Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

Among the great cities of the past which is still the present Paris takes her undisputed place. In youth, in maturity, in age, the charm of intellectual and artistic Paris ever affects not merely her own citizens, but the strangers within her gates. And the young Vendéen Clemenceau was from the first a Parisian of Parisians. The attraction of Paris for him was permanent. From his arrival in 1860 until the present time practically his whole life has been spent in the French capital. Many years afterwards he gave expression to the influence Paris had upon him. Paris for Clemenceau is the sun of the world of science and letters, the source of light and heat from whose centre art and thought radiate through space. “Intuition and suggestion spreading out in all directions awake dormant energy, sweep on from contact to contact, are passed on, dispersed, and finally exhausted in the inertia of material objects. Here is the radiance of humanity, more or less powerful, more or less durable as time and place may decree.”

It is this impatience of Paris with results already achieved, this desire to reach out and to embrace new forms in all departments of human achievement, which give the French city her position as an indispensable entity in the cosmos of modern life. “Boldness and boldness and boldness again” was Danton’s prescription for the orator, and it might be taken as the motto of intellectual and artistic Paris. There is no hesitation, no contentment, no waiting by the wayside. New ideas and new conceptions must ever be replacing the old. Experience may teach what to avoid: experiment alone can teach what to attempt. And this not incidentally or as a passing phase of endeavour, but as a principle to be applied in every region of human effort. “The Rights of Man,” “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Property is robbery” are as thought-provoking (though they solve no problem) in the domain of sociology as Pasteur’s achievements in physiology and medicine. Whatever changes the future may have in store for us, we who are not Frenchmen cannot dispense with the leadership and inspiration that come to us from Paris.

On his return to France from America Clemenceau renewed his acquaintance and friendship with those who shared his political and social opinions, especially Etienne Arago, now an old man, and practised as a doctor in the working-class district of Montmartre. Here, by his gratuitous medical advice to the people and his steady adherence to his democratic principles, he gained an amount of popularity and personal devotion from the men and women of Montmartre which, in conjunction with Arago’s advice and support, prepared the way for the positions which he afterwards attained. Meanwhile the Second Empire was going slowly downhill. The change which had already taken place was not generally recognised. Nevertheless, the failure of the ill-fated Mexican Expedition with its Catholic support, its sordid financial muddling and the degrading system of plunder carried on in Mexico itself by Marshal Bazaine, the effect on Paris of the murder of Victor Noir by a member of the Buonaparte family, and the Government’s growing incapacity to handle domestic and foreign affairs all told against the prestige of Napoleon. Only a successful diplomatic stroke or a victorious war could rehabilitate the credit of the Empire. The time had gone by for either. Bismarck’s disgraceful forgery at Ems was as unnecessary as it was flagitious. Sooner or later the Second Empire would have collapsed from its own incompetence. But that waiting game did not suit the grim statesman of Berlin. He knew that the French army by itself could not hold its own against the Prussian and other German forces; he felt convinced also that Austria would not move without much clearer assurances of success than Napoleon could supply; while Italy was still tied to her Ally of 1866, and England was devoted to a policy of profitable non-intervention. So Napoleon was half driven, half tricked into a hopeless campaign, and every calculation on which Bismarck relied was verified by the results. Nay, the plébiscite which Louis Napoleon risked eighteen years after the coup d’état went entirely in his favour, and it was in reality quite unnecessary, from the point of view of internal politics, that any risk of war should be run. The Empress, however, has always had the discredit of not having been of that opinion. Hence steps were taken which played into Bismarck’s hands.

