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Great Contemporaries: Georges Clemenceau (2), The Statesman
- By PAUL A. ALKON
- | February 10, 2022
- Category: Churchill in WWI Explore Great Contemporaries
Dr. Alkon continues Churchill’s writings on Georges Clemenceau, concentrating on the Frenchman’s statecraft, particularly in the years following the Great War of 1914-18. Here Churchill expresses the Tiger’s statesmanlike qualities, together with his own profound understanding of French history and character.
Continued from Part 1
Part 2: Clemenceau the Statesman
Churchill’s second major essay on Clemenceau was published in its definitive version in Great Contemporaries, September 1937. There it is titled simply “Clemenceau” and illustrated with one picture of the Tiger in old age. The original text first appeared in December, 1930.7 It is an entirely different article from “My Day with Clemenceau.” (Part 1 of this essay.)
In 1936, before Great Contemporaries, an alternate version appeared in The News of the World.8 It was one of Churchill’s newspaper series, “Great Men of Our Time.” This text has a substantially different beginning.
All three versions, with their surviving manuscripts, reveal that Churchill lavished great care on his Clemenceau sketches. He made numerous small and large revisions en route to his definitive version. Here Churchill—eventually a Nobel laureate in literature—shows himself to have been very much a professional writer, polishing style as well as substance. His sketch of Clemenceau also reveals much of what Churchill knew and thought about France.
Writing this essay became for Churchill a kind of historical workshop wherein he tried to define the essential nature of France no less than of Clemenceau. For Churchill, the two became on a symbolic level interchangeable.
A national symbol
Churchill begins his News of the World article with his version of a Proustian association of memories:
Whenever I hear the Marseillaise, I think of Clemenceau. He embodied and expressed France. As much as any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was France. He was an apparition of the French Revolution at its sublime moment, before it was overtaken by the squalid butcheries of the Terrorists. He represented the French People risen against tyrants. If the story of England is an epic, that of France is a drama. The nation has the sense of the theatre. At the crises of its destiny it always remembers the audience. In this, too, Clemenceau was the type of France. All that he did was drama.9
Churchill’s metaphors are expressive. Clemenceau is a ghost of the French Revolution, come to haunt the tyrants of present time in France. He is both actor and dramatist in the theater that is French politics at the country’s critical moments. Unobtrusively but unmistakably, Churchill also loyally ranks England above France in the great scheme of things. He calls the history of England an epic, that of France merely a drama—a worthy though lesser genre. Epics, as every Harrow boy must have been told, are the vehicles of great significance and heroic tales.
Unlike the two other Clemenceau essays, the News of the World text explains how Clemenceau’s attitudes were shaped by his upbringing and first experience of political tyranny: “He was born into a home whose only religion was republicanism…when the French monarchy was tottering to its fall.” That fall, Churchill says, came when the 1870 Battle of Sedan ended the “tawdry splendours” of Emperor Napoleon III.
Vive la république
Churchill hammers home his distaste for that empire—and conveys an impression that he knows a great deal about it. He explains more precisely what Clemenceau’s father taught him to value:
While vanity strutted in the limelight and intrigue mined and countermined in the shadows behind the throne, the elder Clemenceau declaimed against the court and preached the stern virtues of the republic in arms. Danton, Robespierre, St. Just—these were his gods…. “Mangy dogs” the Tiger called his father’s heroes in after years, but his passion for the Republic burned like a flame till the end. Often it was a devouring flame. Paul-Benjamin Clemenceau had builded better than he knew.10
Here in allegorical mode, Churchill dismisses court politics of the Napoleon III as merely antics of the personified abstractions vanity and intrigue, whose actual manifestations need not be further specified. More than the particulars of court politics, according to Churchill, it was Paul-Benjamin’s hatred of such intrigue and of the monarchy itself that shaped his son’s outlook.
* * *
Even more crucial in Churchill’s account is the episode in which Paul-Benjamin Clemenceau was imprisoned. This followed an assassination attempt on Napoleon III, although “the elder Clemenceau was in no way implicated.” The shock of that wrongful imprisonment “proved too much for his only surviving daughter. She was struck down by a nervous disease, lost the power of speech and for many months lay between life and death.”
For Paul-Benjamin’s son, Churchill explains, “The dynamic of hatred was added to theoretic republicanism.” Churchill dramatizes Georges’ reaction: “I’ll revenge you,” he says, “careless of the listening spies” in his father’s prison. “He now had the martyrdom of a beloved sister to avenge as well.” (Char 8/542. NOTW.)
Whether accurately recorded by Churchill or, more likely, a product of his or some historian’s imagination, this bit of dialogue where father and son are overheard by shadowy spies is indeed dramatic. Churchill finds it characteristic of French politics. As Churchill presents the scene, however, it is more the stuff of melodrama than theater.
