Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (28 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman who was prime minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A physician turned journalist, he played a central role in the politics of the Third Republic, particularly amid the end of the First World War. He was a key figure of the Independent Radicals, advocating for the separation of church and state, as well as the amnesty of the Communards exiled to New Caledonia.
After about 1,400,000 French soldiers were killed between the German invasion and Armistice, he demanded a total victory over the German Empire. Clemenceau stood for reparations, a transfer of colonies, strict rules to prevent a rearming process, as well as the restitution of Alsace–Lorraine, which had been annexed to Germany in 1871. He achieved these goals through the Treaty of Versailles signed at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920). Nicknamed Père la Victoire ("Father Victory") or Le Tigre ("The Tiger"), he continued his harsh position against Germany in the 1920s, although not quite so much as President Raymond Poincaré or former Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch, both of whom thought the treaty was too lenient on Germany. Clemenceau obtained mutual defence treaties with the United Kingdom and the United States against possible future German aggression, but these never took effect due to the U.S. Senate's failure to ratify the treaty, which in turn released Britain from its obligation.
Early years Clemenceau was a native of Vendée, born in Mouilleron-en-Pareds. During the period of the French Revolution, Vendée had been a hotbed of monarchist sympathies. The department was remote from Paris, rural, and poor. His mother, Sophie Eucharie Gautreau (1817–1903), was of Huguenot descent. His father, Benjamin Clemenceau (1810–1897), came from a long line of physicians, but lived off his lands and investments and did not practice medicine. Benjamin was a political activist; he was arrested and briefly held in 1851 and again in 1858. He instilled in his son a love of learning, devotion to radical politics, and a hatred of Catholicism.David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (1976) pp. 16–22. The lawyer Albert Clemenceau (1861–1955) was his brother. His mother was a devout Protestant; his father was an atheist and insisted that his children should have no religious education. Clemenceau was interested in religious issues. He was a lifelong atheist with a sound knowledge of the Bible. He became a leader of anti-clerical or "Radical" forces that battled against the Catholic Church in France and the Catholics in politics. He stopped short of the more extreme attacks. His position was that if church and state were kept rigidly separated, he would not support oppressive measures designed to further weaken the Catholic Church.David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (1978) p 17, 152.
After his studies in the Lycée in Nantes, Clemenceau received his French baccalaureate of letters in 1858. He went to Paris to study medicine and eventually graduated with the completion of his thesis "De la génération des éléments anatomiques" in 1865.Clemenceau (1865), pp. 7–11
Political activism and American experience
In Paris, the young Clemenceau became a political activist and writer. In December 1861, he and some friends co-founded a weekly newsletter, Le Travail. On 23 February 1862, he was arrested by the imperial police for having placed posters summoning a demonstration. He spent 77 days in the Mazas Prison. Around the same time, Clemenceau also visited the old French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui and another Republican activist, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, in jail, further deepening his hatred of the Napoleon III regime and advancing his fervent republicanism.
He was graduated as a doctor of medicine on 13 May 1865, founded several literary magazines, and wrote many articles, most of which attacked the imperial regime of Napoleon III. After a failed love affair, Clemenceau left France for the United States as the imperial agents began cracking down on dissidents and sending most of them to the bagne de Cayenne (Devil's Island Penal System) in French Guiana.
Clemenceau worked in New York City during the years 1865–1869, following the American Civil War. He maintained a medical practice, but spent much of his time on political journalism for a Parisian newspaper, Le Temps. He taught French in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and also taught and rode horseback at a private girls' school in Stamford, Connecticut, where he would meet his future wife. During this time, he joined French exile clubs in New York that were opposing the imperial regime.
As part of his journalistic activity, Clemenceau covered the country's recovery following the Civil War, the workings of American democracy, and the racial questions related to the end of slavery. From his time in America, he retained a strong faith in American democratic ideals as opposed to France's imperial regime, as well as a sense of political compromise that later would become a hallmark of his political career.
Marriage and family
On 23 June 1869, he married Mary Eliza Plummer (1849–1922), in New York City. She had attended the school where he taught horseback riding and was one of his students. She was the daughter of Harriet A. Taylor and William Kelly Plummer.
Following their marriage, the Clemenceaus moved to France. They had three children together, Madeleine (born in 1870), Thérèse (1872) and Michel (1873).
Although Clemenceau had many mistresses, when his wife took a tutor of their children as her lover, Clemenceau had her put in jail for two weeks and then sent her back to the United States on a steamer in third class. The marriage ended in a contentious divorce in 1891.Watson (1976), pp. 23–32. He obtained custody of their children. He then had his wife stripped of French nationality.
