rarely has a politician received a heavier blow than this which fell upon clemenceau in 1893. ordinarily, a man of his intellectual eminence and remarkable political faculties has no difficulty, if he loses one seat in the national assembly of any country, in speedily getting another. not so with clemenceau. his very success as leader of the advanced left and the proof that, though always a comparatively poor man, he had remained thoroughly honest amid all the intrigues and financial scandals around him told against him. he interfered with too many ambitions, was a stumbling-block in the way of too many high policies, to be able to command his return for another constituency. the same interests and jealousies which had combined against him at draguignan would have attacked him with redoubled fury elsewhere. persistent determination to carry really thorough democratic reforms in every department, combined with very high ability, relentless disregard of personal claims, complete indifference to mere party considerations and perfect honesty are qualities so inconvenient to modern politicians of every shade of opinion that the wonder is clemenceau had held his position so long as he did. to have destroyed no fewer than eighteen more or less reactionary administrations, while always refusing to form a cabinet himself, was a title to the highest esteem from the mass of his countrymen: it was a diabolical record from the point of view of the ministers whom he had displaced and the cliques by whom they had been surrounded. not a french statesman but felt that his reputation and his hold upon office were more secure now that clemenceau’s masterly combinations and[128] dynamitical oratory were safely excluded from the national assembly. so clemenceau, at this critical period of his life and career, could rely upon no organised political force strong enough to encounter and overcome the persistent hostility of his enemies.
a weaker man would have felt this exclusion less and have been discouraged more. after seventeen years of such valuable work as clemenceau had done, to be, to all appearance, boycotted from the assembly for an indefinite period was a strange experience. i wrote him myself a letter of sympathy, and in his reply he expressed his special bitterness at the attitude of the socialists towards him. this hostility might have been easily averted without any sacrifice of principle on clemenceau’s part. but clemenceau, defeated and driven out of his rightful place in active french politics, did not hesitate for a moment as to the course he would pursue. he had left the national assembly as the first parliamentarian in france: he at once turned round and at the age of fifty-two became her first journalist. nothing in his long life of stress and strain is more remarkable than the success he then achieved and the vigour with which he devoted himself to his new vocation.
it is no easy matter, especially in france, for a publicist and journalist to discover a fresh method of bringing his opinions to bear upon the public. yet this is what clemenceau did. he applied his humanist-materialist philosophy to the everyday incidents of french life. that philosophy is a strange compound of physical determinism and the ethical revolt against universal cruelty involved in the unregulated struggle for existence. the fight for life is inevitable. so far, throughout historic times it has been a long campaign in which the usurping minority have always won. wholesale butchery and cannibalism by conquering tribes have been transformed first into slavery, then into serfdom, lastly into the wage-earning system of our own time. in each and every case the many have been at the mercy of the dominating few. there is little or no effective attempt made to remedy the evils arising out[129] of such a state of things. the struggle for mere subsistence still goes on below, and those who revolt against it or endeavour seriously to ameliorate it by strikes or combinations are treated as misdemeanants or criminals. mining capitalists, industrial capitalists, railway capitalists, landowners large and small have the law, the judges, the magistrates, the police and all the reactionary forces on their side. hence the grossest injustice and the most abominable oppression of the poor.
therefore the state ought to intervene, not in order to repress the aspirations and punish the attempts of the wage-earning class to obtain better conditions of life for themselves and their children, but to protect this most important portion of the community in every possible way: to secure for them shorter hours of labour, thorough education, full opportunity for legitimate combination, boards of arbitration to avert strikes, fair play at the hands of the courts and the police. the state, in fact, is to act as a national conscience and perpetual trustee for the poor. note that the struggle for existence, the fight for subsistence must go on—clemenceau has never contemplated the possibility of a human scheme of co-operation by which competition would be wholly eliminated—but its harsher features ought to be reduced. there is no complete overthrow of mutual destruction, and no condition of universal fellowship is in view. only the mind and heart of the community must be changed; men must survey modern society from the point of view of humane guidance and prepare the material development and economic arrangements which shall by degrees render individual injustice and cruelty as unheard-of as now is anthropophagy.
