Georges Clemenceau

8 Key excerpts on "Georges Clemenceau"

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  World War I

  People, Politics, and Power

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, William Hosch(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  union sacrée of right, left, and centre. Throughout World War I (1914–18) he strove to preserve national unity, even confiding the government to Clemenceau, the man best qualified to lead the country to victory.

  GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

  (b. Sept. 28, 1841, Mouilleron-en-Pareds,France—d. Nov. 24, 1929, Paris)

  Georges Clemenceau was a dominant figure in the French Third Republic and, as premier (1917–20), a major contributor to the Allied victory in World War I and a framer of the postwar Treaty of Versailles.

  British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (left), French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (centre), and American President Woodrow Wilson (right) walk together to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  In 1911 Clemenceau became both a member of the French Senate’s commissions for foreign affairs as well as the army. He was convinced that Germany was intent upon war, and, haunted by the fear that France might again be caught unprepared, he enquired diligently into the state of France’s armaments. In order to publicize his views on rearmament, he founded in May 1913 a new daily paper, L’Homme Libre, and acted as its editor. When World War I erupted in July 1914, the partisan in him gave way to the patriot, who called upon every Frenchman to join the fray. L’Homme Libre suffered at the hands of the censors for Clemenceau’s plain speaking and, in September 1914, was suppressed. Two days later, however, it reappeared entitled L’Homme Enchaîné.

  Meanwhile, in the Senate Clemenceau agitated for more guns, munitions, and soldiers, for judicious use of the available manpower, and for a better organized and equipped medical service. Deeply concerned about the attitude of the United States to the war, he sent urgent appeals to the American public and to President Woodrow Wilson and was overjoyed at the United States’ entry into the war in April 1917.

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  Supreme Command

  Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime

  • Eliot A. Cohen(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster UK

    (Publisher)

  Even for Churchill, no stranger to flying bullets and in an odd way partial to them (“there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result”), it was a moment to remember. For Clemenceau, however, it was hardly a remarkable occasion; during the year in which he directed France’s supreme effort during the war, he visited the front lines roughly once a week. He did so, as we shall see, not out of mere bravado or irresponsible delight in the noise and drama of war—not that he, or any politician, is ever immune to such temptations. Rather, Clemenceau’s visits, like Lincoln’s letters, reflected a style of wartime civilian leadership as carefully considered as any state paper or formal address, and no less effective. What prompted the old man to spend one day out of seven dodging shells and chatting with soldiers in their trenches? And what did he achieve by it?

  THE TIGER

  “War is too important to be left to the generals,” remains Georges Clemenceau’s chief legacy to English-speaking students of military affairs; few of them, however, know anything about how he arrived at or implemented that view. They may know vaguely that he breathed a spirit of resistance into an exhausted France in 1918, and that he attempted to win for a blood-drained country a hard peace with Germany in 1919, but beyond this he is too little known to us. In his own country, the story is different—although there too the trials and triumphs of France after 1919 have tended to put his accomplishments in the shade.

  The Tiger, as he was known by 1903, came to power late in life. He had three and a half generally unhappy years as France’s minister of the interior and then premier from 1906 to 1909, entering government again only on 17 November 1917, scarcely a year before the end of World War I. He served as premier until January of 1920, having decided to run for the less powerful but more honorific position of president of France, for which office he was defeated. In 1917, when he came to power in France’s greatest crisis to that point, he was already seventy-six years old. He had made more than his share of enemies, and would gladly make more. Late in his life he told General Edward Spears, the elegant British liaison officer with the French armies: “I had a wife, she abandoned me; I had children, they turned against me; I had friends, they betrayed me. I have only my claws, and I use them.”2

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  Armistice 1918

  • Bullitt Lowry(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  4

  France, Clemenceau, and Foch

  I n France, civil-military relations were more troubling than they were across the Channel. Prime Minister (properly President of the Council of Ministers) Georges Clemenceau, in his late seventies, sometime duelist, Communard and Dreyfusard, publisher and pamphleteer, called “the Tiger” by virtue of his political ferocity, had led France since 1917. Having twice seen Germany invade France, Clemenceau believed that his duty—and his destiny—lay in his preventing its ever occurring again.

