BOOKS

Brightly burning tiger

John Grigg

AT THE HEART OF A TIGER: CLEMENCEAU AND HIS WORLD, 1841-1929 by Gregor Dallas Macmillan, £25, pp. 620 In November 1917 the 76-year-old Georges Clemenceau was recalled to the leadership of France. Though hated and feared by many of his fellow-politicians, from right to left, and not least by the president of the republic, Raymond Poincare, he was the inevitable man to turn to when the country was in extreme danger. And he did not disappoint. Without him the calamity of 1940 might well have occurred in the previous war. French losses were substantially higher than British, from a rather smaller population, and only 40- odd years after another costly war; so one can hardly be surprised that there were mutinies in the French army in 1917, while among politicians there was a strong minority favouring peace with Germany on terms which, in the circumstances, would have been tantamount to defeat. Clemenceau counteracted the defeatist mood and led the country through to triumph, richly deserving the title Pere-la- Vietoire conferred on him by the French people.

No less well deserved was a nickname he had earlier acquired, le Tigre, and it is as a tiger that Winston Churchill, an eye- witness, describes him as he made his first parliamentary speech after taking office as war leader:

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, growl- ing 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.

In that speech he said 'We present our- selves before you with the single thought of waging total war'. And when, the following May, the Germans launched their last offensive against the French army, once again reaching the Marne, Churchill heard from him more words whose future reso- nance is unmistakable: 'I will fight in front of Paris. I will fight in Paris. I will fight behind Paris'. (In 1917-18 Churchill was minister of munitions in the Lloyd George government. His essay on Clemenceau appears in Great Contemporaries, published in 1932).

Throughout his long career Clemenceau was always a fighter — often literally, as a duellist — and the wounds that he inflicted tended to rankle. Hence, in part, his exclu- sion from government until he was in his sixties. Though he had been active in public life since the foundation of the Third Republic, and had proved his administra- tive efficiency as mayor of Montmartre during the siege of Paris in 1870, it was not until 1906 that he first received govern- ment office. He was then minister of the interior for a few months before becoming prime minister until 1909, a relatively long period by the standards of the Third Republic: longer, indeed, than that of his second and more momentous ministry.

Apart from his quirks of character, another reason why he was hard to accom- modate was that he was a genuine republi- can and radical who had little time, however, for socialism, and none whateVer for syndicalism. In 1871 he was opposed to the Commune, as well as to the reactionary majority supporting Thiers; and a similar pattern persisted in the new century, when he championed a radicalism based upon the individual against the collectivism of Jaures and the Marxist left. Though his opposition to colonialism in the 1880s, and his famous newspaper campaign on behalf of Dreyfus at the turn of the century, won him sympathy on the left, this was largely forfeited when he took a tough line with strikers during his first premiership.

A good straightforward 'political biogra-

'It's a watercolour oil painting.' phy' of Clemenceau by David Robin Wat- son appeared here in 1974. It is now sup- plemented, but by no means supplanted, by a very different sort of life of him by Gre- gor Dallas, who is presumably American. (Though he went to Sherborne school, and has become a French resident, he graduat- ed at Berkeley and has a doctorate from Rutgers university, New Jersey. He has previously written a study of the Loire peasantry from 1800 to 1914).

Dr Dallas thinks that Clemenceau is now 'forgotten', and seeks to rescue him from oblivion by setting him in the 'various human worlds' that he inhabited. This approach has some advantages, but also leads the author into irrelevances that have the cumulative effect of making the book far too long before we come to the supremely important phase of Clemenceau's life. We have reached page 500 before he takes power in 1917, and the rest of the story — including, of course, the last year of the war, in which he saved his country, and the peace conference over which he presided — is then disposed of in under 100 pages.

By contrast, we have six pages describing New York at the time Clemenceau went there in 1865, with entirely superfluous details about the way the city was gov- erned, and there are numerous other longueurs. Some of them are the verbal equivalent of mood-music, of a kind to which the Private Eye comment 'Get on with it — Ed.' would be appropriate. For instance: Before the tourists arrived, August 111 Provence was the month of swallows. With- out them it would have been just silence, for there were no winds. . . High from a moun- tainside north of the River Argens you might have looked across the jumbled terrain of hill and valley into the haze of the sea's horizoll. That distant world melted, as in an oriental painting ....

