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Show - "CLEMENCEAU A MATCH FOR EVERY ONE BUT HIMSELF" "Up to 1906 Europe Had Little Chance to Think Him Anything Any-thing but a Compound of Malicious Spirit and Presuming Bully, Pursuing in Politics a Dog-in-the-Manger Policy, Destroying Everything, Creating Nothing He Slew Cabinet After Cabinet as He Chose He Joyed in Triumph With a Cool and Exasperating Insolence" By Sydney Brooks LONDON, Dec. 15. JRANCE has summoned to the pre-j, pre-j, miership her most formidable fighter. That seems a strange description descrip-tion of a man of seventy-six years. But it is a true description of Clemen-ceau. Clemen-ceau. The years sit lightly on him. His vigor, his aptitude for affairs, the fine free play of his lucid intellect, are little, if at all, Impaired. A fighter from boyhood, he is a fighter still, and no Frenchman even today equals his combination of practical sagacity, debating de-bating brilliance and administrative thoroughness and courage. I think it was W. T. Stead who, trying try-ing to translate Clemenceau into terms of English politics, spoke of him as "a compound of John Morley, John Burns and Sidney Webb." Throw In a little of Mr. Birrell and a grain or two of Labouchere as Labouchere was in his most impish days, and the resultant re-sultant amalgam, if one's imagination could only hold it, might perhaps pass for a rough condensation of the French Premier's 'politics and personality. person-ality. A Self-Willed Atheist But Clemenceau may be explained without reference to any one but himself. him-self. He is sufficiently individual to be able to dispense with comparisons; he is perhaps the most individual Frenchman who has given himself up to public life since the Third Republic came into existence. His career, his opinions, the way he holds-them, his temperament, are all unique, or at Sit least conspire to form a unique com- blnatlon. A Macau lay would revel In the dramatic contrasts he presents. r. Breton born, he has all his life been the unsparing foe of that Church which still finds In Brittany one of its suirai. iciugcs. atiiiio iuuf,u 115111 Ing mind and stubborn self-will that have kept his fellow-provincials devoted de-voted to Catholicism threw him into lostility to It. It is indeed because Clemenceau has preserved so many Df the Breton characteristics that he :s the power he is. His father was an unbending republican re-publican in the days when to be a republican re-publican of any kind was to make the icquaintance of the Imperial prisons. The son quickly followed in the father's footsteps. He was thrown into gaol before his twentieth year for shouting "Vive la Republique! " on ne of the imperial anniversaries. fter his release he emigrated to merica, lived in New York between I860 and 1869, mastered the English ongue. married an American lady and eturned to Paris to settle down as a jhysician. His father and his soil had made -lim an individualist and an atheist. America strengthened his individual-sm individual-sm without destroying his atheism. 3e came back to France with all his lative hatred of every form of social epression retempered by an almost nglo-Saxon devotion to the realities, md not merely the rhetoric, of Ub-1. Ub-1. arty. ;W A man of his capacity and preco--ious lcvel-headedness could not, of jourse, keep, and could not be kept, out of public life in the tumultuous year of 1S70. Pie was appointed maire Df Montmartre after the revolution, md became responsible during the siege not only for the conduct of the . most turbulent district in the whole fomented city, but for the provisioning provision-ing of 150.000 men. A Ready Duelist He showed a coolness and far-seeing caution that peemed only to grow with the frenzy around him. The penalty for being sane and energetic in a crisis af disordered fury is that you find Cew to argue with you and many to distrust you. M. Clemenceau lost the confidence of the Central Committee; lie withdrew from the National Assembly; As-sembly; but. prophesying its bloody futility, he declined to join the Com-mine. Com-mine. The prophecy was remembered and when reaction came Clemenceau ivas elected to the Municipal Council, and In 1876 became a deputy for Paris in the Chamber. As a public man Clemenceau for thirty years instructed all Kurope in the art of political wrecking. Until lis first Premiership, which lasted from 1906 to 1009, scarcely any one thought of him except as an undisciplined undis-ciplined vandal. lie was the Red Indian In-dian of French politics, the master of intrigue and ambuscade, the planner if violent forays, the director of vast ministerial slaughterings. It was a more chance that some f' at least of those slaughters did not j call for a coroner's inquest. Clemenceau Clemen-ceau has 'never been backward in sup porting his speeches and writings with rapier and pistol, and his duels were sufficiently numerous and businesslike to enhance the terror of his name. Up to 1906 Europe had little chance to think him anything but a compound of malicious spirit and presuming