Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
Great Contemporaries, Clemenceau (3): How the Tiger Inspired Churchill
- By PAUL A. ALKON
- | February 24, 2022
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries The Literary Churchill
As an actor playing a major role, Clemenceau led “A life of storm, from the beginning to the end; fighting, fighting all the way, never a pause, never a truce, never a rest”15 It is Clemenceau as fighter during peace as well as war that Churchill stresses. The key word that fascinates Churchill to the point of repetition is “fighting.”
Part 3: Clemenceau as Churchill’s Inspiration
Clemenceau’s combative nature appealed to Churchill’s similar temperament, which had made him a life-long connoisseur and student of political combat. Moreover, Clemenceau’s rhetorical methods so impressed Churchill that he later adapted them to his own purposes.
They became friends while Churchill was Minister of Munitions. The French had just reluctantly turned to him during what Churchill calls “the worst period of the War.” Every other conceivable combination had been tried, Churchill writes: “The fierce old man was summoned to what was in fact the Dictatorship of France. He returned to power as Marius had returned to Rome; doubted by many, dreaded by all, but doom-sent, inevitable.” (GC, 309-10).
Churchill later thought of himself as “walking with destiny” when summoned in parallel circumstances. Here he uses the phrase “doom-sent” in a way that shifts the latter part of his Clemenceau sketch toward the mood, though not the denouement, of a Greek tragedy.
As chorus, Churchill from this point in the sketch is eye-witness and commentator.
Dealing with the opposition
Churchill approves of Clemenceau’s way of dealing with an unfriendly parliament chamber:
To do any good you have got to get down to grips with the subject and in human touch with the audience. Certainly Clemenceau seemed to do this; he ranged from one side of the tribune to the other, without a note or book of reference or scrap of paper, barking out sharp, staccato sentences as the thought broke upon his mind. He looked like a wild animal pacing to and fro behind bars, growling and glaring; and all around him was an assembly which would have done anything to avoid having him there, but having put him there, felt they must obey. (GC, 310-11.)
Such improvised, unscripted speeches were never Churchill’s preferred method. He acknowledges, however, that in France’s dire circumstances, when the Great War looked very close to lost, it was necessary to encourage—as Clemenceau did—a mood of defiance: “Indeed it was not a matter of words or reasoning…. France had resolved to unbar the cage and let her tiger loose upon all foes, beyond the trenches or in her midst. Language, eloquence, arguments were not needed to express the situation. With snarls and growls, the ferocious, aged, dauntless beast of prey went into action.” (GC, 311.) Here the image of Clemenceau as old tiger is elaborated. And via the sound effects of snarls and growls he is almost made literal rather than merely metaphoric.
A private tutorial
The importance during a crisis of projecting the right mood was certainly a lesson Churchill learned well. He remembered too some particular words that had served Clemenceau to good effect. By trying them out on Churchill before using them in the French parliament, Clemenceau provided a kind of private tutorial. And WSC certainly proved to be the old teacher’s most important and apt pupil.
Churchill wrote: “He uttered to me in his room at the Ministry of War words he afterwards repeated in the tribune: ‘I will fight in front of Paris; I will fight in Paris; I will fight behind Paris.’ Everyone knew this was no idle boast. Paris might have been reduced to the ruins of Ypres or Arras. It would not have affected Clemenceau’s resolution” (GC, 312.) Here of course is a model for part of the peroration of Churchill’s speech about Dunkirk to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”16
In adapting Clemenceau’s trope, Churchill amplifies it. He hammers home his point by greatly widening and also particularizing its geographical scope. He provides a memorable vignette of future war waged relentlessly on sea and land and in the air, in France as well as in England.
“All principles equally true and false”
Churchill evidently took to heart Clemenceau’s explanation of how as prime minister in perilous times he cast aside theories and usual axioms of party politics in favor of pragmatic decisions:
One day he said to me, “I have no political system, and I have abandoned all political principles. I am a man dealing with events as they come in the light of my experience,” or it may be it was “according as I have seen things happen.” I was reminded of Monsieur de Camors’ letter to his son: “All principles are equally true or equally false, according to circumstances.” Clemenceau was quite right. The only thing that mattered was to beat the Germans.” (GC, 311-12.)
