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 control. They had that faculty of detachment, of looking at the situation from without, which is so invaluable to anyone who has to play a great part in the world. Some of them could so far survey, as well as enter into, the peculiarities of the French mind that they could play upon its weaknesses as well as call forth its strength. Yet, with all their genius, the four men named failed to accomplish what they set out to achieve, and none left behind him amid his own immediate followers those who were capable of carrying on his work.

LÉon Gambetta had but fourteen years of active political life, and during only eleven of those years was he in a position to make himself seriously felt. But what an amazing career this was of the grocer’s boy of Cahors who stirred all France to enthusiastic support or ferocious denunciation between 1871 and 1882! When William Morris died, the doctor who attended him was asked what he died of. “He died of being William Morris,” was the reply. Although Gambetta’s death was due to a pistol-shot received under circumstances never fully explained, it may be said that he also died of being LÉon Gambetta. For his inner fires had burnt the man out. He crowded all the excitement and passions of a long lifetime into those stormy eleven years, and without some account of him and his efforts for the foundation of the Republic the story of Clemenceau is not complete.

Born in 1848 and enabled to come to Paris by the touching self-sacrifice of a maiden aunt who believed that her nephew’s confidence in his destiny to do great things would be realised, Gambetta was soon regarded as a leader among the young men of the Quartier Latin, who were in full revolt against the Empire. He distinguished himself by his easy-going, rough-and-tumble mode of life, his carelessness about study of the law which was to be his means of earning a livelihood, and his perfervid eloquence in the political circles which he frequented. Lawyer, journalist, bohemian orator of the clubs, strongly anti-Imperialist, he had much personal magnetism, but was not generally recognised as a man of exceptional ability. The few cases he had had in the Courts did not give him any considerable standing. Such was Gambetta when a number of Republican journalists were arrested on November 12th, 1868, for starting a subscription to erect a monument to M. Baudin, the Republican deputy who had been shot down in cold blood during Louis Napoleon’s massacre of the people of Paris on December 2nd, 1851—seventeen years before. Among these prisoners was the famous Delescluze, then editor of the RÉveil. His counsel was LÉon Gambetta. Gambetta’s speech was not merely a defence of his client, it was a scathing indictment of the Empire, from its foundation on the ruin of the Republic of 1848 by the coup d’État onwards. “Who,” the advocate asked, “were the men who ‘saved’ France at the cost of the death or transportation or exile of all her most eminent citizens? They were, to quote Corneille, ‘un tas d’hommes perdus de dettes et de crimes.’ These are the sort of people who for centuries have slashed down institutions and laws. Against them the human conscience is powerless, in spite of the sublime march-past of the martyrs who protest in the name of religion destroyed, of morality outraged, of equity crushed under the jackboot of the soldier. This is not salvation: it is assassination.” And this was no longer a press prosecution: it was the Emperor and his set of scoundrels who were now on their trial before the people of France and Europe.

The speech gave Gambetta great popularity and the opening into public life he desired. The cause itself was lost before the trial began. Delescluze was fined and imprisoned. “You may condemn us, but you can neither dishonour us nor overthrow us,” cried Gambetta. From that time forward he was regarded as a new force on the side of the Republic. His behaviour in the Corps LÉgislatif, to which he was soon afterwards elected, justified this opinion. When the disasters of the Empire came Gambetta was one of the first to cry for Napoleon’s abdication and the establishment of the Republic, taking an active part in the foundation of the new order in Paris. It may be said that he worked side by side, though never hand in hand, with Clemenceau.

