Clemenceau Over Here and Over There

A Discussion of the Purposes and Results of the Tiger's Visit to America

WALTER LIPPMANN

THE desire to stage-manage history is an increasing obsession of our times. But the attempt is usually a failure, even as an illusion, because it is so hard to create illusion when half the audience is behind the scenes.

That, perhaps, is the main reason why Clemenceau's tour left behind it no sharply focussed impression. Few people who stopped to consider the matter believed that the official fiction explained the curious contradictions of the whole performance, explained the Tiger who behaved like a lamb, or explained the coldness of France toward a plea made in behalf of France.

Certainly the fiction as published to the world was not credible. Nobody with an instinct for realities will believe a tale like this: The Father of Victory was sitting quietly in his cottage by the sea. One morning he picked up his newspaper, and there he read that people were saying France was militaristic. He read and he pondered. He thought of Jean Louis the Peasant and the gentle cure of the parish. France militaristic! How terribly untrue. But still he sat in his cottage by the sea. Again on another day he picked up his newspaper, and there in black and white was another terrible piece of news. Rudyard Kipling had told Clare Sheridan that America's soul was lost. He could sit no longer in his cottage by the sea. He must go to America.

A Legend and a Symbol

AMERICA was glad to see him, but it was not prepared to believe in fairies. This old Goth who descends in direct line from Rabelais, Montaigne, and Voltaire was known to have too much of the juice and salt of human experience in him for the role of an ingenue in world affairs. You don't cast Madonna Lisa for Mary Pickford, nor Dr. Faustus for Peter Pan. You don't serve vintage wine as lemon pop, nor Clemenceau as Bryan.

The public spectacle was inherently unreal. People gazed upon Clemenceau, and were conscious that they were gazing upon an historical figure. They remembered the legend which has gathered about him, and were glad that they would be able to say they had seen the hero of it. But most of all they tried to realize that he was strong enough at eighty-one to undertake an exhausting journey, and this gave them a renewed confidence in themselves. For, after all, political events lie very much on the surface of human life, and to be strong at eighty-one is more significant than all the treaties and guarantees that ever bored and complicated mankind. The vitality of this ancient meant more to the crowds that gathered to watch him than anything he could possibly have said.

What he had to say was certain to be disappointing in the light of his reputation. He was the Tiger who had destroyed eighteen French cabinets, two Central European Empires, and, according to the popular impression, one Wilsonian peace. If he was to seem real in America, there was a very definite Clemenceau character to which he had to conform. People expected to see claws, and instead they were shown a man making a plea so simple that it sounded naive, and a man who, except for a few flashes which were hardly noticeable, was absolutely scrupulous of all the sensibilities and all the proprieties. Clemenceau's conduct was technically above criticism from the official point of view. His bitterest enemy in France could find nothing on which to hang an objection to him. He kept away from French politics, from American politics, from personalities, and from all practical suggestions. This was perfectly correct and it would have been very dull, if the man uttering these truisms had not been such a dazzling celebrity.

Two interpretations were generally put upon the flatness of his speeches. Some people said he was eighty-one years old, and others said that he must be playing some game they did not understand.

The explanation on the basis of age is, I am certain, quite incorrect. If Clemenceau's powers have declined, they must once have been astonishing. For when he was off the platform he was as nimble-minded as men are likely to be, not given to reminiscence or to despair or to hope, but intensely alert to an experience which had taught him always to remember the complications of ambition, and interest, and manoeuver. I came away with the impression that while he undoubtedly loved his cottage by the sea, he liked even better the prospect of battle. And I think he started for America in the first instance primarily because he needed the exercise. It was perhaps a little monotonously idyllic in that cottage by the sea. For Clemenceau has known too many excitements to abandon them voluntarily. He could swear off politics quite sincerely, but so long as he exists, he will have to have just another and just another and just another little drink.

It was some impulse of an old habit like that which at the beginning made him accept the invitations from America. But once a journey was decided upon, it was bound to become a political event. For Clemenceau has been so deeply entangled for fifty years in the mesh of French politics, that he cannot move without causing a political commotion. Intentionally or not his mission at once became charged with the factions and antagonisms of Paris. His followers speculated on what there was in his trip for them. His enemies to the right, the clericals, the militarists, the royalists, Poincaré and Foch and Weygand were on guard at once; his enemies to the left, Caillaux and his friends were infuriated at the prospect of the Tiger's return to public life.

The Storm in France

SO there broke about him a perfect hell-cat fury both in the ministerial and in the radical press. Why? Because an old man sitting in a cottage by the sea was going to plead the case of France? No, because the most dangerous parliamentarian in the history of the French Republic was again at large. Because the volcano was not after all extinct. Because the Poincaré cabinet, already rottenripe to fall, feared Clemenceau to the point of hysteria, feared him most of all because he might be returning to public life as a national figure rather than as a partisan figure.

So in their hearts his enemies wished him the worst of luck when he took ship for America. They hoped above all things that he would be indiscreet. If only he would say something in the exuberance of his oratory which could be described as disloyal! Anything would do, if only it could be made to appear that Clemenceau had lowered the prestige of France or obstructed the Poincare Government in the midst of delicate negotiations.

The old serpent understood this perfectly. Nothing showed so clearly how thoroughly he was in possession of all his political wits as the flatness and dullness to which he held himself in his American addresses. To be sure he lost lots of applause that he might otherwise have gained, but he was altogether too disillusioned to count applause as an important factor in international politics. Hi' was a genuine realist about his trip. He knew that he could not talk America into a change of policy. No one with his sense of irony could imagine that. He was certain, on the other hand, that the logic of facts would force Mr. Harding back into Europe, and he saw that it would do no one any harm to lend the inevitable a helping hand. He used the utmost political sagacity in that judgment, as events have shown. For the conclusion of his trip coincided almost exactly with Mr. Harding's abandonment of the isolation policy of 1920. And now who will ever be able to prove in France whether his trip was the cause of the change, or coincident with it?

His Influence in America

I am inclined myself to think that he wielded a greater influence over here than is generally realized. It is true that people stopped reading his speeches, and probably never read the articles he signed, and that the editorial comment dwindled off at the end. Nevertheless, I think he impressed perhaps a few hundred minds sufficiently to push them over the threshold of their hesitations. I think he influenced the sources of influence a good deal, and helped at a critical moment to make a latent current of opinion overt.

At any rate, in politics, results arc more sensational than reasons, and coincidences are almost as effective as consequences. He is returning to France, as this is written, with a record that is officially impeccable, at the precise moment when the Chinese wall of American foreign policy has been breached. It is a triumph of luck, if you like, but enough of a triumph to have struck his enemies dumb. They must be calculating feverishly how to counteract the blow which he is able to deliver.

For while Clemenceau may be no man himself to make the settlement which Europe needs, while almost certainly he will not take office again, while his lieutenants may themselves inspire no confidence, the fact remains that in the political game within France, Clemenceau is one of the most dangerous opponents of the militarist-clerical reaction which governs French policy. The ominous silence which greeted his return to France implied no lack of interest. It indicated the fear which the old man inspires.