CLEMENCEAU THE RADICAL
All this Clemenceau, though not himself a Socialist, saw by intuition.
His powers of organisation and capacity for inspiring confidence among
the people might have been of the greatest service to Paris at that
critical juncture in her history--might even have averted the crash
which laid so large a portion of the buildings of the great city in
ruins and led to the infamous scenes already referred to. This was not
to be, and Clemenceau was fortunate to escape the fate of many who were
as little guilty of terrorism or arson as himself.
The trial of the men responsible for the death of Generals Lecomte
and Thomas was held on November 29th, 1871. Clemenceau himself was
accused of not having done enough to save their lives. He was in no
wise responsible for what had occurred, was strongly opposed to their
execution, and, as has been seen, did all that he could do to prevent
the two assailants of his own friends and fellow-citizens from being
killed. That, however, was no security that he would have escaped
condemnation if the evidence in his favour had not been so conclusive
that even the prejudiced court could not decide against him. He was
completely cleared from the charge by the evidence of Colonel Langlois,
and given full credit for his efforts on behalf of the militarists who
certainly could be reckoned among his most bitter enemies. Scarcely,
however, was his life relieved from jeopardy under the law than he was
compelled to risk it, or so he thought, on the duelling ground. Here
Clemenceau was quite at home. He used his remarkable skill in handling
the pistol with moderation and judgment, being content to wound his
adversary, Commandant Poussages, in the leg. None the less, the result
of his encounter was that he was fined and committed to prison for a
fortnight as a lesson to him not to act in accordance with the French
code of honour in future.
But the truth is, M. Thiers did not wish to make a peaceful settlement
with the people of the capital of France. Conciliation itself was
branded as a crime as much by the political leaders and military chiefs
on his side as it was by the Communist extremists on the other. The
Versaillais aimed at the conquest of Paris by force of arms: they did
not desire to enter peacefully by force of agreement. And having won,
Paris was treated by the Republican Government as a conquered city. All
sorts of exceptional laws, such as Napoleon III himself never enacted,
were registered against the liberties of her inhabitants, and she was
deprived of her fair share of representation in the National Assembly.
The capital of France was a criminal city.
Clemenceau on March 21st, 1871, had brought into the National Assembly
at Versailles a measure which established the Municipal Council of
Paris with 80 members. This was a valuable service to the capital and
one of which the man himself was destined to take advantage. For,
having failed to bring about a reasonable compromise between the
Versailles chiefs and the leaders of the Commune, and having also lost
his seat for Montmartre in the Assembly as well as the Mayoralty of
that district, he gave up general politics and after the fall of the
Commune accepted his election as Municipal Councillor for Clignancourt.
He devoted the next five years of his life to his doctor's work, giving
gratuitous advice as before to her poor around him, and to constant
attendance as a Municipal Councillor, where he was the leader of the
radical section. He thus gained a knowledge of Parisian life and the
needs of Parisians which no other experience could have given him.
As one of the municipal representatives he never ceased to protest
against the shameful legislation which deprived Paris of its rights.
But he did more. The man who is regarded by many, even to-day, as
essentially a political destroyer with no idea of a constructive policy
in any department made himself master of the details of municipal
administration and was a most valued colleague of all who, acting on
the extreme left of the Council, endeavoured, while upholding the
dignity of the city against the repressive policy of the Government, to
improve the management of city affairs in every department. In this he
was as successful as the circumstances of the time permitted. He became
in turn Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Council.
Though this portion of Clemenceau's career is little known, the
continuous unrecognised municipal service he rendered to Paris during
those eventful years gave him a hold not only upon Montmartre but
upon the whole city which has been of great service to him at other
times. He had, in fact, become a thorough Parisian from the age of
nineteen onwards, which can by no means always be said of men who
have afterwards taken a leading part in French politics. It is very
difficult to say what qualities are those which entitle a man to this
distinguished appellation. I have myself known Frenchmen able, witty,
brilliant and original, good speakers and clever writers, who somehow
never seemed to be at home with Parisians and Parisian audiences.