at the back of all this lies a picturesque pessimism and what nowadays is frequently spoken of as a philosophy of despair. no sooner has this planet, its solar system, its galaxy of suns and worlds reached its full development than they all begin to traverse the downward path which leads slowly and inevitably to decay and eventual destruction, until the entire process unconsciously and inevitably begins over again. infinity[130] oppresses us all: the cosmos with its interminable repetitions eludes conception by the human intelligence. yet we live and strive and feel and hope and have our conceptions of justice and sympathy and duty which come we know not whence and pass onwards we know not whither. man as a highly organised individual entity becomes superior to the mere matter of which his mind is a function, because as an individual he can rise up out of himself and criticise and reflect upon that which, without any such power of conception, surrounds, upholds and then immolates him. “the universe crushes me,” wrote pascal, “yet i am superior to the universe, because i know that it is crushing me and the universe knows nothing about it at all.” strange to find clemenceau quoting and agreeing with an intelligence so wholly different from his own as pascal’s!
then, fate, necessity, the nemesis of monism working on to its foreseen but uncontrollable destiny, dominates the cosmos and through the cosmos that infinitesimally small but sentient and critical microbe man, who creates an individual ethic out of this determinist material evolution. francis newman, the brother of the famous john henry the cardinal, said that it is as impossible for man to comprehend matter developing and reproducing itself from all time as it is for him to conceive of an omnipotent deity superintending the matter he has created in its evolution from all time. we are therefore driven back, whether we like it or not, upon the ancient and never-ending discussion of free-will and predestination in a non-theological form which leaves in the main all the psychologic phenomena untouched, including clemenceau’s own social morality that impels him to champion the cause of the oppressed. beyond the demand for justice in the abstract and freedom in the abstract applied as a test to each special case as it arises, there is no guiding theory in clemenceau’s philosophy. the recognition of the struggle for existence among human beings, as among plants and animals, does not imply any conscious co-ordination of effort, arising out of the growth of society, in order to do away with the antagonism engendered by life itself.[131] so with all his humanism clemenceau will not accept the theories of scientific socialism which could give an unshakable foundation to his own views of life. that is the weakness which runs through all his books and articles. his own individuality is so powerful that he simply cannot grasp the possibility of anything but individual effort, personal suasion and isolated measures of reform.
nevertheless, we come upon a passage which, written obviously in perfect good faith, would, within its limits, be accepted as a fair statement of socialism from an outsider: “socialism is social beneficence in action, it is the intervention of all on behalf of the victim of the murderous vitality of the few. to contend, as the economists do, that we ought to oppose social altruism in its efforts is to misrepresent and seriously calumniate mankind. to complain that collective action will degrade the individual by some limitation of liberty is to argue in favour of the liberty of the stronger which is called oppressive. is it not, on the contrary, to strengthen the individual by restraining and controlling every man who injures another man as does the employer of to-day when left to the bare exigences of competition? . . . follow the laissez-faire policy for the individual, says the anti-social economist, and speedily a whole regiment of devotees will rush to the succour of the vanquished. we always wait, but see nothing save the terrible condition of humanity which ever remains. . . . against this anarchy it is man’s glory to revolt. he claims the right to soften, to control fatality if he cannot escape from it. how?”
and then clemenceau, whom in active life none would accuse of undue sentiment, goes off into a series of moral reflections and the need for perpetual moral preachments which really lead us nowhither; though, some pages further on, he quotes karl marx, who speaks of the unemployed as the inevitable “army of reserve” due not to human immorality but to the necessary functioning of the unregulated competitive capitalism of our period. yet the great french radical shrinks from the[132] organised social collective action and revolution needed to lift us out of this anarchy of oppression. he turns to the individual himself and his hard lot under the domination of fate. he has a justifiable tilt at free-will and personal responsibility. thus:—
“but what is absurd, contradictory, idiotic is the responsibility of the creature before the creator. i say to god, ‘if you are not satisfied with me, you had only to make me otherwise,’ and i defy him to answer me.” and then, quoting from “lucian’s dialogues of the dead,” he cites minos as discussing with a new-comer who is brought before him for punishment:
“all that i did in life,” says sostrates, “was it done by me voluntarily, or was not my destiny registered beforehand by fate?”