But those scenes of the downfall of the Empire in the capital, dramatic and exciting as they were, could bear no comparison with his bold escape from beleaguered Paris in a balloon and the magnificent effort he made to rouse the Provinces against the invaders. He failed to turn the tide of German victories, but he prevented the shameful surrender without a fight for the French Republic which many would have been glad to accept, and he, more than any other man, kept the flag flying, when Legitimists, Orleanists and Buonapartists were all doing their utmost to set on foot a reactionary government against the best interests of France. All this is part of the common history of the time. But we are apt, in looking back over that period of his activities, to underrate the almost superhuman energy he displayed, to attach too much importance to the mistakes he inevitably made, and to forget that his own countrymen were among his worst enemies in the work he undertook. Also, if the Empire had left the Republic one single really first-rate general at the disposal of France, the result might have been very different from what it was. There is such a thing as luck in human affairs, and luck was dead against Gambetta. All the more credit to him for never losing heart even in the face of continuous disasters and even betrayals. First as leading member of the Government of Defence, and then as virtual Dictator of France, Gambetta bridged over for the time being the bitter antagonism which separated Paris, the besieged seat of government, from the rest of France. Immediately on his arrival at Tours he created a new National Government out of the unpromising elements gathered together almost accidentally there. The fall of Metz and the threatened starvation of Paris, which might lead to surrender at any moment, made Gambetta’s own position desperate. The Paris Government, which apparently looked only to Paris, had failed to make a resolute effort to break through the lines of the German investment before Metz fell, and then lost heart altogether, refusing even to listen to any remonstrance from outside against a humiliating peace. Gambetta never gave way. Arrived at Bordeaux, he stuck to his text of carrying on the war, having in the meantime vigorously denounced the Government in Paris for its weakness. He and his fellow-delegates were deaf to the counsels of despair brought red-hot by members of the Government; but at last, overwhelmed by circumstances he could not control, the young Dictator resigned. After Paris had surrendered there was really no further hope, and those who voted in the new Assembly, as did Louis Blanc, Clemenceau and others, for the continuance of the war, did so more by way of protest against the apathy which pervaded the whole Assembly, and because foreign intervention in favour of France and against Germany seemed possible even thus late in the day, than because they saw at the moment any prospect of success.

Thus France lay prostrate at the feet of Germany, but at least Gambetta and the Republicans who acted with him showed their confidence that she would rise again. They were not responsible for the collapse of the French nation: undismayed by defeat they believed in Republican France of the near future.

Gambetta had created new armies out of disarray and disorder, and he had also aroused a fresh spirit which rose superior to disaster. The victory of the Republic in years to come over all the forces of reaction was largely due to the work done during Gambetta’s four months of dictatorship.

Universal Suffrage, General Secular Education, No Second Chamber, the Republican form of Government: those were the principal measures advocated by the extreme Left of the National Assembly, and these were advocated by Gambetta both at Bordeaux and when he took his seat at Versailles as one of the Deputies for Paris. But the Royalists were still in a majority, and were determined to take every advantage of their position while power still remained in their hands. Their object was to render Republicanism hateful. The object of their opponents was to show that no other form of government was possible and to prevent any other form from being established. Now that the Republic has been maintained for more than forty-seven years, under all sorts of difficult and dangerous circumstances, the obstacles which stood in its way at the start are sometimes under-estimated. Continuous agitation was needed to keep the country fully alive to the intrigues of the Royalists and Catholics. It was essential to put the misdeeds of the Empire and the real objects of the monarchists constantly before the public. No man in France was better qualified for this work than Gambetta, and he did it well, so well that the whole reactionary party was infuriated against him. There was no opportunism about him at this period, beyond the necessary adaptation of means to ends under circumstances which rendered immediate success impossible.

M. Thiers, in consequence of his horrible suppression of the Commune, was by far the most powerful public man in the country. He was acting, though a Constitutional Monarchist, as trustee for a provisional form of government which could not be distinguished from a conservative Republic. The longer this continued the better the chance of obtaining a Government which would not be conservative. It was of great importance, therefore, to keep M. Thiers on the Republican side, and this was made easier by the action of M. Thiers’ own old friends. So antagonistic was their attitude to the former Minister of Louis Philippe that, even when Gambetta supported the ex-Mayor of Lyons, a fervid Radical, M. Barodet, against M. Thiers’ eminent friend and coadjutor M. de Remusat, as representative of Paris, and the former won by 40,000 votes, Thiers never wavered in his decision to keep away from any direct connection with the monarchists. They therefore determined to upset the President, did so by a majority of 26 votes in the Assembly, and elected a President of their own in the person of Marshal MacMahon. This was on May 24th, 1873.

