Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

by H. M. Hyndman

“In these disturbances my orders, issued through the highest police authorities, were precise. Maintain, I said, Liberty to strike, liberty to work. Soldiers to be called in only in case of actual violence. But the miners themselves infringed the liberties of others. They indulged in the anarchical wrecking of houses belonging to men of their own class. I have here photographs of the destruction wrought. Were Monsieur Jaurès Minister of the Interior—misfortune comes so suddenly—he himself would send down troops to stop wholesale pillage. Yet, if he did, he would in turn be denounced, by the anarchist heads of the General Confederation of Labour, as the enemy of the class whose cause he now champions. I challenge M. Jaurès to say what he would do under such circumstances as I have had to face”—the orator pauses and waits. There is dead silence. No answer. “By not replying, you have replied. There have, I repeat, been no dead or wounded among the working class. On May 1st, when general disorders were openly threatened, I took precautions against organised outbreak. No trouble arose.”

The Republic, he continued, was a rule of freedom for the individual, so far as it could be secured under existing conditions. Those conditions and the law itself might work injustice, but it was then the duty of the State, and the Minister who had to translate its functions into action, to mitigate such harshness by protecting the weaker side. Soldiers had been sent down to Courrières not to attack the strikers—no attack had been made upon them—but to prevent the strikers themselves from destroying the mines and inflicting illegal punishments upon those of their class who did not agree with them. When this was done, the strikers molested the soldiers, who never fired a shot. The lieutenant in command was assailed, though his sabre remained all the time in its sheath. The right of men to work on terms they themselves are willing to accept could not be contested as the law now stood. “But, says M. Jaurès, by assuring non-strikers the right to work, I myself am violating the right to strike, which I have declared to be the inalienable privilege of the wage-earners. But then, I ask, what are the non-strikers to do? They also have wives and children who demand to be fed. What law justifies me in preventing them from working? Republicanism means the right of the individual to combine with others to resist oppression and obtain advantages. This freedom is admitted. It does not include the freedom to oppress others, still less to assault servants of the State, who are acting in order to safeguard the law as it stands. When the Socialists of M. Jaurès’s school begin to deal with facts, and not with ideals at present all in the air, what sort of programme do they formulate?

“Here we have it. An eight-hours working day for all trades. The right of State Employees to form Trade Unions and to strike. Proportional Representation. A progressive Income Tax, and so on. A nice little programme, but a bourgeois programme all the same. No idealism, no Socialism there! M. Jaurès, however, claims the immediate Nationalisation and Socialisation of all departments of industry, including the land. But such unification of society is in reality the Catholicisation of Society. There is a definite programme of Radical Reforms, nevertheless, constituting an advance towards a Socialist policy. They are formulated by the bourgeoisie, but Socialists threaten to vote against the Budget, which is necessary in order to carry out some of their own proposals. Take Old Age Pensions. These need money. The Socialists refuse the required funds. Yet Socialists are for the Republic. So far we cordially agree. So far I, of necessity, work with them. But if they at the same time denounce Republicans as the enemies of the workers and secure a majority of votes in that sense, then that is to vote for the defeat of the Republic. If Socialists would work with the Radicals, in order to attain the ends they have in common, none would be more glad than I. But if such common action is impossible, then let each work on in their own way.”

It was said at the time that at the close of the debate, when Clemenceau was leaving the Assembly, he remarked to Jaurès, “After all, Jaurès, you are not the good God.” To which Jaurès replied: “And you are not even the Devil.”

I have dealt with this famous controversy at some length, without attempting to give the speeches in full, because, although the discussion led to no decision at the moment, it certainly brought before the public of France and even the public opinion of Europe the direct theoretical and practical difference between Socialism and well-meaning Radicalism, in an intelligible manner, as nothing else would. The effect upon French politics within the next few months, in spite of further desperate outbreaks in 1907, was also remarkable. Jaurès’s speech did much to consolidate the Socialist Party as a unified section of the Chamber; and Clemenceau himself was so far influenced by it and by the trend of events that, as will be seen, it affected his policy as Prime Minister in the formation of his own Cabinet shortly afterwards. Looking at the matter from the Socialist point of view, therefore, Jaurès was building better than his opponents in the Chamber knew, and Socialists had no reason to regret the apparent victory of his formidable antagonist at the time. In fact, as Bernard Shaw said in regard to a very different debate under widely different circumstances in London more than thirty years before: “The Socialist was playing at longer bowls than you know.”

