PARIS 1919 (7 page)

After these first encounters with the men who were going to become his closest colleagues in Paris, Wilson continued on to Italy, to more ecstatic welcomes. But the cheers, the state receptions, the private audiences, could not conceal that time was passing. He began to wonder whether this was not deliberate. The people, he thought, wanted peace; their rulers seemed to be dragging their feet, for who knew what sinister motives. The French government tried to arrange a tour of the battlefields for him. He refused angrily. “They were trying to force him to go to see the devastated regions,” he told his small circle of intimates, “so that he might see red and play into the hands of the governments of England, France and Italy.” He would not be manipulated like this; the peace must be made calmly and without emotion. “Even if France had been entirely made a shell hole it would not change the final settlement.”
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The French resented his refusal bitterly and were not appeased when he finally paid a fleeting visit in March.

Wilson was coming to the conclusion that he and the French were not as close in their views as House had encouraged him to believe. The French government had drawn up an elaborate agenda which placed the League of Nations well down the list of important issues to be decided. Paul Cambon, the immensely experienced French ambassador in London, told a British diplomat, “The business of the Peace Conference was to bring to a close the war with Germany.” The League was something that could easily be postponed. Many in the French official establishment thought of a league that would be a continuation of the wartime alliance and whose main role would be to enforce the peace terms. No matter, said an internal memorandum, that much of the French public thought in more idealistic terms: “that can help us.” Clemenceau was publicly skeptical. The day after Wilson had made a speech in London reiterating his faith that a League of Nations was the best way to provide security for its members, Clemenceau had spoken in the Chamber of Deputies. To loud cheers he asserted: “There is an old system of alliances called the Balance of Power—this system of alliances, which I do not renounce, will be my guiding thought at the Peace Conference.” Wickedly, he had referred to Wilson's noble
candeur,
a word that can mean either candor or pathetic naïveté. (The official record transformed it into
grandeur.
) The American delegation saw Clemenceau's speech as a challenge.
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In that speech and the American reaction to it were sown the seeds of what grew into a lurid and enduring tableau, especially in the United States. On the one hand, the Galahad, pure in thought and deed, lighting the way to a golden future; on the other, the misshapen French troll, his heart black with rage and spite, thinking only of revenge. On the one side, peace; on the other, war. It makes a good story, and it is not fair to either man. Both were liberals with a conservative skepticism of rapid change. What divided them was temperament and their own experience. Wilson believed that human nature was fundamentally good. Clemenceau had his doubts. He, and Europe, had been through too much. “Please do not misunderstand me,” he once said to Wilson, “we too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.” Wilson had lived in a world where democracy was safe. “I have lived,” Clemenceau explained, “in a world where it was good form to shoot a democrat.” Where Wilson believed that the use of force ultimately failed, Clemenceau had seen it succeed too often. “I have come to the conclusion that
force
is right,” he said over lunch one day to Lloyd George's mistress, Frances Stevenson. “Why is this chicken here? Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!” Clemenceau was not opposed to the League; he simply did not put much trust in it. He would have liked to see greater international cooperation, but recent history had shown all too clearly the importance of keeping the powder dry and the guns primed just in case. In this he faithfully reflected French public opinion, which remained overwhelmingly suspicious of Germany.
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By the second week of January Wilson was back in Paris, waiting for the preliminary conference to start. He was living in great state at the Hôtel Murat, a private house provided by the French government. (One of Wilson's little jokes was that the Americans were paying indirectly through their loans to France.) The hotel was owned by descendants of the great soldier Joachim Murat, who had married one of Napoleon's sisters, and lent by them to the French government. Later, when relations soured between France and the United States, the Princesse Murat asked for it back again. The presidential party, which included Wilson's personal physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, and Mrs. Wilson's social secretary, settled uneasily into the cold and gleaming rooms, filled with treasures from the past reflected back endlessly in huge mirrors. A British journalist who came to interview the president found him in a gray flannel suit sitting at a magnificent Empire desk with a great bronze eagle above his head.
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The rest of the American delegation was housed some distance away, also in considerable luxury, at the Hôtel Crillon. “I was assigned an enormous room,” wrote an American professor to his wife, “high ceiling, white paneling, fireplace, enormous bathroom, very comfortable bed, all done in rich old rose.” The Americans were delighted with the food, impressed by the meticulous service and amused by the slow old hydraulic elevators, which sometimes hung suspended between floors until enough water had moved from one tank to another. Because the hotel itself was small, their offices were scattered nearby, some in what had once been private dining rooms at Maxim's and which still smelled of stale wine and food. Over the months, the Americans added their own touches to the Crillon: a barbershop, a network of private phone lines and a hearty American breakfast in place of the French one. And, of course, the guards at the doors, and the sentries who paced back and forth on the flat roof. “The whole place is like an American battleship,” said Harold Nicolson, the young British diplomat who left one of the most vivid descriptions of the Peace Conference, “and smells odd.” British visitors were also struck by how seriously the Americans took rank: unlike their own delegation, the important men never sat down to meals with their juniors.
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Lansing and his fellow plenipotentiaries White and Bliss had rooms on the second floor, but the true hub of power was on the floor above them, where House had his large suite of heavily guarded rooms—more, he smugly noticed, than anyone else. There he sat, as he loved to do, spinning his plans and drawing in the powerful. Prime ministers, generals, ambassadors, journalists: they almost all came by to see him. His most important relationship was always that with his president. The two men talked daily, either in person or on the direct private line the Army engineers had installed. Sometimes Wilson strolled down to the Crillon; he never stopped on the second floor, but always went directly upstairs.
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3