At first, as I have heard Clemenceau say himself, it was almost impossible for a patriotic Republican to desire victory for the French armies. That would only have meant a new life for the decadent Empire. Sad, therefore, as was the long succession of disasters, and terrible the devastation wrought by German ruthlessness, not until the culminating defeat of Sedan, the surrender of Napoleon and the decree of Imperial overthrow pronounced by the people of Paris, could men feel that French soldiers were really fighting for their country. Thenceforward the struggle was between democratic and progressive France and autocratic and reactionary Prussia. The Empire for whose humiliation the King of Prussia had gone to war existed no longer. A Republic was at once declared in its place. Any fair-minded enemy would directly have offered the easiest possible terms for peace to the new France. But that was not the view of Prussia. France, not merely the Second Empire, was to be defeated and crushed down, because she stood in the way of that permanent policy of aggression and aggrandisement to which the House of Hohenzollern, with its Junker supporters, has always been devoted. This was the moment when England should have interfered decisively on the side of her old rival. It was not only our interest but our duty to do so, and the whole nation would have enthusiastically supported the statesmen who had given it a vigorous lead in the right direction. Unfortunately Queen Victoria, then as ever bitterly pro-German, was utterly unscrupulous in enforcing her views upon her Government: the men then in office were essentially courtiers, who combined servility at home with pusillanimity abroad: the laissez-faire school of parasitical commercialism which regards the accumulation of wealth for the few as the highest aspiration of humanity held the trading classes in its grip. Consequently, the monarch and the ruling class of the day thought it was cheaper, and therefore better, to leave France to her fate, and make a good cash profit out of the business, rather than courageously to withstand the beginnings of evil and uphold the French Republic against the brutality and greed of Berlin. It is sad, nearly fifty years later, to reflect upon the results of this mistaken and cowardly policy. The war was continued, owing chiefly to English indifference, until France lay at the feet of the conquerors.

No sooner did the news of the defeat and surrender of Sedan reach Paris than a general shout for the overthrow of the Empire went up from the people throughout the French capital. The collapse of the Second Empire was in fact even more sudden and dramatic than its rise. The whole imperial machinery fell with a crash. There was not a man in Paris among the friends of the Emperor in good fortune who had the courage and capacity to come to the front in the time of his distress. The bigoted Catholic Empress, against whom Parisians cherished an animosity scarcely less bitter than that which their forbears felt for Marie Antoinette, was with difficulty got safely out of the city, and Paris at once took control of her own destinies. A Republic having been proclaimed, Republicans, Radicals and Socialists, harried and proscribed the day before, rushed to the front the day after, and forthwith became masters of the city. Clemenceau as one of them was immediately chosen Mayor of Montmartre, at the instance of his old friend Etienne Arago.

It was a period for action, not for argument, or reflection, or propaganda. Clemenceau understood that. In his capacity as Mayor of Montmartre, by no means an easy district to manage, he exhibited marvellous energy, as well as sound judgment, in every department of public affairs. Everything had to be reorganised at once. There was no time to respect the inevitable details of democratic authorisation and delay. Clemenceau with his natural rapidity of decision was the very man for the post. Patriotic and revolutionary excitement seethed all round him. Society seemed already to be in the melting-pot. The enthusiasm evoked by eloquent orations in favour of Socialism was accompanied by the discharges of cannon and the rumbling of ammunition-wagons. But public business had to be carried on all the same. Clemenceau was indefatigable and ubiquitous. He prevented the priests from intriguing in the municipal schools, he established purely secular education, hurried on the arming of the battalions and kept a sharp eye on the defences of the city. Simultaneously he set on foot a series of establishments for giving warmth, food and general help to the number of people who had sought refuge on the heights. He acted throughout practically as municipal dictator, raising, arming and drilling recruits for the new republican army, as well as organising and administering all the local services.

It was a fine piece of work. Having been so closely in touch with the bulk of the population of Montmartre, he was able to act entirely in their interests and with their concurrence throughout. They therefore warmly supported him against the reactionists and religionists who, then as always, were his most virulent enemies. It was no easy task to maintain order and carry out systematic organisation at this juncture. The downfall of the Empire occurred on September 4th, the Republic, with General Trochu—the man of the undisclosed strategical “plan”—as President and Jules Favre as Vice-President, being declared the same day. On September 19th Paris was invested by the Germans. Seeing that there were then no fewer than 400,000 armed men, at various stages of training, in the capital, with many powerful forts at their disposal, while the Germans could spare at the beginning of the siege no more than 120,000 men for the attack, the French having still several armies in the field, successful resistance by the Republic seemed by no means hopeless. Paris might even have had her share in turning the tide of victory. Clemenceau was of that opinion.