“evidently by fate,” answers minos.
“punish fate, then,” is the reply.
“let him go free,” says minos to mercury, “and see to it that he teaches the other dead to question us in like manner.”
“substitute fate for jehovah or by the laws of the universe, and tell me,” puts in clemenceau, “when the pot owes his bill to the potter.” all this and the farewell benediction which the author vouchsafes to the human plaything of all these pre-ordered decisions of society do not get us much further, even though after so many mischances he may live on only to appreciate more thoroughly “the sublime indifference of things eternal.” that is not very consolatory by way of a materialist viaticum. but it is the best clemenceau can give.
none the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy, illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great effect. the commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges, priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. here and there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate, so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which[133] they had been hitherto satisfied. with no phase of french life is clemenceau better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the french peasantry. thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. the small proprietor is on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. the cherry-eater “had despoiled him of two-ha’porth of fruit!” it justified prompt execution of the thief by the owner. that such small robbery did not at once give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point of view that the peasant can never take. why? because of the penal servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to death. it is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal saying, “this is mine.”
“the peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love. bowed, he knows only the earth. his activity has but one end and object: the soil. to acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh and rapacious. he speaks of my land, my field, my stones, my thistles. to till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of his entire physical or intellectual effort. amusement for him: not a bit of it. he has no other resource than to console himself for the disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morrow. he is at war with the seasons, the elements, the sun, rain, hail, wind, frost. he fights against the neighbouring intruder, the invading cattle, the birds, the caterpillars, the parasites, the thousand-and-one unknown phenomena which, without any apparent reason, bring down upon him all sorts of unlooked-for ills.
“then has he risen at dawn for nothing, badly fed, badly clothed, sweating in the sun, shivering in the wind and the rain, exhausting his energies against things which resist his utmost[134] efforts? do sowing, manuring, labour and the pouring out of life all, too, go for nothing, without rest, without leisure, without any thought but this: i toiled and suffered yesterday, i shall toil and suffer to-morrow? and all this is balanced by no pleasures but drunkenness and lust. no theatres, no books, no shows, no enjoyments of any kind. hard to others, hard to himself, everything is hard around him.”
such is the peasant of western france. though the peasant of the south is of a livelier and happier disposition on the surface, both are at bottom the same. and france is still in the main rural france as clemenceau himself impressed upon me many years ago. that is the influence which holds in check the advanced proletariat of the towns and mining districts. they can see nothing outside private property, property, property: yet it is this very unregulated individual ownership which forces them to fight out their existence against the hardships of nature with inefficient tools, insufficient manure and no adequate arrangements for marketing the produce they have for sale. high prices and a few advantages gained have somewhat ameliorated the lot of the peasant, but it is still a hard, depressing existence which cannot be made really human and happy for the great majority under the conditions of to-day. the only boon the peasant has is that he is not under the direct sway of the capitalist exploiter. what that means in the mines clemenceau had an opportunity of seeing very close, as a member of the commission appointed to examine into the coal-mines of anzin in 1884. he tells of his experience ten years later in one of the pits he descended. “never go down a coal-mine,” wrote lord chesterfield to his son. “you can always say you have been below, and nobody can contradict you.” clemenceau did not follow this cynical advice. he went down, “and after having waded through water, bent double, for hundreds upon hundreds of yards through dripping scales which hang from the upper stratum, i crawled on hands and knees to a nice little vein twenty inches thick. on this seam human beings were at work, lying on their side, bringing[135] down coal which fell on their faces and replacing it continuously by timber in order not to be crushed by the upper surface. you must not neglect this part of the work!” he was not allowed to talk with the men themselves, and when they came to interview him secretly they implored him not to let the manager or the employers know, or they would be discharged at once! the old story of miners in every country which even the strongest trade unions are as yet scarcely able to cope with, though the tyranny in french mines has been checked since the time clemenceau wrote. these and similar cases of oppression on the part of the capitalist class caused clemenceau to support socialists more and more in their demands for limitation of the then unrestricted powers of individual employers and “anonymous” companies. so, too, individualist as he was, he wrote article after article in defence of the right of the men to strike against grievous oppression, holding that the combination of the workers was more than sufficiently handicapped by the fact that they were bound to imperil their own subsistence as well as the maintenance of their wives and children by going on strike at all. this argument he applied to all strikes in organised industries.
