Tribune of the People

Americans aboard the Gripsholm (see p. 26) brought the sad news from shackled France: portly, jolly-jowled, kind-eyed Edouard Herriot is dead. He died in a prison of silence, watched by Vichy jailers. The Petain government did not proclaim the death, did not mourn the massive liberal who was thrice Premier of France, 36 years Mayor of Lyon, always a tribune of the people.

For the Republic. For two decades Edouard Herriot, son of a bourgeois army officer, had been the symbol of all that was benevolent, expansive and enduring in French civilization.

He was the wise and witty pedant: a lover of Greek verses, a professor of rhetoric, a biographer of Beethoven. He was the rotund trencherman: in the piping days of peace, he lunched on soup, a couple of trout, a partridge, vegetables, dessert, cheese and two bottles of Burgundy. He was a Gallic sentimentalist: cartoonists loved to draw him as a transparent body with half-a-dozen hearts. In politics he stood left of center, where the heart belongs, the leader of the Radical Socialists. In statesmanship he fell heir to Briand's mantle; he preached the gospel of a United States of Europe, but his wise, rotund and sentimental words were lost in the smashing tread of the Brownshirt goosestep.

For Parliament. When defeat came in 1940's summer, Edouard Herriot was President of the Chamber of Deputies. The men of Vichy had no use for the man of Lyon. He retired to his hilltop house in the upper Rhone Valley. In 1942's summer a visitor, Rightest Deputy C.J. Fernand-Laurent found him there, dressed in sweater and cap, smoking his pipe, culling mushrooms in his garden, sighing gently over a thin rabbit stew and the last of his wine. One thing made Edouard Herriot openly indignant: Vichy had sent a policeman to take note of his visitors, remarks, gestures--"even in the bathroom. . . . Now, wasn't that dishonorable?"

The Deputies' President had resolved upon his duty: to defend, until the last possible moment, "the rights of Parliament, which are the rights of the people. . . . This is a role I shall never step out of."

The test came in 1942's late summer. Parliament's rump gathered in Chatelguyon's shabby Hotel Richelieu, heard Cabinet Chief Pierre Laval decree the legislature's virtual death. Edouard Herriot, with venerable Senate President Jules Jeannenez, broke silence. To Chief of State Petain he sent a solemn, indignant protest: "You have substituted unlimited dictatorship for guarantees that all civilized nations grant. . . . It is impossible for liberty to die in the country of its birth."

For Resistance. The rest was silence. Now & then a report crept through. Edouard Herriot, under strict house arrest in his 72nd year, was very old, very tired. Americans interned at Vittel had a glimpse of him when his Vichy gaolers brought him to a villa in the old watering place. Rumor said that he was suffering from an incurable ailment. One day the jailers hustled him on to Nancy, not far from the German frontier. There, some time in the fall of 1943, death came to Edouard Herriot, but not to his words, not to his memory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.