Octave Mirbeau’s sharp tribute to Georges Clémenceau (1895) – a biting essay on politics, literature, and the triumph of ideas over parliamentary mediocrity.
To Gustave Geffroy
Do you remember, dear Geffroy, that exquisite day—that restorative day—we spent in a little house with our friend, just days after that memorable electoral campaign? A campaign where so much courage couldn’t overcome such cowardly hatred, where every stupidity, every grudge, every petty provincial ambition, led by all the Parisian slanders, finally triumphed over the man whose eloquence and intellectual superiority made all those wretched parliamentary insects tremble?
I expected—and who could blame me, even knowing his moral strength—to find him somewhat discouraged by the futility of so many fine and valiant efforts. But he was exactly as he had been before that revolting, savage struggle. I had the joy of seeing not a shadow of disgust on his energetic face, not a trace of dejection in his resolute gaze. Nothing had dimmed his infectious good humour, his wholesome gaiety; nothing had weakened those ardent, robust enthusiasms that always, in the darkest hours, protected him from despair’s foul whispers. The deed done, having performed a violent somersault back to himself, Clémenceau had already stopped thinking about those terrible days he had just endured, about human ingratitude—of which he had truly plumbed the depths, right down to the muck. And as before—perhaps with something even more penetrating than before—he enchanted us that afternoon with intimate, charming conversation, with the marvellous lucidity of a mind so magnificently open to every understanding, every beauty in art, philosophy, and life.
That day, my dear Geffroy, I was almost tempted to thank the imbecile hatred that thought it had crushed this man, for giving him back to us freer, with new strengths perhaps unknown to him but certainly felt by us. For we understood that this apparent defeat was actually a deliverance, that it led to something beautiful, and that if we had lost a deputy, we had gained an admirable writer.
The writer of La Mêlée sociale and all the volumes to follow.
⁂
Politics, by definition, is the art of leading men to happiness; in practice, it’s merely the art of devouring them. It is therefore the great lie, being the great corruption. A politician engaged in politics inevitably shows only one face of his personality—the ugliest: his appetites. In noble spirits seduced by its mirages, politics soon absorbs—when it doesn’t utterly depress—the best of their mental faculties and activities. In any case, it quickly diverts them from their original destiny, for it’s powerless to keep them on the ideal path they had dreamed of following. What can a man of strong culture and generous action do, what can he dream of doing, in a Parliament delivered up—by the very conditions of its recruitment—to every mediocrity, every idleness, every bankruptcy of provincial life, bound together only by the discipline of greed and the servility of electoral interests? He can do nothing. Questions are settled in advance, even voted on before being understood. No surprise of dialectic, no burst of passion, no illumination of eloquence can penetrate those walls, open breaches of light in those walls of darkness that are parliamentary majorities. Clémenceau has often had this bleak, disheartening experience. But perhaps never more than in that lamentable session when, after the bloody repression at Fourmies, he came to ask the Chamber for amnesty. It was the first time anyone had heard a cry of human pity in that chamber. It was useless. An icy silence followed his ardent, eloquent, pleading appeal to higher justice. His voice shattered against the wall without making a dent. And I understood from that day that action, as we conceive it, was impossible in a Parliament that not only wants to do nothing but wants to hear nothing.
Today, action must take refuge in books. Only in books, freed from the unhealthy, multiple contingencies that annihilate and stifle it, can it find the proper soil for germinating the ideas it sows. For what do gestures matter! Gestures pass; in the time it takes to describe their ephemeral arc, they have left no trace. Ideas remain and multiply; sown, they germinate; germinated, they flower. And humanity comes to gather these flowers, to make them into sheaves of joy for its future liberation.
So it’s with profound satisfaction that I see Clémenceau emerge from active politics—where, despite all his superior qualities of persuasion, eloquence, and tenacity in struggle, he could only intimidate the complacency of majorities and reduce government action, through fear of collapse, to its minimum of harm—to enter the true and fruitful battle of ideas, that is, into full consciousness of his duty, into complete freedom with his rejuvenated powers.
Artist, philosopher, nourished by strong scientific culture, passionate about life, endowed with very sure critical sense and very generous enthusiasm, having spent his existence in the spiritual company of this era’s greatest thinkers—like Stuart Mill, whose translator he was, and Spencer, whose friend he is, I believe; educated by long travels where observation personalises and develops accumulated knowledge—no one was better prepared than Clémenceau to become the writer of La Mêlée sociale. A writer he is, in every sense we give that word. His style is brief but clear and vibrant. The verb bites sharply and deeply into the bronze of the phrase, and thought illuminates it. He knows how to express, with bold concision, in rapidly incised strokes, striking historical shortcuts, to note characters, evoke artistic sensations, Darwinian landscapes, surges of dream, prodigies of teeming, murderous life. He knows the meaning of things and their fatalism in terrible, beautiful nature, the destiny of beings prey to the evil of universal massacre. He knows how many accumulated deaths make up the grass he treads, the flower he breathes, how many injustices, violences, and bloody thefts compose human suffering, whose martyrology he counts—which will cease, alas, only with the universe.
What I admire in Clémenceau is that he uses particular facts only to rise to thought’s highest generalisations. Everything is a pretext for him to philosophise, because, like great minds, he knows that the tiniest, most indifferent thing in itself, that which most escapes vulgar preoccupations, always contains a particle of the eternal, irritating enigma, and is merely a reduction of the universe’s total soul.
While political hacks, in their shameful jargon of bailiffs or morose notaries, endlessly quibble over articles of law—ephemeral law like those who make it—Clémenceau has eyes and attention only for Life. Never stopping before these phantoms dragging their paper shrouds, rattling their cardboard bones, it’s Life alone he pursues. He questions it wherever he meets it, and he meets it everywhere: in the street, among crowds, in the hovels of the poor and salons of the rich. He follows it into fields, mines, distant forests, to workshops, museums, prisons, to the foot of the scaffold. And he tries to wrest from it something of its impassive secret, something of the obscure hope that it might, perhaps one day, cast over the world the light of a gentler dawn.
I had followed La Mêlée sociale passionately, day by day, in La Justice. Reading the book, my impressions grew even stronger, for I find in it an admirable unity of thought within a diversity of subjects that all touch on life’s most interesting social problems.
I don’t presume to analyse and critique this book systematically. I merely wanted to point it out to my readers who are passionate about questions other than novelistic adultery and boulevard gossip. Above all, I wanted to salute with all my friendship and admiration the master craftsman of this masterwork, forged from noble thoughts and flowered with artistic beauty.
1895.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 