In 1940, Churchill’s inspired and energetic muddling through was surely fortified by recollections of Clemenceau. He quotes above Octave Feuillet’s Monsieur de Camors (evidently from memory). Opening the novel, Camors advises his son against entangling emotional or other alliances. The novel piously (and tediously) dramatizes the inadequacy of that irreligious advice. But what perhaps made Camors’ quote linger in Churchill’s memory is its dangerously seductive appeal to any rhetorician: “In reality, all principles are indifferent—true or false according to the hour and circumstance.”17 To Churchill later, beating the Germans was all that mattered. He sometimes muttered, “in the night, all cats are grey.”18
Neither Clemenceau nor Churchill could have agreed to this dismissal of ideas as nothing more than rhetorical counters. Yet both knew that abstract political principles must sometimes be cast aside in favor of pragmatic action. In any case, Churchill displays familiarity with a French novel once very popular and highly regarded.
The Tiger at the end
Churchill’s last verbal image of Clemenceau portrays him “a year before he died,” in his unheated library-sitting room in wintery Paris:
The old man appears, in his remarkable black skull-cap, gloved and well wrapped up. None of the beauty of Napoleon, but I expect some of his St. Helena majesty, and far back beyond Napoleon, Roman figures come into view. The fierceness, the pride, the poverty after great office, the grandeur when stripped of power, the unbreakable front offered to this world and to the next—all these belong to the ancients.” (GC, 313.)
In this picture of the aging giant, Churchill turns to a more vague but equally laudatory vision of Clemenceau as a modern whose true place is now in the pantheon of admirable ancients. Churchill rightly praised George Bernard Shaw’s plays because in them “His ideas become personages…. Yet they live.”19 This is no easy achievement. Churchill came closest to successfully emulating it in his sketch of Clemenceau. There his subject becomes both a vividly particularized individual, the embodiment of ancient virtues, and above all the living idea of Revolutionary France at its best.
Last thoughts
Churchill’s Great Contemporaries sketch winds down with recollection of visits to Clemenceau during his retirement. His daughter Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire is quoted, correcting the legend that although he wanted to be buried upright that wish was not honored. In the Strand Magazine and News of the World essays, Churchill had accepted this tale, and stoutly ended these versions: “If I were a Frenchman, I would put it right—even now.”
However much this rebuke may have grated on French sensibilities, Madeleine took no umbrage. She did assure Churchill that her father left no such wish, although he was quite particular about his burial arrangements. Churchill’s final essay ends with her description:
If you go one day to visit this grave, nameless, and without any inscription, I think that you will be moved in that simple and lonely place, where one only hears the wind in the trees and murmuring of a brook in the ravine….he had wished to return alone to his father’s side, to the land whence his ancestors came, les Clemenceau du Colombier, from the depths of the woodlands of La Vendée, centuries ago.” (GC, 313.)
These haunting words from Madeleine evoke the long and important sweep of French history and Clemenceau’s place in it.20 Churchill thanked her, expressing pleasure that she liked his essay. He added his hope that England and France would remain united to avert the peril facing the civilization. (The date was 13 January 1937.) Nine months later, Great Contemporaries was published with its revised ending, quoting her comments.
Appendix
1. Churchill’s judicious use of French
In the selective bits of French sprinkled in his Clemenceau essays, Churchill adroitly heightens Gallic color and flavor. This avoids either flaunting his French (such as it was) in an off-putting way, or confusing non-French readers. It’s hard to imagine a reader of Great Contemporaries too linguistically challenged to guess the meaning of his few untranslated remarks. That Churchill gave careful thought to such stylistic issues is clear not only from his occasional, though on that account all the more effective, resorts to French, but also from the myriad revisions of his Clemenceau essays.
Here is one telling example of knowing how much French to use. In this final version Churchill writes that Clemenceau was “a truer mascot for France than any barnyard fowl.” (GC, 302.) In the Strand Magazine, Churchill wrote that he “would make a truer oriflamme for France….” (SM, 584.) “Oriflamme” was appropriately redolent of French history, though hardly a familiar word, even in the 1930s. It refers to the ancient banner of French kings from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It is in fact what Joan of Arc holds in her Paris statue. (See Part 2 of this article.)
Churchill was fond of antique words, a striking hallmark of his style. But he used them with a surer touch when they were English. It may have hurt to suppress this gem of his French vocabulary, but Churchill correctly replaced “oriflamme” with “mascot.” With self-discipline and keen critical eye, he chose Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s words rather than his own.
