’s age, would care to attempt to do the work which he is doing now, day after day, with all the anxiety and responsibility that now rest upon his shoulders.

What perhaps is still more noteworthy, especially from the English point of view, Clemenceau has never at any period of his career been a well-to-do man. His complete independence of monetary considerations, at a time when place-hunting had been brought to a fine art in French politics, gave him an influence all the greater by consequence of its rarity. Politicians whom he could have easily eclipsed in the race for well-paid positions, or the acquisition of wealth, became Prime Ministers, and rich people, while Clemenceau remained what he had always been, the leader of the most difficult party to control, without the means which have usually been considered indispensable for such a thankless post. Only once did he offer himself as the candidate for a well-paid office—the Presidentship of the Chamber—to which his experience and services fully entitled him. He was then beaten by one vote. Honourable and dignified as is the chairmanship of such an Assembly, it was well for France, in the long run, that the recorder of that single vote should have allowed what he believed to be a personal grievance to influence his natural inclination to support Clemenceau.

[CHAPTER X]

PHILOSOPHER AND JOURNALIST

Rarely has a politician received a heavier blow than this which fell upon Clemenceau in 1893. Ordinarily, a man of his intellectual eminence and remarkable political faculties has no difficulty, if he loses one seat in the National Assembly of any country, in speedily getting another. Not so with Clemenceau. His very success as leader of the advanced Left and the proof that, though always a comparatively poor man, he had remained thoroughly honest amid all the intrigues and financial scandals around him told against him. He interfered with too many ambitions, was a stumbling-block in the way of too many high policies, to be able to command his return for another constituency. The same interests and jealousies which had combined against him at Draguignan would have attacked him with redoubled fury elsewhere. Persistent determination to carry really thorough democratic reforms in every department, combined with very high ability, relentless disregard of personal claims, complete indifference to mere party considerations and perfect honesty are qualities so inconvenient to modern politicians of every shade of opinion that the wonder is Clemenceau had held his position so long as he did. To have destroyed no fewer than eighteen more or less reactionary administrations, while always refusing to form a Cabinet himself, was a title to the highest esteem from the mass of his countrymen: it was a diabolical record from the point of view of the Ministers whom he had displaced and the cliques by whom they had been surrounded. Not a French statesman but felt that his reputation and his hold upon office were more secure now that Clemenceau’s masterly combinations and dynamitical oratory were safely excluded from the National Assembly. So Clemenceau, at this critical period of his life and career, could rely upon no organised political force strong enough to encounter and overcome the persistent hostility of his enemies.

A weaker man would have felt this exclusion less and have been discouraged more. After seventeen years of such valuable work as Clemenceau had done, to be, to all appearance, boycotted from the Assembly for an indefinite period was a strange experience. I wrote him myself a letter of sympathy, and in his reply he expressed his special bitterness at the attitude of the Socialists towards him. This hostility might have been easily averted without any sacrifice of principle on Clemenceau’s part. But Clemenceau, defeated and driven out of his rightful place in active French politics, did not hesitate for a moment as to the course he would pursue. He had left the National Assembly as the first Parliamentarian in France: he at once turned round and at the age of fifty-two became her first journalist. Nothing in his long life of stress and strain is more remarkable than the success he then achieved and the vigour with which he devoted himself to his new vocation.

It is no easy matter, especially in France, for a publicist and journalist to discover a fresh method of bringing his opinions to bear upon the public. Yet this is what Clemenceau did. He applied his humanist-materialist philosophy to the everyday incidents of French life. That philosophy is a strange compound of physical determinism and the ethical revolt against universal cruelty involved in the unregulated struggle for existence. The fight for life is inevitable. So far, throughout historic times it has been a long campaign in which the usurping minority have always won. Wholesale butchery and cannibalism by conquering tribes have been transformed first into slavery, then into serfdom, lastly into the wage-earning system of our own time. In each and every case the many have been at the mercy of the dominating few. There is little or no effective attempt made to remedy the evils arising out of such a state of things. The struggle for mere subsistence still goes on below, and those who revolt against it or endeavour seriously to ameliorate it by strikes or combinations are treated as misdemeanants or criminals. Mining capitalists, industrial capitalists, railway capitalists, landowners large and small have the law, the judges, the magistrates, the police and all the reactionary forces on their side. Hence the grossest injustice and the most abominable oppression of the poor.