Reaction had won at Versailles. It remained to be seen whether it would win in the country. A “Ministry of Combat” for reaction, headed by the Duc de Broglie, was formed, and a Ministry of Combat it certainly proved to be. They were allowed no peace by their opponents, who never ceased to attack them all round, and they met these persistent assaults by attempts secretly to cajole and suborn public opinion. So the great combat went on. The majority remained a majority and rejected the Republic. It was useless. But in his anxiety to win speedily in conjunction with M. Thiers, Gambetta himself and his followers practised that very opportunism which he had previously denounced. A non-democratic Senate, which had always been opposed by Republicans, was enacted as an essential part of the Republican Constitution, and on February 25th, 1875, the French Republic was firmly established as the legal form of government by the very same majority that, in the hope of rendering any such disaster to monarchy impossible, had made Marshal MacMahon President and the Duc de Broglie Premier.

But it was a truncated Republic that Gambetta had thus obtained. What he had gained by political compromise he had lost in the enthusiasm of principle. A leader who desires to achieve great reforms must always keep in close touch with the fanatics of his party. They alone can be relied upon in periods of crisis, they alone refuse to regard politics merely as a remunerative profession. The compromise—for men of principle compromise spells surrender—of February 25th, 1875, was destined to be fatal to the democratic parliamentary dictatorship which Gambetta might have achieved by common consent of his party, had he pursued his original policy of democratic Republicanism through and through. He stunted the growth of his own progeny by helping to establish a Republicanised Empire. No doubt this averted friction for the time being, but it slackened the rate of progress, placed obstacles in the path of democracy, and destroyed public enthusiasm. By one of the strange ironies of political life, however, it so chanced that, nearly thirty years later, Clemenceau himself owed his return to Parliament to the institution of that same Senate the creation of which he had always resolutely opposed.

But during these years of reconstruction from 1871 to 1875 Clemenceau had been excluded from the Assembly and actively engaged in the work of the Municipal Council of Paris. There he did admirable service in consolidating the organisation of Parisian municipal life to which he had been instrumental in giving expression in legal shape as Deputy for Montmartre. Paris had become the bugbear of all the reactionists and law-and-order men. The capital was constantly referred to by them as if the last acts of despair of the irresponsible extremists of the Commune were the habitual diversions of the Parisian populace when allowed free play for the realisation of their own aspirations. The Parisians, in fact, according to these persons, were burning with the desire to destroy their own city in order to avenge themselves upon their provincial detractors and enemies. It was important to show, therefore, not only that Paris could manage her own affairs coolly and capably, but also that she could take a progressive line of her own which might give the lead to other French cities in more than one direction. This was precisely what the Municipal Council did, and Clemenceau, by his constant attendance and the continuous pressure he exerted as an active member of the Left of that body, prevented the Council from being used at any time as a centre of reactionist intrigue. By this means also he strengthened his personal influence in his own democratic district as well as in Paris as a whole. He took care likewise all the world should know that on the matter of the full restitution of Parisian rights and the return of the Assembly to the capital he was as determined as ever, and that in the affairs of general politics he was and always would be a thoroughgoing Radical Republican. Thus he was building up for himself outside the Chamber a reputation as a capable municipal administrator as well as a fearless champion of the public rights of the great city he had made his home. At the same time his local popularity, due to his thorough knowledge of social conditions and his advocacy of municipal improvements of every kind, added to his gratuitous service as doctor of the poor, gave him an indisputable claim upon the votes of the people when, after having become President of the Municipal Council, he should decide to offer himself for re-election to the Assembly.

