Clemenceau to-Day and Yesterday

I

LET the reader be reassured. This will be no foolish attempt at painting a grand Reynoldsian portrait, with the background of victory and of a glorious sunset to warm it. The following pages aim only at replacing the main facts of Clemenceau’s life in their natural environment. Even this humble task has its difficulties, for Clemenceau, as an individual, is far from being well known; he has been frequently and passionately discussed; and there have been in his long life curious incongruities which had better be merely stated than explained.

Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841, the son of a country doctor in a village of Vendée. People in Vendée, since the royalist rebellion of 1794, have been divided into ‘ Whites ’ and ‘ Blues, the former being the Royalists and the latter the Republicans, with all the changes that such words must inevitably undergo in the space of a century. Now, Dr. Clemenceau was a Blue, and of a decidedly deep dye, for he was anti-royalist and anti-clerical to the extent of refusing to let his children be christened, even in a district where religious antagonisms were so marked.

It should not be inferred that Clemenceau’s father had had these opinions bequeathed to him. On the contrary, his family was entirely on the other side, belonging to the aristocracy of the province and being better able than most others to support its claims with seals and charters. One of his uncles — to whom M. Clemenceau refers affectionately in Le Grand Pan — was a priest. But the medical schools of the early part of the nineteenth century in France were hot-beds of atheism, and toward 1840 a physician who retained some religious belief was regarded as a phenomenon. So young Georges Clemenceau grew up in a home which must have been pointed out as a stronghold of‘advanced ideas,’and it is probable that both his father and himself enjoyed the consciousness that it was.

Circumstances must also have helped to make a resolute partisan of the boy. He was seven in 1848, when the Second French Republic was proclaimed; and even to its enemies this new experiment appeared so idealistic and noble, that when, three years later, it was brought to an end by the President — Prince Louis Bonaparte — becoming a dictator, there was disappointment in all liberal circles; and in the environment in which Georges Clemenceau was being reared there must have been rage. A boy of eleven, intelligent as this one undoubtedly was, is deeply influenced by such happenings.

About this time young Georges was sent to the lycée at Nantes, to go through the classical course which was the universal rule in those days, and became optional, only in the case of a future physician, in 1902. He was a good scholar and must have enjoyed his Classics, for even now he frequently quotes the Greeks. The lycées in those days were patronized by Republican families preferably to Catholic schools, because their teaching staff was secular, and a few professors here and there actually were against the tyrant, as Napoleon III was called by his braver enemies. But even there the son of Republican parents must be conscious of being watched and disliked as a future agitator and the cause of possible trouble to the headmaster. So this atmosphere again could only produce irritation, and occasionally dare-devil recklessness, in such a boy as was father to the Clemenceau we have known.

Indeed, in 1860, Georges Clemenceau was ripe for the freedom of the Paris Medical School. Here, where he was entered on graduating from the lycée, the student could rail at religion — superstition, he no doubt called it — in the paternal vein, and even ventilate his abhorrence of the Imperial régime in the cafés to which the not very scientific sawbones of those days devoted much of their valuable time. Yet even this had to be done with some precaution; and how unreticent Georges Clemenceau must have been between his twentieth and his twenty-third year, we can easily imagine. The consequence was that in 1861 he spent seventy-three days at the Mazas penitentiary, and three years later even a worse misfortune befell him. The academic authorities, shocked, as he himself says, at his insistence in proclaiming the Republic while there was an Emperor, temporarily struck his name from the rolls.

He was twenty-three years old, and not rich: he could not afford to wait till the tyrant was overthrown, to go on with his medical studies. Those were not days when the French felt particularly anxious to seek their fortunes abroad; but Georges Clemenceau chose that desperate course. A few miles from his long-familiar town of Nantes, the big ships constantly sailed for America.

The half-fledged physician sailed on one of them. He stayed four years in the United States, keeping himself, not by the practice of an art he was conscious of having by no means mastered, but, as so many educated emigrants had done before him, by teaching his own language. He came back to France in 1868, with an American wife and with a knowledge of the English language which stood him in good stead during the Great War, but with a curious indifference to English or American thought and to political conditions in the United States. Most Frenchmen who have lived in America show the deep imprint of their experience during all their lives, but Georges Clemenceau seems to have come back as unmixedly French as when he left.

