M. Briand.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20491, 9 March 1932, Page 10

M. Briand.

The death of M. Briand, reported in this morning's cable news, will cause more surprise than it ought to, since he said quite plainly when he retired in January last that he was too ill to work any more. Nevertheless, the Paris correspondents said knowingly that his retirement was " ostensibly on "the grounds of ill-health," while one of the latest issues of the Manchester Guardian contains the pathetic assertion that he was stronger outside the Laval Cabinet than he was in it, and that he would probably reappear as the leader of the Left bloc. It is a melancholy comment on the ways of politicians that the world was ready to accept almost any explanation of his retirement except his own, though his capacity for strategic retreats, and the fact that during the twenty-six years since he first took a portfolio he had been in office for sixteen years and six months, perhaps gave the sceptics some excuse. To Englishmen this dexterity has always seemed a little diabolical, and a writer in the latest issue of the New Statesman and Nation probably expresses a very general feeling when he says: I sometimes wonder why a man of M. Briand 'a genuine humanity and incomparable political gifts has achieved so little in leading French policy in what I, and I believe he himself, regard as the only sane direction. Perhaps the reason is that he has been too long in politics and is too characteristically a Frenchman to be anything at bottom but a French politician. If you look at the smile which hovers about the corners of his extraordinary mouth, you will remark that no man could smilo like that who had left himself with the inconvenience or consolation of a single illusion. But to criticise M. Briand for steering a middle course is to mistake the nature of his influence in French politics; successive Prime' Ministers sought his help, not because of his following, but because of his personal qualities and because of the confidence ho inspired abroad. At no time since the War could he have become the leader of a really powerful group, for his Socialism was too Fabian for the Socialists and after the Daudet affair the Right barely tolerated him. In any case, what he might have been is less important than 1 what he was—the most influential European statesman of the post-war decade. Europe might be in a happier state to-day had not the making of the Versailles Treaty coincided with his longest period out of office, and as it was no man did more to humanise its provisions and to make it an instrument of peace rather than of retribution. The Locarno Treaties,!

his greatest and most characteristic achievement, have been much criticised in England and America, but they are the basis of what progress international co-operation has made in Europe since the War. Sir Austen Chamberlain's grandiloquent tribute —" He was the " greatest European of us all" —is apter than it sounds, since it covers both his greatness and his failings. He served Europe well, with the methods that Europe understands.