And from February 25th, 1875, onwards, matters were taking such a turn that the presence of a thoroughly well-informed, determined, active and fearless representative of Paris became necessary. A leader was wanted on the extreme Left who should loyally support the moderate Republicans when they were going forward and have the courage to attack them when they seemed inclined to hesitate or go back. The success of the conservative compromise in the constitution of the Republic had strengthened the belief of the reactionary majority in the Assembly in their own power under the new conditions. Gambetta’s own moderation deceived them as to the real position in the country. They began to think that the Republicans were afraid not only of how they would fare in the elections to the newly constituted Senate, but that the result of the General Elections which must shortly be held would be unfavourable to their cause. The Prime Minister, M. Buffet, aided and abetted by the President, MacMahon, who never forgot that the members of the Right were his real friends, made full use of the Exceptional Laws and the State of Siege, which was still in force, to show the Republicans plainly what a reactionary majority would mean. The “Conservatives” and Imperialists had things all their own way. Democracy became a byword and Radicalism a vain thing.

With the Ministry at their command and the President in their hands, they needed only to obtain the control of the Senate to have the people of France entirely at their mercy. Then, with the army favourable, with whole cohorts of anti-Republican officials at their service, they might postpone the General Elections, maintain the state of siege permanently, and prepare everything for a monarchical restoration or a Buonapartist plÉbiscite. L’Empire rÉpublicanisÉ indeed!

M. Buffet, within a few months of the declaration of the Republic as the real form of government of France, spoke quite in this sense. Happily the forces of reaction fell out among themselves. They could not trust one another in any sharing of the booty which might fall to the general lot. Therefore, when the time came for nomination and election of the seventy-five members of the Senate to be elected by the Assembly, their intestine differences lost them the battle: one portion of their motley group even went over to the enemy. So the Republicans actually obtained a majority by the votes of their opponents. In this way the danger of the Senate as a whole being used against the Republic was averted and the Radicals had secured the first point in the political game. Yet, in spite of this preliminary success, the reactionists had a majority of the Senate of 300 when the limited votes of the country had been polled. But the Republicans in revenge gained a surprising majority at the General Elections for the National Assembly, such a majority that it might have been thought any further serious effort on the part of the anti-Republicans would be impossible and even that Gambetta’s previous policy of opportunism was unnecessary.

It was at this election of 1876 that Clemenceau was returned again for the 18th Electoral District of Paris to the National Assembly as a thoroughgoing Radical Republican, and took his seat on the extreme Left under the leadership of Gambetta.

Marshal MacMahon, the President, was a good honest soldier who served his country as well as he knew how, but was quite incapable of understanding the new forces that were coming into action around him. The Parisians were never tired of inventing humorous scenes in which he invariably figured as the well-meaning pantaloon. Everybody trusted his honour, but all the world doubted his intelligence. He was by nature, upbringing and surroundings a conservative in the widest sense of the word. Radical Republicanism was to him the accursed thing which would bring about another Commune of Paris, if its partisans were given free rein. Although, therefore, incapable of plotting directly for the overthrow of the Constitution he had pledged himself to uphold, he was liable to yield to influences the full tendency of which he did not discern. Thus it happened that he allowed himself unconsciously to become the tool of the highly educated and clever Duc de Broglie, who was undoubtedly a monarchist and, what was still worse, a statesman imbued with the ideals of clericalism and of the Jesuits—precisely those powers which the growing spirit of democracy and Republicanism most feared. It was this growing spirit and its expression in the National Assembly that the Prime Minister, M. Jules Simon, who succeeded de Broglie had to recognise and deal with. Gambetta was still the leader of the Republican Party, and with him for this struggle were all the more advanced men, including Clemenceau, who afterwards stoutly opposed his policy of opportunism and compromise. M. Jules Simon, finding the majority of the Assembly in favour of steady progress towards the Left, was quite unable to check the movement in this direction or to refuse the legislation to which the Republican demands of necessity impelled him. The President could not see that an extremely moderate man, such as Jules Simon undoubtedly was, would not have taken this course unless he had been convinced that the Republic had to be in some degree republicanised if serious trouble were to be averted. In short, Marshal MacMahon felt that the floodgates of revolution were being opened, and forthwith knocked down the lock-keeper. In other words, he sent for M. Jules Simon and talked to him in such a manner as gave the Premier no option but to resign. Resign he did. Thereupon France was thrown into that turmoil of peaceful civil war ever afterwards known as the Coup du Seize Mai. The Duc de Broglie, with a trusty phalanx of seasoned reactionaries and devotees of priestcraft, again took office, regardless of the fact that the majority of the Chamber was solid against them all. Even with the most strenuous support of the President of the Republic, the de Broglie Ministry never had a chance from the first. They were in a hopeless minority, and their attempt to govern, on the basis of MacMahon’s reputation and the support of the priests, could not but result in failure, unless the Marshal himself were prepared to risk a coup d’État. This the Duc de Broglie and his followers were ready to attempt, but it was useless to embark upon anything of the kind so long as the President held back.

