23 chapters
10 hour read
Selected Chapters
23 chapters
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
I began to write this book in June. We were then holding our breath as we looked on, after the disasters of Cambrai and St. Quentin, upon the British troops still fighting desperately against superior numbers and defending the Channel Ports “with their backs to the wall” and barely left with room to manœuvre. The enemy was at the same time seriously threatening Amiens and Epernay, and the possible withdrawal of the French Government from Paris was being again discussed. It was a trying four mont
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
We are all accustomed to think of La Vendée as that Province of France which is most deeply imbued with tradition, legend and religion. Even in this period of almost universal scepticism and free thought, the peasants of La Vendée keep tight hold of their ancient ideas, in which the pagan superstitions of long ago are curiously interwoven with the fading Catholicism of to-day. Nowhere in France are the ceremonies of the Church more devoutly observed; nowhere, in spite of the spread of modern edu
16 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
Paris of the early sixties was a very different city from the Paris of to-day. It was still in great part the Paris of the old time, on both banks of the Seine. Its Haussmannisation had barely begun. The Palais Royal retained much of its ancient celebrity for the cuisine of its restaurants and the brilliancy of its shops. But to get to it direct from what is now the Place de l’Opéra was a voyage of discovery. You went upstairs and downstairs, through narrow, dirty streets, until, after missing y
11 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Early in 1866, Clemenceau, after a visit to England, crossed the Atlantic for a somewhat prolonged stay in the United States. He could scarcely have chosen a better time for making acquaintance with America and the Americans. The United States had but just emerged from the Civil War, which, notwithstanding the furious bitterness evoked on both sides during the struggle, eventually consolidated the Great Republic as nothing else could; though, owing to the behaviour of “society” in England, the t
21 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
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
22 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
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 gu
19 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
Medici, Mazarin, Riquetti-Mirabeau, Buonaparte, Gambetta—these names recall the great influence which Italians have had upon French affairs. Few, if any, nations have allowed persons of foreign extraction to lead them as France permitted the five recorded above. Much, too, as these Italians were affected by their French surroundings, there is something in them all quite different from what we regard as distinctively French intelligence and general capacity. Possibly that gave them their power of
28 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
When a political leader in the course of some fifteen years of Parlamentary life has upset, or has helped to upset, no fewer than eighteen administrations and has always refused to take office himself, that leader is likely to have created a few enemies. When, in addition to these feats of destruction, he has during the same period secured the nomination and election of three Presidents of the Republic and has thus proved an insuperable obstacle to the realisation of the legitimate ambitions of
28 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
The relations of Clemenceau to General Boulanger form an important though comparatively brief episode in the career of the French statesman. Boulanger was Clemenceau’s cousin, and in his dealings with this ambitious man he did not show that remarkable skill and judgment of character which distinguished him in regard to Carnot and Loubet, whose high qualities Clemenceau was the first to recognise and make use of in the interest of the Republic. Boulanger was a good soldier in the lower grades of
19 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
The great Panama Canal Affair was only one of many financial scandals which seriously damaged the good fame of the French Republic founded upon the fall of the Empire, and consecrated by the collapse of the Commune of Paris. But this Panama scandal was by far the most important and most nefarious, alike in respect to the amount of money involved, the position and character of the people mixed up in it, and the wide ramifications of wholesale corruption throughout the political world that were in
38 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
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 ar
25 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
M. Clemenceau had a ready pen as well as a very bitter one, and he did not confine himself to articles on politics and sociology. Besides La Mêlée Sociale , of which I have given some account in the previous chapter, he published the following books in order within eight years: Le Grand Pan , a volume of descriptive essays; Les Plus Forts , a novel; Au Fil des Jours , and Les Embuscades de la Vie , which were, in the main, collections of sketches and tales. At the same time he did a great deal o
19 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
In December, 1894, Captain Dreyfus, a member of the General Staff, was found guilty of treason by a Court Martial. The Court was unanimous. He was condemned to be sent to the Ile du Diable, there to expiate his offence by the prolonged torture of imprisonment and solitary confinement, in a tropical climate. It was a terrible punishment. But the offence of betraying France to Germany, committed by an officer entrusted with the military secrets of the Republic, was a terrible one too. It seemed so
