H. M. Hyndman

“ 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.” ”

“ The watchword of all our Governments since the war began has been victory for the sake of justice. That frank policy we shall uphold. We have great soldiers with a great history led by men who have been tested and have been inspired to deeds of the highest devotion worthy of their ancestral renown. The immortal fatherland of our common humanity, overmastering the exultation of victory, will follow, on the lines of its destiny, the noble aspiration for peace, through them and through us all. Frenchmen impelled by us into the conflict have special claims upon us. ”

“ Since the bourgeois gained his freedom in the great Revolution by using the arm of the sans-culotte, what a grip he has kept upon his possession! and how much dearer to him his property is than anything else in the world! Clemenceau does but take up the theme of Balzac and others when he describes provincial France and its twin gods, money and the land—money which compels loveless marriages, envy, fawning, bitterness, perpetual small cheating or endless insect-like toil; and the land, in whose service men work themselves and their kindred to the bone, and grudge a pittance to old age. ”

“ Perhaps no politician of any nation ever so persistently refused to “range himself” as did Clemenceau for thirty-five years of stormy public life. He revelled in opposition: he rejoiced in overthrow. He was on the side of the people, but he would not help them to realise their aspirations in practical life. He was a political philosopher compact of incompatibilities. As an individualist he was a stalwart champion of individual freedom: as a man of affairs he advocated the use of State power to limit the anarchic domination of personal power. ”

“ But there was always an active section left which in all good faith stood to their views that under the capitalist system nothing could justify the workers of one country in killing the workers of another. They had no interest in their own nation which was worth defending in the field. The past of France was for them a record of class oppression, the present of France the continuance of chattel slavery in disguise, the future of France no better than the permanence of penal servitude for life as wage-slaves to the bourgeoisie. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether he writes of town or country, of Fleur de Froment and Six Sous, or of a ménage à trois; whether he calls up a Greek courtesan to theorise about her profession, or describes a long-standing bitter, and motiveless peasant feud, his style is always fluent and charming, vivid with irony, and graceful with poetic thought. Yet the defect as well as the merit of M. Clemenceau’s fiction and essay-writing is just this admirable, unvarying ease and fluency. One feels that he writes with perfect unconsciousness, as the thoughts come into his head. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This triune fetish Clemenceau, with all his keenness of criticism, might be said to worship: yet to worship in a more or less reasonable way. He could not shut his eyes to the truth that, for men and women whose livelihood was at the mercy of capitalists, there could be no real liberty, dominated as the workers were by their daily compulsion to obtain the wherewithal for the necessaries of life. The only way by which even partial justice could be secured, under the system of payment of wages, was combination among the wage-earners. Hence he recognises the liberty to strike. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Clemenceau’s task was therefore an exceedingly hard one. He had ever in mind the old eighteenth-century watchword which, from his point of view, is the foundation of the French Republic—Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And the greatest of these is liberty! He throughout forgot, or overlooked, that, even according to his own pronouncements, liberty in any real sense is impossible for the weaker—the majority who own no property—against the stronger—“Les Plus Forts,” the minority who own all the property. ”

“ For my part I have done my best as an old and convinced Social-Democrat, and on some important points his opponent, to give a frank and unbiassed study of Clemenceau’s fine career. His very mistakes serve only to throw into higher relief his sterling character and the genius which has enabled him to command success. Read aright, his actions do all hang together, and constitute one complete whole. Comprising within himself the brilliant yet thorough capacity of his French countrymen, he has risen when close upon eighty to the height of the terribly responsible position he was forced to fill. ”

“ I am accused of attacking the workers and of doing worse than other Governments. I have never attacked the workers, I have never done them wrong. The duty of the Government is to maintain tranquillity. This I have done without injury to the toilers, though I had to face 85,000 strikers in the Pas de Calais and 115,000 in Paris—the largest number ever known on strike at the same time in France. I went down to Courrières to ensure liberty. We have all of us here to go through our education in Liberty. Education is not a matter of words, but of deeds. ”

“ This Clemenceau never allows us for one moment to forget. But he it was who had breathed new life into the whole combination, military and civilian, at the front and in the factories. No man of his time of life, perhaps no man of any age, ever carried on continuously such exhausting toil, physical and mental, as that which this marvellous old statesman of seventy-seven undertook and carried though from November 1917 to November 1918. ”

“ Accused persons shall all be brought before courts-martial. The soldier of justice shall make common cause with the soldier in the field. No more pacifist plots: no more German intrigues. Neither treason nor semi-treason. War, nothing but war. Our country shall not be placed between two fires. Our country shall learn that she is really defended.
“The day will come when from Paris to the smallest village of France storms of cheers will welcome our victorious colours tattered by shell-fire and drenched with blood and tears—the glorious memorials of our great dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Capital and labour, capitalists and wage-earners, are at variance everywhere. Their antagonism can no more be averted or bridged over than could the class struggle [200] between land and slave-owners and their chattel slaves, or the nobles and their serfs. Only the slow process of social evolution leading up to revolution can solve the problem. Meanwhile, combination on the one side is met by combination on the other. Outside political action, which is ineffective until the workers themselves understand how to use it, there is no weapon for the wage-earners or wage-slaves but the strike. ”

“ After giving conclusive proof that in 1875, in the Schnäbele affair, as well as at Tangier, Morocco and Casablanca, Germany’s policy had been to wound, weaken and irritate France, Clemenceau wound up as follows:
“In all good faith we desire peace, we are eager for peace because we need it in order to build up our country. But if war is forced upon us we shall be there! The difficulty between Germany and ourselves is this: Germany believes the logical consequence of her victory is domination. We do not believe that the logical consequence of our defeat is vassalage. ”

“ You are using the military discipline of the comrades of the men out on strike against the electrical companies, to render their protest nugatory, by employing the sappers against them. You have, in fact, called out the powers of the State to crush the workers in a particular industry. If you were true to yourself, you would convert the electrical supply of Paris now in the hands of greedy monopolists into a public service, and give the strikers every satisfaction. That is the only real solution of social anarchy. ”

“ Personal malevolence and political pusillanimity together were the imputations made against those who thus declined to serve France in her utmost need. Happily for Europe, their strength was not equal to their ill-will, and Clemenceau, after his first month of power, was able to treat them as a negligible quantity. So they remain to-day. A very great opportunity of serving the workers of their country has been missed: that the bitterest enemy of France and of freedom has not been greatly helped in her war for universal domination is no fault of theirs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why should they borrow to pay taxes when wine was fetching a derisory price? Let Government take short order with the adulterators and big producers out there in the West, who were preventing the hard-working toilers on the soil in the South from disposing of their sole saleable product at a profit. A Republic which couldn’t protect the backbone of the nation, the Southern wine-growers, to wit, was of no use to them. And the people of the South, as M. Clemenceau knows very well, for he is Senator for the Var, are a vivacious and an excitable folk. ”

“ 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 [9] 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. ”