He bargained with me sullenly, and I agreed to five francs for a place on his roof. It was worth that money, to me, to see how the poor of Paris sleep in their cheap lodging houses. I went through the rooms on each floor, by way of rickety old stairs, and in each room were fifteen to twenty people, sitting or lying on iron bedsteads, men in some rooms, women in others. Some of them were sleeping and snoring, others lay half-dressed, reading scraps of newspaper by flickering gas light. Others were undressing, careless of the publicity given to their rags. It was astonishing to me that hardly any of them paid the slightest attention to the scenes in the street below, which were becoming riotous, as I could hear by gusts of noise, in which the shrieks of women mingled with hoarse groans and yells and a kind of sullen chant with the words, “Hue! Hue! Hue! A bas la police. A bas la police! Hue! Hue! Hue!”
This house was older than the French Revolution, and I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps when the tumbrils were passing on their way to the guillotine, men and women like this were lying abed, or yawning and combing their matted hair, or playing cards by candlelight, as two fellows here, not bothering to glance beyond the windows at such a common sight as another batch of aristocrats going to their death.
From the roof I looked down on the turbulent crowd, charged again and again by the Republican Guards until the street was clear. Presently the cheminots came surging out of the Salle de Manège, with Jaurès at their head, walking very slowly. The police let Jaurès get past, and then broke up the procession behind him, with needless brutality, as it seemed to me. Many men were knocked down, and fell under the horses’ hoofs. Others were beaten by blunt swords.
Not only Paris was in the throes of the general strike, but all France. It was a serious threat to the French government and to the social life of the people. Briand, who had played with revolutionary ideas as a younger man, showed now that he had the wisdom that comes from responsibility, and the courage to apply it. He called certain classes to the colors. If they disobeyed, it would be treason to the Flag, punishable by death. If they obeyed, it would break the general strike, as they would be ordered, as soldiers, to run the trains, and distribute supplies. It was a great risk to take, threatening civil war, but he took it, believing that few men would refuse obedience to military discipline. He was right, and by this means he crushed the general strike and broke the power of the trade unions.
I interviewed him at that time, and remember my first meeting with that man who afterward, when the World War had ended in the defeat of Germany, held the office of Premier again and endeavored vainly to save France from the ruin which followed victory.
I waited for him, by appointment, in a great salon furnished in the style of Louis XV, with gilded chairs and a marble-topped table at which Napoleon had once sat as Emperor. I was chatting with one of his secretaries, when the door opened, and a tall, heavily built man with large, dark, melancholy eyes, came into the room. He looked at me somberly, and I stared back, not realizing that it was the Prime Minister of France. Then the secretary whispered “Monsieur Briand,” and he held out his hand to me. We had a long talk, or, rather, he talked and I listened, impressed by the apparent frankness and simplicity and courage of the man.
He told me how great had been the danger to France from the forces of anarchy let loose by the Confédération Générale de Travail by their action of the general strike, and he defended the policy by which he had broken that threat against the authority of government. He did not disguise from me that he had risked not only his political life and reputation, but even the very peace and stability of France. But that risk had been necessary, because the alternative would have been a weak and shameful surrender to anarchy and revolution.
Jaurès was beaten, as he deserved to be, on that issue. His worst defeat was not then, but in August of 1914, when those German Socialists, in whose pacifism and brotherhood of man he had believed, supported the challenge of their war lords against France and Russia, and marched with all the rest toward the French frontier. The whole of Jaurès’s life struggle for international peace was made vain by the beating of drums for the greatest war in history. Among his own people there were many, once spellbound by his oratory and loyal to his leadership, who now abused him as the man who had weakened the defenses of France by his antimilitarist influence. There were some, even, who said “Jaurès betrayed us to the Enemy!”
On that night when many nations of Europe answered the call to arms, stupefied, conscious of enormous terrors approaching all human life, hearing already, in imagination, the thunder of a world of guns that had not yet opened fire, I paced the streets of Paris with a friend, wondering how soon he and I would be caught up in that death struggle.
“Let us turn in at the Croissant,” he said. “We must eat, though the world goes mad.”