Then came the famous division, following up a most violent discussion, which for many a long year formed a landmark in the history of the Republic. Three hundred and sixty-three Republicans declared against the President’s Ministry of reaction and all its works. But Marshal MacMahon still would not understand that in his mistaken attempt to override the National Assembly in order to save France from what he believed would be an Anarchist revolution, he himself, with his group of monarchists and clericals, was steadily impelling the country into civil war. The action taken against Gambetta, then at the height of his vigour and influence, for declaring in his famous phrase that, in view of the attitude of the Chamber, the President must either “give in or get out,” made matters still worse. The President’s manifestoes to the Assembly and the country also only confirmed the growing impression that a sinister plot was afoot against the Republic itself, in the interest of the Orleanists.

This was a much more serious matter than appeared on the surface. In the six years which had passed since the withdrawal of the German armies and the suppression of the Commune, France had become accustomed to the Republic and to the use of universal suffrage as a democratic instrument of organisation. Great as were its drawbacks in many respects, the Republic was, as Gambetta phrased it, the form of government which divided Frenchmen the least. The people, who comprised not only the enlightened Radical Republicans of the cities, but the easily frightened small bourgeoisie and the peasantry, could now make the Assembly and the Senate do what they pleased. They were not as yet prepared to push those institutions very fast or very far, but they were unquestionably moving forward and were in no mind whatever to go back either to Napoleonism, Orleanism or Legitimism. France as a Republic was becoming the France of them all.

When, therefore, the 363 deputies who voted against the Duc de Broglie’s rococo restoration policy and Marshal MacMahon’s constitutional autocracy stood firmly together, sinking all differences in the one determination to safeguard and consolidate the Republic, there could be no real doubt as to the result. Those 363 stalwarts issued a vigorous appeal to the country, and the issue was joined in earnest at the General Elections. Gambetta, meanwhile, was the hero of the hour, straining every nerve for victory, exhausting himself by his furious eloquence, and the other advanced leaders did their full share of the fighting. In all this political warfare Clemenceau was as active and energetic as the fiery tribune himself, and as one of the framers and signatories of the great Republican appeal identified himself permanently with the document which recorded, as events proved, the decision of France to be and to remain a Republic.

Although it did not seem so at the time, the President played completely into the hands of the Republicans by the Message he sent to the Assembly and the Senate just before the prorogation he had so autocratically decreed. Here is a portion of it:—

