Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [25]
BY THE TIME ROOSEVELT reached Paris on the twenty-first, it was apparent that he was the most famous man in the world. In their respective sovereignties, the Kaiser, King Edward VII, and the Tsar of Russia might be better known, but none had his democratic appeal, nor his press appeal across three continents. “When he appears, the windows shake for three miles around,” one overawed correspondent wrote. “He has the gift, nay the genius of being sensational.”
He knew enough of fame not to expect it to last. But with seven kingdoms still to visit, and reports of a massive homecoming being planned for him in New York, he had to brace himself for more and more adulation. “Like the elder Mr. Weller’s Thanksgiving turkey,” he joked to Robert Bacon, the American ambassador waiting to greet him at the Gare de Lyon, “I am old and tough and I will be all right for everything.”
Jules Jusserand, Bacon’s opposite number in Washington, was also on the platform. Roosevelt adored the spry little diplomat, a medieval scholar and veteran of his White House “Tennis Cabinet.” It had been Jusserand’s idea to have him address the Sorbonne. Both ambassadors had been working for some months to balance their desire to have him meet France’s political elite, and his preference for the society of intellectuals. As a result, his calendar for the next week juxtaposed the names of President Armand Fallières, Prime Minister Aristide Briand, Foreign Minister Stéphen Pichon, the Radical leader Georges Clemenceau, and other public men with those of Edith Wharton, Auguste Rodin, the historians Victor Bérard and Pierre de La Gorce, and a brace of literary barons, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant and Pierre de Coubertin.
En route to the Sorbonne on Saturday, 23 April, Roosevelt stopped off to thank officers of the Académie de Sciences Morales et Politiques for electing him an associate member. He did so in French, apologizing for his abuse of the language of Voltaire. “Quand on parle français, on manie l’instrument le plus précis et le plus éclair qui existe.”*
Shortly before three o’clock he entered the grand amphitheater of the university to a standing ovation. Jusserand had seen to it that he was flanked onstage by representatives of the French Institute’s five academies: Arts, Letters, Sciences, Belles Lettres, and finally the Académie Française itself, represented by eleven green-robed immortels. Elsewhere sat ministers in court dress, army and navy officers in full uniform, nine hundred students, and an audience of two thousand ticket holders. The vice-rector of the Sorbonne announced that the greatest voice of the New World was about to speak. Turning to Roosevelt, he said, “Vous unissez le moral à la politique et le droit à la force.”*
No thirteen words could have better proved the Colonel’s linguistic point, made just an hour earlier. He stuck to English, with the help of an interpreter, as he proceeded to read his long oration, entitled “Citizenship in a Republic.”
Acknowledging the right of the French to be proud of their old and sophisticated civilization, he made no apology for the relative rawness of his own. He boasted that the first Roosevelts in New Amsterdam had fought off hostile Indians and lived on equal terms with “traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and fisherfolk.” This somewhat rusticated his family’s urban history. But he sought to emphasize that “primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities” before a nation could think of becoming a republic. Even after it did, it was likely to exhibit “all the defects of an intense individualism” for a century or so. The “materialism” of contemporary industrial America was simply the pioneer spirit redux.
Politically, however, the United States and France were of mutual stature. Sister republics in a world of Empire, they represented “the most gigantic of all possible social experiments,” that of perfecting democratic rule. They were not dependent on the excellence,