Clemenceau attempted two plays but then desisted. It is just as well that Churchill never tried anything for the stage. Their forte was expository prose and oratory—as the Nobel Prize committee recognized in Churchill’s case. His literature prize was awarded for “mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”11
Portrayals of greatness
For the The Strand and Great Contemporaries, Churchill starts by praising Clemenceau’s much criticized Grandeurs et Misères de la Victoire. This was his posthumous reply to the posthumous accusations of Marshal Foch: “We are the richer….that Foch flings the javelin at Clemenceau from beyond the tomb,” Churchill writes. “…and that Clemenceau, at the moment of descending into it, hurls back the weapon with his last spasm.”12
Despite Churchill’s comic start, he argues soberly in Clemenceau’s defense. History, he says, is best served by showing great men as they really were, even in petty moments. Not by mere monuments “upon which only the good and great things that men have done should be inscribed.” (GC, 301.)
In what became the definitive text, Churchill omits his personal response to the Marseillaise, his characterizations of French and English history, and how Clemenceau was influenced by his father’s imprisonment. But he retains, greatly amplifies and complicates his equation of Clemenceau with France as its best symbol:
He represented the French people risen against tyrants—tyrants of the mind, tyrants of the soul, tyrants of the body; foreign tyrants, domestic tyrants, swindlers, humbugs, grafters, traitors, invaders, defeatists—all lay within the bound of the Tiger; and against them the Tiger waged inexorable war. Anti-clerical, anti-monarchist, anti-Communist, anti-German—in all this he represented the dominant spirit of France. (GC, 302.)
Here is a brilliantly particularized list of all the forms of tyranny. Because of Churchill’s equation of Clemenceau and France, the list is also a catalogue of what Churchill regards as characteristic and in the main admirable French attitudes. These stemmed ultimately from the French Revolution “at its sublime moment.” They defined new ideals for the country and the world.
“Clemenceau was France”
A student of political symbols, Churchill adds an image of Clemenceau as a new, more appropriate symbol of France. As much as any person could be, he writes, Clemenceau “was France.” Then: “Fancy paints nations in symbolic animals—the British Lion, the American eagle, the Russian double-headed ditto, the Gallic Cock. But the Old Tiger, with his quaint, stylish cap, his white moustache and burning eye, would make a truer mascot for France than any barnyard fowl.” (GC, 302.)
As Churchill must have known, cartoonists enjoyed putting Clemenceau’s head (complete with moustache) on the body of a tiger. But this was usually for satiric purposes, not as an emblem of France. As he also knew, since at least 1912 cartoonists occasionally depicted him (not always fondly) as an English bulldog.13
Despite Churchill’s suggestion, the tiger never displaced the Gallic cock. Nor was the British lion chased away by the Churchillian bulldog. In the 1940s, however, Churchill as bulldog became the symbol of his country and its best qualities. It was one of history’s few pleasingly ironic outcomes: Churchill became precisely the kind of honored mascot he thought the old Tiger deserved to be.
Tragedy and triumph
History provided a less pleasing parallel in 1945 when Churchill’s wartime efforts as prime minister did not prevent a wounding ejection from office. Likewise Clemenceau in 1920. In the new French electoral system, he hoped to be chosen to lead by acclaim. He lost (by a much narrower margin than Churchill would in 1945). Churchill records his fall without apparent premonition about his own future: “When the victory was won, France to foreign eyes seemed ungrateful. She flung him aside and hastened back as quickly as possible to the old hugger-mugger of party politics.” In an understated but cutting rebuke to the country that so often sets itself up as an arbiter and supreme example of politeness, Churchill adds: “In principle one cannot blame the French; but they might have behaved more politely.” (GC, 312-13.)
Churchill’s essay as a whole, however, portrays the Tiger triumphant. It outlines a career that, only eight years after his death, had in Churchill’s opinion made it “already certain that Clemenceau was one of the world’s great men.” (GC, 302) For readers who might aspire, as Churchill himself did, to become one of the world’s great men, his outline of Clemenceau’s life provides a clear though far from easy model for imitation, and is evidently designed partly as such. Questions about how to recognize great men, and how to become one, were never far from Churchill’s thoughts.
National symbols
In the definitive version of “Clemenceau,” Churchill surveys another emblematic figure. France’s victorious Marshal Foch represented the aristocratic virtues of pre-revolutionary France. While noting their antagonisms, Churchill presents their wartime cooperation as symbolic of France at her best. The clash between revolutionary and aristocratic ideals, he explains, gives the French “a dual nature in a degree not possessed by any other great people….”
There is nothing like this duality in Great Britain or the United States, or even in Germany. It is an unending struggle which goes on continually, not only in every successive Parliament, but in every street and village of France, and in the bosom of almost every Frenchman. Only when France is in mortal peril does the struggle have a truce. The comradeship of Foch and Clemenceau illustrates as in a cameo the history of France. (GC, 303.)
Churchill’s explanation of the aristocratic strain of French history symbolized by Foch is among his most memorable set pieces. Its romantic eloquence rivals Edmund Burke’s famous recollection of Marie Antoinette at the height of her glory. I guess but can’t prove that Burke’s passage was in Churchill’s mind, to be equaled or outdone.