But it was not to be. France failed to produce a great general, and the “bagman Marshal,” as Bazaine was called in Mexico, by shutting himself up with 175,000 men in Metz, rendered final defeat certain; though if Marshal MacMahon’s advice had been followed, and if General Trochu had later sufficiently organised the forces at his disposal in Paris to break through the German lines, a stouter fight might have been fought. As it was, one French army after another was defeated in the field, and Paris and Metz were forced to surrender by literal starvation. On January 28th, 1871, an armistice was signed between Bismarck and Jules Favre and the revictualling of the famine-stricken Parisians began, the siege having lasted a little over four months. A National Assembly was summoned to decide the terms of a definite peace or in what manner it might be possible to continue the war.

So well satisfied were the voters of Montmartre with the conduct of their Mayor during all this trying time that they decided to send him as their representative to Bordeaux and polled just upon 100,000 votes in his favour. To Bordeaux, therefore, Clemenceau went, on February 12th, as deputy for one of the most radical and revolutionary districts of Paris. Though neither then nor later an avowed Socialist, no Socialist could have done more for practical democratic and Socialist measures than Clemenceau had done. That, of course, was the reason why he was elected by so advanced a constituency.

He found himself strangely out of his element when he took his seat in the National Assembly. Perhaps no more reactionary body had ever met in France. The majority of the members were thorough-going Conservatives who at heart were eager to restore the monarchy. They were royalists but slightly disguised, dug up out of their seclusion, from all parts of the country, who thought their time had come to revenge themselves not so much upon the Buonapartists who had governed France for twenty years as upon Paris and the Parisians who had chased Charles X and Louis Philippe out of France. They well knew that the capital would never consent to the restoration of the candidate of either of the Bourbon factions. These fitting champions of a worn-out Legitimism or Orleanism were old men in a hurry to resuscitate the dead and galvanise the past into fresh life. Their very heads betrayed their own antiquity. So much so that a favourite pastime of young ladies of pleasure in the Galleries, who had flocked to Bordeaux, was what was irreverently called “bald-headed loo.” This consisted in betting upon the number of flies that would settle within a given period upon a devoted deputy’s hairless occiput. Unfortunately these ancient gentlemen found in M. Thiers a leader who could scarcely have been surpassed for ingenuity and unscrupulousness. He deliberately traded upon prejudices, and his main political assets were the fear and distrust which he awakened in one set of his countrymen against another. In modern as in ancient society there is an economic and almost a personal antagonism between country and town.

The man of the Provinces, living always in the rural districts, the tiller, the producer, the indefatigable toiler, the parsimonious accumulator of small gains, the respecter of ancestral traditions and the devotee of old-world methods and well-tried means of gaining a poor livelihood, profoundly affected likewise by his inherited religion, has, in most cases, a deep-seated contempt, strangely enough not wholly divorced from fear, for the man of the town, and especially for the man of Paris. This animosity, which has by no means wholly disappeared to-day, was keenly in evidence forty and fifty years ago. There is an economic cause at the bottom of the antipathy, but this does not account for its many-sided manifestation. The countryman naturally desires to sell his produce at as high a price as possible. It is for him almost a matter of life and death to do so. The townsman, on his side, the artisan or labourer or even the rentier of the great cities, is naturally anxious to obtain the necessaries of life which he gets from the rural districts at as low a rate as he may be able to buy them having regard to his wages or his income. Hence any expenditure which tends to benefit the country is regarded with suspicion by the townsman and contrariwise as between town and country, except such outlay as cheapens the cost of transportation, where both have an identical interest.

But this general divergence of economic advantage, which has existed for many centuries does not wholly account for the ill-feeling which too often appears. There is a psychological side to the matter as well. Thus the peasant, even when he is getting satisfactory prices for his wares, despises his own customers when they pay too much for small luxuries which they could easily do without. Moreover, he considers the cleverness of his fellow-countrymen of the city, their readiness to change their opinions and adopt new ideas, their doubts as to the super-sanctity of that individual property, property which is the small landowner’s god, as evidences of a dangerous disposition to upset all that ought to be most solemnly upheld. The townsman, on the other hand, too often looks down upon the peasant and the rural provincial generally as an ignorant, short-sighted, narrow-minded, grasping creature, full of prejudices and eaten up with superstition, who, out of sheer obstinacy, stands immovably in the way of reforms that might, and in many cases certainly would, benefit them both.