Therefore the State ought to intervene, not in order to repress the aspirations and punish the attempts of the wage-earning class to obtain better conditions of life for themselves and their children, but to protect this most important portion of the community in every possible way: to secure for them shorter hours of labour, thorough education, full opportunity for legitimate combination, boards of arbitration to avert strikes, fair play at the hands of the courts and the police. The State, in fact, is to act as a national conscience and perpetual trustee for the poor. Note that the struggle for existence, the fight for subsistence must go on—Clemenceau has never contemplated the possibility of a human scheme of co-operation by which competition would be wholly eliminated—but its harsher features ought to be reduced. There is no complete overthrow of mutual destruction, and no condition of universal fellowship is in view. Only the mind and heart of the community must be changed; men must survey modern society from the point of view of humane guidance and prepare the material development and economic arrangements which shall by degrees render individual injustice and cruelty as unheard-of as now is anthropophagy.

At the back of all this lies a picturesque pessimism and what nowadays is frequently spoken of as a philosophy of despair. No sooner has this planet, its solar system, its galaxy of suns and worlds reached its full development than they all begin to traverse the downward path which leads slowly and inevitably to decay and eventual destruction, until the entire process unconsciously and inevitably begins over again. Infinity oppresses us all: the cosmos with its interminable repetitions eludes conception by the human intelligence. Yet we live and strive and feel and hope and have our conceptions of justice and sympathy and duty which come we know not whence and pass onwards we know not whither. Man as a highly organised individual entity becomes superior to the mere matter of which his mind is a function, because as an individual he can rise up out of himself and criticise and reflect upon that which, without any such power of conception, surrounds, upholds and then immolates him. “The universe crushes me,” wrote Pascal, “yet I am superior to the universe, because I know that it is crushing me and the universe knows nothing about it at all.” Strange to find Clemenceau quoting and agreeing with an intelligence so wholly different from his own as Pascal’s!

Then, fate, necessity, the Nemesis of Monism working on to its foreseen but uncontrollable destiny, dominates the cosmos and through the cosmos that infinitesimally small but sentient and critical microbe man, who creates an individual ethic out of this determinist material evolution. Francis Newman, the brother of the famous John Henry the Cardinal, said that it is as impossible for man to comprehend matter developing and reproducing itself from all time as it is for him to conceive of an omnipotent deity superintending the matter he has created in its evolution from all time. We are therefore driven back, whether we like it or not, upon the ancient and never-ending discussion of free-will and predestination in a non-theological form which leaves in the main all the psychologic phenomena untouched, including Clemenceau’s own social morality that impels him to champion the cause of the oppressed. Beyond the demand for justice in the abstract and freedom in the abstract applied as a test to each special case as it arises, there is no guiding theory in Clemenceau’s philosophy. The recognition of the struggle for existence among human beings, as among plants and animals, does not imply any conscious co-ordination of effort, arising out of the growth of society, in order to do away with the antagonism engendered by life itself. So with all his humanism Clemenceau will not accept the theories of scientific Socialism which could give an unshakable foundation to his own views of life. That is the weakness which runs through all his books and articles. His own individuality is so powerful that he simply cannot grasp the possibility of anything but individual effort, personal suasion and isolated measures of reform.

Nevertheless, we come upon a passage which, written obviously in perfect good faith, would, within its limits, be accepted as a fair statement of Socialism from an outsider: “Socialism is social beneficence in action, it is the intervention of all on behalf of the victim of the murderous vitality of the few. To contend, as the economists do, that we ought to oppose social altruism in its efforts is to misrepresent and seriously calumniate mankind. To complain that collective action will degrade the individual by some limitation of liberty is to argue in favour of the liberty of the stronger which is called oppressive. Is it not, on the contrary, to strengthen the individual by restraining and controlling every man who injures another man as does the employer of to-day when left to the bare exigences of competition? . . . Follow the laissez-faire policy for the individual, says the anti-social economist, and speedily a whole regiment of devotees will rush to the succour of the vanquished. We always wait, but see nothing save the terrible condition of humanity which ever remains. . . . Against this anarchy it is man’s glory to revolt. He claims the right to soften, to control fatality if he cannot escape from it. How?”

