Clemenceau
'HISTORY will probably rate Georges Clemenceau as XX the greatest Frenchman of the Third Republic ; and yet if he had not become Prime Minister, and virtually Dictator, in the War when he was already an old man— if he had not flogged the waning spirit of France back into energy—he could hardly have been reckoned great in the real qualities of statesmanship. As it was, he performed a prodigious feat which no other man in France could have done nearly so well. All his life he had been an iconoclast who had sacrificed a colleague as easily as he had wrecked a Government ; and when he gradually worked his way up to the first place in the War, walking over the numerous fallen politicians who bore the label of failure, he enjoyed little of that goodwill which is rightly regarded as the working capital of a Prime Minister, The moment, however, was unique. France was wavering on the verge of collapse ; there was mutiny in the Army ; something like a conviction of defeat was secretly spreading throughout civilian France. Clemenceau set to work with demonic energy. With his tongue be lacerated the faint-hearted. They were imbeciles, sluggards, defeatists, traitors. When, for the second time in the War, it was proposed that Parliament should be removed from Paris, Clemenceau exclaimed with passionate irony, " Yes. Let it be moved. It is already too far from the enemy." He was the elder Cato of France. Delenda est Germania.
He thought only in mechanical terms for the safety of France. Never was the fear of Germany more bitterly preserved than in the mind of Clemenceau. And he had reason. As a young man he had seen Favre weeping over the grinding terms of Bismarck. He had seen St. Cloud burning. He had seen people eat rats. He entered politics with a hatred of the Empire and all the dilettantism of the Emperor, Napoleon III. He had a detestation of Clericalism as strict as that of Gambetta. He soon established his reputation as a wrecker. It was he who brought down the Governments of Jules Ferry and Freycinet ; he who was not afraid to ridicule Boulanger mounted on his spectacular charger ; he who even went so far as to enforce the resignation of a President.
When he became Prime Minister for the first time in 1906 he unhesitatingly suppressed a workmen's rising with bloodshed. He was indeed the Tiger of politics, but for all his cold-bloodedness he had many of the liberal elements of an old-fashioned French Radical. It was vastly to his honour that he published Zola's withering enunciation of the plotters against Dreyfus when other newspapers feared to touch it. At the beginning of the War he was still acting as general denouncer because, in his view, France was not putting forth all her strength against Germany. It was easy to read a lack of patriotism into a patriotism burning too bright. He was tripping up his country, it was said. His newspaper, L'Homme Libre, was suppressed. He came out at once with another paper, L'Homme Enchaine. Still the alleged impeder of his country rose step by step till he stood forth as " the necessary man." M. Poineare could do nothing but ask him to become Prime Minister.
What a full tide of emotion must have swept through the mind of Clemenceau when he presided over the Peace Conference in that very hall where the King of Prussia had been proclaimed, not indeed King of Germany, but at least German Emperor ! The clash of disposition and theory when Clemenceau and President Wilson wrangled over the peace terms must have been one of the most piquant on record—the materialist and realist against the idealist and doctrinaire. Clemenceau smiled cynically over the Covenant, and lavished his sparkling wit on it in private, without thinking it worth while to obstruct it. Why not let the President have his harmless toy so long as his attention was distracted from subjects actually much more important to France ! Wilson went away with his Covenant, but Clemenceau remained with an American guarantee of French safety in his pocket. Apparently Clemenceau had won.
Posterity will smile. The guarantee of French safety was not honoured by America, and France had to look for her safety in a very different form at Locarno. Mean- while the League goes from strength to strength and is altering the diplomatic face of the world.
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