It is the task and the duty of the true statesman to bridge over these differences as far as possible, to try to harmonise interests and assuage feelings which under existing conditions are apt to conflict with one another. Thus only can the whole country be well and truly served. M. Thiers pursued precisely the contrary course. In order to foster reaction and to strengthen the position of the bourgeoisie, he and his supporters set to work deliberately to excite the hatred of the country-folk against their brethren of the towns. They were willing to accept the Republic only on the distinct understanding that it should be, as Zola expressed it, a bourgeoised sham. The bogey of the social revolution was stuck up daily to frighten the timid property-owners. Above all, Paris was pointed out as the danger spot of order-respecting France. Paris ought to be muzzled and kept under even more strictly by the self-respecting Republic than by the Empire. That way alone lay safety. Thus the dislike of the provincials for the capital was fanned to so fierce a heat that the very title of capital was denied to her. As a result of this unpatriotic and traitorous policy Paris herself was unfortunately forced to the conviction that the reactionists of Bordeaux were determined to deprive her of all her rights, and that the great city which founded the Republic would be made to suffer dearly for her presumption. Nearly all that followed was in reality due to this sinister policy of provocation, adopted and carried out by M. Thiers and his bigoted followers.

Clemenceau’s position was a difficult one. Knowing both peasants and Parisians intimately well, he saw clearly the very dangerous situation which must inevitably be created by such tactics of exasperation. As one of the deputies of Radical Republican Paris, he did his utmost at Bordeaux to maintain the independence of his constituents and to resist the fatal action of the majority. As the son of a landowner in La Vendée, he understood clearly the views of the provincials and how necessary it was that they should be thoroughly informed as to the aims of the Parisians. But Paris had first claim on his services. He therefore associated himself with Louis Blanc, voted with him against the preliminaries of peace and in favour of the continuance of the war. There was a strong opinion at this time that many of the Buonapartists in high military command, as well as in important civil posts, were traitors to the Republic and had acted, as Bazaine unquestionably did, in the interest of the Imperial prisoner instead of on behalf of France. These factionists too were hostile to Paris, and a demand was made, in which Clemenceau joined, for a full investigation of the conduct of such men during the siege. Unfortunately, affairs in the capital were now becoming so critical and the probability of another revolution there seemed so great that Clemenceau felt his duties as Mayor of Montmartre were still more urgent than his votes and speeches at Bordeaux, as deputy for that district. Consequently, after less than a month’s stay at Bordeaux, he returned to Paris on the evening of March 5th. The Commune of Paris was set on foot within a fortnight of that date, on March 18th, 1871.

CHAPTER IV

THE COMMUNE

Unquestionably, the revolt was brought about by the ill-judged and arbitrary conduct of the agents of the National Assembly. To attempt to seize the guns of the National Guard as a preliminary to disarming the only Citizen force which the capital had at its disposal was as illegal as it was provocative. It was virtually a declaration of civil war by the reactionaries in control of the national forces. The people of Paris were in no humour to put up with such high-handed action on the part of men who, they knew, were opposed even to the Republic which they nominally served. They resisted the attempt and captured the generals, Lecomte and Thomas, who had ordered the step to be taken.

So far they were quite within their rights, and Clemenceau at first sympathised wholly with the Federals. The Parisians had undergone terrible privations during the siege, they were exasperated by the denunciations that poured in upon them from the provinces, they saw no hope for their recently won liberties unless they themselves were in a position to defend them, they had grave doubts whether they had not been betrayed within and without during the siege itself. It is no wonder that, under such circumstances, they should resent, by force of arms, any attempt to deprive them of the means of effective resistance to reactionary repression.

There was also nothing in the establishment of the Commune itself which was other than a perfectly legitimate effort to organise the city afresh, after the old system had proved utterly incompetent. But the attempt to disarm the population of Montmartre roused passions which it was impossible to quell. Clemenceau, as Mayor of the district, did all that one man could do to save the two generals, Lecomte and Clément Thomas, from being killed. With his sound judgment he saw at once that, whether their execution was justifiable or not, it would be regarded as murder by many Republicans whom the cooler heads in Paris desired to conciliate. As was proved afterwards, he exerted all his power to check even the semblance of injustice. But his final intervention to prevent the tragedy of the Château Rouge came too late, and Lecomte and Thomas, who had not hesitated to risk the massacre of innocent citizens on behalf of a policy of repression, were regarded as the first victims of an infuriated mob.