Critical and cynical, though at times enthusiastic and idealist, the
Parisian crowd takes no man at his own valuation and is no less fickle
than crowds in cities generally are. But Clemenceau has never failed
to be on good terms with them. I attribute this to the fact that in
addition to his other higher qualities, which impress all people of
intelligence, Clemenceau has in him a vein of sheer humorous mischief
that savours of the Parisian _gamin_ rather than of the hard-working
student from La Vendée. There is something in common between him and
the young rogues of the Parisian streets who are not at all averse from
enjoying life at the cost of poking fun at other people and even at
themselves. This spirit of Paris early got hold of Clemenceau and he of
it.
However this may be, on February 26th, 1876, he was again elected
deputy to the National Assembly. He now began the active and continuous
political life which had been broken off at its commencement by the
second revolution followed by the gruesome tragedy just recounted.
That he had never lost his sympathy for the men and women of the
Commune, little reason as he personally had for good feeling towards
them, was, proved by his delivery of his speech in favour of the
Amnesty of the Communists, some of whom had been so eager to get
rid of him for good and all when they had been in power for a short
time themselves. The speech at once put Clemenceau among the first
Parliamentary orators of the day. At this time a man of such capacity
was greatly needed on the extreme left. Others, who had lost much of
their energy and fervour in the long struggle against repression,
were little inclined to run further risks for the sake of a really
democratic Republic, still less for a set of people who in their
misguided efforts for complete freedom had endangered the establishment
of any Republic at all. They were content with what they had done
before and with the positions they occupied then. It was greatly to
Clemenceau's credit that he did not hesitate a moment as to the line he
should take. Popular or unpopular, fair play and freedom for all were
his watchwords.
When the Amnesty question came up again in 1879 Clemenceau's speech in
favour of the release of the indefatigable Communist Blanqui was, like
his appeal for the amnesty of the members of the Commune generally,
very creditable to him, for it was an unpopular move and gained him
little useful political support from any party. Perhaps no man in
the whole history of the revolutionary movement ever devoted himself
so entirely and with such relentless determination to the spread of
subversive doctrines as Auguste Blanqui. He began early and finished
late. He was first imprisoned at the age of twenty-one and spent more
than half of his seventy-six years of existence in gaol or exile. He
was a strong believer in organised violence as a means of bringing
about the realisation of his communist ideals. Insurrection against
the successive French Governments he regarded as a duty. It was a duty
which he faithfully fulfilled. In 1827 he was an active fighter in the
insurrection of the Rue St. Denis. It was suppressed and Blanqui was
wounded. He was one of the leaders of the successful rising against
Charles X in 1830, in which he was again wounded. In the reign of
Louis Philippe, which followed the failure to establish a Republic, he
speedily went to work again. Insurrection, conspiracy, establishment of
illegal societies, accumulation of weapons and explosives for organised
attacks, attempts to constitute a communist republic, were followed by
the usual penalties, and after his participation in the insurrection
of the Montagnards, by condemnation to death commuted to imprisonment
for life. Such was Blanqui's career up to 1848. Then the revolution
of that year set him free again. No sooner was he released than he
began afresh, forming a revolutionary combination which led to another
three days of insurrection, with the result that he was sentenced to a
further ten years of imprisonment. In 1858, under the Second Empire,
he returned to Paris, his birthplace, but was soon ejected and passed
eight years more in exile. In 1870 and 1871 Blanqui took part in the
overthrow of Napoleon III, and in the Commune which followed, was
captured by the Versaillais troops and sentenced to transportation to
New Caledonia, after the Communards had offered to exchange for him the
Archbishop of Paris, then held by them as a hostage. Instead of being
shipped off to New Caledonia he was imprisoned at Clairvaux, where he
remained until 1880, when he was elected, while still in gaol, deputy
for Bordeaux, was not allowed to take his seat but was released, and
died in Paris in 1881.
This brief summary gives but a poor idea of Blanqui's activities and
sufferings. At the period when Clemenceau pleaded for his release he
was still, at seventy-one, the most dangerous revolutionary leader in
France. From the first and throughout he was absolutely uncompromising
in his adherence to his communist theories, and, being at the same time
of dictatorial tendencies, he was an extremely difficult man to work
with. None the less Blanqui represented the highest type of educated
anarchist. He never considered himself for a moment. So long as he was
able to keep the flag of revolution flying, and thus to prepare the
way, by constant attempts at direct action, for the period when the
people would be strong enough and well-organised enough to achieve
victory for themselves, he was satisfied. A leader of his knowledge and
capacity must have known and did know that his views could not possibly
be accepted and acted upon, even if scientifically correct for a later
date, at the stage of evolution which France had reached in his day.
