Georges Clemenceau

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (Mouilleron-en-Pareds, September 28, 1841-Paris, November 24, 1929) was a French doctor, journalist and politician who achieved the position of prime minister and head of government during the regime of the French Third Republic.

Biography

Political career

Clemenceau came from the bourgeoisie of the Vendée region and was educated in a republican family, his father being a firm opponent of the monarchies of Charles X and Louis Philippe I, and then of Emperor Napoleon III. Following family tradition, he studied medicine in Nantes and Paris where he participated in the creation of several magazines and wrote numerous articles opposing Napoleon III. From 1865 to 1869 he lived in the United States, where he taught at a secondary school.

Clemenceau's political career began as soon as the Third Republic began, in September 1870, when he was appointed mayor of the 18th arrondissement (Montmartre neighborhood) of the French capital, where he carried out important social work. In the elections of February 1871 he was elected deputy to the National Assembly for the department of Sena, in the ranks of the radical republicans. During the Paris Commune he tried to mediate between the government of Adolphe Thiers and the government of the Communards without success, which led him to resign from both his functions as deputy and district mayor.

Re-elected deputy for Paris in the general elections of 1876, he emerged as head of the extreme left opposition fighting for amnesty for the prisoners of the Commune, advocating the separation of Church and State and against the colonial policy of France. His opposition to the French military interventions in the Suez Canal and Tonkin, as well as his fight for the suppression of the Senate, brought down several governments, earning him the nickname "El Tigre". & # 34;.

After being unjustly implicated in the Panama scandal, he withdrew from the political scene for a few years until the outbreak of the Dreyfus case. Clemenceau was then editor of the newspaper L'Aurore, and was the inventor of the famous title of Emile Zola's article, called J'accuse...!, distinguishing himself as one of the defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

In 1902 Clemenceau returned to political life, being elected senator for the department of Var. As a senator, he continued to campaign for the separation of powers between Church and State, supporting the anticlerical legislation of Prime Minister Émile Combes. After the victory of the Radical Party in the 1906 elections, Clemenceau was appointed Minister of the Interior and the same year he became Head of Government (as President of the Council of Ministers). Shortly after the Courrières catastrophe of that same year, there were numerous workers' protests sponsored by the socialists, which were repressed by Clemenceau using military force. Ruling with an iron fist, Clemenceau reformed the police forces so that they could confront protest movements by militants of the political left, creating "mobile brigades" of police (which in reference to him were nicknamed "Tiger brigades") and describing himself as the "first policeman in France".

Confronted by his political environment, and harassed by the socialists, Clemenceau broke his relations with the socialist leader Jean Jaurès and supported the establishment of the Entente Cordiale with Great Britain. However, he was harshly questioned by Théophile Delcassé in 1909 regarding the state of the French navy, for which he resigned that same year to return to his journalistic career. He founded the regional newspaper Le journal du Var and the Parisian newspaper L'homme libre (The Free Man).

First World War

After the outbreak of the Great War of 1914, Clemenceau dedicated himself in the press to addressing international and military issues, thereby forging a solid reputation as a patriot and nationalist. Detractor of the pacifist stance of his socialist colleagues regarding the war, he was harshly questioned by the government chaired by René Viviani and suffered the censorship of his newspaper L'homme libre in September 1914, when which changes its name to L'homme enchaîné (The chained man). In November 1917, the President of the Republic Raymond Poincaré called Clemenceau to be head of government again, accumulating the positions of Prime Minister (President of the Council) and Minister of War.

During his mandate, Clemenceau restored the confidence of the French people in republican institutions by carrying out a true policy of "public salvation" to achieve the full mobilization of the French economy with a view to sustaining the war effort. Clemenceau actively persecuted pacifists and the press that suggested defeatist ideas but without resorting to censorship, and his frequent visits to troops at the front earned him enormous popularity. He also publicly called for the imprisonment of parliamentarian Joseph Caillaux, who had suggested that France begin peace talks with the German Empire and abandon its alliance with Great Britain, a proposal that Clemenceau called treason and defeatism, insisting on the contrary in his decision to continue the war. war until the end (in French la guerre jusqu'au bout or jusqu'au-boutisme), maintaining the fight against Germany until its surrender.

In parallel, Clemenceau left the full conduct of the war to the military staff led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, without political interference, taking care for his part to harshly preserve a very solid "internal front", which generated broad support among the popular masses in his favor. Admiration and support for Clemenceau spread even among the troops at the front, a rather unusual situation among the politicians of the Third Republic.

Postwar

Clemenceau was one of the architects and prominent negotiators of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. During the signing of the Treaty of Versailles he was part of those who demanded to severely punish Germany through the payment of high war reparations, the incorporation of the Rhineland to the French economy, and the complete extinction of the German colonial empire, along with various other plans to decisively weaken the defeated side. The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, were opposed to these kinds of ideas and prevented Clemenceau's plans from being fully realized.

Clemenceau nevertheless managed to have various clauses approved in the peace agreements aimed at "definitively" to Germany, but even so he maintained for the rest of his life the thought that the defeated Germany had been treated in a & # 34; too benevolent way & # 34; by France, which is why several contemporary historians consider him partly responsible for the errors of the Treaty of Versailles. Even so, he opposed the French occupation of the Ruhr, considering that it unnecessarily distanced France from its British and American allies.

In 1920 Clemenceau lost the elections for the Presidency of the Republic. At seventy-nine years old, he retired to dedicate himself to traveling and writing two important works: Démosthène, Grandeur et Misères d'une victoire (Demosthenes, greatness and miseries of a victory), dedicated to defending his political position during the years 1917-1919, and Au soir de lapensae (In the twilight of thought), a reflection on his political evolution through throughout his life.

A fan of art, Clemenceau was a protector of many painters such as Claude Monet. Thanks precisely to his intervention, this painter gave his series of works The Water Lilies to the French State in 1922.

Clemenceau died in Paris on November 24, 1929, at the age of eighty-eight. According to his wishes, he was buried in a simple grave in the village of Mouchamps (in the Vendée region), the land of his ancestors.