Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

by H. M. Hyndman

“Punish Fate, then,” is the reply.

“Let him go free,” says Minos to Mercury, “and see to it that he teaches the other dead to question us in like manner.”

“Substitute Fate for Jehovah or by the laws of the Universe, and tell me,” puts in Clemenceau, “when the pot owes his bill to the potter.” All this and the farewell benediction which the author vouchsafes to the human plaything of all these pre-ordered decisions of society do not get us much further, even though after so many mischances he may live on only to appreciate more thoroughly “the sublime indifference of things eternal.” That is not very consolatory by way of a materialist viaticum. But it is the best Clemenceau can give.

None the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy, illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great effect. The commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges, priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. Here and there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate, so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which they had been hitherto satisfied. With no phase of French life is Clemenceau better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the French peasantry. Thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. The small proprietor is on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. The cherry-eater “had despoiled him of two-ha’porth of fruit!” It justified prompt execution of the thief by the owner. That such small robbery did not at once give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point of view that the peasant can never take. Why? Because of the penal servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to death. It is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal saying, “This is mine.”

“The peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love. Bowed, he knows only the earth. His activity has but one end and object: the soil. To acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh and rapacious. He speaks of my land, my field, my stones, my thistles. To till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of his entire physical or intellectual effort. Amusement for him: not a bit of it. He has no other resource than to console himself for the disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morrow. He is at war with the seasons, the elements, the sun, rain, hail, wind, frost. He fights against the neighbouring intruder, the invading cattle, the birds, the caterpillars, the parasites, the thousand-and-one unknown phenomena which, without any apparent reason, bring down upon him all sorts of unlooked-for ills.

“Then has he risen at dawn for nothing, badly fed, badly clothed, sweating in the sun, shivering in the wind and the rain, exhausting his energies against things which resist his utmost efforts? Do sowing, manuring, labour and the pouring out of life all, too, go for nothing, without rest, without leisure, without any thought but this: I toiled and suffered yesterday, I shall toil and suffer to-morrow? And all this is balanced by no pleasures but drunkenness and lust. No theatres, no books, no shows, no enjoyments of any kind. Hard to others, hard to himself, everything is hard around him.”

Such is the peasant of Western France. Though the peasant of the South is of a livelier and happier disposition on the surface, both are at bottom the same. And France is still in the main rural France as Clemenceau himself impressed upon me many years ago. That is the influence which holds in check the advanced proletariat of the towns and mining districts. They can see nothing outside private property, property, property: yet it is this very unregulated individual ownership which forces them to fight out their existence against the hardships of nature with inefficient tools, insufficient manure and no adequate arrangements for marketing the produce they have for sale. High prices and a few advantages gained have somewhat ameliorated the lot of the peasant, but it is still a hard, depressing existence which cannot be made really human and happy for the great majority under the conditions of to-day. The only boon the peasant has is that he is not under the direct sway of the capitalist exploiter. What that means in the mines Clemenceau had an opportunity of seeing very close, as a member of the Commission appointed to examine into the coal-mines of Anzin in 1884. He tells of his experience ten years later in one of the pits he descended. “Never go down a coal-mine,” wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son. “You can always say you have been below, and nobody can contradict you.” Clemenceau did not follow this cynical advice. He went down, “and after having waded through water, bent double, for hundreds upon hundreds of yards through dripping scales which hang from the upper stratum, I crawled on hands and knees to a nice little vein twenty inches thick. On this seam human beings were at work, lying on their side, bringing down coal which fell on their faces and replacing it continuously by timber in order not to be crushed by the upper surface. You must not neglect this part of the work!” He was not allowed to talk with the men themselves, and when they came to interview him secretly they implored him not to let the manager or the employers know, or they would be discharged at once! The old story of miners in every country which even the strongest Trade Unions are as yet scarcely able to cope with, though the tyranny in French mines has been checked since the time Clemenceau wrote. These and similar cases of oppression on the part of the capitalist class caused Clemenceau to support Socialists more and more in their demands for limitation of the then unrestricted powers of individual employers and “anonymous” companies. So, too, individualist as he was, he wrote article after article in defence of the right of the men to strike against grievous oppression, holding that the combination of the workers was more than sufficiently handicapped by the fact that they were bound to imperil their own subsistence as well as the maintenance of their wives and children by going on strike at all. This argument he applied to all strikes in organised industries.

But Clemenceau naturally found himself drawn into bitter antagonism to the doctrine of laissez-faire and the law of supply and demand. “You say all must bow down to them. I contend all must revolt against them.” “The individual struggle for existence is only a great laissez-faire! Far from being liberty, it is the triumph of violence, it is barbarism itself. The man who mastered the first slave founded a new system . . . so completely that after some ages of this rule a physiocrat overlooking it all would have sagely pronounced: Slavery is the law of human societies. This with the same amount of truth as he says to-day: The law of supply and demand is an immutable ordinance. And, for all that, the supreme irony of fate has decreed that the first slave-driver was at the same time the first sower of the seed of liberty, of justice. For by enslaving men he created a social relation, a relation different from that enjoined by the primitive form of the struggle for existence: kill, eat, destroy. Henceforth man was bound to man. The social body was formed.” Man had to discover the law governing the new relation, and he found it at last in the first flashes of justice and liberty. “What, then, is this your laissez-faire, your law of supply and demand, but the pure and simple expression of force? Right overcomes force: that is the principle of civilisation. Your law once formulated, let us set to work against barbarism!”

All that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and the anarchist chaos which they connote. But here again Clemenceau, with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding historic and economic theory—the sociologic theory which scientific Socialism supplies. It was not justice or liberty which created slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social necessity. The cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to material revolution.

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! were the last words of Henry. The man was a fanatic. “The crime seems to me odious. I make no excuse for it,” says Clemenceau, but he objects to the capital penalty. “Henry’s crime was that of a savage. The deed of society seems to me a loathsome vengeance.” Clemenceau compares, too, the anarchists of dynamite to the would-be assassin Damien, so hideously tortured before death. “My motive,” said he, “was the misery which exists in three-quarters of the kingdom. I acted alone, because I thought alone.” The anarchist, asked by his mother why he had, become an anarchist, answered, “Because I saw the suffering of the great majority of human beings.” Vaillant, Henry, Caserio and their like are overmastered by the same idea as Damien. They kill members of the king caste of our society of to-day in order to scare the bourgeoisie into justice. There is no arguing with honest fanatics of this type. Whether society is justified in guillotining or hanging them is another matter. That their method is futile, as all history shows, gives society the right if it so chooses to regard it also as criminal.