Georges Clemenceau: Grandeur and Misery of a Victory. F. M. Atkinson translation. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930.
“Man is so great that his greatness appears in his consciousness of his misery”: in alluding to this aphorism of France’s most distinguished Christian, Clemenceau tacitly lays claim to a unique status, the Pascal of atheism. As head of the vigorously anti-clerical Independent Party in France, Clemenceau carried on the secularist tradition of French republicanism, a tradition born in the 1789 revolution, then brought into the Third Republic and the twentieth century. A firm realist, he had no more patience for secular utopians on the Left than he had for what he regarded as the pious utopians on the Right. Early on, he worked as a journalist, but he ended up as Prime Minister, twice (1906-09, 1917-29) and Minister of War, as well (1917-20). He was no paper politician, and he ran his country’s show, well, during one of its worst crises, when he was in his late seventies.
A decade later, near the end of his life, he hadn’t lost any of his considerable gift for polemic. Marshall Ferdinand Foch, a hero of the Great War, wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre, 1914-1918, which would be published posthumously in 1931. [1] In it, he ventured to criticize his civilian boss, both for decisions made during the war and especially for his decision to drop France’s claim to the Rhineland in exchange for security guarantees from Great Britain and the United States. Foch and Clemenceau’s career-long political rival, Raymond Poincaré, wanted to retain the Rhineland. The secular-clerical dispute may well have underlain some of this. Foch was an ardent Catholic, Poincaré the head of the center-Right Democratic-Republican Alliance; the Rhineland was the Catholic region of Germany. Clemenceau, who tells us that he had appointed Foch commandant of the prestigious École de Guerre, despite the fact that the man’s brother was a Jesuit (and therefore suspect of monarchism), saw portions of the manuscript and went on the attack. An “impudent farrago of troopers’ tales,” a ” stale mess of military grousings” by a man who was “unconsciously seeking his revenge for conflicts with authority that did not always end in his favor”—such were these memoirs. Clemenceau assures his readers that he remains serene: “Once he has seen himself thus half-way suspended between heaven and earth, and has escaped being smitten by stars hurtling form their orbits, it is not the childish nonsense of a great soldier suffering from attacks of nerves, nor the wordy flux of a few hack scribblers, that can perturb a philosopher upon whom is laid the task of sustaining others himself sustained of none.”
Admittedly, Clemenceau writes in his Foreword, addressed directly to Foch, “you have to your credit the Marne, the Yser, Doullens, and of a surety, other battles besides.” As indeed Foch had. He began the war as commander of the XX Corps, part of the Second Army under the command of General Joseph Joffre. In August, French troops advanced into German-held territory in what turned out to be an overreach. As the XV Corps fell back from the German counteroffensive during the Battle of Lorraine, Foch conducted an orderly retreat to the city of Nancy, saving it from further German advance. By October, he had been appointed Assistant Commander in Chief in the Northern Zone, still serving under Joffre. In September, troops under his direction retook Châlon in the First Battle of the Marne; in October, his troops won the Battle of Yser (“had it been lost, it was he who would certainly have borne the responsibility”), and the First Battle of Ypres. His fortunes reversed in 1915, when as commander of the Northern Army Group troops under his command took heavy casualties during the Artois Offensive and the Battle of the Somme; he was transferred to the Italian front and Joffre was sacked, replaced by General Robert Nivelle. But in 1917, when a major French offensive failed, Nivelle in turn sacked, and General Henri Pétain appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, Foch was returned to the main theater, serving as the French military representative to the inter-allied Supreme War Council and soon becoming Generalissimo over all Allied forces. (“It was at Doullens that Foch, without any one’s permission, laid hold of the command. For that minute I shall remain grateful to him until my last breath.”) From then on, he went from triumph to triumph, countering the German spring offensive in 1918 by holding firm against a surprise German attack at Chemin des Dames that May, then overseeing Allied victories in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Grand Offensive of that September, leading to German acceptance of an end to hostilities two months later. He ended the war as Marshal of France. “This frightful war brought us out good general, and many of those who have the right to risk an opinion will perhaps tell us that Foch was the most complete of them all,” an “admirable chief in the name of France in deadly peril.”
