M. TARDIEU

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3178, 14 May 1932, Page 6

M. TARDIEU

A PERSONALITY AND A PROPOSAL. All eyes in Paris to-day are turned on Geneva, where the weightiest meeting ever held since the formation of the League of Nations is taking place with M. Andre Tardieu, the most brilliant politician of France, in the chair formerly occupied by M. Aristide Briand, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, writes the Paris Correspondent of the Melbourne Age. M. Tadieu, now Minister of War, is only temporarily filling the chairman’s duties—Maitre Paul-Boncour, who now holds the appointment, being unwell. Once again, therefore, M. Tardieu is in the limelight. It is indeed his destiny to be ever in the front ranks. Early, at the age of 23, fresh from college, he was called to act as chief of staff under Waldeck-Rousseau, the then Prime Minister (1904). Before he was 30 he directed the foreign policy of tho “ Temps,” the influential (evening) political paper of Paris, and at 40 he was Minister, reaching the Premiership before he was 50. Now, at 51, he is Minister of War in M. Laval’s Cabinet, where his high intellectual qualities—his bold initiative, his rapid decision, his incisive logic and his wide culture —make him the outstanding personality of any gathering. He knows the history of his country by heart, and is a fervent patriot. In his journalistic phase, he led some activities during the war—the role he played at Clemenceau’s side at the Peace Conference and in the drafting of the Versailles treaty—kept Andre Tardieu ever among the foremost of active politicians., He retired for a short time when Clemenceau, so ungratefully passed over by his colleagues, withdrew entirely from public affairs. Later Tardieu returned to sit in the Chamber as member for Belfort, and he was one of Poincare’s henchmen when that statesman took once more the helm of the State and stablised the franc (1928). He succeeded his chief as Premier, and now, as War Minister, he is representing the policy of his country at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva.

While all the press of France is occupied with the same burning question, the Toulouse Dispatch, a leading provincial sheet, makes a bold and original contribution to the argument. “ Security,” the the Depeche, “ in any political association can only be achieved by the institution of one public authority whose strength is theoretically greater than that of any other unit or group. . . The only practicable way left to us to obtain this essential is to place in the hands of the League of Nations an invincible force; for example, we might give the League the monopoly of the world’s air forces.” True, the question arises, which State is prepared to make such a surrender?