But, like Raspail, Delescluze, Amilcare Cipriani, Sophie Perovskaia,
and more than one of the French dynamitical anarchists, he deliberately
sacrificed his whole career, as he also risked his life time after
time, in desperate efforts to uplift the mass of the people from
their state of economic and social degradation. Nothing daunted him.
His courage was of that exceptional quality which is strengthened by
defeat. Even his bitterest enemies respected his devotion to his cause,
his disregard of danger and the spirit he maintained, in spite of years
upon years of confinement. He hated and despised the bourgeoisie, with
their capitalist wage-earning, profit-making system, even more than he
did monarchy and aristocracy. He revolted against the slow processes
of social evolution, as he did against the inherited wrongs of class
repression. No weapon of agitation came amiss to him. Journalist,
pamphleteer, author, orator, organiser, conspirator, he covered in his
own person the whole of the ground open to a convinced revolutionist.
The suppressive order of to-day must be smashed up to give an outlet
to the liberative order of to-morrow. Such a programme was in direct
opposition to the ideas of Clemenceau, who, individualist as he is,
has always regarded political action and trade organisation of a
peaceful nature as the best means of attaining thorough reform and
social reconstruction without running the risk of provoking monarchist
or imperialist repression. Blanqui to him was an idealist who, by
his very honesty and singleness of purpose, played into the hands of
reaction, when he spent so much of his life as he lived outside of a
prison in one broken but relentless effort to overthrow the existing
society of inequality and wage-slavery by the same forcible methods
that capitalist society itself uses to maintain the system in being.
On the other hand, the right to freedom of person and freedom of
expression was erected by the Radical leader into something not far
from an intellectual religion. On this ground, therefore, he argued
strongly in favour of Blanqui's release, though quite possibly, and
indeed probably, Blanqui's freedom, had it been secured, would have
been vigorously used against Clemenceau and his party--whom the great
Anarchist-Communist would have regarded as mere trimmers--to the
advantage of the reactionists themselves. But in this case as in that
of the amnesty to the Communists, the Clemenceau of the Rights of Man
and Liberty, Equality and Fraternity overcame Clemenceau the practical
politician. That he failed to get Blanqui out of prison could only have
been expected, having regard to the character of the Assembly to which
his appeal is addressed.
His Amnesty speech made a fine beginning for Clemenceau's active
Parliamentary life. It put him on a very different level from that
occupied by the mere political adventurers and intriguers whose main
objects were either to help on the reconstitution of some form of
monarchy or to secure for themselves posts under the Republic of much
the same kind as existed under the Empire. Men who but yesterday had
been champions of a genuine Republic in which the interests of the
majority of the French people should be considered first, foremost and
all the time had now become mere plotters for reaction, or opportunists
anxious never to find an opportunity. They were Republicans in name
but not in spirit. They were convinced that the most important portion
of their policy consisted henceforth not in organising the factor of
democracy for general progress but in reassuring their conservative
opponents and the propertied classes generally, from the plutocrat to
the peasant proprietor, that the Republic meant only a convenient form
of government, in which all classes should agree harmoniously together
to stand at ease for the next few generations. Their arguments in
favour of such a scheme of permanent repose were unfortunately only
too striking. They had but to recall the downfall of the Commune and
to point to the ruins of fine public buildings to appeal effectively
to the feelings of a large and influential portion of the people.
Enthusiasm had become suspect, idealism the antechamber to violent
mania, even Radicalism a vain thing.
Gambetta himself, regarded in England as the most eloquent and capable
leader of the Republican party, invented an excuse for the existence
of the Republic which he had taken an active part in creating, by the
formula, "It is that which divides us the least." Indifference on
every important question except colonial expansion became the highest
political wisdom. It was, in fact, hesitating opportunism and cowardly
compromise which then dominated France. Such tactics evoked no loyalty
and solved no problem. The old became cynical, the young contemptuous.
To attack such flabby consistency in doing nothing seemed as bootless
an enterprise as entering into conflict with a feather-bed. The early
years of the French Republic constituted a period of apathy led,
with one or two exceptions, by mediocrity. Even the scathing sarcasm
and biting irony of Rochefort failed to produce any serious effect
upon the smug stolidity of the rest-and-be-thankful representatives
of the French middle class. Hence arose "a divorce between politics
and thought," and men of capacity became disgusted with the form of
government itself. All this played directly into the hands of reaction
and was preparing the way for a series of attempts against the Republic.
