ARISTIDE BRIAND DEAD

Taranaki Daily News, 9 March 1932, Page 7

ARISTIDE BRIAND DEAD

GREAT FRENCH STATESMAN

notable work for peace

ORIGINATOR OF PEACE PACT

END OF STRENUOUS CAREER

British Wireless. Rugby, March. 8. M. Aristide Briand, the famous French statesman, died at his Paris home today, following a heart attack. His death is profoundly regretted in London, where he had many friends. The King, in a telegram to the French President, says: “It is with profound regret I learn of the sudden death of M. Briand, and I hasten to express my sympathy at the loss of a distinguished statesman whose labours in the cause of peace and goodwill among nations will ever be held in honoured and grateful remembrance.”

Lord Tyrrell, the British Ambassador at Paris, transmitted a letter of sympathy from the Ministry to M. Tardieu, and conveyed to him personal expressions of sympathy on behalf of Mr. Stanley Baldwin. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in the name of his colleagues and himself, assures the French Government of deep sympathy in the great loss the French nation has suffered “in the passing of my old-friend.” “We have been working together for well over a generation and I feel his death with peculiar keenness,” says Mr. MacDonald. “M. Briand dedicated the best years of his long life without respite to the high purpose of creating good understanding between the peoples, for which hie name will be a famous monument more lasting than bronze. He indeed was the architect of peace, and his loss will be deeply felt, not in France only, but also among all men of goodwill throughout the world.” TRIBUTE PAID AT GENEVA. When the news of M. Briand’s death was read at a meeting at Geneva of the standing orders committee of the Disarmament Conference delegates stood in silence with bowed heads. A touching tribute was paid by the chairman, M. Hyams.During the debate in the House of Commons on the navy estimates Sir Austen Chamberlain referred to the passing of M. Briand, remarking that the cause of peace needed new friends to take the place of those who passed away. No man was a better friend of that cause and no man espoused the cause more loyally. “We who mourn him may find encouragement and stimulus to continue his effort by following his example,” added Sir Austen. In an interview at Geneva, Sir John Simon, Foreign Secretary, said: “Few statesmen of our time have won so noble a place in the history of mankind as M. Briand, alike by his love of and devoted service to his own country, and by his whole-hearted work for the cause of peace and international friendship. At this difficult moment in the League’s history we can pay no better tribute than by doing the utmost to cherish the institution to the building of which M. Briand devoted so much enthusiasm.”

SCENE IN DEATH CHAMBER.

FRANCE HONOURS PATRIOT.

Rec. 5.5 p.m. Paris, March 7. In a room bare as a hermit’s. cell M. Briand breathed his last, despite every care of specialists, who rationed his abnormal consumption of cigarettes. He became unconscious and succumbed to heart failure in his modest home in the Avenue Kleber, whither he returned at the instance of Dre. Vacquez and Marx, who were unable to undertake adequate treatment at his country home in Cochereal.

M. Inland had been in bed since his his arrival and grew worse last night, being too weak to move this morning. He was a bachelor, but his nephew and niece and three collaborators were present at the deathbed. M. Briand began his career as a contributor to an anarchist newspaper and as an advocate of direct action, and ended as a single-minded devotee to the peace of the world. For a French politician he was rich, but his death chamber contained only a bedstead, a table and a chest of drawers on which stood a loving cup, the gift of Sir Austen Chamberlain in commemoration of the Locarno Conference. His leonine features seemed. to have recovered the strength of his youth as his body lay in a wide, white bed in the brilliant limelight, dressed in his customary evening clothes and awaiting the lying-in-state and the national funeral. Celebrities paying their last homage crowded into a little pink and yellow room, hung with political cartoons and signed portraits of famous associates. M. Tardieu, white with emotion, stepped from the centre of a hushed group into the bedroom and kissed the dead statesman’s hand. A crowd gathered in the street, many weeping.

Tributes to the dead patriot have been paid by monarchs, statesmen and famous people of nearly every country in tho world, echoing and amplifying Sir Austen Chamberlain’s noble epitaph, “The greatest European of us all.” Viscount Cecil honoured his statesmanship, and Mr. Arthur Henderson cited the Disarmament Conference as his monument.

M. Bouisson informed the Chamber of Deputies of the death of its greatest orator, after which M. Tardieu spoke and the- Assembly rose in token of mourning.

