France

Churchill saw in Clemenceau the importance of projecting the right mood in a crisis. He remembered the particular words Clemenceau had tried out to him, before exclaiming them in the French parliament: “I will fight in front of Paris; I will fight in Paris; I will fight behind Paris.” In 1940, Churchill adopted the Tiger’s trope: “Clemenceau was quite right. The only thing that mattered was to beat the Germans.

“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.”

Churchill regarded Paul Reynaud as a fighting Frenchman overwhelmed by circumstance. Reynaud held Churchill his country’s liberator.

Churchill’s understanding of France, and its potential for good and ill, begins with his biography of Marlborough, redolent with his lifetime theme of resisting continental tyrants.