It was at this unhopeful period of stagnation, compromise and
mediocrity that Clemenceau came to the front as leader of the
Left in the National Assembly. He at once showed that he had every
qualification for this important position--never more important than
when there was a conspiracy afoot to prove to the world that there
was no Radical Left at all. At the time he entered the Assembly in
1876 Clemenceau was thirty-five years of age, with an irreproachable
past behind him and the full confidence of the Republicans of Paris
around him. In his work in Montmartre and on the Municipal Council the
people had come to know what manner of man he was. Without their steady
support it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for him to
carry on the uphill fight he fought for so many years. His principles
upon every subject of public policy were from the first clear and well
defined.
Freedom of person, of speech and of the press were cardinal points
in his programme. He demanded that Paris should be released from
all exceptional measures of repression inflicted by the so-called
Conservatives upon the whole of the inhabitants of the capital as
revenge for the rash action of a small number of fanatical idealists
and as a means of keeping down any agitation against their own
corruption and incompetence. He claimed also that no perpetual
disability, in the shape of imprisonment and exile, should attach to
the members of the Commune of Paris, and he called for the fullest
pardon and freedom even for the irreconcilable Anarchist, Blanqui.
On questions of political rights, universal secular education, the
separation of Church and State, the generous treatment of the rank and
file of the army, the prevention of the intrigues of the Catholics,
and the expulsion of the Jesuits, Clemenceau took the line of an
out-and-out democrat. So, likewise, in regard to the treatment of the
working classes. Though not really a Socialist, the Radical leader
recognised clearly the infinite hardships suffered by the wage-earners
under the capitalist system, and proposed and supported palliative
legislation to lessen and redress their wrongs. In foreign affairs
he was a man of peace, never forgetting the outrages committed by
the German armies in the war nor the territory seized and the huge
indemnity exacted by the German Government at the peace; but hoping
always that the friendly development of the peoples of both France and
Germany might avert further antagonism and eventually lead to a full
understanding which would assuage the hatreds of the past and lay the
foundations of mutual good feeling in the future. To colonisation by
conquest and colonial adventures generally Clemenceau was steadfastly
opposed. The entire policy of expansion he regarded as injurious to the
true interests of the country, diverting to doubtful enterprises abroad
resources which were required for the development of Republican France
at home. Such colonial schemes also were apt to create difficulties and
even to risk wars with other nations which could in no wise benefit the
people, while they might strengthen the financiers whose malefic power
was already too great.
Such in brief was the general policy which Clemenceau set himself to
formulate and put to the front on behalf of the only party which at
that moment could exercise any serious influence in the political
world. The whole programme was closely knit together, and for
many years stood the brunt of the bitterest Parliamentary warfare
conceivable. It was a conflict of ideas that Clemenceau entered upon.
He conducted it throughout on the most approved principle of all
warfare: Never fail to attack in order to defend. The advice of the
American banker, "David Harum," might have been enunciated as the motto
of Georges Clemenceau the French statesman: "Do unto others as they
would do unto you, and do it _first_."
But the main point of all, that which assured and confirmed and
strengthened his leadership under the most difficult and dangerous
circumstances, was his resolute opposition to compromise. This was
contrary to all the ideas of political strategy and tactics which then
prevailed in France. "Men became Ministers solely on condition that
they refused when in power to do that which they had promised when
in opposition"--quite the English method, in fact. He himself never
failed to denounce nominal Republicans who set themselves stubbornly
against reform and progress in every shape, as mere reactionists in
disguise. They were, in fact, the staunch buttresses of that bourgeois
Republic of which Clemenceau not long afterwards said to me, "_La
République, mon ami, c'est l'Empire républicanisé_." It was indeed a
republicanised Empire which best suited the leading French politicians
of that day. For at first bourgeois domination of the narrowest and
meanest kind, leading, so the reactionaries hoped, to the restoration
of the monarchy, had its will of Paris and all that Paris at its best
stood for. As we look back upon that period of pettifoggery in high
places, the wonder is that the Royalists were not successful. If they
had had a king worth fighting for they might have been; for more than
one President was certainly not unfavourable to the monarchy or empire.
Prime Ministers were similarly tainted with reaction, and the army was
none too loyal to the Republic.