Prime Minister of France

“ Where the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of its territory or the fulfilment of its international commitments are under serious and immediate threat, and where the proper functioning of the constitutional public authorities is interrupted, the President of the Republic shall take measures required by these circumstances, after formally consulting the Prime Minister, the Presidents of the Houses of Parliament and the Constitutional Council. ”

“ This sum appears generous when contrasted with the £5000 paid to the British First Lord of the Treasury and his unpaid services as Prime Minister of the Crown. The President appoints all the Ministers and heads of the civil and military departments. He declares war with the consent of both Houses, and a Minister counter-signs every act.
The national desire for security prompts the men folk of a large proportion of the upper middle classes to aim towards the pleasantly safe pigeon-holes in the State dovecot. ”

“ The new prime minister was the bearer of an eminent name, being the grandson of the statesman of 1831, and the great-grandson of the owner of Vizille, where the estates of Dauphiné met in 1788, as a prelude to the assembling of the states-general the next year. His acceptance of office aroused additional interest because he was a minister possessed of independent wealth, and therefore a rare example of a French politician free from the imputation of making a living out of politics. ”

“ A Ministerial government, too, is carried on in the face of day. Its life is in debate. A President may be a weak man; yet if he keep good Ministers to the end of his administration, he may not be found out—it may still be a dubious controversy whether he is wise or foolish. But a Prime Minister must show what he is. He must meet the House of Commons in debate; he must be able to guide that assembly in the management of its business, to gain its ear in every emergency, to rule it in its hours of excitement. ”

“ The personal qualities of the French King added to the respect inspired by the power and importance of his kingdom. No sovereign has ever represented the majesty of a great state with more dignity and grace. He was his own prime minister, and performed the duties of a prime minister with an ability and industry which could not be reasonably expected from one who had in infancy succeeded to a crown, and who had been surrounded by flatterers before he could speak. ”

“ It was not until the eighteenth century that a Premier of the modern type came into existence. With the development of the party system, the gradual growth of the Cabinet's prestige, and the consequent weakening of the sovereign's prerogatives, the Prime Minister ceased to be the choice of the Crown, and became the nominee of the nation. As the leader of the party in office, he acquired the unquestioned right of selecting his own Ministers. ”

“ How bring together human beings so divided? How bridge such a gulf?
Well, first he brought into the conferences those men who stood between the quarrelling parties—the railway managers. Here he found a remarkable body of Englishmen—alert, resourceful, self-made, unprejudiced.
How often he used to praise those railway managers! Ten years after, in a still greater emergency, his mind went back to those men; and in the gravest crisis of the Great War he called them in to aid the hard-pressed British lines in France.
What is it that has made Mr. Lloyd George so great a conciliator? ”

“ Lloyd George saw that even in the darkest hour here was the governing issue—which nation could hold out the longest. So now he set himself, with all his great powers, to hearten and encourage both the peoples and the Armies in France and Great Britain. He kept travelling between London and Paris, attending the meetings of the Versailles Council, visiting the armies at the front, and exchanging cheerful messages between the fighting men and the civilians. ”

“ But a good prime minister is he who is upright in his heart, moderate in his fear of the prince, faithfully obedient to all his orders, kind-hearted, not oppressive to the people, and always exerting himself to the utmost for the happiness of the people and the welfare of the country. ”

“ The highest patronage of a prime minister is, of course, a considerable power, though it is exercised under close and imperative restrictions—though it is far less than it seems to be when stated in theory, or looked at from a distance. ”

“ The mission of the President of France is to keep ambitious men and partisans at bay, and afford the best elements and the truest interests of all France a fair expression and the opportunity of forming a stable and suitable political government. ”

“ Now, as to this new policy, I will tell the House what I think the Prime Minister should do. He ought, I think, always to choose for his President of the Board of Control or his Secretary of State for India, a man who cannot be excelled by any other man in his Cabinet, or in his party, for capacity, for honesty, for attention to his duties, and for knowledge adapted to the particular office to which he is appointed. If any Prime Minister appoint an inefficient man to such an office, he will be a traitor to the Throne of England. ”

“ My recollections of that tea-party centre in the impression left on my dramatic sense by the contrast and, as subsequent events show, the conflict of family relations and dynastic interests. There was the Archduke, a stiff-set, stolid, gloomy, not very inspiring person, commonly understood to be intensely hostile to England and France, and closely bound to Germany and the person of the Kaiser. And there was the brighter and more expansive Belgian Princess, daughter of the late King and cousin of the present one. ”

“ Lloyd George said that the Bolshevists had an army of 300,000 men, who would, before long, be good soldiers, and to fight them at least 400,000 Russian soldiers would be required. Who would feed, equip, and pay them? Would Italy, or America, or France do so? If they were unable to do that, what would be the good of fighting Bolshevism? It could not be crushed by speeches. He sincerely trusted that they would accept President Wilson’s proposal as it now stood. ”

“ In the United States, where the whole people is the fountain of power, the ministers are the servants of the President, appointed and dismissed by him. In England, while they are still in theory her Majesty's ministers, and the Prime Minister is nominally selected by the sovereign, by a remarkable transformation they have become the servants of the legislature—that is, of the people. ”