He settled in Paris again, and went back to his interrupted medical studies. A year later he took his degree, and immediately looked for patients in the Montmartre district.

The famous hill was not at that time the haunt of pleasure-seekers that it has since become. The American artists who loved it twenty years ago must remember how like a Southern French town the climbing winding streets used to look. It was a neighborhood of workmen, or very small tradesmen, with a proportion of painters and sculptors. The local doctors had a slim chance of attaining either to fame or to wealth; but they must have known their clientele as intimately as they might have in any provincial market-town. So it was with Clemenceau, and it gave him a chance to make a career beside the one he had inherited rather than chosen.

France frequently shows a type of man scarce in the rest of the world, namely, the politician evolved from the country doctor, or even from the veterinary surgeon. It is surprising that no political physician has yet beaten the political lawyer in the race for the Presidency, for each Parliament has numbered between sixty and eighty members of that profession, some of whom have achieved considerable success. Nobody could have been surprised in Montmartre to see the new doctor take advantage of his daily growing acquaintance with the quarter to give a political significance to his hatred of the Imperial government, of the Church, and of all their supporters.

The power of Napoleon III was fast waning at the time; the Emperor, a few years before, had been compelled to renounce the absolute authority he had possessed between 1852 and 1860, and probabilities pointed to democratic changes. In Belleville — a quarter almost adjoining Montmartre — a young barrister of rare magnetism and eloquence, Léon Gambetta, had been elected a deputy on what was called a very ‘ red ’ ticket, and his platform, which included equal franchise, proportional taxation, disarmament, and the transfer of authority to the people, was fast becoming popular. Georges Clemenceau adopted it, and with the violent views he had cultivated, nobody was better fitted to defend it. In fact, he sprang into notoriety almost at a leap. It is surprising to note that as early as September, 1870, as soon as defeat had swept away Napoleon III and made a republic the inevitable alternative, Clemenceau, who barely a year before was still walking the hospitals, had become Mayor of Montmartre and was on the eve of becoming a prominent member of the Municipal Council, and of being sent as a deputy to the Assemblée Nationale.

Such unexpected risings from obscurity are frequent in all revolutions, but, contrary to what has also been so generally the case, Clemenceau never relapsed into anonymousness. During the decade which followed 1870 he was not known to many foreign observers beyond professionals like Bismarck or Sir Charles Dilke; but in Paris, and even throughout France, he was as popular a character as he is to-day.

What sort of a person was he at that time, and what were his tenets and influence? An answer to these questions will enable us to visualize him more distinctly and to proceed with comparative rapidity through the continuation of his career.

II

Gambetta was the great man of the nascent Republic. He had founded it on the ruins of the Empire, and he was now defending it against the Assemblée Nationale, which, as everybody knows, consisted of a large majority of Monarchists busy making a republican constitution because they could not agree about the person of the monarch.

Clemenceau admired Gambetta, and they fought side by side. Both men were patriots and had voted on February 17, 1871, against the delivery of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Both wished to rebuild France on entirely democratic foundations. But while Gambetta revealed himself as Oriental by his warm heart and warm imagination, by his splendid rhetoric, by his deftness at making the most of contingencies, by his magnetic gift for making and keeping friends, but also by his laziness, by his charming way of fancying that problems were solved when they ceased to bother, and by a pliability to circumstances which made him willing to negotiate secretly with Bismarck less than ten years after the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Clemenceau was very different. He flattered nobody, loved nobody, and though followed by a large party, was not much loved by anybody. He had not yet developed the capacity for elegant witticisms which later on gave a sort of dry grace to his sarcasms; he was nothing except violent. His logic was harsh and cruel, as was his irony, and his method consisted exclusively in brutally telling what he thought the truth about everything and everybody. The world to him seemed all wrong, and he said as much, in a tone which left no doubt that the principle of his action was hatred rather than love.