  Clemenceau ruled his cabinet with a firm hand, so that it played a less prominent role in airing policy on the armistice than the British cabinet did. In his cabinet, Clemenceau did not encourage strong or independent figures. Cunning men could prosper, but with the exception of Marshal Foch, who was a special case, Clemenceau brought no strong or independent person to the center of power. With the cabinet kept in line, armistice discussions in France focused on two men: Clemenceau and Foch.

  During early October, the president of the Republic, Raymond Poincaré, also tried to play a role, but Clemenceau fought him off. Poor relations between those two stemmed less from principle than personality. They hated each other. A Lorrainer never reconciled to the Treaty of Frankfurt, Poincaré had been president of France since before the war. At the end of 1917, Poincaré called Clemenceau to office, not because of any fondness for the Tiger, but as a last alternative in desperate times.1

  Clemenceau’s problems with Poincaré reached feverish intensity even while the Conference of Prime Ministers was meeting. Just after the first news of the German request for an armistice arrived, Clemenceau met with President Poincaré, and, according to Poincaré, supported a lessthan-rigorous position.2 Clemenceau maintained that the Allies had to be “prudent and moderate.” The president, still according to his own account, was “dumbfounded” by Clemenceau’s words. He wanted to have the military leaders write the armistice conditions and leave Clemenceau and the cabinet only the task of approving them once written.3 Whatever transpired at their meeting, Poincaré wrote to Clemenceau after it was over and accused him of “having hamstrung” the French soldiers during the German spring offensive six months earlier.4

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  Great Contemporaries

  • Winston S. Churchill(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • RosettaBooks

    (Publisher)

  Deep forces, widespread interests, sacred traditions had been affronted—nay, wounded, injured, hampered. A dozen statesmen of first-class eminence remembered that he had been the ruin of their ambitions and of their plans. Sometimes their plans were good. Jules Ferry, 16 denounced and driven from power as ‘the Tonkinner,’ 17 tripled by his labours and his sacrifices the extent of the French Colonial possessions. His fall was due to Clemenceau more than to any other man. Another field opened, an old, historic field for France. The English invited French co-operation in restoring solvency and order to Egypt. Fear of Clemenceau was a recognizable factor in the momentous decision which made the French Fleet steam supinely from the scene of the impending bombardment of Alexandria. 18 Clemenceau had not been able to stop France acquiring Tunis, Tonkin, or Indo-China. But he had broken the man who did the work; and he had, in fact, {305} kept her out of Egypt. The new Colonial Empire of France had its contribution of bayonets to make in the fighting lines of 1914. No one had checked or prevented the acquisition of that Empire so much as Clemenceau. Surely, in after years, this reflection must have caused him many a pang. It certainly brought him many a reproach. There is in French politics an intensity, an intricacy, and a violence unequalled in Great Britain. It reached its extreme in the eighties and nineties. All the elements of blood-curdling political drama were represented by actual facts. The life of the French Chamber, hectic, fierce, poisonous, flowed through a succession of scandals and swindles, of exposures, of perjuries, forgeries, and murders, of plottings and intriguings, of personal ambitions and revenges, of crooking and double-crossing, which find their modern parallel only in the underworld of Chicago. But here they were presented upon the lime-lit stage of the most famous of the nations before an audience of all the world

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  Years of Plenty, Years of Want

  France and the Legacy of the Great War

  • Benjamin Franklin Martin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Northern Illinois University Press

    (Publisher)