“ On the reconciliation of the king-emperor with the coalition he was therefore selected as the most suitable man to lead the new government, and on the 8th of April 1906 was appointed prime minister, taking at the same time the portfolio of finance. ”

“ The Government of France had passed into the hands of a Minister far more influential, more able, and more ambitious than any man who had taken part in public affairs since the retirement of Thiers, and the time was at hand when that Minister must decide on the line of policy to be followed with regard to Foreign Powers. ”

“ It so happened that the prime minister was a member of a great house which had become illustrious by its profession of Protestant principles, and even by its sufferings in a cause which England had once looked on as sacred. The prime minister, a man of distinguished ability, not devoid even of genius, was also a wily politician, and of almost unrivalled experience in the management of political parties. ”

“ The head of the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He has no manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal superiority, tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the taxes, and declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers created by the nineteenth century, pointing out to you as a political monstrosity the fact that the prime minister is a man of no birth. ”

“ It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the best patriot. To say that such a man as this—a man who has a better knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his country—needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. ”

“ But the English politician is so far suffused with the spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest contrast to his environment. ”

“ The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. ”

“ In other words, the incoming Prime Minister, with his Cabinet, has the right to remodel the Sovereign's household—or any other body of offices—in whatever degree he may think requisite, and the late Prince Albert could not even appoint his own private secretary, but much to his chagrin had to accept one appointed for him by the Prime Minister. ”

“ With the same keenness of insight M. Clemenceau, writing on July 1st, 1917, in L’Homme Enchaîné, saw in Mr. Lloyd George a great political experimentalist adapting his course always to the actual events of the war:
“The English Prime Minister is, above all things, a man of action—one of those who, under the active impulse of living thought, apply themselves to one task only—and that is to bring order and method into the plans and resolves which come to them from a rigorous scrutiny of realities.” ”

“ If one did not not admire Louis Napoleon, I should like to know upon whom one could, as a public man, fix one's admiration! Just look at our English statesmen! And see the state to which self-government brings everything! Look at London with all its sanitary questions just in the same state as ten years ago; look at all our acts of Parliament, one half of a session passed in amending the mismanagement of the other. For my own part, I really believe that there is nothing like one mind, one wise and good ruler; and I verily believe that the President of France is that man. ”

“ By the royal ratification the Prime Minister finds himself not only the confirmed master of all his collaborators, however ambitious and impatient, but also the mouthpiece of the nation in international matters, with all the moral authority of the King’s choice and the unanimous advice of the “Elder Statesmen.” ”

“ No regular government at variance with this many-sided, intangible power could be established. The regular government of France especially—the hereditary monarchy—could not take root again. Public opinion and enthusiasm are like stage machinery that rises and falls. We witnessed the workings of this machinery from 1848 to 1852. The inventors did not even give themselves the trouble to hide the workings from the eyes of the public. This reign of opinion has continued. The word of command from the emperor was echoed by the ministers, and from them by the préfets, sous-préfets, and mayors. ”

“ More commonly, it is the duty of the prime minister to lay the collective opinion of his colleagues before the sovereign, and take his pleasure on public measures and appointments. The sovereign never presides at a cabinet; and at the meetings of the privy council, where the sovereign does preside, the business is purely formal. ”

“ He thinks the French Minister one of the greatest Enemies of our Country, that he would have straitned our Boundaries, to prevent the Growth of our People; contracted our Fishery, to obstruct the Increase of our Seamen; and retained the Royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our Negociations with foreign Courts, and afforded us, during the War, the Assistance we receiv'd, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weaken'd by it; that to think of Gratitude to France is the greatest of Follies, and that to be influenc'd by it would ruin us. ”

“ Foreign Office, for which he is peculiarly well fitted, and there is no reason why he should not look forward to being Prime Minister in some future combination of parties, a post which he would fill better than any of the statesmen who now play the principal parts in the political drama. ”

“ Add to this that he was the essence of good-nature, the most genial of friends, simple and straight, manly and cheery, and we have some idea of the man whom the nation insisted on having for Prime Minister, when he was over seventy years of age, at a critical moment when it was felt that only a strong, fearless, popular statesman could guide the ship out of the storm. ”

“ They have the experience of the Past before them. They have seen to what deplorable consequences the abuse of parliamentary privilege, and of the liberty of the press, led during the years 1830-48,—are they willing again to try the event? Whilst Louis Napoleon lives and reigns, France can scarcely be a constitutional country—that is to say, a country where the sovereign is a state-cypher, and the minister a creature of a parliamentary majority. ”

“ A Prime Minister never gets fired, Mawruss—he resigns, and while I admit that nine times out of ten when the French President has had a Prime Minister resign on him, it's probably been a case of the stenographer tipping the Prime Minister off that before the boss went to lunch he said, 'If that grafter's still here when I come back there'll be another Prime Minister going around on crutches,' y'understand, yet at the same time this here last Prime Minister has been right on the job, and the French President has been quite worried for fear he's going to quit. ”