The outcome of Clemenceau’s own endeavours to save these misguided militarists was that he himself became “suspect” to the heads of the Central Committee of the Commune sitting at the Hôtel de Ville, which had taken control of all Paris. He was the duly elected and extremely popular Radical-Socialist—to use a later designation—Mayor of perhaps the most advanced arrondissement in the capital, he had been sent to Bordeaux by a great majority of his constituents to sit on the extreme left, and, in that capacity, had stoutly defended the rights of Paris; he was strongly in favour of most of the claims made by the leaders of the Commune. But all this went for nothing. The new Committee wanted their own man at Montmartre, and Clemenceau was not that man.

So Mayor of Montmartre he ceased to be, but earnest democrat and devoted friend of the people he remained. Unfortunately, having a wider outlook than most of those who had suddenly come to the front, he could not believe that mere possession of the capital meant attainment of the control of France by the Parisians, or the freeing of his country from German occupation. For once he advocated prudence and suggested compromise. A reasonable arrangement between the administrators of Paris with their municipal forces and the National Assembly with its regular army seemed to Clemenceau a practical necessity of the situation. He therefore urged this policy incessantly upon the Communists. It was an unlucky experience. Pyat, Vermorel and others so strongly resented his moderate counsels that they issued an order for his arrest, with a view to his hasty, if judicial, removal. Failing to lay hold upon Clemenceau himself, they captured a speaking likeness of the Radical doctor in the person of a young Brazilian. Him they were about to shoot, when they discovered that their proposed victim was the wrong man. Possibly these personal adventures in revolutionary democracy under the Commune may have influenced Clemenceau’s views about Socialism in practical affairs in after life.

It is highly creditable to Clemenceau that a few years later one of his greatest speeches was delivered in the National Assembly to obtain, the liberation and the recall from exile of the very same men who would gladly have silenced him for good and all when they were in power. However, he escaped their well-meant attentions, and, leaving Paris, went on a tour of vigorous Radical propaganda through the Provinces.

This was a most important self-imposed mission. Clemenceau, as he showed by his vote at Bordeaux, was strongly in favour of continuing the war and bitterly opposed to any surrender whatever. At the same time he was a thoroughgoing Republican who did not forget that the mass of Frenchmen must have voted for the Empire a few months before, or Napoleon’s plébiscite, of course, could not have been so successful, even with the whole of the official machinery in the hands of the Imperialists. Differing from Gambetta afterwards on many points, the coming leader of the advanced Radicals was at this period entirely at one with the man who had not despaired of France when all seemed lost. But in order to carry on the war with any hope of success and to keep the flag of the Republic flying, it was essential that the people of the provincial towns and the peasants should be kept in touch with Paris and be convinced that the only chance of safety and freedom lay in sinking all internecine differences for the sake of unity. No man, not even Gambetta himself, was better qualified for this service. Throughout his tour he kept the independence, welfare and freedom of France as a whole high above all other considerations. But the risks he ran were not trifling. The local reactionists were by no means ready to accept his views. The police was set upon his trail, with great inconvenience to himself. But at no period of his life has Clemenceau considered his personal safety of any account. He had set himself to accomplish certain work which he deemed to be necessary, and he carried it through without reference to the dangers around him. Nor must the success of this propaganda be measured by its immediate results. The great thing in those days of defeat and despair was to keep up the national spirit and to declare that, though the French armies might be beaten again and again, the France of the great Revolution and the Republic should never be crushed down. Believing, as Clemenceau did, in the religion of patriotism and the sacred watchwords of the eighteenth-century upheaval, he spoke with a sincerity that gave to his utterances the value of the highest oratory. The speeches produced a permanent impression on those who heard them, and their effect was felt for many years afterwards.

But this was quite as objectionable to Thiers and the case-hardened reactionists as his previous conduct had been to Pyat and the extremists of the Commune. Men of ability and judgment are apt to be caught between two fires when prejudice and passion take control on both sides. It was, in fact, little short of a miracle that the future Prime Minister of France did not complete his services to his country by dying in the ditch under the wall of Père-la-Chaise at the early age of thirty-one.