Paris

PARIS WAS SAD and beautiful as the peacemakers began to assemble from all parts of the world in January 1919. Its people were subdued and mournful but its women were still extraordinarily elegant. “Again and again,” wrote a Canadian delegate to his wife, “one meets a figure which might have stepped out of
La Vie Parisienne,
or
Vogue
in its happier moments.” Those with money could still find wonderful clothes and jewels. The restaurants, when they could get supplies, were still marvelous. In the nightclubs, couples tripped the new fox-trots and tangos. The weather was surprisingly mild. The grass was still green and a few flowers still bloomed. There had been a lot of rain and the Seine was in flood. Along the
quais
the crowds gathered to watch the rising waters, while buskers sang of France's great victory over Germany and of the new world that was coming.
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Signs of the war that had just ended were everywhere: the refugees from the devastated regions in the north; the captured German cannon in the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées; the piles of rubble and boarded-up windows where German bombs had fallen. A gaping crater marked the Tuileries rose garden. Along the Grands Boulevards the ranks of chestnuts had gaps where trees had been cut for firewood. The great windows in the cathedral of Notre-Dame were missing their stained glass, which had been stored for safety; in their place, pale yellow panes washed the interior with a tepid light. There were severe shortages of coal, milk and bread.

French society bore scars, too. While the flags of victory fluttered from the lampposts and windows, limbless men and demobilized soldiers in worn army uniforms begged for change on street corners; almost every other woman wore mourning. The left-wing press called for revolution, the right-wing for repression. Strikes and protests came one after the other. The streets that winter and spring were filled with demonstrations by men and women in the customary blue of French workers, and with counterdemonstrations by the middle classes.

