Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

by H. M. Hyndman

[CHAPTER I]

EARLY LIFE

We are all accustomed to think of La Vendée as that Province of France which is most deeply imbued with tradition, legend and religion. Even in this period of almost universal scepticism and free thought, the peasants of La Vendée keep tight hold of their ancient ideas, in which the pagan superstitions of long ago are curiously interwoven with the fading Catholicism of to-day. Nowhere in France are the ceremonies of the Church more devoutly observed; nowhere, in spite of the spread of modern education, are the people as a whole more attached to the creed of their forefathers. Here whole crowds of genuine believers can still display that fervour of religious enthusiasm which moved masses of their countrymen to such heroic self-sacrifice for a losing and hopeless cause more than four generations since. Even men who have little sympathy with either theological or social conventions of the past are stirred by the simple piety of these people, uplifted for the moment out of the sordid and monotonous surroundings of their daily toil by the collective inspiration of a common faith.

Here, too, in the Bocage of La Vendée amid the heather and the forest, interspersed with acres of carefully tilled soil, the fays and talismans and spirits of days gone by delightedly do dwell. But below all this vesture of fancy and fable we find the least pleasing features of the life of the small proprietors and labourers on the land and fishermen by the sea. Their feelings of human sympathy are stunted, and even their family relations are, in too many instances, rendered brutal by their ever-present greed for gain. The land is a harsh taskmaster, when its cultivation is carried on under such conditions as prevail in that portion of France which abuts on the Bay of Biscay. The result is a harsh people, whose narrow individualism and whole-hearted worship of property in its least attractive guise seem quite at variance with any form of sentiment, and still more remote from the ideals of poesy or the dreams of supernatural agencies which affect the imagination. But there is the contrast and such are the people of the Bocage of La Vendée.

Here, on September 28th, 1841, at the village of Mouilleron-en-Pareds, near Fontenay le Comte, on the Bay of Biscay, Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was born. His family came of an old stock of La Vendée who had owned land in the province for generations. His father was a doctor as well as a landowner; but his practice, I judge, from what his son told me, was confined to gratuitous services rendered to the peasants of the neighbourhood. M. le Dr. Clemenceau, however, was scarcely the sort of man whom one would expect to find in a remote village of such a conservative, not to say reactionary, district as La Vendée. A thorough-going materialist and convinced Republican, he was the leader of the local party of extreme Radicals.

But he seems to have been a great deal more than that. Science, which took with him the place of supernatural religion, neither hardened his heart nor cramped his appreciation of art and poetry. Philosopher and philanthropist, an amateur of painting and sculpture, inflexibly devoted to his political principles, yet ever ready to recognise ability and originality wherever they appeared, this very exceptional medical man and country squire had necessarily a great influence upon his eldest son, who inherited from his father many of the qualities and opinions which led him to high distinction throughout his career. Hatred of injustice, love of freedom and independence of every kind, brought the elder Clemenceau into conflict with the men of the Second Empire, who clapped him in prison after the coup d’état of December 1851. Liberty in every shape was, in fact, an essential part of this stalwart old Jacobin’s political creed, while in the domain of physiology and general science he was a convinced evolutionist long before that conception of the inevitable development of the universe became part of the common thought of the time.

With all this the young Clemenceau was brought into close contact from his earliest years. A thoroughly sound physique, strengthened by the invigorating air of the Biscayan coast, laid the foundations of that indefatigable energy and alertness of disposition which have enabled him to pass triumphantly through periods of overwork and disappointment that would have broken down the health of any man with a less sound constitution. Georges Clemenceau owed much to the begettings and surroundings, to the vigorous country life and the rarefied mental atmosphere in which his earlier years were passed. Seldom is it possible to trace the natural process of cause and effect from father to son as it is in this case. From the wilds of La Vendée and the rough sea-coast of Brittany circumstances of the home and of the family life provided France with the ablest Radical leader she has ever possessed.

At first, it appeared little likely that this would be so. Clemenceau, entering upon his father’s profession, with the benefit of the paternal knowledge and full of the inculcated readiness to probe all the facts of life to the bottom, took up his medical studies as a serious business, after having gone through the ordinary curriculum of a school at Nantes. It was in the hospital of that city that he first entered as a qualified student. After a short stay there he went off to Paris, in 1860, at the age of nineteen, to “walk the hospitals,” as we phrase it, in the same capacity. It was a plunge into active life taken at a period in the history of France which was much more critical than it seemed.

The year which saw Clemenceau’s arrival in Paris saw also the Second Empire at the height of its fame and influence. As we look back to the great stir of 1848, which, so far as Paris and France were concerned, was brought about by the almost inconceivable fatuity of Louis Philippe, we marvel at the strange turn of events which got rid of Orleanist King Log in order to replace him by a Napoleonist King Stork. But we may wonder still more at the lack of foresight, capacity and tact of Louis Philippe himself, who had been in his youth the democrat Citoyen Egalité, and an excellent general, with all the hard experience of his family misfortune and personal sufferings in exile as a full-grown man, possessed, too, of a thorough knowledge of the world and an adequate acquaintance with modern thought in several departments of science and literature. Yet, enjoying all these qualifications for a successful ruler, Louis Philippe failed to understand that a democratic monarchy, and a democratic monarchy alone, could preserve France from a republic or a military dictatorship. This was astounding. He refused to agree to the democratic vote claimed by the people, and then ran away. So the House of Orleans joined the House of Bourbon in the array of discrowned Heads of the Blood Royal. The short-lived Republic of 1848 existed just long enough to scare the bourgeoisie by the installation of the National Workshops, which might well have succeeded but for their unintelligent opposition, and the peasantry by the fear of general Communism, into a demand for a ruler who would preserve them from those whom they considered the maniacs or plunderers of Paris.

It is one of the ironies of history that the French Revolution which promulgated ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that shook the whole civilised world should have been unable to furnish France herself with a democratic republic for well-nigh a hundred years after the overthrow of Louis XVI. For scarcely had the Republic of 1848, with Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, Albert, and others as its leaders, been founded than the Buonapartist intrigues were successful. Louis Napoleon, who just before had been the laughing-stock of Europe, with his tame eagle at Boulogne that would persist in perching on a post instead of on his head, with his queer theories of Imperialist democracy and his close association with the Italian Carbonari, was elected President of the French Republic.