And then Clemenceau, whom in active life none would accuse of undue sentiment, goes off into a series of moral reflections and the need for perpetual moral preachments which really lead us nowhither; though, some pages further on, he quotes Karl Marx, who speaks of the unemployed as the inevitable “army of reserve” due not to human immorality but to the necessary functioning of the unregulated competitive capitalism of our period. Yet the great French Radical shrinks from the organised social collective action and revolution needed to lift us out of this anarchy of oppression. He turns to the individual himself and his hard lot under the domination of fate. He has a justifiable tilt at free-will and personal responsibility. Thus:—

“But what is absurd, contradictory, idiotic is the responsibility of the creature before the creator. I say to God, ‘If you are not satisfied with me, you had only to make me otherwise,’ and I defy him to answer me.” And then, quoting from “Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead,” he cites Minos as discussing with a new-comer who is brought before him for punishment:

“All that I did in life,” says Sostrates, “was it done by me voluntarily, or was not my destiny registered beforehand by Fate?”

“Evidently by Fate,” answers Minos.

“Punish Fate, then,” is the reply.

“Let him go free,” says Minos to Mercury, “and see to it that he teaches the other dead to question us in like manner.”

“Substitute Fate for Jehovah or by the laws of the Universe, and tell me,” puts in Clemenceau, “when the pot owes his bill to the potter.” All this and the farewell benediction which the author vouchsafes to the human plaything of all these pre-ordered decisions of society do not get us much further, even though after so many mischances he may live on only to appreciate more thoroughly “the sublime indifference of things eternal.” That is not very consolatory by way of a materialist viaticum. But it is the best Clemenceau can give.

None the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy, illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great effect. The commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges, priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. Here and there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate, so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which they had been hitherto satisfied. With no phase of French life is Clemenceau better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the French peasantry. Thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. The small proprietor is on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. The cherry-eater “had despoiled him of two-ha’porth of fruit!” It justified prompt execution of the thief by the owner. That such small robbery did not at once give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point of view that the peasant can never take. Why? Because of the penal servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to death. It is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal saying, “This is mine.”

“The peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love. Bowed, he knows only the earth. His activity has but one end and object: the soil. To acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh and rapacious. He speaks of my land, my field, my stones, my thistles. To till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of his entire physical or intellectual effort. Amusement for him: not a bit of it. He has no other resource than to console himself for the disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morrow. He is at war with the seasons, the elements, the sun, rain, hail, wind, frost. He fights against the neighbouring intruder, the invading cattle, the birds, the caterpillars, the parasites, the thousand-and-one unknown phenomena which, without any apparent reason, bring down upon him all sorts of unlooked-for ills.

“Then has he risen at dawn for nothing, badly fed, badly clothed, sweating in the sun, shivering in the wind and the rain, exhausting his energies against things which resist his utmost efforts? Do sowing, manuring, labour and the pouring out of life all, too, go for nothing, without rest, without leisure, without any thought but this: I toiled and suffered yesterday, I shall toil and suffer to-morrow? And all this is balanced by no pleasures but drunkenness and lust. No theatres, no books, no shows, no enjoyments of any kind. Hard to others, hard to himself, everything is hard around him.”