He was not an Internationalist; he would have loathed being called one, for the best part of his bitterness was reserved for the enemies of his country; but he was a Revolutionist, and frightened people a great deal more than Jaurès ever did, or any of Jaurès’s truculent successors. All this can be read very clearly, not only in the contemporary documents, but in the wellknown picture by Manet at the Luxembourg, called La Réunion Publique. The whole atmosphere of this picture is threatening; and while to us it appears as a portrait of Clemenceau, with a suitable background, to the generation which first saw it, it seemed that Clemenceau had to be the central figure of it precisely because it was threatening.

It is not surprising, therefore, if, after seconding Gambetta during his fight with the Assemblée, after preparing with him armed resistance to Marshal MacMahon, who had become the hope of the Monarchists, and after leading with him, and more actively than he did, the first great campaign against the Catholic Church, he parted company with him the moment Gambetta declared that the opportuneness of a reform was its best chance, expressed his belief that there was no such thing as a social question, and seemed to divert the country’s attention from Alsace-Lorraine by attracting it to colonial expeditions. The same year in which Gambetta dubbed his doctrine and party Opportunism, Clemenceau, on his side, christened his doctrine and party Radical Socialism, and he took advantage of the first opportunity— the question of French intervention in Egypt — to overthrow his so-called chief and former hero without any ceremony.

The effect of this prowess was extraordinary. It seemed as if nothing, not even the worshiped heroes of the new age, was sacred for Clemenceau or proof against his whims. During twenty-five years — he was forty then — not one Cabinet fell while he tolerated it, none lasted long after he became tired of it, and in most instances he was seen bringing the whole fabric down with a flourish of his pen, — for he had become the editor of a newspaper and never failed afterwards to have an organ of his own, — or with one of his short crushing speeches. He got whomever he liked elected to the Presidency, and kept whomever he disliked from the supreme magistracy. People became used to calling him the ‘Tiger,’ and although the students of contemporary history can see a serious motive for every one of his executions, a legend was created which showed him as a dilettante of destruction and a man who reveled in exercising his power against friend as well as foe.

Gradually it became a sort of postulate that a man who had such a gift for destruction had been refused the capacity for building up, and that Clemenceau would die without having done anything except please himself.

As for the questions on which the dreaded man’s activities were exercised, they need not be recapitulated at great length. Clemenceau was against colonial expeditions, and overthrew Ferry after Gambetta, because he thought it as imprudent for France to settle in Tonkin as it was to settle in Tunis, so long as Alsace and Lorraine were in the hands of Germany. That this was his motive, and not the fact that he was vendu aux Anglais, has been contradicted, but whole articles can be adduced to prove that it was so. He wanted a revision of the constitution, because he thought it insufficiently democratic; and when the Prime Minister objected that, this was likely to create agitation, he replied with an encomium of agitation which added another trait to his description as a perturber.

He was an anti-clerical, of course, was against the monks, priests, and nuns, because, he said, they were the agents of a foreign monarch; he refused to welcome the Royalists, who, on the recommendation of Pope Leo, made their submission to the Republican régime, and he seized the occasion of Sardou’s play, Thermidor, in 1891, to blame the dramatist for criticizing Robespierre, insisting that the Revolution must be taken in a lump (hence the bloc theory), and concluding with a savage apology for the murder of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

This was the attitude of Clemenceau, and the impression of the world about him when, in 1893, the Panama scandal filled the world with disgust. M. de Lesseps had founded a company to dig the celebrated canal, and nine hundred million francs of French savings had gone into it. It was found after a few years that two thirds of this sum had been spent in auxiliary jobs or advertising, while a considerable part of it had been paid to one hundred and four French deputies, to secure their goodwill.

The name of Clemenceau was not on the fatal list, but the corrupt deputies were members of his party, and it was said that, without accepting money for himself, he had accepted some for his newspaper. Déroulède arraigned him in the Chamber; a famous duel ensued; then an electioneering campaign of extraordinary violence; and the upshot of it all, in the autumn of 1893, was that Clemenceau, for the first time in many years, had no seat in the Chamber. During nine years he was kept out of the French parliaments, and had no means of influence except his pen.

III

This period of his life deserves some attention, as he was compelled to spend his activities in writing, and seven or eight of the fourteen volumes he then published revealed a very different Clemenceau from the man his people had been led to imagine.