  March 1906 brought Clemenceau’s chance. Radical stalwart Jean Sarrien sought to form a cabinet in the midst of disturbances over the separation of church and state and asked him, among others, to his house for consultation. Passing the drinks tray, Sarrien asked what each would have, to which Clemenceau replied, “the Interior.” He was sixty-four years old and in charge of domestic order, but he had no intention of stopping there. Seven months later, Clemenceau had so vigorously restored order that he took over as premier from the utterly overshadowed Sarrien, who was afterward called “the Tiger’s meal.” His most perceptive biographer, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, described the attitude Clemenceau would take now that he had power: “For him, it was pride and will. His faith in the Republic, in liberty, in France was joined to a potent scorn for most other men, by an inflexible harshness which, with age, led him to a preference for order, for authority that must be obeyed.” Clemenceau spoke vaguely of social reforms, but he spent money on modernizing France’s national bureau of criminal investigation, the Sûreté générale. Its head, Célestin Hennion, called these new forces his “Tiger Brigades.” When electrical workers went on strike in March 1907, Clemenceau called out troops, restored power, and when Jaurès demanded by what right he acted, replied, “In the name of society’s right to live, in the name of the government’s right to assure that life.” Ten months earlier before the Chamber, in June 1906, he had derided Jaurès: “He speaks from the mountainside, absorbed in his sumptuous mirage while I, down on the plain, till a barren soil. . . . You claim to create the future but we will make that future.” When an overproduction of wine in 1907 caused a collapse in prices and led vintners to foment violence, Clemenceau had them arrested. In July1908, he called in cavalry units to break strikes at Vigneux and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. When the largest union, the General Confederation of Labor (Confédération générale du travail), threatened to call a general strike, he had all of its leaders jailed. He called himself France’s “top cop [

  premier flic ].” Jaurès now said he was an “evil man.” 23

  Clemenceau broke with Jaurès over foreign policy as well. The Socialists had convinced themselves that an international brotherhood of workingmen could—surely would—preserve Europe from any future war. Clemenceau denied that brotherhood of any sort existed, and he detested Germany for seizing Alsace and Lorraine from France in 1871. In the best Jacobin fashion, he was a patriot and a nationalist. He opposed imperial ventures not only on principle but because they distracted French concentration from the blue line of the Vosges River that was the border with Germany. When Clemenceau discovered that Caillaux favored German economic hegemony as long as France could share in the spoils, he became the deadly antagonist of this “demagogue-plutocrat.” In 1905 Germany had threatened France over Morocco. In September 1908, tempers flared over the “Casablanca Affair,” involving three German deserters from the French Foreign Legion. Imperiously confronting Clemenceau, Prince Huero von Radolin, Germany’s ambassador to Paris since 1901, demanded that France adopt the German position or he would have to return to Berlin fo

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  Peaceless Europe

  • (Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  All his life Clemenceau has been a tremendous destroyer. For years and years he has done nothing but overthrow Governments with a sort of obstinate ferocity. He was an old man when he was called to lead the country, but he brought with him all his fighting spirit. No one detests the Church and detests Socialism more than he; both of these moral forces are equally repulsive to his individualistic spirit. I do not think there is any man among the politicians I have known who is more individualistic than Clemenceau, who remains to-day the man of the old democracy. In time of war no one was better fitted than he to lead a fighting Ministry, fighting at home, fighting abroad, with the same feeling, the same passion. When there was one thing only necessary in order to beat the enemy, never to falter in hatred, never to doubt the sureness of victory, no one came near him, no one could be more determined, no one more bitter. But when War was over, when it was peace that had to be ensured, no one could be less fitted for the work. He saw nothing beyond his hatred for Germany, the necessity for destroying the enemy, sweeping away every bit of his activity, bringing him into subjection. On account of his age he could not visualize the problems of the future; he could only see one thing necessary, and that was immediate, to destroy the enemy and either destroy or confiscate all his means of development. He was not nationalist or imperialist like his collaborators, but before all and above all one idea lived in him, hatred for Germany; she must be rendered barren, disembowelled, annihilated.

  He had said in the French Parliament that treaties of peace were nothing more than a way of going on with war, and in September, 1920, in his preface to M. Tardieu's book, he said that France must get reparation for Waterloo and Sedan. Even Waterloo: Waterloo et Sedan, pour ne pas remonter plus haut, nous imposaient d'abord les douloureux soucis d'une politique de réparation.

  Tardieu noted, as we have seen, that there were only three people in the Conference: Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Orlando, he remarks, spoke little, and Italy had no importance. With subtle irony he notes that Wilson talked like a University don criticizing an essay with the didactic logic of the professor. The truth is that after having made the mistake of staying in the Conference he did not see that his whole edifice was tumbling down, and he let mistakes accumulate one after the other, with the result that treaties were framed which, as already pointed out, actually destroyed all the principles he had declared to the world.