bully, pursuing in politics a dog-ln-the-manger policy, destroying everything, creating nothing. He slew cabinet after cabinet as he chose. He joyed in triumph with a cool and exasperating insolence. Foes watched him ride by, smart, dapper, quiet, with the subdued, distinguished air, in the bois of a morning, and ground their teeth to see him nonchalant, non-chalant, careless and easy, a couple of hours before he was due at the Chamber to smash them with a biting, horrible, acute speech that picked out all the weak points in their fabric of policy, summoned with a few happy words a general onslaught and upset the cabinet like a house of cards. Then he would go off smiling" to dinner with a party of opera stars, and afterward to the Foyer de la Danse, .there to entertain en-tertain the ladies with stories of the light side of politics. The two triumphs tri-umphs in conjunction were unendurable. unendur-able. The Panama affair dragged M. Clemenceau Clem-enceau to the ground. Though the accusations ac-cusations leveled at him in the Chamber Cham-ber utterly broke down, his constituents constitu-ents turned against him, and from 1S93 to 1002 he was out of public life. Nobody ever thought he would rise again, nobody, that is, but Clemenceau. His enemies held joyous orgies over his political grave. For twenty years he had spared no one, and no one had the wish to spare him. He was damned, it seemed, beyond redemption. And for a while it appeared as though Clemenceau himself accepted his fate. Of the wily, unscrupulous, worldly politician nothing was heard. He gave up politics, green rooms and the bois, and retired to his retreat in a countrified part of Paris. Then began to appear a very different Clemenceau, Clem-enceau, an exquisite and humane writer, praising the great god Pan, philosophising with unclouded mind on the larger social problems, winning the praise and adoration of Its jeunes of literary Paris. Never before did a politician climb from such a depth by so strange a path. Nearly a dozen volumes of hia stand on my shelves. English positivism, posi-tivism, devout paganism, sympathetic materialism, the ideals of 89 wrapped up in commercialism and a peculiar, aristocratic aloofness, a genuinely poetic feeling for art and nature and a deep confession for the dispossessed combine with a style that has the crispness and lucidity of the eighteenth century to make them a stimulus and a delight. The Journalist From philosophy and sociology and . letters Clemerfceau passed back again to journalism. His old paper, La Justice, Jus-tice, had been overwhelmed by the crash; a new one, L'Aurore, arose to proclaim the innocence of Dreyfus. M. Clemenceau became the sentient conscience con-science of France in print. With amazing vivacity and perspicuity, and with a consummate employment of all the weapons of irony, wit and a golden style, he analyzed day by day the shifting elements of "the affair." Even' now the volumes in which he gathered up his articles on the Dreyfus Drey-fus case, by their limpid, unadorned French, their air of speclousness, their passionate pity, hold and thrill the reader. They remain, I suppose, the most brilliant masterpiece of polemics that French literature has produced since Pascal's "Provincial Letters." Their effect at the time of their appearance ap-pearance was prodigious. No publicist publi-cist did more, very few did as much, to guide French opinion through the mazes of that exhausting crisis. Pie li , ' s I ft A ! ' ) ""tX, Awl, v , , ill xW - SVll . M. CLEMENCEAU v 1 had his reward. In 1902 he was elected to the Senate by the very constituency that nine years earlier had hounded him out of politics. In May, 1906, he became Minister of the Interior. In November of the same year he rose to the premiership. From then up to July, 1900, he was not only Prime Minister, Min-ister, but little less than dictator. I fancy that the historian of the future will give a good deal of space to Clemenceau's premiership. It followed fol-lowed soon after that lamentable period pe-riod when Germany-s intervention in the Morocco question had humbled and confounded France, when Del-casse Del-casse had been dismissed from the Foreign Office at the dictation of Berlin Ber-lin and when the spirit of the country coun-try and the tone of its politics were shaken and demoralized. Clemenceau's supreme achievement as Premier was that he stiffened the national backbone. back-bone. He put heart into the republic. He stood up to the Socialists and the anti-mllitarlsts as no man had ever sioou up lo ui?in. nt: sii'ppeu liio ury rot that wa- eating into the army and navy. He preserved internal orMer with the vigor of a man who completely com-pletely understood both his countrymen country-men and himself. Something that might partly be called a thrill of regeneration radiated from his electric personality. It showed itself in the admirably firm and yet wholly unprovocative policy which M. Plchon, who is now once more installed In the Qua! d'Orsay. was able to procure in foreign affaire. It showed itself In