Up Herriot!

(See front cover)

Profound emotions aroused by the assassination of the President of the Republic (see p. 21), sent French voters to the polls last week in a mood of extraordinary and unwonted calm. There were no riots, no street fights, no arrests of individual malcontents such as disturbed the initial balloting fortnight ago for the Chamber of Deputies. But Frenchmen continued to think for themselves and to vote according to their thoughts. They were not stampeded toward the political Right by scare stories that beloved old President Doumer had been done to death by a "regular Bolshevik." The second ballot took the same course as the first, a steady swing not to either extreme but from the Right Centre to Left Centre.

For a nation of Centrists, a moderate land of thrifty folk, this shift was sufficiently dramatiP: Everyone agreed that it blasted and destroyed the power of the Right Centre coalition in the Chamber of Deputies whose leader is Premier Andre Tardieu, called "L'Americain" because of his go-gettishness. Looking for the next Premier of France, the nation shifted its attention from Paris-on-the-Seine 250 miles due south to Lyon-on-the-Rhone. Lyon presented a terrific sight.

A sudden landslide from the rain-soaked, earthen cliffs that tower above the Rhone had sent a heaving mass of mud hurtling down Caliure Hill where it burst like a tidal wave upon two apartment houses, shattering and engulfing them, ripping open water mains which spouted and gas mains which promptly burst into flame. A little further down the very street on which the two apartment houses had stood is the comfortable bourgeois home of Edouard Herriot, for 25 years Mayor of Lyon, Leader of the Radical-Socialist Party, outstanding French statesman of the Left Centre, and therefore apparently destined to succeed Right-Centreman Tardieu as Premier of France.

The hour of the slide was 8:30 a. m. The nation was just about to vote. Mayor Herriot, of whom it is said "he could sell the Lyonese as slaves and they would make no objection," had just finished his coffee & croissant. Clapping on his old slouch hat he rushed, baggy trousers flapping, to the landslide. Five minutes later Fire Chief Rossignol (Nightingale) arrived and Lyonese firemen attacked the ruins, working furiously to rescue entrapped persons before there should be another slide. Like a commanding general Mayor Herriot backed off, took a perspective view of the hillside, conferred with city engineers who agreed with him that a cement earth-retaining wall was about to collapse. Mayor Herriot ordered Fire Chief Nightingale to sound a firemen's retreat.

Disobedient and daring, the firemen refused to quit, though they knew that in Lyon's 1930 autumn landslide 19 firemen were killed. Roared Mayor Herriot: "Get back! Back all of you!" When this had no effect, the burly Mayor rushed in and climbed to the top of the ruins, placed himself in the post of maximum danger, bellowed: "Do you all want to be killed? Messieurs, I insist that you get back."

Not a second too soon M. Herriot's insistence prevailed. As the earth began to heave firemen scattered, ran for their lives, but the Mayor did not move a muscle, stood puffing his common briar pipe,* until he thought all the firemen were safe, then dashed down the hill to safety just as the second slide came. Fire Chief Nightingale was injured by falling masonry.

As the day wore on, renewed digging brought to light no bodies, so deeply were the two apartment houses buried, but a count of missing persons made it certain that at least 31 had perished. By this time election returns were pouring in, the swing from Right Centre to Left Centre was a nationwide fact, and Lyonese reporters told their heroic Mayor that beyond a doubt he would be the nation's next Premier.

"Our success at the polls," said M. Herriot shortly, "is magnificent, but I can think of nothing else tonight than the tragedy that is happening here before my eyes."

Sternly the Mayor's friends took him in hand, bundled him off on the midnight train to Paris, where he found these

Election Results: The Right Centre parties supporting Premier Tardieu hold 43 less seats in the new Chamber than in the old, a stinging setback which caused the Cabinet to announce their resignation, effective when the National Assembly should meet next day at Versailles to elect the new President of France.

Strongest in the new Chamber is Edouard Herriot's Radical-Socialist Party with 157 seats--a thumping gain of 44. Next are the Socialists led by Jewish Deputy Leon Blum with 129 seats, a gain of 23, while former Premier Paul Painleve's Republican Socialists hold 37 seats, a gain of five. On the extreme Left the Communists have twelve seats, a gain of two; and on the extreme Right the Conservatives hold five seats, a loss of three.

Thus it seemed that the next French Cabinet must be of the Left Centre with Edouard Herriot as Premier. But the situation remained complex. To form a Cabinet with a working majority of some 350 in the Chamber of 615, M. Herriot would have to draw other parties into coalition with his own, turning for that purpose either to his immediate Left or Right or both.