Let us leave aside his pamphlets on the Dreyfus case, of which he ultimately became heartily tired; they were as violent as his hatred of injustice, coupled with his own inborn capacity for unjust criticism, could make them, and they cannot be absolved from the reproach of having brought contumely on the whole French army, while only a few officers had been reprehensible. But the works entitled La Mêlée Sociale (1898), Le Grand Pan (1896), Les Plus Forts (1898), Au Pied du Sinai (1898), AuFildes Jours (1901), Le Voile du Bonheur (1901), VEmbuscades de la Vie (1903), and Figures de Vendée (1903), were completely different in character. They were not literature of a high kind. Most of them were made up of articles published in the newspapers, and especially of those chroniques — they have no equivalent in English — which are little else than a reporter’s work, raised by the literary effort natural to the French to the level of essays or memoirs. When we go back to them, after the tremendous events of the past four years, we experience a strange sensation. The same Clemenceau whose name will be handed down to future generations with the glamour of gigantic history about it, appears to us as a mere journalist. He had talent, but of a kind distinctly inferior to that of a Lavedan, or a Donnay, or even of a Henri Fouquier. He wrote terse, witty French, much better than the flaccid stuff which made his articles in l’Homme Enchaîné, at the beginning of the war, such tedious reading; but it was not the original French of a master of the language. Above all, volume after volume leaves on us the desolate impression that the man was looking for subjects while he might have been doing the greatest things preserved in the memory of men.

But in spite of this contrast of the past and the present, we cannot turn to those paper-covered volumes without remembering the pleasant revelation they were. Here was a good-humored, almost good-natured, Clemenceau, with a tendency to dreaming or to the quiet enjoyment of the past; a. Clemenceau who was no misanthropist, for Le Voile du Bonheur — the dramatized story of a man long blind, who wants to be blind again the moment he gets a glimpse of the world — is only a literary apologue; a Clemenceau who made no allusions to politics or to the politicians he scorned; finally, a Clemenceau who condescended to show feeling, who loved his family, if he was still reticent about his friends, and out of the fulness of his heart found for animals the name which best describes what they are and what they ought to be — les parents pauvres, or the Fifth Estate.

The greatest surprise was for those who, either approving or deprecating, felt sure that Clemenceau could be only a mangeur de curés, a priest-hater. Surely the preface to Le Grand Pan was one long attack on Christianity; but it was evident that what the author imagined to be Christianity was only asceticism of inferior degree, and that whenever he should meet with Catholics who were kind and not selfish, intelligent and not stubborn, he could love them, not only for being kind and intelligent, but for being Catholics as well. This was what appeared in Les Plus Forts, the hero of which is exactly the Monarchist and believer that the author was supposed to detest, and yet is invested by him with such qualities as nobody could resist.

In the afternoon of November 11, 1918, Clemenceau, whose every minute that day must have been full enough to seem like a lifetime, found leisure to drive to the convent in the rue Bizet in which he was tended a few years ago during a dangerous illness. He was seen leaving his car with an enormous bouquet, and asking for the Sister Superior, he gave her the flowers with a ‘There, Sister! but for you, I should not be alive to-day.’ People who have read Les Plus Forts knew quite well that Clemenceau only needed to become acquainted with nuns to love them.

But comparatively few people had read this novel. When Clemenceau wrote it the public imagined that his active life was over, and he was not enough of a literary creator to compel attention. He lived in seclusion in his quiet house in the rue Franklin, wrote his not quite first-rate articles, walked, fenced, or reared his chickens in the fancy farm in his back garden, and generally gave the impression of a happy sexagenarian. Nobody imagined thal he would ever be the man he had been. And when, in 1902, he became a senator, it seemed that this was exactly as it should be; for what is a French senator if not a retired politician?

In reality, the most energetic part of his existence had not yet begun, but it was drawing near. In 1905, tired, like everybody else, of Combes’s stupidanticlericalism, and finding to his disgust that he was shadowed by the Prime Minister’s police, he shelved him as he had done so many of his predecessors. The same year the Kaiser appeared on his yacht off Tangier, went ashore, and delivered a speech which left no sensible person in doubt that Germany would some day try to annex France, either by persuasion or by violence. It appeared also that the time for amateur premiers was passed, and responsible men must henceforth be found.

