Clemenceau is doing what the former governments seemed to find impossible. He has adjourned politics. And when I found that out I understood why this man, the “Tiger,” as he is styled, is also called the savior of France. For France has been cursed with politics and politicians, and it is no affront to the most universally loved and admired of all nations to make that admission.
I have no intention of trying to explain the political parties of France, or the minute shades of opinion that separate them. The Chamber of Deputies has a right, or conservative, a left, or radical, and a center. But every one of the three has a right, left and center, and each one of the subdivisions seems to have. This explains why France, or at least Paris, has more newspapers than any place in the world.
Scores of newspapers are displayed on the news-stands, and there are some that are not displayed at all, but are circulated none the less. Most of these papers have only four pages and some have only two. They are supported not by subscriptions or sales, much less by advertising. The political group which each represents does the supporting.
With all these warring political parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies, it is a wonder that anything in the way of legislation is effected. But the French people managed very well, until the war. Then it was time to call a truce. But no prime minister before Clemenceau was able to bring about a truce.
Clemenceau, who had been out of office for some years, thundered away in his paper, L’Homme Libre, the Free Man, excoriating, abusing, calling down invectives on all party leaders alike. The mildest term he applied to President Poincaré was Nero. The censor suppressed one issue of the Free Man cutting out everything in it except the head-lines. Clemenceau changed the name of his paper to the Man in Chains. The censor ignored him for a time and he changed it again to the Man Less Chained.
Everybody read the paper, because it was so brilliantly written, especially the two columns of invective which Clemenceau signed every day. Nevertheless, it was a scandal. Nobody was spared. The “Tiger” respected nor wealth nor power.
Things were at a troublous pass in France during the year 1917. The war did not approach an end. There was a serious shortage of fuel. Agricultural affairs were in a tangle. Russia, which owed France vast sums of money, had collapsed. Traitors were abroad in the land. While the real France fought gloriously, immortally at Verdun, and at Ypres, the politicians in the capital wrangled the hours away.
People began to say, “We must have a strong government. There must be unity. Who is the man to give it to us?” One after another man they tried, splendid men. Ribot, the diplomat, the grand old aristocrat, who could talk familiarly with kings, the man who had made the Franco-Russian alliance. Painlevé, the intellectual, one of the greatest mathematicians in Europe. Other statesmen. One by one they had fallen. Clemenceau was usually responsible for their fall. He kept after them until they got too unpopular to last. He is said, in the course of his entire career, to have wrecked sixteen ministries and he certainly removed one president.
People began to say: “That man Clemenceau, that ‘Tiger,’ who has been such a firebrand, such a thorn in the side of all the governments, that man has usually been right in his judgments. He was right about Salonica. We should never have sent General Sarrail there. He was needed for France. Clemenceau said so at the time, and he was right.
“He was right about Bolo, too. He probably knew what he was talking about when he accused Caillaux of trying to persuade Italy to sue for a separate peace with Germany. He was right when he said there ought to be a generalissimo at the head of the allied armies. Nobody, not even his worst enemies, ever accused the ‘Tiger’ of being anything but a good patriot. Why, he is the biggest and most single-minded patriot in France. What if we had to have Clemenceau for prime minister?”