Clemenceau, Georges

Clemenceau, Georges (b. Mouilleron-en-Pareds, 28 Sept. 1841; d. 24 Nov. 1929) French; Prime Minister 1906–9, 1917–20 Clemenceau was born in 1841 in the western department of the Vendée. The son of a gentleman doctor imprisoned for his opposition to the 1851 coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte, he inherited from his father a lifelong detestation of Bonapartism and a commitment to democratic Republicanism; one of his most celebrated sayings was that the French Revolution was a bloc which must be accepted in its totality, including the Terror. He studied medicine in Paris, where he engaged in anti-regime politics, and then emigrated to the United States, from which he returned, complete with American wife, shortly before the fall of the Second Empire. His entry into politics coincided with the twin disasters of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. As mayor of Montmartre he experienced at first hand the brutalities which accompanied the latter and as a member of the National Assembly he was one of the deputies who refused to accept the loss of Alsace Lorraine to Bismarck's Second Reich. By the late 1870s he was the leader of the advanced Radicals, and acquired national prominence as a champion of social reform and hammer of the Catholic church—and also as the wrecker of the Opportunist governments of the early Third Republic. He never held office, however, and in the 1880s his political judgement was called into question by his flirtation with the demagogic General Boulanger and by his friendship with the crooked financier, Cornelius Herz, who was heavily implicated in the Panama Scandal. Having lost his seat in the 1893 parliamentary elections, he looked for a time to be politically finished. His campaigning zeal blazed up again when the Dreyfus Affair appeared to reopen the war between the supporters and opponents of Republicanism. He flung himself into the pro-Dreyfus cause, opened the columns of his newspaper to Zola's famous article ‘J'Accuse’, and in 1903 was elected Senator for the Var.

Though Clemenceau still described himself as a Radical, he took no part in the foundation of the Radical Socialist Party in 1901 and was notably reserved about the government led between 1902–5 by the Radical's favourite Émile Combes. In the run-up to the 1906 elections, he was invited to become Minister of the Interior in a coalition government designed to show the unity of the Republican family against its clerical and nationalist opponents. He dealt effectively with the consequences of a mining disaster in Northern France and with the potentially dangerous First of May campaign organized by France's revolutionary syndicalist movement. Four months later, at the age of 64, he became Prime Minister. His appointment was widely regarded as opening the door to the realization of the social programme of Radicalism and his ministerial programme contained proposals for an income tax, old-age pension, and for the nationalization of the Western Railway. Yet although a number of reforms were passed by a government which was one of the longest lasting in the history of the Third Republic, his first ministry is chiefly remembered for the heavy handed way it dealt with labour unrest and for his implacable opposition to public sector trade unionism. Clemenceau insisted that in a democracy force in the defence of the rule of law was justifiable and that public sector officials owed a duty of obedience to the state. His opponents in the Radical Party condemned his disregard for the pieties of Republican unity and the Socialists claimed that his enthusiasm for police repression demonstrated the inability of bourgeois Radicalism to cope with the reality of class conflict. Thus his government witnessed a breakdown in the Socialist-Radical unity which the Dreyfus Affair had created. It gave Clemenceau a reputation as the enemy of organized labour which he would never subsequently lose.

After the defeat of his ministry in July 1909, Clemenceau appeared to settle for the role of Angry, but Isolated, Old Man. If, in the run-up to the First World War he supported the Three Years Law extending military service, he also attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent the election in 1913 of Poincaré as President of the Republic. When the First World War began, he used his presidency of the Senate Army commission, and his newspaper, to launch ferocious attacks on what he regarded as the incompetent management of the conflict by governments and generals alike. Excesses of tone once again contributed to his reputation for irresponsibility. But in 1917, as war weariness set in at—and behind—the front, he began to be seen as the man who might galvanize national energies. By late 1917, there was open talk of a compromise peace and some evidence that prominent politicians were starting to put out feelers to the enemy. Faced with this crisis, Poincaré turned to the man who had been savaging him in the newspaper ever since 1913, and appointed him Prime Minister. Clemenceau's ministerial declaration was simple—‘I make war’—and he dominated his government. He made frequent visits to the troops at the front, established effective relations with the military, and managed to persuade the English to accept Marshal Foch as Allied Supreme Commander. The real war he waged was against proposals for a negotiated peace, and those who made them. He sent a number of German agents to the firing squad, imprisoned a number of prominent politicians on charges of defeatism, and cowed his most prominent rival Briand into silence.

Clemenceau's vigour and determination unquestionably restored France's will to fight. When Germany sued for peace in November 1918, he was greeted with acclamation by the public and was declared by parliament to have deserved well of the country. He remained Prime Minister throughout 1919 and dominated the French delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. As the last surviving representative of the deputies who had refused to accept the 1871 peace settlement, his aims were straightforward—the return of Alsace Lorraine and the destruction of Germany's potential ever again to threaten France. He insisted on the war guilt and reparation clauses of the Versailles Treaty, but was unable to persuade the Allies of the need to separate the Rhineland from Germany. He defended the treaty against the opposition of hard-line nationalists, who argued that it gave too much away, and of the Socialists who regarded it as too harsh. His national popularity remained high and he lent his authority to the anti-Bolshevik Bloc National which swept to power in the November 1919 elections. Thus his victory in the 1920 presidential election looked assured. But at this moment his past reputation destroyed his political future. His uncompromising anti-clericalism alarmed the Catholic right; his equally uncompromising anti-Socialism alienated the radical left; and his bruising attacks on political rivals made him vulnerable to their resentment. On the preliminary vote for the presidency, he was outvoted by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Deschenel. He immediately withdrew from the contest and resigned as Prime Minister. Having spent the last years of his life travelling, writing and defending the Versailles Treaty, he died, at the age of 88 in 1929, and was buried in the Vendée.

For most of his fifty-year career, Clemenceau was a deeply controversial figure. Self-opinionated and aggressive, he could be almost wantonly destructive and he certainly helped create the culture of government instability which became a characteristic of Third Republic politics. Yet he was consistent in his anti-clericalism, his advocacy of good relations with Great Britain, his commitment to the Republican ideal, and, above all, his blazing patriotism. The leadership qualities he demonstrated in 1917–19 brought France victory and the photograph of the old, moustachioed man talking at the front to ordinary soldiers (he took to his grave the bunch of wild flowers which one such group gave him) is one of the potent images of the First World War. He remains France's most celebrated civilian politician of the twentieth century.