So, it was no ordinary high-ranking military officer that Clemenceau took on. “You challenge me. Here I am.” He was no ordinary French statesman. “I belonged to the generation that saw the loss of Alsace-Lorraine” in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which led to the toppling of France’s last monarchy and the founding of the Third Republic. “I stood up against Germany in the Casablanca crisis,” that is, Germany’s challenge to French influence in Morocco, where Kaiser Wilhelm II had supported Sultan Abdelaziz. “After demanding apologies from us” for France’s bombardment of the city, the Kaiser “was forced by my calm resistance to be satisfied with mere arbitration, as in any other dispute”—this, in marked contrast with “the humiliating cession of an arbitrary slice of our Congo to Germany” in 1911 by the Caillaux administration and (he adds, unfairly) the Poincaré administration succeeding it, a cession that traded French territory for German recognition of Morocco as a French protectorate. Clemenceau frankly acknowledges that “this book is not to be regarded as a series of memoirs” but “a reply upon certain points” in light of “the broader considerations that are essentially imposed in such a subject,” the principal of those being that France’s so-called rulers of the 1920s “seem to have forgotten, all nearly in the same degree, that no less resolution is needed to live through peace than war.”
Germany remains France’s enemy, but “I see everywhere nothing but faltering and flinching,” with no prospect of assistance from his country’s erstwhile allies. “England in various guises has gone back to her old policy of strife on the Continent, and America, prodigiously enriched by the War, is presenting us with a tradesman’s account that does more honor to her greed than to her self-respect”—referring to the Coolidge Administration’s insistence that France repay the loans she had arranged during that war. In France, “the vital spark is gone,” but not quite in Clemenceau himself, who, although “an old, done man myself,” finds himself “at grips with a soldier of the bygone days, who brings against me arguments within the comprehension of simple minds—now, when I had changed my workshop and meant to end my days in philosophy.” [2]
One of Foch’s complaints against Clemenceau concerns the prime minister’s conduct in the wake of the French defeat at Chemin des Dames during the Third Battle of the Aisne in spring 1918. Clemenceau replies that the attack would not have happened if Foch had not failed to anticipate the place where the Germans would strike. As a result, German forces advanced within eighty miles of Paris, closer than they had been since the initial year of the war. “Anybody can make a mistake, but there is no real reason for clinging to an opinion in the teeth of the evidence,” which Foch had before him and discounted. Foch resented Clemenceau’s sharp questioning on this point, yet “in such an emergency, when the very life of the country was at stake, a head of the Government had to have the power of making up his mind promptly and of finding the happy meeting between severity and moderation,” resisting “the currents of public opinion clamoring for penalties without knowing on whom they were to fall.” (“I must admit that the Parliamentary system as we know it is not always a school for stout-heartedness.”) Clemenceau accordingly appeared before the French Assembly, “compl[ying] unhesitatingly with all the demands for information”; “there was a speedy return of confidence when it became clear that I meant to hide nothing.” At the same time, “I took everyone under my shield, to the great astonishment of those who had told me that by throwing all the responsibility on the Commander-in-Chief I should regain the authority belonging to my position.” Given this, “on what grounds does he accuse me of persecuting him?”
Foch also charges that Clemenceau pushed the Americans, under the command of General John Pershing, to join the fighting prematurely, before the raw troops had been adequately trained. “Everyone knows that the American troops, in the first rank as far as bravery is concerned, were first and foremost excellent soldiers in a state of mere improvisation,” and “it was essential, at all costs, to avoid a defeat for the first appearance of the American Army on the scene,” although “it was heart-rending to see our men being mown down unceasingly while, under the command of their good leaders, large bodies of American troops remained idle, within earshot of the guns.” “My country’s fate was every moment at stake on the battlefields, which had already drunk the best blood of France.” Foch and President Poincaré concurred with the sentiment but hesitated at pushing the American general too harshly. Clemenceau suspected that Pershing’s reluctance derived not from military necessity but from political shrewdness: “the great democracy inclined to throw in her full power for the supreme victory on the last battlefield.” Among the three French principals, “the dispute turned simply on what action ought to follow from the establishment of the sole command,” whereby Pershing was subordinate to Foch. Foch and Poincaré temporized, the latter saying that they should have recourse to the American forces only if “the situation becomes really desperate.” “At that rate,” Clemenceau ripostes, “we might have waited until the defeatist campaigns” in the civilian population “had utterly gangrened minds that were already turning septic before making up our minds to lay hands or the traitors”; rather than saving lives, such “timidity is surely responsible for the shedding of too much blood.” What good is supreme command if the commander will not command, attempting “to please everyone.” But although “the Marshal had the power to command, he preferred to suggest.” Had the Germans “felt the shock of the American arrival in the field,” they “were bound to realize that all hope of winning the War was thenceforth lost for them.”
Throughout the war, then, “Marshal Foch was a great soldier on the field of battle. All very well, but is that enough?” He lacked the spirit of obedience to civilian command, “his soul lack[ing] that inflexibility in the performance of duty which is the surest sign of moral and intellectual greatness in the soldier no less than in the civilian.” While Foch in his memoir calls Clemenceau “despotic and Jacobin,” Clemenceau remarks, “Too many of our soldiers, and even of our civilians, have an annoying propensity for believing that the world is made for them.”