Rouvier was the first and acquitted himself well. Yet while he was in office, the name of Clemenceau was constantly mentioned as that of his probable successor. Most people, it is true, would repeat what had become a formula, namely, that Clemenceau was only a destructive element, and if he were given office, he would astonish the world by the daring of his freaks: but everybody felt that he must be given a chance. A compromise was found in March, 1906, by appointing him Minister of the Interior under Sarrien. It appeared immediately that Sarrien might be called the Premier, but that the real power was in the hands of Clemenceau. In fact, nobody noticed any change when, in October, Sarrien quietly dropped out and Clemenceau formally took the reins. He held them till July, 1909, beating the record of all the governments since 1871.

Not that this period was uneventful. It lives in the memories of Frenchmen as a time of tension and uncertainty. The religious persecution, which Clemenceau had not begun but which he had to carry on, almost brought about a civil war, and there were a number of strikes, two of which resulted in bloodshed; while another — the postmen’s strike — threatened to stop the life of the nation. The European situation was fully as difficult. France had to fight the Moroccan tribes, cleverly handled by German agitators; and the famous incident of the Casablanca deserters brought her within an ace of a war with Germany herself.

Clemenceau showed his mettle in all these occurrences: he stood for order and patriotism, and resisted Germany as if he felt sure that he could beat her hollow. Throughout these difficulties he found a bitter enemy in the Socialist leader, Jaurès, and the antagonism of the two men went far to simplify the questions at issue; for the man in the street, Jaures became the embodiment of Socialist vagueness, while Clemenceau seemed to be the type of the wideawake patriot.

Another characteristic of Clemenceau, as Prime Minister, also contributed to make him popular. He was the first man in office who refused to be merely the instrument of the Chamber, and insisted on being the leader of the team if he were to be on it. Everybody was tired of the shiftings, inefficiency, hauteur, and selfishness of the deputies; and whenever Clemenceau browbeat them, or answered an embarrassing question about the AngloFrench Entente with a sarcastic bow and a ‘Je vous salue, messieurs!' he was universally approved by the nation. Strange to say, he was approved also by an overwhelming majority in the Chamber itself. It dawned on politicians as on everybody else that the poor equilibrium of the public powers of France came from an uncertainty about, the seat of authority. Let it be where it ought really to be, and everybody would be satisfied. It was only when Clemenceau reminded the Chamber that in 1905 it had swallowed an affront from Germany instead of fighting it out, that the insult seemed insufferable and the vote went against him. On the whole, he had, in spite of his occasional outbursts, shown a great deal more tact than had been expected from a violent man, and it was not till several years later that the real blemish on his administration — an amazing decrease in the French war budgets while the corresponding expenditure constantly rose in Germany — was made capital of in the Monarchist press.

IV

Clemenceau was sixty-eight when he had to give up office, but he showed no trace of fatigue, and was not looked upon as an old man. On the other hand, he had become interested in better things than mere party politics, and he was not to be driven back to the semiidle life with which he had seemed to be satisfied between 1893 and 1902. As a matter of fact, his presence was constantly felt during the years which separated him from his present return to office. He was a senator, — that is to say, not much, — but the position he held in the Senate was singularly influential, for he acted as chairman to the two most important senatorial commissions — the War Commission and the Foreign Affairs Commission. The French Chambers do little good in their public sittings, because eloquence is the enemy of action, and the French political orator has not yet shaken off the notion that eloquence is due to any assembly. But in their private commissions both Chambers are away from the baneful presence of admiring hearers, their members speak in their chairs, — which is a rare antidote against orators, — they generally handle facts coming to them through secret channels, and they have to come to practical conclusions. The consequence is that most of the effective work done by the French Parliament is prepared for it, and not infrequently forced upon it, by these commissions.

As president of two commissions dealing with the vital relations of France to her neighbors, Clemenceau commanded unique influence. It was in the nature of things that this influence should be made known only exceptionally to the public, but it did appear, and created an enormous sensation in one instance, when, in 1911, very direct cross-examination by Clemenceau elicited the fact that it was not the Foreign Minister, M. de Selves, who had negotiated the deplorable cession of the French Congo to Germany, but the Prime Minister, M. Caillaux, unknown to M. de Selves and very nearly unknown to everybody. The government could not survive such a blow, but the country was deeply grateful to the man who had placed the interests of France before those of a party.

