Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau became prime minister of France at seventy-six with the war going badly, and was known as the Tiger. Born in the Vendée in 1841 to a republican doctor who was arrested under Napoleon III, he qualified in medicine, spent four years in the United States teaching and writing, married an American, and came back to be mayor of Montmartre during the Commune. He spent forty years as a journalist and a deputy destroying other people's careers — he brought down several ministries and was called the wrecker — and lost his own seat in 1893 over the Panama Canal scandal. He came back through the Dreyfus affair. He was editor of L'Aurore and it was he who put the headline J'accuse on Zola's letter in 1898, and he wrote several hundred articles on the case. He was prime minister from 1906 to 1909, and again from November 1917, at the point where the French army had mutinied, Russia had left the war and the Americans had not yet arrived. His programme was one sentence: he waged war. He purged defeatists, prosecuted the former premier Caillaux for treason, visited the trenches constantly, and secured a unified allied command under Foch. At the peace conference he wanted guarantees against a German recovery — the Rhineland detached, the frontier fixed, reparations — and was blocked by Wilson and Lloyd George into a settlement he regarded as insufficient. He lost the presidency in 1920 and retired. He died in 1929, and asked to be buried standing up.
- Lived: 1841 CE – 1929 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: prime_minister, political_leader