Few movements have been more grotesquely misrepresented than the Commune of Paris. For many a long year afterwards almost the whole of the propertied classes in Europe spoke of the Communists as if they had been a gang of scoundrels and incendiaries, without a single redeeming quality; while Socialists naturally enough refused to listen to virulent abuse of men most of whom they well knew were inspired by the highest ideals and sacrificed themselves for what they believed to be the good of mankind. At the beginning Paris assuredly had no intention whatever of courting a struggle with the supporters of the Republic at Bordeaux, however reactionary they might be. Such men as Delescluze, Courbet, Beslay, Jourde, Camélinat, Vaillant, Longuet, to speak only of a few, were no mere hot-headed revolutionaries regardless of all the facts around them. Paris was admirably administered under their short rule—never nearly so well, according to the testimony of two quite conservative Englishmen who were there at the time. One of these was the famous Oxford sculler and athlete, E. B. Michell, an English barrister and a French avocat; the other was my late brother, Hugh, a Magdalen man like Michell. They both knew Paris well, and both were of the same opinion as to the municipal management under the Commune. Michell in an article in Fraser’s Magazine, then an important review, wrote as follows:

“It is extremely important that the serious lesson which the world may read in the history of the Revolution should not be weakened in its significance or interest by any ill-grounded contempt either for the acts of the Communal leaders or for the sincerity of their motives. We have seen that the army on which the Revolutionists relied, and by means of which they climbed to power, was not, as certain French statesmen pretended, and some English papers would have had us believe, a ‘mere handful of disorderly rebels,’ but a compact force, well drilled, well organised, and valiant when fighting for a cause that they really had at heart. It is equally false and unfair to regard the Communal Assembly as a crew of unintelligent and mischievous conspirators, guided by no definite or reasonable principle, and seeking only their own aggrandisement and the destruction of all the recognised laws of order. Yet it is certain that such an idea respecting the Commune is very generally entertained by ordinary English readers. It may be shown that the policy of this Government, though defaced by many gross abuses and errors, had much in it to deserve the consideration, and even to extort the admiration, of an intelligent and practical statesman. . . .

“Foreign writers have delighted to represent the purposes of the Commune as vague and unintelligible. Even in Paris and at Versailles writers and talkers affected at first to be ignorant of the real projects and principles entertained by the Revolutionists. But the Commune of 1871 has itself destroyed all possibility of mistake upon the subject. It has put to itself and answered the question in the most explicit terms. The Journal Officiel (of Paris) contained, on April 20th, a document worthy of the most careful perusal. It appears in the form of a declaration to the French people, and explains fully enough the main principles and the chief objects which animated the men of the Commune. Without bestowing on this address the ecstatic eulogies to which certain Utopian philosophers have deemed it entitled, we may credit it as being a straightforward, manly, and not altogether unpractical exposé of the ideas of modern Communists.

“. . . ‘It is the duty of the Commune to confirm and determine the aspirations and wishes of the people of Paris; to explain, in its true character, the movement of March 18th—a movement which has been up to this time misunderstood, misconstrued, and calumniated by the politicians at Versailles. Once more Paris labours and suffers for the whole of France, for whom she is preparing, by her battles and her devoted sacrifices, an intellectual, moral, administrative, and economic regeneration, an era of glory and prosperity.

“‘What does she demand?

“‘The recognition and consolidation of the Republic as the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the regular and free development of society; the absolute independence of the Commune and its extension to every locality in France; the assurance by this means to each person of his rights in their integrity, to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and capacities as a man, a citizen, and an artificer. The independence of the Commune will have but one limit—the equal right of independence to be enjoyed by the other Communes who shall adhere to the contract. It is the association of these Communes that must secure the unity of France.

“‘The inherent rights of the Commune are these: The right of voting the Communal budget of receipts and expenditure, of regulating and reforming the system of taxation, and of directing local services; the right to organise its own magistracy, the internal police and public education; to administer the property belonging to the Commune; the right of choosing by election or competition, with responsibility and a permanent right of control and revocation, the communal magistrates and officials of all sorts; the right of individual liberty under an absolute guarantee, liberty of conscience and liberty of labour; the right of permanent intervention by the citizens in communal affairs by means of the free manifestation of their ideas, and a free defence of their own interests, guarantees being given for such manifestations by the Commune, which is alone charged with the duty of guarding and securing the free and just right of meeting and of publicity; the right of organising the urban defences and the National Guard, which is to elect its own chiefs, and alone provide for the maintenance of order in the cities.

