Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French politician, physician, and journalist, who was Prime Minister of France during the First World War.
Background
Georges B. Clemenceau was born on September 28, 1841, at Mouilleron-en-Pareds, Vendée, to Sophie Eucharie Gautreau and Benjamin Clemenceau. His father Benjamin, a non practicing physician, was a political activist. Popular as a devotee of the 1789 Revolution, he was responsible for shaping his son’s inclination towards Revolution and Catholic detest.
Education
Following the family tradition, he studied medicine at Nantes and Paris.
Career
Graduating in 1865, Clemenceau, together with his father, paid a short visit to England, where he met John Stuart Mill, whose Auguste Comte and Positivism he translated into French.
In 1869 Clemenceau returned to France; after the Revolution of 1870, he was appointed mayor of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, comprising Montmartre.
When the Communard uprising began on Montmartre on March 18, he tried unsuccessfully to prevent bloodshed.
Failing again, he resigned from his position at Paris and his seat in the Assembly.
At that time his graying hair was close-cropped, his bushy eyebrows overhung large, black eyes, and his thick, drooping mustache was still black.
He firmly upheld liberty and natural rights and was influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, and Charles Darwin. Clemenceau possessed a genius for destructive criticism and won the appellation of the "Tiger" for his role in destroying Cabinets.
He was greeted with campaign posters showing him juggling English coins, and he failed to win reelection in 1893.
Between 1893 and 1903 Clemenceau built a new career in journalism.
At first, he wrote daily articles for La Justice, but in 1897 he began writing for L'Aurore, which had a larger circulation.
Selections of his articles were published as Le Mêlée sociale (1895) and Le Grand Pan (1896).
In 1898 he published a novel, Les Plus forts, and a volume of sketches on Jewish subjects, Au pied de Sinai.
On Jan. 13, 1898, Clemenceau ceded his usual space in L'Aurore to Emile Zola's inflammatory article on the Dreyfus Affair, which Clemenceau headlined "J'accuse. "
In 1900 he began publishing a weekly, Le Bloc, most of which he wrote himself, but he soon returned to L'Aurore as editor.
Meanwhile, he published his Dreyfusard articles in five volumes.
He was confronted with new strikes and used the army to control the most formidable, which involved agricultural workers of the Midi.
When Paris postmen struck, Clemenceau denounced strikes by civil servants.
Later he created a ministry of labor and negotiated nationalization of the Western Railway.
He refused to apologize to Germany for an incident in Morocco.
In 1913 he founded a daily paper, L'Homme Libre (The Free Man), to express his views on armaments and the German menace.
In September 1914 Clemenceau's paper was suppressed because of its criticism of government weaknesses, but it reappeared immediately with the title L'Homme Enchainé (The Enchained Man).
Clemenceau restored France's self-confidence.
He welcomed Marshal Ferdinand Foch's appointment as commander in chief of the Allied armies in April 1918 and gave him unqualified support.
Clemenceau's confidence in his military commanders proved justified, and by June, Foch and Pétain were able to take the offensive.
On Nov. 11, 1918, Germany signed the armistice.
As a leader of the French delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, Clemenceau played a major role in drafting the Treaty of Versailles and determining conference policies.
Consequently, the French legislators, who found Clemenceau's rule autocratic and resented being excluded from the peace negotiations, condemned the peace treaty as too lenient and debated 3 months before ratifying it.
After the elections of 1919 Clemenceau resigned as premier.
During the remaining years of his life, he divided his time between Paris and the Vendée and devoted himself to writing.
In 1927 he had completed a two-volume philosophical testament, Au Soir de la pensée (In the Evening of My Thought).
His memoirs of the war and the peace settlement were published after his death as Grandeurs etmisères d'une Victoire (Grandeur and Misery of Victory) in 1930.
Religion
Georges Clemenceau 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 Church.
Politics
Although Clemenceau was prominent particularly in opposition, he nevertheless revealed the qualities which later made him world-famous as the head of the French government: idealistic republicanism, immense will power, and endurance, and steadily growing cultural refinement--coupled, however, with anticlericalism and a cold, pessimistic, almost cruel sense of reality.
He made La Justice an organ of republican radicalism, published several volumes of essays, and wrote a novel and two plays.
During the same period, he collected material for work in several volumes on the development of the ideal of democracy, an idea which he conceived after a lecture tour on democracy through Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1910.
He participated in the oppositional activity with some radical intellectuals, among them Emile Zola, and was jailed for two months.
Clemenceau was convicted as a friend and assistant to Cornelius Hertz, a key figure in the scandal in Panama, and was also accused of paying for the English.
Views
Quotations:
"A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed - I well know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself."
"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
"Liberty is the right to discipline ourselves in order not to be disciplined by others."
"Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee."
Membership
In 1876 Clemenceau returned to national politics and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as representative of the 18th arrondissement of Paris.
In 1902 Clemenceau was elected senator for the Var, and he accepted the post of minister of interior in the Sarrien ministry in 1906.
Connections
In 1865 he traveled to the United States, where he served as correspondent for a Paris newspaper and taught riding and French in a girls' academy at Stamford, Connecticut He married one of his pupils, Mary Plummer.
Two daughters and one son were born to them, but after seven years the couple separated. In 1870, the couple moved to Paris, where Clemenceau began practice as a doctor.