The elections followed. It is difficult to exaggerate the advantage which is given in a French General Election to the party in power at the time. An unscrupulous Minister of the Interior has at his disposal all sorts of devices and machinery for helping his own side to victory. He can bring pressure of every kind to bear upon individuals directly or indirectly dependent on the Government of the day, and the whole official caste may be enlisted on behalf of the administration in control. This is the case ordinarily and in quiet times. But here was a direct stand-up fight between Reaction and Clericalism on the one side and Republicanism and Secularism—for that was at stake too—on the other. Both Marshal MacMahon and the Duc de Broglie honestly believed that they were doing their very utmost to preserve France from rapine and ruin. Every Radical Republican of the old school or the new was to them a bloody-minded Communard in disguise, veiling his instincts for plunder with eloquent appeals for patriotism and humanity. It is easy for the fanatics of conservatism and reaction thus to delude themselves. And once self-deceived they lose no chance of imposing their own wise and sober views upon the misguided people! So it happened in this case. Never were the powers of the Government in office strained to the same extent as in these elections of 1877—the elections which followed on the “Seize Mai” stroke of MacMahon. Not an opportunity for coercing, cajoling and intimidating the voters was missed. In every urban district and rural village throughout France the State, the Church, the Municipality, the Commune were used to the fullest extent possible to obtain a vote favourable to the de Broglie Ministry. Swarms of priests and Jesuits buzzed around the constituencies, and promises of an easy time of it in this life and the next if things went the right way were made in profusion. If the Republic could be beaten by the forces of reaction it would be beaten now! Gambetta had predicted that the 363 would return to the Assembly as 400. This was not to be. But in view of the tremendous efforts made to stem the tide of progress, not only by promises, but by serious threats wherever threats might tell, the wonder is the Republicans were so successful as they proved to be. In spite of all that the President and the Prime Minister and the Catholic Church and the Jesuits—who were fighting for the right to remain in France—and the curÉs and the State functionaries, and all that the agencies of aristocratic, monarchist and Buonapartist—more particularly Buonapartist—corruption could do, the Republicans returned to the Chamber with a substantial majority of upwards of 100 votes. This victory was universally recognised not only in France but throughout Europe as irrefragable evidence that the French people had finally decided for a Republic, and had dealt at the same time a serious blow to the Church.

But, obvious as this was to everybody else, the respectable old soldier who had been a party to all this reactionary turmoil was still unconvinced of the error of his ways! He repeated the formula of the Malakoff fortress: J’y suis, j’y reste. But the Republicans were more tenacious than the Russians. They resolved to dislodge him, political Marshal though he was. A resolution was passed by the Assembly to inquire into corrupt practices during the election. It was a challenge to battle, and signed by such men as Albert GrÉvy, H. Brisson, Jules Ferry, LÉon Gambetta, Floquet, Louis Blanc and Clemenceau.

A great debate, lasting several days, followed, in which de Broglie defended himself in a high-handed manner against the fervid denunciations of Gambetta. A Committee of Inquiry was nominated and the arena of the struggle changed to the Senate, which presently, as might have been expected from its reactionary character, gave a small vote of confidence in the Marshal and his Ministers. Nevertheless the feeling in the country was such that even MacMahon could not hold on. De Broglie resigned, and the Marshal evolved—almost from the depths of his inner consciousness—an “extra-Parliamentary Cabinet” which might have been called “The Cabinet of Men of No Account.” But these were so unknown and so incompetent that all France made fun of them; and the will of the old Marshal, which nothing else could conquer, was broken by ridicule. In December, 1877, the President of the Republic saw that unless he appealed to the army, as the Buonapartists vigorously incited him to do, an appeal which more than probably the army itself would have rejected, there was no course open to him but the alternative which Gambetta had pointed out as being the Marshal’s inevitable destiny if he kept within the limits of law and order—to give in or get out. The old soldier of the Empire gave in, and did his country a service by accepting the rebuff which he had courted: a moderate Republican Ministry under the Premiership of M. Dufaure took office. MacMahon himself remained President of the Republic until January, 1879 (when he was succeeded by Jules GrÉvy), but his reactionary power was broken and France entered on a moderately peaceful era of recognised Republicanism. Gambetta was the acknowledged leader of the Republican majority; and Clemenceau, after this first taste of victory, now began that fine career of destructive, anti-opportunist Radicalism and semi-Socialist democracy which made him for many years the most redoubtable politician and orator in the Republic. The Radical-Socialist Clemenceau stood next in succession to the Opportunist Gambetta.