“Their two hearts beat as one…”
In “Clemenceau,” however, Churchill prudently picks Joan of Arc as a more acceptable 20th-century emblem of ancient French virtues. Supplementing Clemenceau’s France, he writes:
There was another mood and another France…whose grace and culture, whose etiquette and ceremonial has bestowed its gifts around the world. There was the France of chivalry, the France of Versailles, and above all, the France of Joan of Arc. It was this secondary and submerged national personality that Foch recalled. In the combination of these two men during the last year of the War, the French people found in their service all the glories and the vital essences of Gaul. These two men embodied respectively their ancient and their modern history. Between the twain there flowed the blood-river of the Revolution. Between them towered the barriers which Christianity raises against Agnosticism. But when they gazed upon the inscription on the golden statue of Joan of Arc: “La pitié qu’elle avait pour le royaume de France” and saw gleaming the Maid’s uplifted sword, their two hearts beat as one.14
Churchill here invokes an imaginary moment when Clemenceau and Foch, singly or together, look at Emmanuel Frémiet’s statue of Joan, and recall a famous and proverbial phrase. (GC, 303.)
Realism devoid of nostalgia
Reflecting on Joan, Churchill’s nostalgia is in full flood—one of the most notable moments when he indulges sentimental yearning for the “grace and culture” of old aristocratic eras, viewed through very rose-colored glasses indeed. Yet the biographer of Marlborough knew better than most the sordid realities of those days. Even Churchill’s paean to ancient France includes a reminder of “the blood-river” it engendered. He includes too a reminder of the conflict between Catholicism (exemplified by the devout Foch) and fierce anti-clericalism (often led by the skeptical Clemenceau). For the Tiger, as Churchill explains in his essay, “had no hope beyond the grave.” (GC, 312.)
Churchill’s survey of Clemenceau mainly demonstrates realism devoid of nostalgia, along with considerable knowledge of French history. Starting with his courageous action trying to save generals Thomas and Lecomte from execution while he was “Mayor of Montmartre amid the perils of the Commune” in 1871, Churchill outlines the issues that subsequently demanded moral and physical courage from Clemenceau the statesman. He cites the savage debates over expansion of the French Empire, the arguments over Boulanger, accusations that Clemenceau was a paid agent of England, and not least, the Dreyfus Affair, in which Clemenceau had “to fight, to him the most sacred thing in France—the French Army.” (GC, 303, 309.)
Throughout Clemenceau’s political heyday during France’s 1880s-90s belle époque, as Churchill sums it up:
All the elements of blood-curdling political drama were represented by actual facts. The life of the French Chamber, hectic, fierce, poisonous, flowed through a succession of scandals and swindles, of exposures, of perjuries, forgeries, and murders, of plottings and intriguings, of personal ambitions and revenges, of crooking and double-crossing, which find their modern parallel only in the underworld of Chicago.” (GC, 305.)
Concluded in Part 3.
Endnotes
7 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “Tiger of France,” Colliers, 29 November 1930, 62-64 (Cohen C343a); “Clemenceau–The Man and the Tiger,” The Strand Magazine (December, 1930): 582-93 (Cohen C343b); “Clemenceau,” American Mercury, May 1943 (Cohen 343c). Also published in German as “Clemenceau,” in Das Nue Tage-Bude, 21 May 1938.
8 WSC, “Great Men of Our Time (IX), Clemenceau: The Tiger,” News of the World, 15 March 1936, 5 (Cohen C486.10).
9 Ibid.
10 Citations to CHAR with various reference numbers refer to documents, often untitled, in the Churchill Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge University. Char 8/542: manuscript, and the News of the World text (with slightly different paragraphing). Subsequent citations will be documented parenthetically in my text as Char 8/542 & NOTW.
11 Nobel Prize Library: Albert Camus, Winston Churchill (New York: Alexis Gregory; Del Mar, CA: CRM Publishing, n.d.), 175.
12 WSC, “Clemenceau,” in Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937), 301-02. Subsequent citations to this work will be documented parenthetically in my text with the abbreviation GC.
13 See Punch, 29 May 1912. For other examples of Churchill as bulldog, see Fred Urquhart, WSC: A Cartoon Biography (London: Cassell, 1955), 105, 121, 131, 242; and Churchill in Caricature (London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2005), 44. There is also Henri Guignon’s widely reproduced American World War II poster “Holding the Line,” which depicts Churchill as a bulldog guarding the British flag on which he (immovably) stands. Cartoons of Churchill as bulldog seem to be memorable not because there were large numbers of them, but because the image stays in mind on account of its simplicity and aptness.
14 WSC, Great Contemporaries, 1937 revised and extended edition (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), (Danielle Mihram tells the phrase Churchill quotes (“the pity she had for the Kingdom of France”) is sometimes attributed to Joan’s vision of Saint Michael telling her about the distressed state of France and expressing compassion (“pitié”), which motivates her mission. Note also that Fremiet’s statue raises a standard, not a sword.
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