Clemenceau's Cub

In the panel of statesmen to whom France turns when she needs a new Premier, M. Andre Tardieu, slashing political disciple of Georges ("Tiger") Clemenceau, sits high.

When it was a question of "Sacred Union to Save France" in 1934, the Right lent Tardieu and the Left lent Herriot to do nothing as Ministers of State but lend their prestige to the Doumergue Cabinet. When distracted "Papa" Doumergue decided that the sheer rascality of Paris politics left him no alternative but to retire to his farm, M. Tardieu resigned as Minister of State, announcing, "I retire with Doumergue!"

Last week his hat came sailing back into the ring. Tardieu began a comeback with the peculiar maneuver of resigning from the Republican Centre Party and attacking its President Paul Reynaud for having attacked fortnight ago Premier Pierre Laval and the Hoare-Laval Deal to dismember Ethiopia (TIME, Jan. 6). The effect of this slash from a claw of "Tiger" Clemenceau's cub was that within 24 hours M. Reynaud was obliged to resign his Party's Presidency and demands were heard that M. Tardieu be elected his successor.

In M. Reynaud the Tiger's Cub attacked the chief eulogist in France of Britain. The better to be able to eulogize, M. Reynaud went to London and sat in the House of Commons gallery while Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made Sir Samuel Hoare a scapegoat (TIME, Dec. 30). Last week this trans-Channel junket seemed likely to blast many of M. Reynaud's political ambitions. As he went down under the Tiger's Cub, millions of Frenchmen pondered with care the exposition of the Ethiopian Question given by Andre Tardieu. Excerpt:

"Sanctions, when organized in advance and consequently en masse, can prevent war. On the contrary the application of improvised Sanctions, that is partial and piecemeal Sanctions, may, by reason of their dubiousness, lead to war."

Since the Great War, recalled M. Tardieu, nearly every French Premier from Briand and Herriot to himself, sought to persuade the Great Powers to bind themselves to back the League with an organized and rational machinery of Sanctions. "In 1924 the efforts of Herriot were foiled by the British and so eight years later were my own," declared Andre Tardieu. "During the Manchurian troubles Sir John Simon, as British Foreign Secretary, declared that under no pretext would His Majesty's Government permit their country to be drawn into a conflict.

"Great Britain has since then changed her mind," continued M. Tardieu, but he argued that 15 years of British sabotaging of proposals for Sanctions has left the League with no adequate or workable machinery for applying Sanctions.

Concluded the Tiger's Cub: "The terrible confusion in the present situation has only one cause: people have tried to apply Sanctions without having in the first place organized them. Hence their inefficiency and their danger. . . . Britain is responsible for the persistent lack of organization of Sanctions. ... It is our right also to recognize that Britain's brusque reversal constitutes an injustice for Italy, a peril for Peace."

That so astute a French leader should have chosen to re-enter the political spotlight with such words, and that their mere publication should have forced an important French party leader to resign, was of grave significance. It made no great splash in the world press, yet possibly was more important than the making of a showy scapegoat out of Sir Samuel Hoare.

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