“‘Paris desires no more than this, with the condition, of course, that she shall find in the Grand Central Administration, composed of delegates from the Federal Communes, the practical recognition and realisation of the same principles. To insure, however, her own independence, and as a natural result of her own freedom of action, Paris reserves to herself the liberty of effecting as she may think fit, in her own sphere, those administrative and economic reforms which her population shall demand, of creating such institutions as are proper for developing and extending education, labour, commerce, and credit; of popularising the enjoyment of power and property in accordance with the necessities of the hour, the wish of all persons interested, and the data furnished by experience. Our enemies deceive themselves or deceive the country when they accuse Paris of desiring to impose its will or its supremacy upon the rest of the nation, and of aspiring to a Dictatorship which would amount to a veritable attack against the independence and sovereignty of other Communes. They deceive themselves or the country when they accuse Paris of seeking the destruction of French unity as established by the Revolution. The unity which has hitherto been imposed upon us by the Empire, the Monarchy, and the Parliamentary Government is nothing but a centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and burdensome. Political unity as desired by Paris is a voluntary association of each local initiative, a free and spontaneous co-operation of all individual energies with one common object—the well-being, liberty, and security of all. The Communal Revolution initiated by the people on the 18th of March inaugurated a new political era, experimental, positive, and scientific. It was the end of the old official and clerical world, of military and bureaucratic régime, of jobbing in monopolies and privileges, to which the working class owed its state of servitude, and our country its misfortunes and disasters.’”

The two Englishmen, coming straight to my house from Paris, gave me a favourable account of the administration of municipal Paris, especially at the time when Cluseret held command.

Others who were there at the same time were similarly impressed. Paris ceased even to be the Corinth of Europe, since all prostitutes had been ordered out of the city. The leaders set an example of moderation in their style of living, which was the more remarkable as they had no authority but their own sense of propriety to limit their expenditure. How little they regarded themselves as relieved from the ordinary rules of the strictest bourgeois social order is apparent, also, from the fact that Jourde and Beslay, who were responsible for the finances of the Commune, actually borrowed £40,000 from the Rothschilds in order to carry on the ordinary business of the Municipality. Yet at the time not less than £60,000,000 in gold, apart from a huge store of silver, was lying at their mercy in the Bank of France; enough, as some cynically said, if judiciously used, to have bought up all M. Thiers’ Government and his army to boot. The fact that the Communists left these vast accumulations untouched proves conclusively that they were the least predatory, some might say the least effective, revolutionists who ever held subversive opinions. In all directions they showed the same spirit. Every department was managed as economically and capably as they could organise it. But always on the most approved bourgeois lines. Many of the reforms they introduced, notably those by Camélinat at the Mint, are still maintained.

How, then, did it come about that people of this character and capacity were regarded almost universally as desperate enemies of society, from the moment when they came to the front in their own city? It is the old story of the hatred of the materialist property-owner and profiteer for the idealist who is eager at once to realise the new period of public possession and co-operative well-being. The fact that such an indomitable anarchist-communist as the famous Blanqui, who spent the greater part of his life in prison, took an active part in the Commune and that others of like views were associated with the rising scared all the “respectable” classes, who regarded any attack upon the existing economic and social forms as a crime of the worst description. A tale current at the time puts the matter in a humorous shape. A number of communists, when arrested, were put in gaol with a still larger number of common malefactors. These latter greatly resented this intrusion, boycotted the political prisoners, and, it is said, would have gone so far as to attack their unwelcome companions but for the intervention of the warders. Asked why they exhibited such animosity towards men who had done them no harm, the ordinary criminals took quite a conservative, bourgeois view of their relations to the new-comers. “We,” they said, “have some of us taken things which belonged to other people; but we have never thought for a moment of abolishing the right of property in itself. Not having enough ourselves, we wanted more and laid hands upon what we could get. But these men would take everything and leave nothing for us.” So even the gaolbirds embraced the bourgeois ethic of individual ownership.

