The Inside Story of the Peace ConferenceDillon, Emile Joseph
History
The Inside Story of the Peace Conference
Dillon, Emile Joseph
Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920)
M. Tardieu cannot be separated from his chief, with whom he worked
untiringly, placing at his disposal his intimate knowledge of the nooks
and crannies of professional and unprofessional diplomacy. He is one of
the latest arrivals and most pushing workers in the sphere of the Old
World statecraft, affects Yankee methods, and speaks English. For
several years political editor of the _Temps_, he obtained access to the
state archives, and wrote a book on the Agadir incident which was well
received, and also a monograph on Prince von Bülow, became Deputy, aimed
at a ministerial portfolio, and was finally appointed Head Commissary to
the United States. Faced by difficulties there--mostly the specters of
his own former utterances evoked by German adversaries--his progress at
first was slow. He was accused of having approved some of the drastic
methods--especially the U-boat campaign--which the Germans subsequently
employed, because in the year 1912, when he was writing on the subject,
France believed that she herself possessed the best submarines, and she
meant to employ them. He was also challenged to deny that he had
written, in August, 1912, that in every war churches and monuments of
art must suffer, and that "no army, whatever its nationality, can
renounce this." He was further charged with having taken a kindly
interest in air-war and bomb-dropping, and given it as his opinion that
it would be absurd "to deprive of this advantage those who had made most
progress in perfecting this weapon." But M. Tardieu successfully
exorcised these and other ghosts. And on his return from the United
States he was charged with organizing a press bureau of his own, to
supply American journalists with material for their cablegrams, while at
the same time he collaborated with M. Clemenceau in reorganizing the
political communities of the world. It is only in the French Chamber, of
which he is a distinguished member, that M. Tardieu failed to score a
brilliant success. Few men are prophets in their own country, and he is
far from being an exception. At the Conference, in its later phases, he
found himself in frequent opposition to the chief of the Italian
delegation, Signor Tittoni. One of the many subjects on which they
disagreed was the fate of German Austria and the political structure and
orientation of the independent communities which arose on the ruins of
the Dual Monarchy. M. Tardieu favored an arrangement which would bring
these populations closely together and impart to the whole an
anti-Teutonic impress. If Germany could not be broken up into a number
of separate states, as in the days of her weakness, all the other
European peoples in the territories concerned could, and should, be
united against her, and at the least hindered from making common cause
with her. The unification of Germany he considered a grave danger, and
he strove to create a countervailing state system.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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