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  Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

  • H. M. (Henry Mayers) Hyndman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  By this time Clemenceau had fully justified his claim to the distinction of being the most formidable and relentless political antagonist known in French public life since the great Revolution. As he would never take office himself and was moved by few personal animosities, he stood outside the lists of competers for place. He had definite Radical Republican principles and during all these years he acted up to them. He was throughout opposed, as I have said, to compromise. He fought it continuously all along the line. Moreover, he had a profound contempt for politicians who were merely politicians. “I have combated,” he said, “ideas, not persons. In my fight against Republicans I have always respected my party. In the heat of the conflict I have never lost sight of the objects we had in common, and I have appealed for the solidarity of the whole against the common enemy of all.”

  As, also, he triumphantly declared in a famous oration against those who were engaged in sneering at Parliamentary Government and the tyranny of words, he was ever in favour of the greatest freedom of speech, and even stood up for the commonplace debates which often must have terribly bored him. “Well, then, since I must tell you so, these discussions which astonish you are an honour to us all. They prove conclusively our ardour in defence of ideas which we think right and beneficial. These discussions have their drawbacks: silence has more. Yes, glory to the country where men speak, shame on the country where men hold their tongues. If you think to ban under the name of parliamentarism the rule of open discussion, mind this, it is the representative system, it is the Republic itself against whom you are raising your hand.”

  A great Parliamentarian, a great political Radical was Clemenceau the Tiger of 1877 to 1893. He, more than any other man, prevented the Republic from altogether deteriorating and kept alive the spirit of the great French Revolution in the minds and in the hearts of men.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE RISE AND FALL OF BOULANGER

  The relations of Clemenceau to General Boulanger form an important though comparatively brief episode in the career of the French statesman. Boulanger was Clemenceau’s cousin, and in his dealings with this ambitious man he did not show that remarkable skill and judgment of character which distinguished him in regard to Carnot and Loubet, whose high qualities Clemenceau was the first to recognise and make use of in the interest of the Republic. Boulanger was a good soldier in the lower grades of his profession, and owed his first important promotion to the Duc d’Aumale. This patronage he acknowledged with profound gratitude and even servility at the time; but repaid later, when he turned Radical, by what was nothing short of treacherous persecution of the Orleanist Prince. Boulanger went even so far as to deny that he had ever expressed his obligations to the Duke for aid in his profession, a statement to which the publication of his own letters at once gave the lie.

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  Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century

  Rivalry and Cooperation

  • Alan Sharp, Glyn Stone, Professor Glyn A Stone(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  31

  Responsibility, for good or ill, lies with Clemenceau. He formulated his own policy, made up his own mind, and acted on his own authority. In the matter of the guarantee he dealt directly with Lloyd George. Of his immediate entourage, his main confidant and go-between in the negotiations was Tardieu. Clemenceau sought no advice from the Quai d’Orsay. He consulted neither its Secretary-General, Philippe Berthelot, nor Berthelot’s distinguished predecessor, Jules Cambon—a member of his own delegation—nor Jules’ brother, Paul, the veteran Ambassador to London. He did not canvass opinion in his Cabinet. He seldom convened the Council of Ministers, and when he did, he treated it as a rubber-stamp. On 25 April 1919 he secured its unanimous approval both of the Treaty of Versailles and of the guarantee treaties.

  The most determined and influential opponents of Clemenceau’s policy were Foch and Poincaré. From first to last, from the Armistice until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, it was Foch who repeatedly and vehemently insisted on the absolute indispensability of the Rhine frontier, denounced its abandonment as ‘une capitulation, une trahison’32 and dismissed the guarantee as ‘la monnaie de singe’.33 His objection, simple and clear, was that the guarantee was an illusion: without the Rhine frontier the Treaty of Versailles would be a mere twenty-year armistice, to be followed by a repetition of 1914 and a fresh German assault, with this difference: that without Russia as her ally, France would be defeated. Even if the guarantee materialised, Foch predicted that Britain’s intervention would come too late to prevent the fall of France, and the expeditionary force would be swept back to the Channel.34

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