Such is the peasant of Western France. Though the peasant of the South is of a livelier and happier disposition on the surface, both are at bottom the same. And France is still in the main rural France as Clemenceau himself impressed upon me many years ago. That is the influence which holds in check the advanced proletariat of the towns and mining districts. They can see nothing outside private property, property, property: yet it is this very unregulated individual ownership which forces them to fight out their existence against the hardships of nature with inefficient tools, insufficient manure and no adequate arrangements for marketing the produce they have for sale. High prices and a few advantages gained have somewhat ameliorated the lot of the peasant, but it is still a hard, depressing existence which cannot be made really human and happy for the great majority under the conditions of to-day. The only boon the peasant has is that he is not under the direct sway of the capitalist exploiter. What that means in the mines Clemenceau had an opportunity of seeing very close, as a member of the Commission appointed to examine into the coal-mines of Anzin in 1884. He tells of his experience ten years later in one of the pits he descended. “Never go down a coal-mine,” wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son. “You can always say you have been below, and nobody can contradict you.” Clemenceau did not follow this cynical advice. He went down, “and after having waded through water, bent double, for hundreds upon hundreds of yards through dripping scales which hang from the upper stratum, I crawled on hands and knees to a nice little vein twenty inches thick. On this seam human beings were at work, lying on their side, bringing down coal which fell on their faces and replacing it continuously by timber in order not to be crushed by the upper surface. You must not neglect this part of the work!” He was not allowed to talk with the men themselves, and when they came to interview him secretly they implored him not to let the manager or the employers know, or they would be discharged at once! The old story of miners in every country which even the strongest Trade Unions are as yet scarcely able to cope with, though the tyranny in French mines has been checked since the time Clemenceau wrote. These and similar cases of oppression on the part of the capitalist class caused Clemenceau to support Socialists more and more in their demands for limitation of the then unrestricted powers of individual employers and “anonymous” companies. So, too, individualist as he was, he wrote article after article in defence of the right of the men to strike against grievous oppression, holding that the combination of the workers was more than sufficiently handicapped by the fact that they were bound to imperil their own subsistence as well as the maintenance of their wives and children by going on strike at all. This argument he applied to all strikes in organised industries.

But Clemenceau naturally found himself drawn into bitter antagonism to the doctrine of laissez-faire and the law of supply and demand. “You say all must bow down to them. I contend all must revolt against them.” “The individual struggle for existence is only a great laissez-faire! Far from being liberty, it is the triumph of violence, it is barbarism itself. The man who mastered the first slave founded a new system . . . so completely that after some ages of this rule a physiocrat overlooking it all would have sagely pronounced: Slavery is the law of human societies. This with the same amount of truth as he says to-day: The law of supply and demand is an immutable ordinance. And, for all that, the supreme irony of fate has decreed that the first slave-driver was at the same time the first sower of the seed of liberty, of justice. For by enslaving men he created a social relation, a relation different from that enjoined by the primitive form of the struggle for existence: kill, eat, destroy. Henceforth man was bound to man. The social body was formed.” Man had to discover the law governing the new relation, and he found it at last in the first flashes of justice and liberty. “What, then, is this your laissez-faire, your law of supply and demand, but the pure and simple expression of force? Right overcomes force: that is the principle of civilisation. Your law once formulated, let us set to work against barbarism!”

All that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and the anarchist chaos which they connote. But here again Clemenceau, with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding historic and economic theory—the sociologic theory which scientific Socialism supplies. It was not justice or liberty which created slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social necessity. The cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to material revolution.

Holding the opinions he did, it was inevitable that Clemenceau should put the case of the Anarchists such as Vaillant, Henry, Ravachot. They were the victims of a system. They could not rise as a portion of a collective attack against the unjust class dominion and economic servitude which crushed them and their fellows down into interminable toil with no reward for their lifelong sufferings. So they made war as individuals for anarchy. Vive l’Anarchie! were the last words of Henry. The man was a fanatic. “The crime seems to me odious. I make no excuse for it,” says Clemenceau, but he objects to the capital penalty. “Henry’s crime was that of a savage. The deed of society seems to me a loathsome vengeance.” Clemenceau compares, too, the anarchists of dynamite to the would-be assassin Damien, so hideously tortured before death. “My motive,” said he, “was the misery which exists in three-quarters of the kingdom. I acted alone, because I thought alone.” The anarchist, asked by his mother why he had, become an anarchist, answered, “Because I saw the suffering of the great majority of human beings.” Vaillant, Henry, Caserio and their like are overmastered by the same idea as Damien. They kill members of the king caste of our society of to-day in order to scare the bourgeoisie into justice. There is no arguing with honest fanatics of this type. Whether society is justified in guillotining or hanging them is another matter. That their method is futile, as all history shows, gives society the right if it so chooses to regard it also as criminal.