Georges Clemenceau

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Georges Clemenceau

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In office
25 October 1906 – 24 July 1909
President Armand Fallières
Preceded by Ferdinand Sarrien
Succeeded by Aristide Briand

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In office
16 November 1917 – 20 January 1920
President Raymond Poincaré
Preceded by Paul Painlevé
Succeeded by Alexandre Millerand

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Born 28 September 1841

Died 24 November 1929 (aged 88)

Political party Radical
Profession Physician, newspaper publisher

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau[1] (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ klemɑ̃so]; 28 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman, physician, and journalist. He served as the prime minister of France from 1906-1909 and 1917-1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles. He is commonly nicknamed "le Tigre" (the Tiger) and "le Père-la-Victoire" (Father Victory) for his determination as a wartime leader.

Biography

Early years

Clemenceau was born at Mouilleron-en-Pareds, Vendée, France. In Revolutionary times the Vendée had been a hotbed of monarchist sympathies but now it was fiercely republican. This town would also be famous as the birthplace of another famous politico-military figure in Frence history: Jean de Lattre de Tassigny.

Clemenceau's mother Sophie Eucharie Gautreau (1817 - 1903) was from a Huguenot family. His father Benjamin Clemenceau (1810 - 1897) was the village physician who hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. A fervent republican despite being the grandson of the nobleman Seigneur du Colombier, the elder Clemenceau fought in 1830 in the revolt against Charles X and later against Louis Phillippe. Arrested on the orders of Emperor Napoleon III after his attempted assassination by Felice Orsini, Clemenceau had been sentenced to exile in Algeria but was set free in Marseilles before the deportation order was carried out.

After his studies in the Nantes Lycée, Georges received his baccalaureat of letters in 1858. He then decided to enroll in medical school like his father. During his first few years in the Nantes school, as he himself pointed out, he was disruptive. He opposed the infatuation other students and faculty had with religion and the imperial ideals.

Journalism and exile

In 1861 Clemenceau left for Paris to pursue his studies where he began frequenting artistic and Republican circles in the Latin Quarter. He co-founded a weekly newsletter in December called Le Travail along with some friends. On February 23, 1862 he was arrested by the police for having placed posters summoning a demonstration. He spent 77 days in the Mazas prison.

In the midst of all of this he became a doctor on 13 May 1865 even though he took part in founding several magazines and writing many articles, most attacking the Imperial regime of Napoleon III. It soon became advisable to leave when the Imperial agents began cracking down on dissidents (sending most of them to Devil's Island). On 25 July of that year he set sail for the United States, perfecting his English along the way.

He took a post teaching French and horseback riding at a girls' school in Stamford, Connecticut. He later married in New York City, New York, on 23 June 1869 one of his students, Mary Elizabeth Plummer (1850 - 1923), daughter of William Kelly Plummer and wife Harriet A. Taylor, with whom he had three children before the marriage ended in divorce. During this time he joined French exile clubs in New York opposing the imperial regime.

The beginning of the Third Republic

He returned to Paris after the fall of the regime with the defeat at Sedan. He took part in the Paris Commune but was there to establish the third Republic. His political career began in earnest at this time.

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

Chamber of Deputies

In 1876 he stood again for the Chamber of Deputies, and was elected for the 18th arrondissement. He joined the far left, and his energy and mordant eloquence speedily made him the leader of the Radical section. In 1877, after the Seize Mai crisis, 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 manifestation. His demand in 1879 for the indictment of the de Broglie ministry brought him into particular prominence.

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 ("le Tombeur de ministères") who yet would not take office himself grew rapidly. Leading the Far Left in the National Assembly, he was an active opponent of Jules Ferry's colonial policy (which he opposed on moral grounds and also as a form of diversion from the “Revenge against Germany”) and of the Opportunist party, and in 1885 it was his criticism 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 opponent of the heterogeneous 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 Jules 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" (Sadi 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 Herz led to his being included 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, having held it continuously since 1876.

Dreyfus Affair

After his 1893 defeat, 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 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 Émile 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, in which Clemenceau was practically the sole contributor. Le Bloc lasted until 15 March 1902. On 6 April 1902 he was triumphally elected senator for the Var, although he had previously continually demanded the suppression of the Senate, considered a strong-house of conservatism. He sat with the Radical-Socialist Party and moderated somehow his positions, although he still vigorously supported the Combes ministry, who spearheaded the anti-clericalist Republican struggle. 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, which was implemented by the 1905 Act [2].

In cabinet

In March 1906 the fall of the Rouvier ministry, owing to the riots provoked by the inventories of church property, and the Radicals' victory during the 1906 legislative election, at last brought Clemenceau to power as Minister of the Interior in the Sarrien cabinet. On a domestic level, Clemenceau reformed the police forces and ordered repressive policies towards the workers' movement. He supported the formation of scientifical police by Alphonse Bertillon, and founded the Brigades mobiles (French for "mobile squads") led by Célestin Hennion. These squads were nicknamed Brigades du Tigre ("Tiger's Brigades") after Clemenceau himself.

The miners' strike in the Pas de Calais after the disaster at Courrieres (more than a thousand victims), leading to the threat of disorder on the 1st of May 1906, prompted him to employ the military; and his attitude in the matter — as well as the repression of the wine-growers' strike in the Languedoc-Roussillon — alienated the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) socialist party, from which he definitively broke in his notable reply in the Chamber to Jean Jaurès, leader of the SFIO, 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 cordiale 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 (First Moroccan Crisis in 1905-06, settled by the Algeciras Conference).

Clemenceau was defeated however on 20 July 1909 in a discussion in the Chamber on the state of the navy, in which bitter words were exchanged between him and Théophile Delcassé, former president of the Council whom Clemenceau had helped in his downfall. Clemenceau refused to respond to Delcassé's technical questions, and resigned after his proposal for the order of the day vote was rejected. He was succeeded as premier by Aristide Briand, with a reconstructed cabinet.

Between 1909 and 1912, Clemenceau dedicated his times to travels, conferences and also to the treatment of his sickness. He went to South America in 1910, traveling to Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina (where he went as far as Santa Ana de Tucuman in the North-West of Argentina). There, he was amazed by the influence of French culture and of the French Revolution on local elites [3]. In 1912, he was operated on because of a problem of the prostate.