Neither the British nor the Americans had wanted the Peace Conference to be in Paris. As House confided to his diary, “It will be difficult enough at best to make a just peace, and it will be almost impossible to do so while sitting in the atmosphere of a belligerent capital. It might turn out well and yet again it might be a tragedy.” The French were too excitable, had suffered too much and were too bitter against the Germans to provide the calm atmosphere needed. Wilson had preferred Geneva until alarmist reports coming from Switzerland persuaded him that the country was on the verge of revolution and riddled with German spies. Clemenceau did not waver in his insistence on Paris. “I never,” said Lloyd George later on, when he was particularly annoyed, “wanted to hold the Conference in his bloody capital. Both House and I thought it would be better to hold it in a neutral place, but the old man wept and protested so much that we gave way.”
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It may be only a legend that Clemenceau asked to be buried upright, facing Germany. It was certainly true that he had been on guard against France's great neighbor for most of his life. He was only twenty-eight when the Franco-Prussian War started, and he was part of the group of young left-wing republicans who fought on in Paris after the French armies were defeated. He saw the city starve, the French government capitulate and the new German empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. As a newly elected deputy, he voted against the peace terms with Germany. As a journalist, writer, politician and finally prime minister, he sounded the same warning: Germany was a menace to France. “My life hatred,” he told an American journalist shortly before he died, “has been for Germany because of what she has done to France.” He did not actively seek war after 1871; he simply accepted it as inevitable. The problem, he said, was not with France: “Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom.”
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To have a chance, Clemenceau had always recognized, France needed allies. Before 1914, the new Germany had been a formidable opponent, its industry, exports and wealth all growing while France's were static and its birthrate was declining. Today, when sheer numbers of soldiers matter less in battle, it is difficult to remember how important it was to be able to put huge armies into the field. As Clemenceau told the French senate during the ratification debate, the treaty with Germany “does not specify that the French are committed to have many children, but that would have been the first thing to include.” Those disadvantages were why France had reached out to its hereditary enemies, tsarist Russia in the east and Britain across the Channel, for Russian manpower and British industry and maritime power to balance against Germany. Much had changed by 1918, but not the underlying imbalance. There were still more Germans than French. How long would it take the German economy, with its largely intact infrastructure, to recover? And now France could not count on Russia.
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During the Peace Conference, France's allies became exasperated with what they saw as French intransigence, French greed and French vindictiveness. They had not suffered what France had suffered. The war memorials, in every city, town and village, with their lists of names from the First World War, the handful from the Second, tell the story of France's losses. A quarter of French men between eighteen and thirty had died in the war, over 1.3 million altogether out of a prewar population of 40 million. France lost a higher proportion of its population than any other of the belligerents. Twice as many again of its soldiers had been wounded. In the north, great stretches of land were pitted with shell holes, scarred by deep trenches, marked with row upon row of crosses. Around the fortress of Verdun, site of the worst French battle, not a living thing grew, not a bird sang. The coal mines on which the French economy depended for its power were flooded; the factories they would have supplied had been razed or carted away into Germany. Six thousand square miles of France, which before the war had produced 20 percent of its crops, 90 percent of its iron ore and 65 percent of its steel, were utterly ruined. Perhaps Wilson might have understood Clemenceau's demands better if he had gone early on to see the damage for himself.
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At the Peace Conference, Clemenceau was to keep all the important threads in his own hands. The French delegation drew on the best that France had to offer, but it did not meet at all for the first four months of the conference. Clemenceau rarely consulted the Foreign Ministry professionals at the Quai d'Orsay, much to their annoyance. Nor did he pay much attention to the experts from the universities he had asked to draw up reports on France's economic and territorial claims and to sit on the commissions and committees that proliferated over the course of the conference. “No organization of his ideas, no method of work,” complained clever old Paul Cambon from London, “the accumulation in himself of all duties and all responsibilities, thus nothing works. And this man of 78 years, sick, for he is a diabetic . . . receives fifty people a day and exerts himself with a thousand details which he ought to leave to his ministers. . . . At no moment in the war was I as uneasy as I am for the peace.”
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Stéphen Pichon, Clemenceau's foreign minister, was an amiable, lazy and indecisive man who received his instructions every morning and would not have dreamed of disobeying. Clemenceau was rather fond of him in an offhand way. “Who is Pichon?” he asked one day. “Your minister of Foreign Affairs,” came the reply. “So he is,” said the old Tiger, “I had forgotten it.” On another occasion, Pichon and a party of experts were waiting patiently in the background for a meeting to start when Clemenceau teased Balfour about the number of advisers he had. When Balfour replied, “They are doing the same thing as the greater number of people with you,” Clemenceau, infuriated to be caught out, turned around. “Go away all of you,” he told Pichon. “There is no need for any of you!”
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If Clemenceau discussed issues at all, it was in the evening at his house, with a small group that included his faithful aide General Henri Mordacq, the brilliant gadfly André Tardieu and the industrialist Louis Loucheur. He kept them on their toes by having the police watch them. Each morning he would give them a dossier with details of their previous day's activities. As much as possible he ignored Raymond Poincaré, his president, whom he loathed.
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Throughout his long life Clemenceau had gone his own formidable way. His enemies claimed that his slanting eyes and his cruelty were a legacy from Huns who had somehow made it to the Vendée. He was born in 1841, to minor gentry in a lovely part of France with a violent history. Generally, the people of the Vendée chose the wrong side: in the wars of religion, which the Catholics won, they were Protestants; during the French Revolution they were Catholic and royalist. The Clemenceau family was a minority within a minority; republican, radical and resolutely anticlerical. Clemenceau himself thought snobs were fools, but he always went back to the gloomy family manor house, with its stone floors, its moat and its austere furnishings.
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Like his father, Clemenceau trained as a doctor; but, again like his father, he did not practice. His studies in any case always took second place to writing, politics and his love affairs. Like other bright young men, he was drawn to Paris and the world of radical intellectuals, journalists and artists. In the late 1860s he spent much time in the United States, widely admired by republicans as a land of freedom. His travels left him with fluent English, peppered with out-of-date New York slang, in an accent that mingled a Yankee drawl with rolling French “r”s. He also gained a wife, Mary Plummer, a lovely, stupid and very conventional New England girl whom he had met while he was teaching French in a girls' school. He brought her back to France and deposited her for long periods of time with his parents and unmarried aunts in the Vendée. The marriage did not last but Mary Plummer lived on in Paris, supplementing her modest annuity by taking American tourists to museums. She rarely saw Clemenceau after their separation but she faithfully collected his press cuttings. Unfortunately, she could not read them because she had never learned French. After her death in 1917 Clemenceau expressed mild regret: “What a tragedy that she ever married me.”
¹⁰

