[Georges Eugène Benjamin]. French statesman, born at Mouilleron-en-Pareds, Vendée, on the 28th of September 1841. Having adopted medicine as his profession, he settled in 1869 in Montmartre; and after the revolution of 1870 he had become sufficiently well known to be nominated mayor of the 18th arrondissement of Paris (Montmartre)—an unruly district over which it was a difficult task to preside. On the 8th of February 1871 he was elected as a Radical to the National Assembly for the department of the Seine, and voted against the peace preliminaries. The execution, or rather murder, of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas by the communists on 18th March, which he vainly tried to prevent, brought him into collision with the central committee sitting at the hôtel de ville, and they ordered his arrest, but he escaped; he was accused, however, by various witnesses, at the subsequent trial of the murderers (Nov. 29), of not having intervened when he might have done, and though he was cleared of this charge it led to a duel, for his share in which he was prosecuted and sentenced to a fine and a fortnight’s imprisonment.
Meanwhile, on the 20th of March 1871, he had introduced in the National Assembly at Versailles, on behalf of his Radical colleagues, the bill establishing a Paris municipal council of eighty members; but he was not returned himself at the elections of the 26th of March. He tried with the other Paris mayors to mediate between Versailles and the hôtel de ville, but failed, and accordingly resigned his mayoralty and his seat in the Assembly, and temporarily gave up politics; but he was elected to the Paris municipal council on the 23rd of July 1871 for the Clignancourt quartier, and retained his seat till 1876, passing through the offices of secretary and vice-president, and becoming president in 1875. In 1876 he stood again for the Chamber of Deputies, and was elected for the 18th arrondissement. He joined the Extreme Left, and his energy and mordant eloquence speedily made him the leader of the Radical section. In 1877, after the Seize Mai, he was one of the republican majority who denounced the Broglie ministry, and he took a leading part in resisting the anti-republican policy of which the Seize Mai incident was a symptom, his demand in 1879 for the indictment of the Broglie ministry bringing him into particular prominence. In 1880 he started his newspaper, La Justice, which became the principal organ of Parisian Radicalism; and from this time onwards throughout M. Grévy’s presidency his reputation as a political critic, and as a destroyer of ministries who yet would not take office himself, rapidly grew. He led the Extreme Left in the Chamber. He was an active opponent of M. Jules Ferry’s colonial policy and of the Opportunist party, and in 1885 it was his use of the Tongking disaster which principally determined the fall of the Ferry cabinet. At the elections of 1885 he advocated a strong Radical programme, and was returned both for his old seat in Paris and for the Var, selecting the latter. Refusing to form a ministry to replace the one he had overthrown, he supported the Right in keeping M. Freycinet in power in 1886, and was responsible for the inclusion of General Boulanger in the Freycinet cabinet as war minister. When Boulanger showed himself as an ambitious pretender, Clemenceau withdrew his support and became a vigorous combatant against the Boulangist movement, though the Radical press and a section of the party continued to patronize the general.
By his exposure of the Wilson scandal, and by his personal plain speaking, M. Clemenceau contributed largely to M. Grévy’s resignation of the presidency in 1887, having himself declined Grévy’s request to form a cabinet on the downfall of that of M. Rouvier; and he was primarily responsible, by advising his followers to vote neither for Floquet, Ferry nor Freycinet, for the election of an “outsider” as president in M. Carnot. He had arrived, however, at the height of his influence, and several factors now contributed to his decline. The split in the Radical party over Boulangism weakened his hands, and its collapse made his help unnecessary to the moderate republicans. A further misfortune occurred in the Panama affair, Clemenceau’s relations with Cornelius Herz leading to his being involved in the general suspicion; and, though he remained the leading spokesman of French Radicalism, his hostility to the Russian alliance so increased his unpopularity that in the election for 1893 he was defeated for the Chamber, after having sat in it continuously since 1876. After his defeat for the Chamber, M. Clemenceau confined his political activities to journalism, his career being further overclouded—so far as any immediate possibility of regaining his old ascendancy was concerned—by the long-drawn-out Dreyfus case, in which he took an active and honourable part as a supporter of M. Zola and an opponent of the anti-Semitic and Nationalist campaign. In 1900 he withdrew from La Justice to found a weekly review, Le Bloc, which lasted until March 1902. On the 6th of April 1902 he was elected senator for the Var, although he had previously continually demanded the suppression of the Senate. He sat with the Socialist Radicals, and vigorously supported the Combes ministry. In June 1903 he undertook the direction of the journal L’Aurore, which he had founded. In it he led the campaign for the revision of the Dreyfus affair, and for the separation of Church and State.
In March 1906 the fall of the Rouvier ministry, owing to the riots provoked by the inventories of church property, at last brought Clemenceau to power as minister of the interior in the Sarrien cabinet. The strike of miners in the Pas de Calais after the disaster at Courrières, leading to the threat of disorder on the 1st of May 1906, obliged him to employ the military; and his attitude in the matter alienated the Socialist party, from which he definitely broke in his notable reply in the Chamber to Jean Jaurès in June 1906. This speech marked him out as the strong man of the day in French politics; and when the Sarrien ministry resigned in October, he became premier. During 1907 and 1908 his premiership was notable for the way in which the new entente with England was cemented, and for the successful part which France played in European politics, in spite of difficulties with Germany and attacks by the Socialist party in connection with Morocco. But on July 20th, 1909, he was defeated in a discussion in the Chamber on the state of the navy, in which bitter words were exchanged between him and Delcassé; and he at once resigned, being succeeded as premier by M. Briand, with a reconstructed cabinet.
