The above is all argument and criticism put with almost savage vigour. But Clemenceau used likewise the lighter touch of French irony. Thus a wretched family of father, mother and six children, tramping along the high road near Paris, found some coal which had dropped from a wagon long since out of sight. They pick up these bits of chance fuel as a godsend. They have gleaned after the reapers. Straightway, the story of Boaz and Ruth occurs to Clemenceau, of Boaz and his descendant of Nazareth, who is the God of Europe to-day. The Hebrew Boaz, the landowner of old, gladly leaves the wheat-ears to be gleaned by Ruth and marries her into the bargain. The Christian Boaz, the coal-owner of our time, gets the males of the distressed family of coal-gleaners six days’ imprisonment. Such is progress through the centuries! The moral of the whole story is brilliantly touched in.
So again in his comment on the catastrophe at the Charity Bazaar. It was the rank and religiosity of the persons burnt alive which rendered the tragedy so much more terrible than if the crowd thus incinerated had only consisted of common people! It was the cream of French piety that was there sacrificed. Quite an ecclesiastical and political propaganda was developed from their ashes. The spirit of class made these accidental victims of gross carelessness martyrs of Christian heroism. Yet “if I go to dance at a charity ball, paying twenty francs for my ticket, and expire on the spot, I am not on that account a hero. . . . These gatherings are not exactly places of torture. People laugh, flirt, and amuse themselves, it is an opportunity to display fine dresses, and the charity sale has supplemented the Opéra Comique for marriage-provoking interviews superintended by good grandmothers. . . . Here is class distinction in action. Observe these aristocratic young gentlemen beating with their canes and kicking their frightened womenkind in their cowardly attempt to get out of danger. Then see the servants rushing in to save them! Look also at the workmen by chance on the spot risking their lives with true heroism, the plumber Piquet, who saved twenty people and, though much burnt himself, went back to his work-shop without a word.” The contrast is striking. It is not drawn by a Socialist.
Then the criticism on the German fête in commemoration of the victory of Sedan. “William II is obliged to keep his people in training, to militarise them unceasingly, body and soul. . . . In spite of the handsome protests of most of the Socialist leaders, we may be sure that it is in very truth the soul of Germany whose innermost exultation is manifested in these numberless jubilations which have be-flagged every village in the Empire. . . . It is the curse of the triumphs of brute force to leave room in the soul of the conqueror for nothing but a blind faith in settlement by violence.” Then follows a prophetic summary of what must be the inevitable consequence of this consecration of brutal dominion inspired by the hateful instincts of barbarism, which together prepare to use in Central Europe the most efficient means of murder at the disposal of scientific civilisation. The ethics of the nation are being deliberately corrupted for the realisation of the Imperial policy!
Thus Clemenceau, like others of us who knew the old Germany well, and had watched its sad hypnotisation by the spirit of ruthless militarism, foresaw what was coming more than twenty-five years ago. And thus anticipating and reflecting, he chanced to see on one of the monuments of Paris illumined by the sun, “The German Empire falls.” It was dated 1805! “Short years pass. What remains of these follies? If law and right outraged, reason flouted, wisdom contemned must blight our hopes, as your warlike demonstrations too clearly prognosticate, then for you, men of Germany, the inscription of the Carrousel is patient and bides its time.
“And yet two great rival peoples worthy to understand one another could nobly make ready a nobler destiny.”
There you have the statesman and idealist as well as the clear-sighted journalist. Clemenceau saw the storm-cloud ever menacing and ready to break upon France. He warned his countrymen of their danger, bade them prepare to meet it, but hoped continuously that his forecasts might prove wholly erroneous. Jaurès unfortunately, with all his vast ability, was too idealist and far too credulous. Hence his great influence was thrown against the due preparation of his own country; he did his utmost to support the anti-navy men even in Great Britain, and only began to recognise how completely mistaken he had been just before he was assassinated by the modern Ravaillac of religionist reaction. To anticipate fraternity in a world of conflict is to help the aggressor and to court disaster. This Clemenceau the Radical knew: to this the French Socialists shut their minds.
It was natural that the Vendéen by birth, the Parisian by adoption, should feel himself drawn rather to the ideals of the French capital, which in matters of intelligence and art is also the capital of Europe, rather than to the narrow spirit of the Breton countryside which he has so vigorously sketched. In his writings as in his political activities this preference, this admiration find forcible expression. From the days of Julian the great Pagan Emperor down to the French Revolution and thence onwards, Clemenceau briefly traces the development of the City by the Seine, the French Renaissance and the University of Paris, by the influence of the writings of Montaigne—“this city in right of which I am a Frenchman”—and Rabelais: this meeting-place of Europe, this Central Commune of the planet proposed by Clootz, the Prussian idealist, becomes in the words of the same foreign enthusiast “a magnificent Assembly of the peoples of the West.” We may forgive the French statesman his unbounded enthusiasm for the Paris where he has spent the whole of his active life. “One phrase alone, ‘The Rights of Man,’ has uplifted all heads. Lafayette brings back from America the victory that France sent thither and straightway the great battle is joined between Paris of the French Revolution and the coalition of things of the past.” “True, we have measured
| A la hauteur des bonds la profondeur des chutes, |
“but at least we have striven, and we abate not a jot of our generous ambitions. Thus decrees the tradition of Paris . . . that Paris which now as ever holds in her hands the key to supreme victory.”