If M. Blum would lead his Socialists* into the wigwam well and good, otherwise M. Herriot would have to pitch his Cabinet in such a way as to encompass both the moderate Republican Socialists and some such moderates of the Right Centre as Andre Tardieu, if the outgoing Premier would consent to serve.

To Frenchmen such complexities in building a Cabinet are commonplace. The great fact last week was that Edouard Herriot had been placed by French voters in a position to sway the destiny and mold the policies of France.

Herriot of Lyon. Not a hard, pragmatic go-getter but a brilliant, busy man of romantic enthusiasms and tireless work is Edouard Herriot. Born just 60 years ago, son of an Army officer far from rich but proud, Edouard spent his childhood all over France as his father was shifted from post to military post. Destined by his mother for the church, he barely escaped wearing long black skirts. Youthful scholastic brilliance won him a scholarship which took him to Paris and the famed Ecole Normale Superieure. The first book penned by unknown Edouard Herriot was crowned by the French Academy.

He has written many books since on the long road that led him from the Professorship of Rhetoric at Lyon (1896-1904) to the Mayoralty (1906), which he has held, with one break, ever since, and twice into the office of Premier (1924-25 and 1926, the last time for only two days). To distract themselves other statesmen read. Edouard Herriot (like Winston Churchill) writes. Because he chanced to attend a Beethoven festival, M. Herriot is the author of a life of Beethoven. Because he loves the forests of Normandy he has made a rambling book out of his rambles there. Stimulated by a curiosity to know whether a certain great lady had fully experienced the joys of love and successfully aroused them to the highest pitch in others, Statesman Edouard Herriot wrote his audacious Madame Recamier and Her Friends.

In Lyon there stand as monuments to 25 years of zealous labor by Mayor Herriot four modern bridges across the Rhone, a post-War program of public works put through at a cost of 50,000,000 francs, and the annual Lyon Fair, raised by Mayor Herriot from obscurity to rank with Germany's famed Leipzig Fair. As a "Good European" (which everyone calls M. Herriot) he placed under his personal protection the German goods exhibited at the Lyon Fair of 1914, defied efforts by the French Government to confiscate and sell them. After the War he returned to Germany the things that were Germany's.

On the national stage M. Herriot's role has been less decisive, though without his tact and wisdom as French Premier in

1924 reactionary forces might have prevented adoption of the Dawes Plan. In

1925 the Senate, blaming on M. Herriot's policies the so-called "collapse of the franc," voted his Cabinet out of office. The Chamber at once elected him its Speaker. In the following year he resigned as Speaker to form his disastrous two-day Cabinet and a shift to the Right Centre in the elections of 1928 was said to have "killed Herriot" politically. He was even forced to resign as Leader of his party, lie low. He regained the leadership only last year and has since been forging steadily back to power.

To U. S. citizens these typical Herriotisms are significant:

P: "If European matters do not interest Americans, if they treasure their self-imposed isolation, then America should let Europe alone!"

P: "There can be no naval peace without agreement with England and the United States, nor peace on land without agreement between France and Germany," for which agreement M. Herriot has earnestly striven.

P: "Russian dumping is sufficient reason for the immediate organization of an economic United States of Europe. . . . Poor Europe! Stupid Europe, which is shortsighted and refuses to unite!" P: "I do not declare war on anybody, but I have beaten Socialism in Lyon."

P: Most striking of all, Edouard Herriot stands for the payment by France of her War debts to the U. S. and Britain even if Germany ceases to pay Reparations to France. Writing last February in his newspaper L'Ere Nouvelle, M. Herriot flatly called it the "plain duty" of France to "fulfill her obligations regardless of the Reparations question."

This squares with what M. Herriot calls "my doctrine of the inviolability of contracts." He demands that Germany be similarly held to the letter of her bond, but not in pound-of-flesh fashion.

The Lausanne Conference in June, M. Herriot holds, must not cancel Reparations and War debts, must assist Germany to get back on her feet by a suitable extension of the moratorium principle, must provide that eventually Germany shall pay if not all then certainly a great part of what Germany agreed to pay by signing the Young Plan.

* Not to be confused with the underslung model sent by General Dawes to Mayor Herriot, who has smoked the contraption once or twice (see front cover). Once or twice General Dawes has also smoked the Herriot briar he received as a return gift. * Party names mean next to nothing in France. The Socialists, though great mouthers of Marxism, are almost as moderate in practice as Socialist James Ramsay MacDonald. The Radical Socialists, instead of being more radical than the Socialists are in fact only Liberal.

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