When Clemenceau resigned the French premiership in July 1909, he had already played as great a part in his country’s history as would have satisfied the energies and ambitions of most men. He might be driven from office; nothing could force him to give up the fearless use of his critical gifts as a speaker and as a writer. Out of office he remained a formidable figure. As a senator he did his utmost to defeat Raymond Poincaré in the presidential election of 1913, and rallied against him all the forces of French radicalism. Clemenceau’s candidate, Jules Pams, was adopted by the party caucus, but, in spite of Clemenceau, Poincaré maintained his candidature at Versailles and was elected. There were many then who felt that at last “the Tiger” had been killed. On the boulevards, young students who, years afterwards, were to seek from Clemenceau all their hope and inspiration, paraded shouting “Down with Clemenceau!” The old fighter refused to accept this defeat. He founded l’Homme Libre, in which to carry on his warfare against Poincaré. Every morning he poured a column of acid upon the new President of the republic, but soon found himself forced by patriotic honesty to support with all his strength the chief measure introduced to Parliament during the first year of Poincaré’s term of office—the Three Years’ Military Service bill. He belonged to the generation of defeat, and, while in no way a revanchard, believed, in spite of his cynicism, that injustice cannot be permanent, and therefore desired to see his country strong. He, more than any other Frenchman, had studied and appreciated the meaning of German military preparations, and to him also belongs the honour of having been calmly consistent in warning France of what was to come and exhorting her to gird up her loins. He fought for the Three Years’ Service bill with every weapon in his armoury, and it was he who opened the eyes of many Radical opponents of the measure to the danger of allowing considerations arising from the approaching elections to cloud their judgment on a matter of life or death to the country.
On the very eve of the World War in July 1914, speaking in the Senate, he insisted upon steps being taken to press forward at top speed the realization of the artillery programme. His war writings began long before war was declared, and there are some worthy of a place in history. Among them were the articles published by l’Homme Libre under the splendid titles of “Vouloir ou Mourir,” “Pour Etre,” “Triompher ou Perir.” After the outbreak of hostilities he soon made acquaintance with the stupidity of rigorous censorship, and in September 1914 his paper was suppressed on account of a violent attack upon the appalling inefficiency of army medical services. With characteristic irony and decision two days later he issued l’Homme Enchaîné, a title which was kept until he himself took office on November 16, 1917. Each day the censorship had to forge fresh fetters for chaining him. With all the skill of a surgeon Clemenceau laid bare the faults which too frequently characterized French war-leading. Poincaré was the butt for many of his bitterest jibes, and by the savagery of his opinion Clemenceau perhaps shut himself out of office for so long a time. He fought government after government in his paper, but there the censorship put buttons on his foils. His voice, however, could not be stilled in the private proceedings of the Senate. At the beginning of the war he was president of the foreign affairs committee, and when de Freycinet joined the Briand Ministry he also was elected president of the army committee of the Upper Chamber. These two posts gave him an observation post commanding the whole field of war affairs, and his criticisms and suggestions on these committees were invaluable. M. Caillaux, in his defence, Mes Prisons, states that throughout the war two policies fought in France for supremacy his own tendency towards reconciliation with Germany, and peace without victory, to be made very largely at the expense of Great Britain; and the uncompromising faith of Clemenceau that France must fight to a finish, that it would be better for the world and for France that she should go down into dust rather than she should live in dishonourable partnership with injustice. Caillaux’s analysis is right in its main perspective, and he is also correct in stating that it was in the spring of 1917 that Clemenceau won his victory. Then it was, without a doubt, that the clear revelation of the results of the doctrine of defeatism startled the people from the war-weariness into which they were slipping.
It was upon the wave of feeling then created that Clemenceau came into power. He had to fight not only Caillaux and his henchmen, who knew that with Clemenceau at the head of affairs their shrift would be short; he also had arrayed against him a legion of self-made enemies and the instinctive distrust of mediocre politicians for a man they knew to be their master. By July 1917, Clemenceau had driven Malvy from office by his charges of negligence in dealing with enemy propaganda. The position of the whole Ribot Ministry was made untenable, and the Painlevé Government was the last barrier erected against Clemenceau. On November 16, 1917, he formed his Victory Cabinet. Nearly all the men in it were unknown, and Clemenceau could well have said: “Le Gouvernement, c’est moi.”
A few facts and dates complete the record of his ministry. He presided over the Paris Peace Conference, at which he was chief French delegate. On February 19, 1919 he was wounded by revolver shots fired at him as he was leaving his house in the rue Franklin, by a young anarchist, Émile Cottin (sentence of death, March 14, commuted to imprisonment for life). He allowed himself to be put forward as candidate for the presidency at the preliminary party caucus meeting on January 16, 1920, but, in view of the support given to M. Deschanel, he did not stand for election at the National Assembly of Versailles, and then retired from all public activity. He afterwards traveled in Egypt and India. In June 1921 he was given a doctor’s degree at Oxford University. See also “In the Debate on Socialism with Jaurès.”