The leading newspapers devote editorials to M. Briand’s career, English jiapers emphasising his steadfast friendship to Britain through all the years of the war and since.

JOURNALIST TO POLITICIAN

IDEALS OF WORLD PEACE

31. Briand was the son of a Breton inn-keeper, and in hiis young days he

wanted to be a sailor. His parents cut short his ambitions in this direction when his uncle, a pilot, was brought home drowned, and Aristide took a law course instead. But his ambitions lay with politics, and he achieved them via journalism. He founded a small weekly with the flamboyant title of “The Democracy of the West,” and besides writing the articles himself, he ran every other department of the paper’s organisation. He contributed to various radical publications in Paris as well, and finally, with Jean Jaures, founded the leading organ of French Socialists, “I’Humanite.”

“In the Press gallery of the Chamber of Deputies the young Socialist already had a vision of his future career,” says a writer in an exchange. “Elected as a member in 1902, he began almost at once to take a prominent part in the fight for the separation of State and Church. Four years later he Minister of Public Instruction and Worship, and was expelled from his party for joining a bourgeois Government. Since then M. Briand’s career has been a long succession of rises and falls. He took defeat with aplomb, and usually resigned gracefully when he saw it coming.” With Dr. Stresemann, M. Briand was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 19'26, and he certainly did yeoman service in the cause of international goodwill. In January of this year M. Briand, aged 70, left the political arena. He had done so before, but only for a brief period, for he appeared to be indispensable in the conduct of the foreign policy bf his country. Cabinets, in the French way, might fall in rapid succession, but this ’ indomitable man, when he was not Prime Minister, was almost invariably recalled and entrusted with the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. But this time his retirement was final. Like the late Dr. Stresemann, the German peacemaker, he was.worn out with the weight of his political burdens in his efforts to brings peace to a distracted world. To many people M. Briand’s position seemed an anomaly in France, where for the most part peace advocates, were dumb in the face of the intense nationalism that pervaded the country. M. Briand, however, with infinite courage, had steadily pursued his peace aims through the post-war years. It speaks eloquently for his force of character and the hold that he had on the affections of his countrymen that he had been allowed to go so far. , SUPPORTER OF THE LEAGUE. Among his many activities he originated what is generally called the Kellogg Paet, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy, and he had been a keen and consistent supporter of the League of Nations. s France had looked on with a complacent eye at his work for the League, for it was frequently asserted that the French diplomatically had been highly successful at Geneva, and had no cause for serious apprehension at any decisions that might be made there. It was stated that M. Briand’s retirement was a tragedy of failing health and failing political achievement. There was no doubt that he was a sick man, for messages from time to time indicated that he was afflicted with serious organic trouble. On the political side, the suggestion was made that the French people doubted the wisdom of his foreign policy.

So far as M. Briand. himself was concerned, the words “failing political achievement” had tragic implications, but he wrought mightily for peace, and no one will believe that he has built entirely in vain. M. Briand’s policy as French Foreign Minister was the method of conciliation, with peaceful negotiation in place of the arbitrament of war as an objective. “A statesman,” he said in an interview acceded to a German journalist in 1'930, “must often ignore the present, and even the near future, and must take instead a long point of view. He must be able to avoid the temptation of being right for the moment only.” This remark was the keynote to M. Briand’s character. At the opening of his political career he was a Socialist. He offended the French Socialist Party by accepting a portfolioin a bourgeois Cabinet, and when taxed with this apparent defection he replied: “I believe I am the true Socialist, because Socialism, properly understood, is the creation of a new order, and you are the slaves of an old disorder.” From this it is not difficult to understand his constant efforts to wean his country from the doctrine of extreme nationalism 'and incline its attitude toward the ideal of a rational internationalism; to comprehend his steadfast advocacy of peaceful negotiation in international relationships; to read sincerity into his tireless efforts to bring about a frendly compromise between post-war German and French aspirations. It was he who introduced Germany to the League of Nations, and he did so in a speech conveying sentiments which no European statesman, especially one at the head of his Government, as he was then, had dared until then to express: “Down with the rifles, machineguns, cannons, to clear the way for conciliation, arbitration and peace,” he said. “Be patient and appeal to right to safeguard your interests.”