the confidence which France and her army recovered In themselves. It showed itself la the enthusiastic support yielded to the Premier when he fought the anti-militarists, anti-militarists, suppressed the turbulence of the Midi, pulverized M. Jaures in the Chamber, and proved in unmistakable unmis-takable fashion that Internal order was safe in his hands and that the dignity and efficiency of France engaged en-gaged his utmost care. That he wrote next to nothing on the statute books did not matter in the least. He announced, when he came Into office, an elaborate and grandiose program, but France cared very little, if at all, that not one tithe of it became law. He completed the purchase of tiie Western Railway, but apart from that he refrained altogether alto-gether from the fatal vice of doing too much. France in her heart of hearts dislikes being legislated for and likes to be 'governed. M. Clemenceau, with an instinctive appreciation of his countrymen's psychology, talked much accordingly, and brilliantly administered adminis-tered with unfailing firmness, and passed very few measures. He Ruled France He fascinated France and he ruled her. Compact of common sense, pushing push-ing nothing, not even a principle, to extremes, a clear-sighted radical with an almost English contempt for logic and a quite un-French respoct for opportunism, a Jacobin who had learned the necessity of compromise and accommodation. Intolerant in nothing, not even in his antl-clert-calism, always acknowledging the expediencies ex-pediencies with a bow of airy cynicism, always sure of himself and knowing precisely how far he was prepared to go, always brilliant, vivid, memorable in debate Clemenceau proved himself the strongest as well as the longest lived minister of the Third Republic. Above all, he was unfailingly picturesque. pic-turesque. He had and still has the knack of being always interesting. He touches life at many points in a way that is all his own. Buoyant, masterful master-ful and scorner of the conventions reserved in spite of his exploslveness, solitary in spite of his following, jauntily contemptuous of all opponents, oppo-nents, Impatient of stupidity, disdainful of the average man and still more of the average politician, a difficult minister min-ister to work with or under, a leader of terribly incisive speech, overriding character and volcanic temper, aloof, sarcastic, unlngratiatlng Clemenceau, whatever else lie may be, never wan or could be dull. I do not care to prophesy how Ion he will remain in office. It is obvious that, lacking the support of the Socialists, So-cialists, he is at many disadvantages in the Chamber. But it is not less obvious that he represents, with extraordinary extra-ordinary completeness, the views and temper of the country as a whole a country determined upon victory, longing long-ing for leadership, impatient of politicians, poli-ticians, disgusted with a squalid series of public scandals. His personality, his pure flame of patriotism, hlB rapidity ra-pidity of decision and of action these are his assets. His cabinet is himself him-self which 1b at once its weakness and its strength. But every pacifist and Bolo and follower of Calllaux in the country, and every man who is working to weaken tho fiber of the French people, knows that so long as Clemenceau is In power they need look for no mercy. National unity, vigorous warfare against the Germans at the front and their friends In France, and a firm hand make up lh veteran's program. The Sudden Fall ' But he has one formidable enemy who is not an enemy of his country himself. If one can augur from his first premiership pretty well how he will act and what he will say in hie second, one has also to remember that Clemenceau, the wrecker of so many ministers, was also the wrecker of his own. I well remember that July day in 1909 when he fell. For three years he had dominated France as Mr. Roosevelt once dominated America. His position never seemed more secure than when the Chamber met on Tuesday, Tues-day, Jly 24. There was no "crisis on hand more formidable than th score or ho he had blithely weathered since he stopped into the premiership. If anything ever appeared certain In French or any other politics. It was that M. Clemenceau would stay In office till the genera election of 1910. And then In a moment a sudden tempest, an inexplicable failure to meet It with the old wary audadty, half a d07xm reckless, Jarring, fataJ words and a majority agRln:t him of thirty-fix. A side-issue, an unguarded moment, a few h:r-;ty phrases, and a premiership unique in latter-day French history carne tn its pitifully ironical end. A mutch for every one but hitmelf. Clemenceau fell by his own hand. His irascible temperament had achieved what bis opponents could not achieve. Hut that hns long ago V-en forgiven him. "What Franco remembers re-members ik hH courore. hi:-, firmness, his vho!o-he;i rted fr.lt h in the great-nosH great-nosH of J'Yance. That is why nt thin crilica hour she has called him again y""' to the management of her destinies, |