Moreover, the International Working Men’s Association had been founded in London in 1864, just seven years before. Although the late Professor Beesly, certainly as far from a violent revolutionist as any man could be, took the chair at the first meeting and English trade unionists of the most sober character constituted the bulk of the members in London, the terror which this organisation inspired in the dominant minority all over Europe was very far indeed in excess of the power which it could at any time exercise. But the names of Marx, the learned German-Jew philosopher, and Bakunin, the Russian peasant-anarchist, were words of dread to the comfortable classes in those days. Marx with Engels had written the celebrated “Communist Manifesto,” at the last period of European disturbance, in 1848, analysing the historic development and approaching downfall of the entire wage-earning system, with a ruthless disregard for the feelings of the bourgeoisie. Its conclusion appealing to the “Workers of the World” to unite was not unnaturally regarded as a direct incitement to combined revolt. Though, therefore, few had read the Manifesto this appeal had echoed far and wide, and the organisation of the International itself was credited with the intention to use the Commune of Paris as the starting-point for a world-wide conflagration. Thus the movement in Paris, which at first had no other object than to secure the stability of the democratic Republic, was regarded as an incendiary revolt, and the brutal outrages of M. Thiers, aided by the mistakes of the Communists themselves, gradually forced extremists to the front. Some were like Delescluze, noble enthusiasts who knew success was impossible, and courted death for their ideal as sowing the seed of success for their great cause of the universal Co-operative Commonwealth in the near future; others were such as Félix Pyat, a furious subversionist of the most ruffianly type, who mixed up personal malignity and individual hatred with his every action, and brought discredit on his own comrades. Victory for the Socialist ideals, with the Germans containing one side of Paris and the Versailles troops attacking the other, was impossible—would have been impossible even if the Communists had suppressed their truly fraternal hatreds and had developed a military genius. They did neither. Cluseret showed some inkling of the necessities of the case, but Dombrowski, Rossel and other leaders exhibited no capacity. The wonderful thing about it all was that during the crisis, which lasted two months, Paris was so well administered. The sacrifice of the hostages and the tactics of incendiarism pursued at last, not by the Communist leaders, but by the Anarchist mob broken loose from all control, have hidden from the public at large, who read only the prejudiced accounts of the capitalist press, the real truth about the Commune of Paris.

But whatever may have been done in resistance to the invasion of M. Thiers’ army of reaction, nothing could possibly justify the horrible vengeance wreaked upon the people of Paris by the soldiery and their chiefs. It was a martyrdom of the great city. The coup d’état of Louis Napoleon was child’s play to the hideous butchery ordered and rejoiced in by Thiers, Gallifet and their subordinates. There was not even a pretence of justice in the whole massacre. Thousands of unarmed and innocent men and women were slaughtered in cold blood because Paris was feared by the bloodthirsty clique who regarded her rightly as the main obstacle to their reactionary policy. It was but too clear evidence that, when the rights of property are supposed to be imperilled, all sense of decency or humanity will be outraged by the dominant minority as it was by the slave-owners of old or the nobles of the feudal times.

But the Commune itself, as matters stood, was as hopeless an attempt to “make twelve o’clock at eleven” as has ever been seen on the planet. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was not more certainly foredoomed to failure than was the uprising of the Communists of Paris in 1871. But the Socialists of Europe, like the abolitionists, have celebrated the Commune and deified its martyrs for many a long year. The brave and unselfish champions of the proletariat who then laid down their lives in the hope that their deaths might hasten on the coming of a better day hold the same position in the minds of Socialists that John Brown held among the friends of the negro prior to the great American Civil War. It was an outburst of noble enthusiasm on their part to face certain failure for the “solidarity of the human race.” But those who watched what happened then and afterwards can scarcely escape from the conclusion that the loss of so many of its ablest leaders, and the great discouragement engendered by the horrors of defeat, threw back Socialism itself in France fully twenty years.

Recent experience in several directions has shown the world that enthusiasm and idealism for the great cause of human progress, and the co-ordination of social forces in the interest of the revolutionary majority of mankind, cannot of themselves change the course of events. Unless the stage in economic development has been reached where a new order has already been evolved out of the previous outworn system, it is impossible to realise the ideals of the new period by any sudden attack. Men imbued with the highest conceptions of the future and personally quite honest in their conduct may utterly fail to apply plain common sense to the facts of the present. Dublin, Petrograd and Helsingfors, nearly forty years later, did but enforce the teachings of the Commune of Paris.

CHAPTER V

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.