And so on, until we are eventually given au account of Clemenceau's unsuccessful campaign to defend his seat in the Var. The book is, however, interesting about his family background in Vendee, where the Clemenceaus were minor aristocrats who backed the Revolution, and who als° had a bourgeois tradition of professional' ism, in medicine. Clemenceau's father vvos a doctor, though he never practised, Clemenceau himself was (more or less) qualified and practised a little. There were Protestant antecedents on the father's side' and Clemenceau's mother was a devout Protestant. Despite his ostensible rejection of religious faith, he may have had a secret yearning for it. In his retirement, as a verY

old man, he visited India to study oriental religion, and on his return wrote two volumes in which he expounded a personal Philosophy. His brand of romantic human- ism almost amounted to a religion. .As a husband and father he was a disaster. Dr Dallas says as little as possible about his appalling treatment of his Ameri- can wife, Mary Plummer, whom he married en the rebound. During most of their mar- riage he deliberately lived apart from her, but when he caught her with a lover he at once divorced her, having first had her consigned to prison and divested of French citizenship. The lives of their three children Were, understandably, messy.

He was much better as a friend, and one of his closest friends was Claude Monet. Through him Monet offered his set of water-lily paintings, Les Nympheas, to the French state, but before they were com- Meted he began to go blind from cataract, and at first refused to have an operation. Clemenceau at length prevailed on him to have it, and while he was recovering wrote to him, in December 1923: Carry on, my old brother. Your boat has taken again to the sea. Navigate. Here we are iLlR fog. The important thing is to have the sun in one's heart.

He had English friends, too, among whom the Maxse family were outstanding. Admiral Mane (who inspired Meredith's R. eauchamp's Career) was a radical on most Issues, though a conservative, like '-.1emenceau, on women's suffrage. One of hiS daughters, Violet, married Lord Edward Cecil and, later, Lord Milner. Dr Dallas has too little to say about the M. axses, and does not include in his bibliography Violet Milner's book of memoirs, My Picture Gallery, which contains a vivid description of Clemenceau. He also gives her name as `Violette' (even tnitore unsuited to her formidable character 'Han the correct version) and refers to her atone point as 'Lady Cecil', while Lord Milner is 'Lord Alfred Milner'. Such petty

lecisms are nowadays commonplace even in books published and edited in England.

br Dallas is on the whole right to claim that Clemenceau was a man of passion ether than hate, and to insist that his 'chef in humanity was comprehensive, .th.,°1igh qualified by realism. Yet the out-

World still probably shares the view of min expressed in Keynes's celebrated corn- era (not quoted in the book):

He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen and his colleagues not least. 11e mot is brilliant, but grossly unfair. 7ance is not an illusion, but a palpable ract; and French patriotism is a richer and ;1,cire life-giving essence than anything loumsbury had to offer. Clemenceau was 113cot disillusioned with mankind, and he had dee,11 notably conciliatory towards Germany ring his first premiership. But in 1919 he fwas fully justified in demanding reparations °r his ravaged country, and above all secu- rity for the future. He had to negotiate under pressure from Frenchmen who had none of his breadth of outlook. Foch and Poincare wanted annexation of German territory. He opposed them and got his way, but no other French leader would have had the prestige to do so.

The only comparable French figure of our century revered Clemenceau, and like him de Gaulle is buried simply in the French countryside. Clemenceau's instruc- tions for his burial in Vendee are eloquent. On one of his many wartime visits to the front two soldiers gave him small bouquets of dusty flowers, and he promised that they would go with him to the grave. They did, having meanwhile stood on his mantelpiece for the remainder of his life. He also stated in his will that his walking-stick and a book of his mother's preserved in a goatskin coffer (a prayer book?) should be buried with him. He had deep feelings, and he had style.