Georges Clemenceau

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Template:Cleanup-date Image:Clemenceau.JPG Georges Clemenceau¹ (28 September, 1841 – 24 November, 1929) was a French statesman, doctor and journalist.

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Biography

Clemenceau was born in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, in Vendée.

In his early years in Paris, he was a political activist, publishing what was seen by the government of Emperor Napoleon III as radical material. Clemenceau then traveled to the United States, where he lived from 1865 to 1869. He was impressed by the freedom of discussion and expression he witnessed, which was unknown in France during the reign of Napoleon III, and he had great admiration for the politicians who were forging American democracy.

He taught in a girls' school in Stamford, Connecticut, and married one of his pupils, Mary Plummer, in 1869. Three children were born of the marriage, but the couple separated after seven years.

Back in France, he adopted medicine as his profession. He settled in Montmartre in 1869. After the revolution of 1870, he was sufficiently well known to be nominated mayor of the XVIIIe arrondissement of Paris (Montmartre) - an unruly district over which it was a difficult task to preside.

During the Franco-Prussian War, Clemenceau remained in Paris and was resident throughout the Siege. When the war ended on January 28th 1871, Clemenceau stood for election as mayor and on 8 February, 1871, he was elected as a Radical to the National Assembly for the Seine département. As a Radical, he voted against the proposed peace treaty with newly-formed Germany.

On 20 March, 1871, he introduced a bill in the National Assembly at Versailles, on behalf of his Radical colleagues, proposing the establishment of a Paris municipal council of eighty members; but he was not re-elected at the elections of 26 March. Clemenceau played an important role in the Paris Commune. On March 18th 1871, he witnessed first-hand the murder of General Lecomte and General Thomas by communard members of the National Guard. In his memoirs, he claims that he tried to prevent the murder of the generals and the murder of several army officers and policemen he saw being incarcerated by the National Guard, but this claim has never been confirmed nor denied. His suspected anti-communard sympathies led to him being placed under surveillance by the Central Committee at the Hotel de Ville, the main Communard body responsible for the running Paris during the Commune. The Central Committee ordered his arrest, but within a day he had been cleared and was released. During April and May, Clemenceau was one of several Parisian mayors who tried unsuccessfully to mediate between the Communard government in Paris and the Republican National Assembly at Versailles. When the loyalist Versaillais army broke into Paris on May 21st to end the commune and place Paris back under the jurisdiction of the French government, Clemenceau refused to give any help to the Communard government. After the end of the Commune, Clemenceau was accused by various witnesses of not having intervened to save Generals Lecomte and Thomas when he might have done so. Although he was cleared of this charge, it led to a duel, for which he was prosecuted and sentenced to a fine and a fortnight's imprisonment.

He was elected to the Paris municipal council on 23 July, 1871 for the Clignancourt quartier, and retained his seat till 1876, passing through the offices of secretary and vice-president, and becoming president in 1875.

In 1876 he stood again for the Chamber of Deputies, and was elected for the 18th arrondissement. He joined the extreme Left, and his energy and mordant eloquence speedily made him the leader of the Radical section. In 1877, after the Seize Mai, he was one of the republican majority who denounced the de Broglie ministry, and he took a leading part in resisting the anti-republican policy of which the Seize Mai incident was a symptom. His demand in 1879 for the indictment of the Broglie ministry brought him into particular prominence.

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In 1880 he started his newspaper, La Justice, which became the principal organ of Parisian Radicalism. From this time onwards, throughout Jules Grévy's presidency, his reputation as a political critic and destroyer of ministries who yet would not take office himself grew rapidly. He led the Extreme Left in the Chamber. He was an active opponent of Jules Ferry's colonial policy and of the Opportunist party, and in 1885 it was his use of the Tonkin disaster which principally determined the fall of the Ferry cabinet.

At the elections of 1885 he advocated a strong Radical programme, and was returned both for his old seat in Paris and for the Var, selecting the latter. Refusing to form a ministry to replace the one he had overthrown, he supported the Right in keeping Freycinet in power in 1886, and was responsible for the inclusion of General Boulanger in the Freycinet cabinet as war minister. When Boulanger showed himself as an ambitious pretender, Clemenceau withdrew his support and became a vigorous combatant against the Boulangist movement, though the Radical press and a section of the party continued to patronize the general.