The Clemenceau family kept the three children from the marriage, and Clemenceau never married again. He preferred to travel through life alone. There were women, of course, as friends and as lovers. “Never in my life,” he said, “has it been necessary for me to make appeals to women.” And on the whole it was true. In 1919 he complained sardonically that, just when he was too old to take advantage of it, women were throwing themselves at him.
¹¹

Politics and, above all, France were his great passion. With the collapse of Napoleon III's empire in 1870 and the rise of the Third Republic, the way was open to him and other radical politicians to participate in public life. Clemenceau was elected to the French parliament in 1876. He was a republican like most of those who dominated the Third Republic but he did not belong to a political party in the modern sense (indeed such things did not exist then). In the loose and shifting groupings before the Great War, he was invariably found on the left, just this side of the socialists and those who rejected constitutional, democratic politics. Clemenceau made a name for himself as an incisive and witty orator and a tenacious opponent, happiest when he was attacking governments he saw as too conservative. With his old friend Emile Zola, for example, he helped to reopen the guilty verdict against Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of selling French secrets to the Germans.
¹²
But he was not trusted even on the left; there were too many dubious financiers in his life, women with shady reputations, creditors asking for their money. His duels left an impression of someone who belonged in the pages of Dumas. In his relentless attacks on authority he was prepared to do almost anything to win. “He comes from a family of wolves,” said a man who knew him well. Clemenceau did not help himself by his contempt for convention and his profound cynicism. Lloyd George once said of him, “He loved France but hated all Frenchmen.” In 1906, when he was already in his sixties, he became a government minister. He was brought in as minister of the interior perhaps because France's president at the time owed him a political debt, more likely because, as one of his new colleagues argued, it would be too dangerous to leave him out. Later that year when what was a weak government fell, Clemenceau to the surprise of many emerged as the new prime minister and an effective one at that.

His intimates saw another side. Clemenceau was loyal to his friends and they to him. He was kind and generous with both time and money. He loved his garden, although, according to one visitor, “it was a helterskelter survival of mixed-up seeds hurled about recklessly in all directions.” For years Clemenceau had a country place close to Giverny and Claude Monet, a great friend. In Paris he frequently dropped in to see the great panels of the water lilies. “They take my breath away whenever I enter that room.” (He could not bear Renoir's painting: “It's enough to disgust you with love forever after. Those buttocks he gives those wenches ought not to be allowed.”
¹³
)

Clemenceau was also extraordinarily brave and stubborn. When the Germans advanced on Paris in 1914, the French parliament debated leaving. Clemenceau, who had resigned office in 1909 and was back to his familiar role in opposition, agreed: “Yes, we are too far from the front.” In the dark days of 1917, when the French armies had been shattered on the Western Front and there was talk of collapse at home, Clemenceau the Father of Victory, as the French called him, finally came into his own. As prime minister, he held France together until the final victory. When the Germans made their last great push toward Paris in the spring of 1918, Clemenceau made it clear that there would be no surrender. If the Germans took the city, he intended to stay until the last moment and then escape by plane. When he heard that the Germans had agreed to an armistice, for once in his life he was speechless. He put his head in his hands and wept. On the evening of November 11, he walked through Paris with his favorite sister, Sophie. “The war is won,” he said when he saw the crowds starting to pull captured German guns to pieces. “Give them to the children to play with.” Later, with Mordacq, he talked of the work to come: “Yes, we have won the war and not without difficulty; but now we are going to have to win the peace, and that will perhaps be even more difficult.”
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