This was the position of Clemenceau when the war broke out: he had a great past behind him, possessed immense influence, and in a quiet way enjoyed considerable popularity.

It will be remembered that the declarations made to the French Chambers by President Poincare and by Premier Viviani in August, 1914, created the unanimity of feeling known as l’union sacrée. The immediate outcome of this unanimity was a tacit renunciation on the part of the chambers of Parliamentary control. The transfer of the seat of government to Bordeaux, after the defeat at Charleroi, in its turn weakened the influence of the senators and deputies, and comparatively few of them would leave their constituencies or Paris. The country looked upon this interregnum of the legislative power with undoubted favor, the absence of nagging deputies leaving to the ministers the mental freedom they needed under such momentous circumstances.

Only one man objected, only one voice rose in protest. Clemenceau, in I he involved style which the danger of being censored caused him thenceforth to adopt, stated in l’Homme Libre his reason for keeping apart from the universal chorus. The paper was suspended. Clemenceau promptly issued it again as l’Homme Enchaîné, and returned to the charge. It was a strange thing, this old man defending the Parliament although he scorned most of its members, and attacking the censor, although, thinking of possible changes, he by no means wanted the censorship to be suppressed.

This went on during two years, the articles becoming sometimes bolder, sometimes more cryptic, and l’Homme Enchaîné being frequently suspended. In long ropy sentences, very different from the writer’s former style, each Prime Minister in succession found himself weighed and declared deficient. Viviani was a ringing cymbal, Briand a drone; Ribot and his octogenarian colleagues, above all, were derided by an indefatigable scorner, who, being only seventy-six and feeling like thirty, was full of contempt for their dotage.

Behind the Cabinets loomed a more important person, who was never mentioned by name but came in for copious abuse: this was President Poincaré. Every incident supplied l’Homme Enchaîné with a pretext for its attacks: the sanitary service, the protection given to shirkers, the Dardanelles expedition, the Saloniki expedition, the neglect of Sarrail or of Painlevé, were inexhaustible mines of reproach.

Gradually the criticisms widened their range: the observers who followed Clemenceau’s efforts to break away from the narrow space in which the censor kept journalists confined, saw him day after day take advantage of every bit of cover, until, Verdun giving him a unique point of vantage, he unmasked the royal battery and boldly called the Generalissimo a ‘power of unpreparedness.’ Yes, the military were as bad as the civilians; if the Germans were still at Noyon, if we had no heavy artillery, if we had enormous losses, which the War Minister would never dare to make public, it was the fault of the General Staff.

All this was said prudently and doled out in small doses, but it went home to inquiring minds and created sometimes disquietude, sometimes irritation, sometimes both. The chief reproach was that Clemenceau gave no proofs of his strictures, probably had none, and merely obeyed his destructive tendency. This impression must have prevailed abroad as well as in France, for, in the spring of 1916, Sir Conan Doyle, having met Clemenceau in the course of a visit to the front, described him as a pugilist, a ravager, a man destitute of all constructive capacity. ‘We have dangerous men in England,’ the writer concluded, ‘but none so dangerous as M. Clemenceau.’

A campaign which Clemenceau made to persuade the Chambers to delegate their authority to a sort of Committee of Public Salvation was put down to his old cult of revolutionary memories, or to his wish to place generals under the control of civilians. This feeling was so strong, that at the end of the Senate’s Secret Committee in May, 1916, a motion inspired by him and blaming the Generalissimo was supported by only five votes. The present writer remembers waiting with curiosity for the next leader in l’Homme Enchaîné. It did not come the day after the vote, but it did come the day after that. Clemenceau chaffed the Senate for what he called their cowardice, said that his only object was the salvation of the country and the protection of the soldiers against deplorable influence; finally, he spoke of his indifference to success and of the joy with which he would welcome relieving death, in a tone which disarmed criticism.

