How Clemenceau became a “Tiger’

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 75, 21 December 1929, Page 21

How Clemenceau became a “Tiger’

In the “Living Age,” Juan Jose de Soiza Reilly, an Argentine journalist, gives us a glimpse of the driving force that impelled Clemenceau. He says:—

I WAS praising Clemenceau, the “Tiger,” for his combativeness. “How do you manage to keep yourself in such a bad humour in political life?” I asked him. He was pleased with the question. “Candidly,” he said, “it is remembering what my father suffered. When I am in a dispute, whenever I feel my faith in Republican ideas and democratic principles weakening, I think of him. That memory is enough, I am immediately changed. I become he. “My father. Benjamin Clemenceau, was a doctor, as I was much later. One day, he became so deeply affected by all the human suffering he saw that sadness overcame him. He shut up his office and went off to Nantes with my mother and all their children. He planned to dedicate himself to farming, and to the cultivation of Republican ideas. You can imagine the situation of a Republican in the imperialistic France of 1854, under that little Napoleon 111 who had just dissolved the Assembly, crowned himself Emperor, and was deporting to Argelia all those who did not agree with his ideas, which meant all those who refused to grovel at his feet. “In Blaueon's bookshop in Nautes a little group of intellectuals

used to meet and talk together. Among them was my father. One night the police came and arrested him simply because, in private conversation, he had maintained that a Republican democracy was the only hope for France. They decided to deport him to Africa. The day that they took him away to Marseille, standing between two murderers in the prison van, I went with my mother to say good-bye to him. I was 13 or 14. I saw my mother crying. I saw my father, behind the bars of the van, chained and handcuffed, condemned without trial. None of his intimate friends was there. They had all been afraid to come to say good-bye and had hidden instead. Cowards 1 From that moment, I knew the difference between true friendship and false. From that day forward.l began to growl, and I kept on growling. When the van was about to leave, I came up close to the bars, i said to my father: ‘I will avenge you!’ “M,v father, who was a painter and poet, as well as a great man. was deeply affected, and kissed the bands that I stretched out to him through the bars. Then he said sternly: ‘if you want to avenge me, study hard, and work 1’ ”