20 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
This trial of Zola and l’Aurore was the greatest crisis in the long succession of crises which centred themselves round Dreyfus. The more serious the evidence against the conduct of the Court Martial and the honour of the army, the more truculent became the attitude of the militarists, Catholics, anti-Semites and their following. Passion swept away every vestige of judgment or reason. There was no pretence of fair play to the defendants. Inside the Court, which was packed to overflowing, inartic
16 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
At this time Clemenceau, owing to his apparently resolute determination not to take office, no matter how many Ministries he might successfully bring to naught, had got into a back-water. He had become permanently Senator for the Department of the Var in 1902, a startling, almost incomprehensible move when his continued furious opposition to that body is remembered. However, having thus made unto himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, he found their “eternal habitations” a not unpleas
59 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
Strikes and anarchist troubles, however, formidable as they were in the North and in the South, were by no means the only serious difficulties which Clemenceau had to cope with, first as Minister of the Interior and then as Premier. The danger from Germany, as he well knew, was ever present. Anxious as France was to avoid misunderstandings which might easily lead to war, eager as the Radical leader might be to enlarge upon the folly and wickedness of strife between two contiguous civilised peopl
33 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
It is easy to be tolerant of the Catholic Church and Catholics in a Protestant country; though even in Great Britain, and of course only too sadly in the North of Ireland, there are times when the bitterness inherited from the past makes itself felt, on slight provocation, in the present. At such times of sectarian outburst we get some idea ourselves of what religious hatred really means, and can form a conception of the truly fraternal eagerness to immolate the erring brethren, nominally of the
23 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
Clemenceau flung himself out of office in an unreasonable fit of temper. A man of his time of life, at sixty-eight years of age, with his record behind him, had no right to have any personal temper at all, when the destinies of his country had been placed in his hands. Probably he would admit this himself to-day. But, during his exceptionally strenuous period of office, he had, as we have seen, more than once shown an impulsiveness and even an irritability that were not consonant with his genera
26 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
The events of the great war, from 1914 onwards, are too recent and too deeply graven on all our minds to call for lengthy recital or criticism. What many, if not most, people believed to be outside the limits of calculation occurred. The German armies commenced their campaign by outraging the neutrality of Belgium, which, in 1870, even Bismarck had respected. In a few days they crashed down the great Belgian fortresses, which capable experts had calculated would check the Teutonic advance for at
18 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
During the whole of the war, as for many years before the Germans began their great campaign of aggression, every country with which the Fatherland might in any way be concerned was permeated with German agents and German spies. Great Britain was one of the nations specially favoured in this respect. The ramifications of their systematic interpenetration of the social, political, financial, commercial and even journalistic departments of our public life have never yet been fully exposed; nor, ce
45 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
In the endeavour to give a connected statement of the very dangerous German offensive, conducted by their spies and agents in Paris, at the most critical period of the whole war, I have been obliged to some extent to anticipate events in order to show Clemenceau’s share in the exposure of this organised treachery. By 1917, as already recorded, anti-patriotic and pro-German intrigues in Paris and France had become more and more harmful to that “sacred unity” which had been constituted to present
25 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
“Georges Clemenceau, President of the Council and Minister of War, and Marshal Foch, General-in-Chief of the Allied armies, have well deserved the gratitude of the country.” That is the Resolution which, by the unanimous vote of the Senate of the French Republic, will be placed in a conspicuous position in every Town Hall and in the Council Chamber of every commune throughout France. The Senators of France are not easily roused to enthusiasm. What they thus unanimously voted, in the absence of C
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
WORKS BY GEORGES CLEMENCEAU.
WORKS BY GEORGES CLEMENCEAU.
De la Génération des Eléments Anatomiques. 8vo. Paris: Baillière et fils. 1865. Notions d’Anatomie et de Physiologie Générale. De la Génération des Eléments Anatomiques. Précédée d’une introduction par M. Charles Robin. 8vo. Paris: Germer Baillière. 1867. J. Stuart Mill: Auguste Comte et le Positivisme . 18mo. Paris: Germer Baillière. 1868. Alcau. 1893. L’Amnistie devant le Parlement. Discours Chambre des Députés, 16 Mai, 1876. 18mo. Paris: Imp. Wittersheim. 1876. Affaires Egyptiennes. Discours
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter