This happened soon after Clemenceau had accepted office. A month later, M. Caillaux being in the meantime protected against arrest by his position as deputy, Clemenceau repeated that if all the probabilities accumulated against Caillaux had been formulated against any private person his fate would have been practically decided already. “The Government has undertaken responsibilities. The Chamber must likewise shoulder responsibilities. If the Chamber refuses to sanction the prosecution of M. Caillaux, the Government will not remain in office.”
M. Caillaux’s admitted conferences with well-known defeatists in Italy were of such a nature that Baron Sonnino, the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, had himself informed the French Government that he was inclined to expel Caillaux forthwith. No doubt he would have done so, but for the fact that M. Caillaux had been, and might possibly still be again, an important personage in French and European affairs. Throughout, Clemenceau promised that the public should have the full truth. He kept his word. The delays in bringing M. Caillaux to a definite judgment have not been due to him. M. Caillaux’s immunity as deputy was suspended. He was arrested and imprisoned on January 15th, 1918. Four days later came the partial disclosure of the documents found in his private safe in Florence.
That such papers should ever have been left by a man of M. Caillaux’s intelligence where they might quite conceivably be attached, and that he should have carefully put in writing the names of men whom he hoped to use for the purpose of furthering a coup d’état, do unquestionably support the theory that he is subject to intermittent fits of madness. His extraordinary proceedings at Buenos Aires, where, according to the United States representative in the Argentine capital, he entered into a series of most compromising negotiations with the German von Luxburg, were no good evidence of the permanent sanity of this successful and experienced man of affairs. But “madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” His object was avowed in that remote city: to make peace with Germany at any price, for the purpose of reviving international finance. All these statements coming in succession, and accompanied by the formulation of the cases against M. Malvy, Bolo Pasha, with Duval and others of the Bonnet Rouge clique, at length roused furious public indignation, which the actions of M. Humbert, the senator and owner of the Journal, the paper that Bolo had in effect bought, further inflamed. Who could be regarded as entirely free from treacherous designs, when such a crushing indictment as that officially formulated against Caillaux could be accepted as correct?—when a Minister of the Interior could be publicly charged with criminal weakness towards persons more than suspected of high treason of the most sordid type?—and when a man of Bolo Pasha’s career and associations evidently exercised great influence, not to say authority?
The revelations at the trials of the accused persons, and the ugly evidence submitted not only made matters look worse for M. Caillaux, but roused general amazement that such deadly intrigues should have been allowed to go so far under the very eyes of the authorities. The career of Bolo Pasha, the direct agent-in-chief of the main conspiracy, was well known. The men with whom he was on terms of close intimacy were suspected persons, long before any action was taken. The secret service department was well aware that he had huge sums of money at his disposal that were very, very far in excess of any that he could command from his private resources. The origin of his title of dishonour from the Khedive could not have escaped notice. Yet he, a born Frenchman, all whose begettings and belongings were a matter of record, pursued his shameless policy in the interest of Germany with apparent certainty of immunity from interference.
It was this very same certainty of immunity that made all but a few afraid to speak out. Bolo, in fact, was a privileged person, until there was a statesman at the head of affairs who not only did not fear to take the heavy responsibility of the arrest and imprisonment of M. Caillaux, but was also determined that the proceedings in the other cases already commenced should be pushed to their inevitable conclusion. “The unseen hand” in France, therefore, was no longer unseen. Yet so wide was the reach of the octopus tentacles, directed by underground agency, that even to this day not a few innocent, as well as guilty, people are in mortal fear lest disclosures may be made which will in some or other way implicate them. For the trial of M. Caillaux has yet to come.
The two really dramatic episodes in all this gradual exposure of infamy were the arrest and imprisonment of M. Caillaux, upon the suspension of his privileges as deputy, and the public trial of Bolo Pasha. After what had happened since August, 1914, it seemed almost impossible that any Minister, however powerful he might be, would venture to go to the full extent of what was indispensably necessary with M. Caillaux. A man who had been Prime Minister of France, who in that capacity had gathered round him groups of politicians whose members looked to him to ensure their personal success in the future, was formidably entrenched both in the Senate and in the Assembly. To incur the personal enmity of such a capable statesman and such a master of intrigue as Joseph Caillaux was more than any of the previous Ministries had dared to risk. There were too many political reasons against it. Even the most honest of the Socialist Ministers themselves seem to have felt that. All the time, likewise, an influential portion of the Press vigorously supported the ex-Premier. They carried the war into the enemy’s camp by denouncing his critics either as unscrupulous and lying reactionaries, who were endeavouring to ruin a really progressive statesman, as men imbued with such lust for slaughter and eagerness for revenge that they had lost all grip of the actual situation, or as malignant intriguers behind the scenes whose one object was to blacken the character of an opponent who stood in the way of their schemes for personal aggrandisement.
Furthermore, M. Caillaux, holding the eminent position already referred to in the world of finance, had the whole-souled and entire-pocket backing of the French and German-Jew international money-lords. These magnates of plutocracy, marvellous to relate, found themselves on this issue hand in glove with the most active international French Socialists. Nobody who was in the least afraid of political cliques, of journalistic coteries, of financial syndicates, or of Socialist rancour, could put Caillaux under lock and key. And the military outlook lent itself to the encouragement of the leading advocate of surrender and his acolytes. The word was assiduously passed round that, now Russia was out of the fray, a drawn battle was the very best that the Entente could hope for.
France was bled white, Great Britain was war-weary and her workers were discontented, Italy—think of Caporetto—while, as to the United States, America was a long way off, President Wilson was still “too proud to fight” in earnest, American troops could never be transported in sufficient numbers across the Atlantic, and, to say nothing of dangers from submarines, there was not enough shipping afloat to do it. All pointed, therefore, to prompt “peace by negotiation,” and what better man could there be to negotiate such a peace than M. Joseph Caillaux? It was because he was the one political personage in France who could secure fair terms for his distressful country, at this terrible crisis, that he was so persistently attacked by the Chauvinists as a pro-German and accused of the most sordid treachery by men who envied him his power at the international Council Table!
Such was the situation. So long as M. Caillaux was at large, and able to direct the whole of the forces of defeatism, no genuinely patriotic Ministry could be successfully formed, or, if formed by some fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, could last for three months. Treachery breeds treachery as loyalty engenders loyalty. When Clemenceau took office, therefore, everything depended upon what he did with Caillaux. Paris and all France held their breath as they awaited the event. Patriots were doubtful: defeatists were hopeful: soldiers were on the look-out for a man.
On January 15th, then, M. Caillaux was arrested and put in prison by Clemenceau and his Ministry. All the predictions of upheaval and disaster, indulged in by M. Caillaux’s friends, were falsified. The country breathed more freely. Thenceforward, France knew whom to back. But, supposing that M. Caillaux had still been within the precincts of Parliament and carrying on his political plots when the terrible news came of the disasters of Cambrai and St. Quentin, and when the German armies were within cannon-shot of Paris—how then? Those who knew best how things stood believe themselves that counsels of despair and pusillanimity might have prevailed, to the ruin of the country.