(See front cover)
Profound emotions aroused by the assassination of the President of the Republic (see p. 21), sent French voters to the polls last week in a mood of extraordinary and unwonted calm. There were no riots, no street fights, no arrests of individual malcontents such as disturbed the initial balloting fortnight ago for the Chamber of Deputies. But Frenchmen continued to think for themselves and to vote according to their thoughts. They were not stampeded toward the political Right by scare stories that beloved old President Doumer had been done to death by a "regular Bolshevik." The second ballot took the same course as the first, a steady swing not to either extreme but from the Right Centre to Left Centre.
For a nation of Centrists, a moderate land of thrifty folk, this shift was sufficiently dramati¶ Everyone agreed that it blasted and destroyed the power of the Right Centre coalition in the Chamber of Deputies whose leader is Premier André Tardieu, called "L'Americain" because of his go-gettishness. Looking for the next Premier of France, the nation shifted its attention from Paris-on-the-Seine 250 miles due south to Lyon-on-the-Rhone. Lyon presented a terrific sight.
A sudden landslide from the rain-soaked, earthen cliffs that tower above the Rhone had sent a heaving mass of mud hurtling down Caliure Hill where it burst like a tidal wave upon two apartment houses, shattering and engulfing them, ripping open water mains which spouted and gas mains which promptly burst into flame. A little further down the very street on which the two apartment houses had stood is the comfortable bourgeois home of Edouard Herriot, for 25 years Mayor of Lyon, Leader of the Radical-Socialist Party, outstanding French statesman of the Left Centre, and therefore apparently destined to succeed Right-Centreman Tardieu as Premier of France.
The hour of the slide was 8:30 a. m. The nation was just about to vote. Mayor Herriot, of whom it is said "he could sell the Lyonese as slaves and they would make no objection," had just finished his coffee & croissant. Clapping on his old slouch hat he rushed, baggy trousers flapping, to the landslide. Five minutes later Fire Chief Rossignol (Nightingale) arrived and Lyonese firemen attacked the ruins, working furiously to rescue entrapped persons before there should be another slide. Like a commanding general Mayor Herriot backed off, took a perspective view of the hillside, conferred with city engineers who agreed with him that a cement earth-retaining wall was about to collapse. Mayor Herriot ordered Fire Chief Nightingale to sound a firemen's retreat.
Disobedient and daring, the firemen refused to quit, though they knew that in Lyon's 1930 autumn landslide 19 firemen were killed. Roared Mayor Herriot: "Get back! Back all of you!" When this had no effect, the burly Mayor rushed in and climbed to the top of the ruins, placed himself in the post of maximum danger, bellowed: "Do you all want to be killed? Messieurs, I insist that you get back."