2. Clemenceau in The World Crisis
In Churchill’s memoir of the First World War, Clemenceau receives only brief, laudatory attention. There is no mention of his accolade by the French as “Father of Victory.” Except for the peace conference, Clemenceau’s actions are remarked only in connection with military events. Churchill’s visit to the front with Clemenceau is described in a sentence: “We spent the whole of the 30th at the front, saw all the commanders, got sufficiently near the shells to satisfy the President of the Council, dined with Pétain in his Headquarters train, and returned to Paris after midnight.”21
Clemenceau’s resolve to fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris is quoted. But unlike in Great Contemporaries, it is not used to illustrate his temperament. In The World Crisis it conveys Clemenceau’s support for Foch, who was willing to lose Paris if necessary to win the war—but not Pétain, who wanted to defend Paris even if it meant allowing a potentially fatal gap to open between the British and French armies. Of the unsentimental but correct strategy proposed by Foch and Clemenceau, Churchill comments: “Thus these great men were able to exalt their minds above the dearest temptations of their hearts, and thus we found the path to safety by discerning the beacons of truth.” (WC, II, 449.)
Clemenceau’s only other wartime comment in The World Crisis has for us now a very Churchillian ring: “We are now giving ground, but we shall never surrender. We shall be victorious if the Public Authorities are equal to their task.’” (WC, II, 456.) Clemenceau’s credo here could certainly pass for Churchill’s in 1940.
3. Clemenceau in Churchill’s oratory
Would Prime Minister Churchill would have acted and spoken as he did had he not known or studied Clemenceau? I believe so. Many other aspects of Churchill’s experiences, studies, and psychology pointed him in the same direction. It was their affinities that prompted Churchill’s study of the Tiger—not the study of Clemenceau that created those affinities. Still, Churchill’s instincts as leader, and occasionally his words, were surely fortified by his understanding of Clemenceau’s career.
That said, we must accept that Churchill also studied many other people who offered positive or negative examples relevant to his career. His histories and biographies are replete with exemplary figures, as is Great Contemporaries. The most important of these is his ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, to whom Churchill devoted four volumes and years of study. In Marlborough, Churchill insists that “the success of a commander does not arise from following rules or models…every great operation of war is unique.”22
Churchill’s entire career as a writer, however, equally demonstrates his conviction that the past must be studied—even though it does not neatly offer rules and models to follow. Hence among other works, his accounts of Clemenceau are valuable. Although more detailed biographies are available, none are from authors whose experience so well equipped them as Churchill to understand and in many ways to parallel Clemenceau’s best achievements. The English-speaking peoples have no better student of the Tiger than Winston Churchill.
Parenthetic references
GC: Winston S. Churchill, “Clemenceau,” in Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937).
SM: WSC, “Clemenceau–The Man and the Tiger,” The Strand Magazine (December, 1930).
WC: WSC, The World Crisis, vol. 3 1916-1918, Part 2 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927).
Endnotes
15 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “Clemenceau,” in Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937), 303. Subsequent citations to this work will be documented parenthetically in my text with the abbreviation GC.
16 WSC, House of Commons, 4 June 1940, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 5.
17 Octave Feuillet, Monsieur de Camors (London: Ægypan Press, n.d.), 10. In French: “En réalité, tous les principes sont indifférents; ils sont tous vrais ou faux suivant l’heure. Les idées sont des instruments dont vous devez apprendre à jouer opportunément pour dominer les hommes.” See Octave Feuillet, Monsieur de Camors (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867), 7.
18 WSC, 1933, in Churchill by Himself, 62. This is a very common French expression: “La nuit tous les chats sont gris.” But Churchill may have remembered this from Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 2, Ch. 33 (1605); or John Heywood’s Proverbes, Part 1, Ch. 5 (1546): “When all candles be out, all cats be grey.” Churchill first used the expression in Marlborough.
19 WSC, “George Bernard Shaw,” in Great Contemporaries, 50.
20 Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s to WSC, 12 November 1936, Char 8/548. It was apparently prompted by seeing his 1936 News of the World essay, the only one to mention the Marseillaise. Madeleine hopes that whenever Churchill hears the Marseillaise he will continue to think of her father.
21 WSC, The World Crisis, vol. 3 1916-1918, 2 parts (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), II: 470-71. Subsequent citations to this work will be cited parenthetically in my text with the abbreviation WC.
22 WSC, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 2 vols. (London: Harrap, 1947), I: 105.
The author
Dr. Alkon, who died in 2020, was Leo S. Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. This essay was first published as an abstract in 2008. In his memory we pleased to publish the unabridged original, by kind permission of Mrs. Ellen Alkon. Readers interested in Dr. Alkon’s other Churchill works should acquire his seminal book Winston Churchill’s Imagination.
Sincere thanks to Katharine Thompson at the Churchill Archives Centre for efficient assistance in research; and Dr. Alkon’s USC colleague Danielle Mihram for enlightenment on matters of French language and culture.