It is this power of detachment, this recognition that theory and sentiment play a great part in the moulding of public character and public opinion, even in the practical affairs of everyday life, that renders France—independent, idealist, revolutionist, conservative and thrifty France—so essential a factor in the discussion of the world-problems of to-day. France alone among the nations rises above the smoke of class warfare; and though her own social and economic conditions are not themselves ready for the definite solution of social problems, she indicates the route which may be most safely followed by countries more economically advanced. Both Jaurès and Clemenceau, therefore, rendered good service to mankind when they used their utmost efforts to place before the peoples and the students of all nations the views of the Socialist, with his outlook on the future, and the Radical, with his policy of the present based on the traditions of the past. Jaurès, in the prime of his manhood and the fullness of his fame, was torn from the useful and noble work which lay well within his power and his intelligence by the murderous revolver of a reactionary assassin: a loss indeed to his party, his country, and the world at large! His antagonist, Clemenceau, still works on as nearly an octogenarian, with all the vigour and energy of his fiery youth, on behalf of that France, who, to-day, as for many a long year past, has been the mistress and the goddess of the materialist democrat and Radical champion of the people.

On October 23rd, after six months of service as Minister of the Interior, Clemenceau was called back from Carlsbad, whither he went every year before the war to conjure attacks of gout (which might at least, in all reason, have spared a lifelong teetotaller), in order to form a Cabinet of his own in place of M. Sarrien. That Cabinet was remarkable from many points of view. Comments upon its constitution and significance may be reserved for a wider survey. Suffice it to say here that Clemenceau himself, in addition to holding the Presidency of the Council as Prime Minister, remained Minister of the Interior, thus declaring his intention not to shirk any of the responsibility he had taken upon himself or the animosity he had incurred in his dealings with strikes and other social questions.

France was passing through a very difficult period. Whatever view a thoroughgoing Socialist may take as to the need for a wider general policy than that adopted by Clemenceau, it is not easy to see how, the French people being unprepared to accept a purely Labour or Socialist Government, the Republic could have been peacefully maintained, but for the cool determination of the Radical Republican at the head of affairs. Scarcely a day passed without some fresh economic and social conflicts that called for prompt action. These, however, arose in provinces and cities and under conditions where the antagonism between wage-earners and employers, between capital and labour, in the ordinary way offered no exceptional features for the statesman. But in the spring and summer of 1907 a more complicated and dangerous uprising, which developed into little short of an attempt at an Anarchist-communist, anti-Republican revolution, broke out in the South of France among the wine-growers.

The peasants of the districts round Narbonne and Montpellier, together with many of the inhabitants of those towns, who were themselves dependent upon the wine industry, made, in fact, a desperate local attack upon the existing Government of France. Disaffection had been growing for a long time and was due to a series of economic and agricultural troubles among the wine-growers, which successive Ministries had not understood, far less attempted to cope with. It had its direct origin in a natural cause. This cause was the appearance in the Bordeaux country of the deadly enemy of all vignerons, large and small—the much-dreaded phylloxera. The vineyards of the Gironde were devastated and the famous clarets shipped from Bordeaux ceased to be the product of Bordeaux grapes. Thereupon the inferior vintages of the Midi came into abnormal demand. But the wine-producers of the West were not wholly defeated, even while the phylloxera continued his ravages and no method of checking the mischief had been discovered. There are ways and means of meeting even such a calamity.

“Would your lordship like madeira served with that course?” said a butler to a well-known bishop who was giving a dinner, in days long before the war, to a number of his clergy. “Madeira!” was the reply, in great surprise. “Why, I have not a single bottle in my cellar.” “Oh, yes, my lord, you have. Monseigneur oublie peut-être que je suis de Cette.” Madeira, so the story goes, was duly served. But Cette is not the only town in France where the art of blending and refining wine for foreign and even home palates has been brought to a high pitch. At any rate, during the phylloxera period, Australian, Algerian, Spanish and other wines, which previously had been regarded contemptuously by foreign and French consumers of claret, were, it was alleged, imported at Bordeaux in great quantity and came out again with the old familiar Bordeaux labels and duly impressed corks.