Beginning of the Third Republic Clemenceau had returned to Paris after the French defeat at the Battle of Sedan in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second French Empire. After returning to medical practice as a physician in Vendée, he was appointed mayor of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, including Montmartre, and he also was elected to the National Assembly for the 18th arrondissement. When the Paris Commune seized power in March 1871, he tried unsuccessfully to find a compromise between the more radical leaders of the Commune and the more conservative French government. The Commune declared that he had no legal authority to be mayor and seized the city hall of the 18th arrondissement. He ran for election to the Paris Commune council, but received fewer than eight hundred votes and took no part in its governance. He was in Bordeaux when the commune was suppressed by the French Army in May 1871.Milza, Pierre, L'année terrible – La Commune (mars-juin 1871)
After the fall of the commune, he was elected to the Paris municipal council on 23 July 1871 for the Clignancourt quarter and retained his seat until 1876. He first held the offices of secretary and vice-president, then he became president in 1875.
Chamber of Deputies
In 1876, Clemenceau stood for the Chamber of Deputies (which replaced the National Assembly in 1875) 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 Crisis of 16 May 1877, he was one of the republican majority who denounced the ministry of the Duc de Broglie. Clemenceau led resistance to the anti-republican policy of which the incident of 16 May was a manifestation. In 1879, his demand for the indictment of the Broglie ministry brought him prominence.Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (1976).
From 1876 to 1880, Clemenceau was one of the main defenders of the general amnesty of thousands of Communards, members of the revolutionary government of the 1871 Paris Commune who had been deported to New Caledonia. Along with other radicals and figures such as poet and then-Senator Victor Hugo, as well as a growing number of republicans, he supported several unsuccessful proposals. Finally a general amnesty was adopted on 11 July 1880. The "reconciliation" envisaged by Clemenceau could begin, as the remaining deported Communards returned to France, including his friend Louise Michel.
In 1880, Clemenceau started his newspaper, La Justice, which became the principal organ of Parisian Radicalism. From this time, throughout the presidency of Jules Grévy (1879–1887), he became widely known as a political critic and destroyer of ministries (le Tombeur de ministères) who avoided taking office himself. Leading the far left in the Chamber of Deputies, he was an active opponent of the colonial policy of Prime Minister Jules Ferry, which he opposed on moral grounds and also as a form of diversion from the more important goal of "Revenge against Germany" for the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. In 1885, his criticism of the conduct of the Sino-French War contributed strongly to the fall of the Ferry cabinet that year.
During the French legislative elections of 1885, he advocated a strong radical programme and was returned both for his old seat in Paris and for the Var, district of Draguignan. He chose to represent the latter in the Chamber of Deputies. Refusing to form a ministry to replace the one he had overthrown, he supported the right in keeping Prime Minister Charles de Freycinet in power in 1886 and was responsible for the inclusion of Georges Ernest Boulanger in the Freycinet cabinet as war minister. When General Boulanger revealed himself as an ambitious pretender, Clemenceau withdrew his support and became a vigorous opponent of the heterogeneous Boulangist movement, although the radical press continued to patronize the general.
By his exposure of the Wilson scandal, and by his personal plain speaking, Clemenceau contributed largely to the resignation of Jules Grévy from the presidency of France in 1887. He had declined Grévy's request to form a cabinet upon the downfall of the cabinet of Maurice Rouvier by advising his followers not to vote for Charles Floquet, Jules Ferry, nor Charles de Freycinet, Clemenceau was primarily responsible for the election of an "outsider", Marie François Sadi Carnot, as president.
The split in the Radical Party over Boulangism weakened his hand and its collapse meant that moderate republicans did not need his help. A further misfortune occurred in the Panama affair, as Clemenceau's relations with the businessman and politician Cornelius Herz led to his being included in the general suspicion. In response to accusations of corruption levelled by the nationalist politician Paul Déroulède, Clemenceau fought a duel with him on 23 December 1892. Six shots were discharged, but neither participant was injured.
Clemenceau remained the leading spokesman for French radicalism, but his hostility to the Franco-Russian Alliance so increased his unpopularity that in the French legislative elections of 1893, he was defeated for his seat in the Chamber of Deputies after having held it continuously since 1876.
Dreyfus Affair For nearly a decade after his 1893 defeat, Clemenceau confined his political activities to journalism. His career was further clouded by the long-drawn-out Dreyfus case, in which he took an active part as a supporter of Émile Zola and an opponent of the anti-Semitic and nationalist campaigns. In all, during the affair Clemenceau published 665 articles defending Dreyfus.
On 13 January 1898, Clemenceau published Émile Zola's J'Accuse...! on the front page of the Paris daily newspaper, L'Aurore, of which he was owner and editor. The controversial article, written in the form of an open letter to Félix Faure, the president of France, would become a famous part of the Dreyfus Affair.