V

How the same man who in May, 1916, was deserted by all except five Senators became Prime Minister in November, 1917, is not very difficult to understand, though at first it seemed to be a mystery. Between those two dates the war began to appear unconscionably long; the cabinets of Briand, Ribot, and Painlevé fell amid universal indifference; the military authority itself — owing partly to the government withdrawing the initiative from the Generalissimo to vest it in the War Minister, who at the time happened to be a civilian — became uncertain; Lyautey, Roques, and Painlevé at the War Office, Nivelle, Pétain, and Foch at G.H.Q., succeeded one another without any apparent reason, while it leaked out, in the spring of 1917, that Sir Douglas Haig was, reasonably enough, questioning the right of a French civilian war minister to annex the allegiance given by the British army to a French generalissimo.

Meanwhile the ’Defeatist’ campaign carried on under the very nose of the Minister who ought to have stopped it, M. Malvy, was growing ever more audacious, and it was probable that the end of the war would be brought about at a Socialist conference — a prospect fraught with terrible possibilities.

In such an atmosphere criticisms rather than admiration were inevitable, and it seemed natural that the nation should at last demand that authority be lodged with men who had a right to be called authorities. The safety of France appeared preferable to the keeping up of the inert union sacrée. All this gave an all-important rôle to the commissions mentioned above, and to their president, Clemenceau. The patriotism of the latter had never been questioned, and when by slow degrees he succeeded in persuading his colleagues and his readers that, though discontented, he was not a pessimist, nay, that he, rather than his opponents, had never flagged in his belief in final victory, he became the centre of hope.

Finally, when, leaving aside all party considerations, he showed to the Senate that M. Malvy and, behind him, M. Caillaux were a national danger, he was suddenly seen to be the only leader France could follow.

It will always be to the credit, of President Poincaré that, in spite of the deep antipathy existing between him and the man who daily did his best to make him look ridiculous, he chose Clemenceau; and it will always be to the credit of Clemenceau that he made up his mind to ignore the awkwardness of this situation and consented to work day after day with the President at his elbow. In fact, the two men seem to have acted all along in perfect harmony.

As for the role which Clemenceau played during the year 1918, it can be summed up in one statement: from the day he took office, in spite of the dropping off of Russia, in spite of the difficulty there was in bringing over the American troops which then became the great hope, in spite of the tremendous effort of Germany at the last, there never was any doubt in France as to the final victory. Whatever his faults or mistakes, the man who at such a time could beget such an irresistible faith must be what historians will always call a providential man.

As for M. Clemenceau’s methods, they were simplicity itself. ‘Je fais la guerre,'he said. As a matter of fact he did nothing else. He got rid of Malvy, Caillaux, and their low abettors, in order to have no buffers between him and the enemy; he nullified the attacks of his political opponents, the Socialists, by splendid silences, by a wonderful capacity for making the Chamber realize that those things no longer mattered; he had the courage to discharge a few generals whom no one else had dared to remove, while he recalled Mangin, whom M. Painlevé had exiled from the army, even from Paris, largely because he showed his religious belief with too much simplicity. He did not discover Foch, because he had discovered him ten years before, when he looked for the best man he could place at the head of the École de Guerre; but he made Foch feel that he would be supported in any emergency and anywhere, were it even in those councils of the Allies where he showed what Mr. Balfour once called ‘ little patience and a will-power difficult to resist.’ He visited the Front, saw the men, frequently several times a week, in the trenches, and made them feel that they had ’somebody behind them.'

Meanwhile he managed to do the usual work of a war minister, that is, attend to a thousand matters; and as the present writer can testify, give his attention even to the most modest suggestions. Even his inevitable outbursts — his answer to Czernin, for instance, which the Journal des Débats called the diplomacy of la casquette sur l’oreille, or that, grandiloquent London declaration which President Wilson would have turned into so much more efficient propaganda— acted, after all, as useful simplifications. Altogether he represented the civilian element in a perfection of patriotic courage which the most exacting general could hardly have dreamed of. Nobody thinks it an exaggeration to say that he won the war as much as Foch himself.

Let me add that he has disclosed, since victory relieved him of the formidable tension he was bearing, an unsuspected capacity for emotion, for admiration, and for persuasion instead of bullying logic. No speech ever gave more the impression of the swan’s song than the recent address to the Chamber, in which he besought his hearers to convince themselves that peace would require even more unity than war; and the homage he paid to the memory of Gambetta, to the genius of Foch, and to the heroism of the soldiers he had seen so often and so near, was warm and generous as the homage of a boy.