By his exposure of the Wilson scandal, and by his personal plain speaking, Clemenceau contributed largely to Grévy's resignation of the presidency in 1887, having himself declined Grévy's request to form a cabinet on the downfall of Maurice Rouvier's Cabinet. He was also primarily responsible, by advising his followers to vote for neither Floquet, Ferry, or Freycinet, for the election of an "outsider" (Carnot) as president.

The split in the Radical party over Boulangism weakened his hands, and its collapse made his help unnecessary to the moderate republicans. A further misfortune occurred in the Panama affair, as Clemenceau's relations with Cornelius Here led to his being involved in the general suspicion. Although he remained the leading spokesman of French Radicalism, his hostility to the Russian alliance so increased his unpopularity that in the 1893 election he was defeated for his Chamber seat, after having held it continuously since 1876.

After his 1893 defeat, M. Clemenceau confined his political activities to journalism. His career was further overclouded by the long-drawn-out Dreyfus case, in which he took an active and honourable part as a supporter of Emile Zola and an opponent of the anti-Semitic and Nationalist campaigns.

On 13 January, 1898, Clemenceau, as owner and editor of the Paris daily L'Aurore, published Emile Zola's J'accuse on the front page of his paper. Clemenceau decided that the controversial story that would become a famous part of the Dreyfus Affair would be in the form of an open letter to the President, Félix Faure.

In 1900 he withdrew from La Justice to found a weekly review, Le Bloc, which lasted until March 1902. On 6 April, 1902 he was elected senator for the Var, although he had previously continually demanded the suppression of the Senate. He sat with the Socialist Radicals, and vigorously supported the Combes ministry. In June 1903 he undertook the direction of the journal L'Aurore, which he had founded. In it he led the campaign for the revision of the Dreyfus affair, and for the separation of Church and State.

In March 1906 the fall of the Rouvier ministry, owing to the riots provoked by the inventories of church property, at last brought Clemenceau to power as Minister of the Interior in the Sarrien cabinet. The miners' strike in the Pas de Calais after the disaster at Courrieres, leading to the threat of disorder on the 1st of May 1906, obliged him to employ the military; and his attitude in the matter alienated the Socialist party, from which he definitively broke in his notable reply in the Chamber to Jean Jaurès in June 1906.

This speech marked him out as the strong man of the day in French politics; and when the Sarrien ministry resigned in October, he became premier. During 1907 and 1908 his premiership was notable for the way in which the new entente with England was cemented, and for the successful part which France played in European politics, in spite of difficulties with Germany and attacks by the Socialist party in connection with Morocco.

On 20 July, 1909, however, he was defeated in a discussion in the Chamber on the state of the navy, in which bitter words were exchanged between him and Delcassé. He resigned at once, being succeeded as premier by M. Briand, with a reconstructed cabinet.

Later he served as the forceful wartime premier of France from 1914 to 1918. Nicknamed Le Tigre (The Tiger) and Le Père la Victoire (Father Victory) he was a major contributor to the Allied victory in World War I. As a framer of the postwar Treaty of Versailles, he opposed leniency toward Germany after WWI. Since most people believe the effects of his decision contributed to the events that lead to World War II, Clemenceau's historical reputation can be argued to have suffered as a result.

Clemenceau was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the Third French Republic. Embittered by his defeat, he dismissed the office as being 'as superfluous as a prostate gland'.

He died in Paris on 24 November, 1929, aged 88, from natural causes, and was buried in Le Colombier, Vendée, Mouchamps.

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Trivia

  • Clemenceau led a simple personal life, and preferred to make his own meals whenever possible. He reportedly ate gruel for breakfast, boiled eggs for lunch, and milk and bread for supper during his entire life.
  • During the Paris Peace Conference, he woke each day at 3 a.m. and was capable of working through until 11 at night.
  • Clemenceau suffered from acute eczema on his hands, which by 1916 was so bad he had to wear gloves to cover up his skin
  • France's diplomatic position at the Paris Peace Conference was repeatedly jeapordised by Clemenceau's mistrust of David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and his intense dislike of French President Raymond Poincaré. When negotiations reached a stalemate, Clemenceau had a habit of shouting at the other heads of state and storming out of the room rather than participating in further discussion
  • The French aircraft carrier Clemenceau was named after Georges Clemenceau.

¹ Clemenceau's name is spelled with an e and not with the é that is required in French for the correct pronunciation.

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Clemenceau's First Ministry, 25 October, 1906 - 24 July, 1909

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Clemenceau's Second Ministry, 16 November, 1917 - 20 January, 1920

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