but clemenceau naturally found himself drawn into bitter antagonism to the doctrine of laissez-faire and the law of supply and demand. “you say all must bow down to them. i contend all must revolt against them.” “the individual struggle for existence is only a great laissez-faire! far from being liberty, it is the triumph of violence, it is barbarism itself. the man who mastered the first slave founded a new system . . . so completely that after some ages of this rule a physiocrat overlooking it all would have sagely pronounced: slavery is the law of human societies. this with the same amount of truth as he says to-day: the law of supply and demand is an immutable ordinance. and, for all that, the supreme irony of fate has decreed that the first slave-driver was at the same time the first sower of the seed of liberty, of justice. for by enslaving men he created a social relation, a relation different[136] from that enjoined by the primitive form of the struggle for existence: kill, eat, destroy. henceforth man was bound to man. the social body was formed.” man had to discover the law governing the new relation, and he found it at last in the first flashes of justice and liberty. “what, then, is this your laissez-faire, your law of supply and demand, but the pure and simple expression of force? right overcomes force: that is the principle of civilisation. your law once formulated, let us set to work against barbarism!”
all that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and the anarchist chaos which they connote. but here again clemenceau, with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding historic and economic theory—the sociologic theory which scientific socialism supplies. it was not justice or liberty which created slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social necessity. the cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to material revolution.
holding the opinions he did, it was inevitable that clemenceau should put the case of the anarchists such as vaillant, henry, ravachot. they were the victims of a system. they could not rise as a portion of a collective attack against the unjust class dominion and economic servitude which crushed them and their fellows down into interminable toil with no reward for their lifelong sufferings. so they made war as individuals for anarchy. vive l’anarchie! were the last words of henry. the man was a fanatic. “the crime seems to me odious. i make no excuse for it,” says clemenceau, but he objects to the capital penalty. “henry’s crime was that of a savage. the deed of society seems to me a loathsome vengeance.” clemenceau compares, too, the anarchists of dynamite to the would-be assassin damien, so hideously tortured before death. “my motive,” said he, “was the misery which exists in three-quarters of the kingdom. i acted alone, because i thought alone.” the anarchist, asked by his mother[137] why he had, become an anarchist, answered, “because i saw the suffering of the great majority of human beings.” vaillant, henry, caserio and their like are overmastered by the same idea as damien. they kill members of the king caste of our society of to-day in order to scare the bourgeoisie into justice. there is no arguing with honest fanatics of this type. whether society is justified in guillotining or hanging them is another matter. that their method is futile, as all history shows, gives society the right if it so chooses to regard it also as criminal.
the above is all argument and criticism put with almost savage vigour. but clemenceau used likewise the lighter touch of french irony. thus a wretched family of father, mother and six children, tramping along the high road near paris, found some coal which had dropped from a wagon long since out of sight. they pick up these bits of chance fuel as a godsend. they have gleaned after the reapers. straightway, the story of boaz and ruth occurs to clemenceau, of boaz and his descendant of nazareth, who is the god of europe to-day. the hebrew boaz, the landowner of old, gladly leaves the wheat-ears to be gleaned by ruth and marries her into the bargain. the christian boaz, the coal-owner of our time, gets the males of the distressed family of coal-gleaners six days’ imprisonment. such is progress through the centuries! the moral of the whole story is brilliantly touched in.
