Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

by H. M. Hyndman

“‘I wasn’t a shareholder then; it was my father.’

“‘My father, like myself, was a miner. He died of consumption, his lungs choked with coal-dust. Now it is my turn to cough and spit black. And my wife, looking at her babes, asks herself whether I shall live long enough for them to be old enough, before my death, to go down into the mine which will kill them in turn. If I crack up too soon, misery, ruin, beggary, wholesale wretchedness for wife and children.’

“They don’t come to terms. The strike begins.

“Economists argue, to begin with, that the State has no right to interfere in the relations between miners and mine-owners. The mine-owner is at home on his own property. Certain securities for life and limb may be demanded, nothing more. But no sooner does a strike begin than the State, which five minutes ago had no right to interfere, is called upon to bring in horse, foot and artillery on the side of the coal-owners. Then the miners have no rights left, and the judges decide against them on shameless pretexts and condemn them to prison, when they cannot bear false witness in support of the police and military.”

Such were Clemenceau’s views on the right to strike and the grievances of the men, before he accepted the post of Minister of the Interior and began to deal with the troublous state of things at Courrières-Lens, where the terrible accident had occurred and a strike had been entered upon, while the entire district was in a state of mind bordering upon anarchist revolt.

The first step he took was as bold and as remarkable an act as any in the whole of his adventurous life. He went down at once to Lens himself. Arrived there, he walked straight off, without any escort whatever, to meet and confer with the committee of the miners themselves. Courageous and honourable as this was, it failed at first to impress the strike committee. This was natural enough. They were lamenting the wholesale butchery of their comrades and were incensed against the employers who, with hundreds upon hundreds of dead pitmen below, would not deal fairly with the survivors. Clemenceau therefore met with a very cool reception. But he was nothing daunted, and began to address them. Gradually, he convinced the committee that he meant fairly by the men, and that he had not come down, alone and unarmed as he was, with any intention of suppressing the strike, but, so far as he could, to see that they had the fairest of fair play, according to their rights under the law.

Thereupon, the committee agreed that Clemenceau should go with them to speak to a mass meeting of the miners. It was a doubtful venture, but Clemenceau went. In the course of his speech he reassured the men upon the attitude of the Government as represented by himself. He told them plainly: “You are entitled to strike. You will be protected by the law in doing all which the law permits. Your rights are equal to the rights of President or Ministers. But the rights of others must not be attacked. The mines must not be destroyed. For the first time, you will see no soldiers in the street during the strike. True, soldiers have been placed in the mines, but solely to protect them, not in any way to injure you. On the other hand, you must not resort to violence yourselves. The strike can be carried on peacefully and without interference. Respect the mines upon which you depend for your livelihood.”

This was quite plain, and Clemenceau adhered to his own programme as he had formulated it. But the difficulty was apparent from the first, and it is a difficulty which must always recur when a great strike is organised. If the State claims the right to intervene, in order to protect the laws and liberties of those who wish to work for the employers, in spite of the strike and the decisions of the strikers, antagonism to such action is practically certain beforehand. For, in this case, as the strikers say, the State is using the forces of the military and the police in order to protect “blacklegs” who, by offering their labour to the employers at such a time of acute class war, act in the interests of the coal-owners and against the mass of the workers. Socialists argue that the strikers are sound in their contention, and that by assuring to non-strikers the right to work the Government practically nullifies the right to strike. When, therefore, in this typical Courrières case, the strikers as a whole remained out, notwithstanding certain insufficient offers by the coal-owners, and a minority of non-strikers claimed the help of the law, with support of the State army, to weaken by their surrender the position of the majority of their fellow-workers in the same industry, then the ethics of the dispute between sections of the miners could not be so easily determined as M. Clemenceau from his individualist training assumed.

If the employers were in the wrong, as it appears they were, then to call out the military to protect those miners who showed themselves ready to make immediate terms with injustice was, however good the intention, to take sides against the main body of the men. So it seemed to these latter. When, therefore, the soldiers defended the non-strikers, the strikers assailed the military, who had not attacked them. Clemenceau accordingly decided that the strikers had broken the law, as undoubtedly they had, by stoning and injuring the servants of the State, who were upholding the law as it stood. The truth is that, so long as these antagonistic sections exist among the working class, and persist in fighting one another, it is practically impossible for the State not to intervene in order to keep the peace. There may be no sympathy with blacklegs, but the Minister of the Interior could scarcely be blamed for protecting them against an infuriated mob, which would probably have killed them, or for insisting upon the release of those whom the strikers had seized. That the temper of the crowd had become highly dangerous was apparent a little later, when the Socialist Mayor was knocked down as he was trying to calm them.

All this rendered M. Clemenceau’s second and third visits to the scene of class warfare far more stormy than the first. Owing to the horror and hatred created by the avoidable holocaust in the Courrières mines, and the further discovery that engineers appointed by the State had played into the hands of the employers, the situation got worse from day to day. The strike itself was not only an effort to get more wages, but a declaration of hostility to the mine-owners, and those of the miners’ own class who showed any tenderness towards them, or were ready to take work under them. Their own leaders and representatives had no longer any influence with the men or control over them. M. Basly, the deputy who acted throughout for the miners, had as little power over the strikers as anybody else. The whole movement was taking an anarchist turn. Also, agents were at work among them both from the reactionary and the revolutionary side whose main object, for very different reasons, was to foster disturbance and influence passion. Foreign emissaries likewise were said to be at work.