VI

It would be futile to attempt anything like a judgment on Clemenceau’s life as a whole just now. We are too near the great drama to measure the characters in it properly. And the dénouement has been too sudden and too wonderful. Clemenceau would have been the same man even if the war had come to a less glorious conclusion; but what a difference it would have made in the verdict we should have passed upon him! Statesmen and warriors are not gauged like literary men, by their thoughts or their words, but by their deeds, and action of this kind is always conditioned by something which in ordinary life is generally called luck. Clemenceau himself feels this, and it was under this impression that he said recently that, after being long treated unjustly, he is now overestimated.

Clemenceau is not to be classed among the men whose power is made of deep-rooted belief served by neverfailing energy, a Lincoln, for instance. He has nothing in common either with a Venizelos, whose infallible vision takes in the whole political horizon, or with a Wilson, so studiously trying to sum up his time and country that he almost seems impersonal. He is nothing if he is not personal. He was born like that, no doubt, and what we know of his bringing up in rather narrow provincial surroundings, where political antagonism was felt acutely and would seek violent expression, helps us to realize that he could only be a man of unsuppressed passions. He always appeared as an ultra-modern individual, the direct offspring of the Revolutionists — not by any means a man who cultivated agitation for its own sake, but a daring bubbling temperament which shrank neither from an armed conspiracy, nor from the danger of imprisonment, nor from duels, and which refrained in 1871 from being in the riot only because the riot did not answer to what he thought useful to his country. He loved freedom and what he imagined was justice; and it was not his fault if in 1871, 1877, and 1898, — at the time of the Commune, the Royalist reaction, and the Dreyfus case, — his fight for justice and freedom was made easy by the masses following him.

His passions were noble. He long made the mistake of believing that the Republic could be only the continuation of the Revolution; but his soul was not the soul of a persecutor. He was not a cynic either, though he would perversely speak like one: he pitied more than he despised, and it is striking to find on investigation that, although he attacked men all his life, he retained an extraordinary belief in man.

His overruling passion, the mainspring of all his actions, great or small, was patriotism. It is pathetic to find so often in his writings the humble expression of an almost childlike gratitude for being born a Frenchman. The lore of France and of all French traditions has been to him what a definite creed is to others. There would have been no foundation for his moral life without it; but in the degree in which he possessed this feeling or was possessed by it, he never had any hesitation about his duty. The unity of his existence comes from nothing else, and his power had no other source. Whenever he saw France at stake, and felt responsible for her safety, — after the war of 1870, at the time of the Casablanca crisis, during this war, — he stiffened prodigiously and his great resources appeared. Whatever may have been his faults, the man who could not only represent but keep together forty million other men, as he did, must have had a great soul.

As for the influence which the attitude of Clemenceau cannot but have on the future of his country, it is immeasurable, but it can be stated in a few words. Not one French minister, in the last forty years, not even Gambetta, had given us the impression that he could extricate himself from politics, that is to say, from vanity or self-seeking interest. Clemenceau did. He lifted us up from what has so admirably been called la République des Camarades to the level of 1792. The notion of a responsible authority was becoming so obscured that even during the war it was misunderstood as much by those who defended as by those who assailed it. It is to-day as bright and clear as a beacon, and will inevitably bring about before long a remodeling of the French Constitution according probably to the American pattern.

Finally, the indomitable resolution of Clemenceau to achieve results, to secure the reward of an effort, and never be reconciled to failure, is in utter contrast to the amateurish government, of so many of his predecessors. The lesson he thus gave will not be lost. A few years ago the fashion among aspiring young statesmen was to declare themselves realists, that is to say, to boast of being intelligently selfish. But Clemenceau has brought us back to the higher plane of virile ambition. He was in the tradition of Danton, who was in the tradition of the Ancients.

We can expect to see the men of M. Tardieu’s generation take up the tradition of Clemenceau, and France will be the gainer. An era of manly activity is dawning upon us, nay, has already begun; and it is not the antipathy of a hundred thousand or so violent Socialists to the development of individuals that can untimely close it.