so again in his comment on the catastrophe at the charity bazaar. it was the rank and religiosity of the persons burnt alive which rendered the tragedy so much more terrible than if the crowd thus incinerated had only consisted of common people! it was the cream of french piety that was there sacrificed. quite an ecclesiastical and political propaganda was developed from their ashes. the spirit of class made these accidental victims of gross carelessness martyrs of christian heroism. yet “if i go to dance at a charity ball, paying twenty francs for my ticket, and expire on the spot, i am not on that account a hero. . . . these gatherings are not exactly places of torture. people laugh, flirt, and amuse themselves,[138] it is an opportunity to display fine dresses, and the charity sale has supplemented the opéra comique for marriage-provoking interviews superintended by good grandmothers. . . . here is class distinction in action. observe these aristocratic young gentlemen beating with their canes and kicking their frightened womenkind in their cowardly attempt to get out of danger. then see the servants rushing in to save them! look also at the workmen by chance on the spot risking their lives with true heroism, the plumber piquet, who saved twenty people and, though much burnt himself, went back to his work-shop without a word.” the contrast is striking. it is not drawn by a socialist.
then the criticism on the german fête in commemoration of the victory of sedan. “william ii is obliged to keep his people in training, to militarise them unceasingly, body and soul. . . . in spite of the handsome protests of most of the socialist leaders, we may be sure that it is in very truth the soul of germany whose innermost exultation is manifested in these numberless jubilations which have be-flagged every village in the empire. . . . it is the curse of the triumphs of brute force to leave room in the soul of the conqueror for nothing but a blind faith in settlement by violence.” then follows a prophetic summary of what must be the inevitable consequence of this consecration of brutal dominion inspired by the hateful instincts of barbarism, which together prepare to use in central europe the most efficient means of murder at the disposal of scientific civilisation. the ethics of the nation are being deliberately corrupted for the realisation of the imperial policy!
thus clemenceau, like others of us who knew the old germany well, and had watched its sad hypnotisation by the spirit of ruthless militarism, foresaw what was coming more than twenty-five years ago. and thus anticipating and reflecting, he chanced to see on one of the monuments of paris illumined by the sun, “the german empire falls.” it was dated 1805! “short years pass. what remains of these follies? if law[139] and right outraged, reason flouted, wisdom contemned must blight our hopes, as your warlike demonstrations too clearly prognosticate, then for you, men of germany, the inscription of the carrousel is patient and bides its time.
“and yet two great rival peoples worthy to understand one another could nobly make ready a nobler destiny.”
there you have the statesman and idealist as well as the clear-sighted journalist. clemenceau saw the storm-cloud ever menacing and ready to break upon france. he warned his countrymen of their danger, bade them prepare to meet it, but hoped continuously that his forecasts might prove wholly erroneous. jaurès unfortunately, with all his vast ability, was too idealist and far too credulous. hence his great influence was thrown against the due preparation of his own country; he did his utmost to support the anti-navy men even in great britain, and only began to recognise how completely mistaken he had been just before he was assassinated by the modern ravaillac of religionist reaction. to anticipate fraternity in a world of conflict is to help the aggressor and to court disaster. this clemenceau the radical knew: to this the french socialists shut their minds.
it was natural that the vendéen by birth, the parisian by adoption, should feel himself drawn rather to the ideals of the french capital, which in matters of intelligence and art is also the capital of europe, rather than to the narrow spirit of the breton countryside which he has so vigorously sketched. in his writings as in his political activities this preference, this admiration find forcible expression. from the days of julian the great pagan emperor down to the french revolution and thence onwards, clemenceau briefly traces the development of the city by the seine, the french renaissance and the university of paris, by the influence of the writings of montaigne—“this city in right of which i am a frenchman”—and rabelais: this meeting-place of europe, this central commune of the planet proposed by clootz, the prussian idealist, becomes in the words of the same foreign enthusiast “a mag[140]nificent assembly of the peoples of the west.” we may forgive the french statesman his unbounded enthusiasm for the paris where he has spent the whole of his active life. “one phrase alone, ‘the rights of man,’ has uplifted all heads. lafayette brings back from america the victory that france sent thither and straightway the great battle is joined between paris of the french revolution and the coalition of things of the past.” “true, we have measured
a la hauteur des bonds la profondeur des chutes,
“but at least we have striven, and we abate not a jot of our generous ambitions. thus decrees the tradition of paris . . . that paris which now as ever holds in her hands the key to supreme victory.”