The Armistice ended the war, “after four nerve-wracking years, lived through in the anguished expectation of the worst” from “the most stupendous mass of military forces most formidably equipped.” And although “mutual butchery cannot be the chief occupation of life,” and “the glory of our civilization is that it enables us—occasionally—to live an almost normal life,” both victorious and vanquished countries will regroup within their borders with new alliances beyond their borders. “What will be the new equilibrium to which we are tending fortunately we do not know,” but Clemenceau knew one thing: Germany’s “November Revolution” beginning in 1918, establishing the Weimar Republic, “was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy.” This supposed revolution overthrew the empire while leaving in place the military officers, judges, and bureaucrats of the Kaiserreich. In starting the war, the Germans “flung aside every scruple…hoping for a peace of enslavement under the yoke of a militarism destructive of all human dignity.” And with Europeans locked in ever-renewing death struggles, “there might result, by some unforeseen turn of the wheel, an Americanization of Europe and its dependencies.” If so, it will occur thanks to Germany’s “characteristic tendency to go to extremes,” with her slogan, Deutschland über alles, a slogan appealing to “the intolerable arrogance of the German aristocracy, the servile good nature of the intellectual and the scholar, the gross vanity of the most competent leaders in influence of a violent popular poetry,” all of which “conspire to shatter throughout the world all the time-honored traditions of individual, as well as international, dignity.” Indeed, that “peculiar mentality of the German solider” [was] the cause of the premature exhaustion that brought him to beg for an armistice before the French soldier, who was fighting for his independence.” That German immoderation, however, bespeaks a universal human trait, the French not excepted. “Man is manifold and various” and for this reason men “do not know themselves.” Man “lives in the shifting hours, and not, as simple souls [i.e., Christians] would have it, in absolute eternity.” Human complexity, variety, and temporality befog minds and hearts; immoderation is only one manifestation of that. Even “Napoleon, who, with Alexander and Caesar, was one of the greatest military geniuses in history, never understood himself even at S. Helena, where, if he could have summed himself up, balancing his strength against his weakness, he might have towered above all the common run of conquerors.” “Where shall we find the man capable of interpreting himself?”
Not in the Frenchman. He won the war “with his gallant allies,” then “planned and made his peace on a basis of reasoned idealism”—that is, an abstract, neo-Kantian idealism that “will perhaps end by making us lose the peace.” We French do not see that “visions without the action they call for are only empty words,” that “peace or war, we are in the midst of a relentless struggle for power.” This being so, “Woe to the weak!” Better to “turn your back on the purveyors of soothing syrup!” And while “our defeat would have resulted in a relapse of human civilization into violence and bloodshed, the question is to know what contribution to moral progress our victory can and must furnish, it be maintained.” To achieve such progress, “all we lacked later,” in the decade following the war, after Clemenceau left office, “was a statesman of some strength of purpose.” Instead, France got Poincaré and Aristide Briand, who have been unable to stand up to English and American efforts to strengthen the fundamentally unreformed German regime and, in the American case, have been able to keep France on its knees by demanding repayment of its war debts. In initiating the war, Germany had counted on Allied disunity; this did not occur, to a fatal degree, during the war itself, but it has intensified during the subsequent decade of peace. As for Great Britain, it “may yet suffer more from this than the insight of her latter-day politicians yet allows them to suppose,” as they continue to ” believe herself obliged to multiply causes of dissension among the peoples of the Continent, so as to secure peace for her own conquests,” her own still-extensive Empire,” her metropole being “an island defended by the waves.” Unlike the French and the Americans, the Brits aren’t swayed by ‘idealist’ illusions. Regrettably, their realism is out of date.
Before turning to his account of the Versailles Conference, Clemenceau undertakes a brief survey of previous peace treaties in modern Europe. “It is well known that the Treaty of Westphalia,” asserting the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of European states by other states, “claimed to have founded European law.” That is, it was an international law, agreed to by the sovereigns who signed it, assuring state sovereignty by limiting sovereign actions. “The French Revolution proved clearly that it had not succeeded. And as Napoleon proved the same thing with regard to the French Revolution, all this imbroglio of wars sent us back to where we had to begin all over again.” That is, neither monarchic nor republican regimes could establish a lasting peace, particularly when confronting one another. Following the failures of regimes of ‘the one’ and regimes of ‘the many,’ in the Congress of Vienna, following the Napoleonic Wars, “it was the turn of the European aristocracies,” ‘the few,’ to try their hand at peacemaking. That lasted until the catastrophe of 1914.
The Versailles Conference reminds Clemenceau of the French General Assembly in 1789. The French republicans “talked Montesquieu from the tribune without discovering the meeting-ground of what should be taken and what left in order to attain a happy blending of the revolutionary and the stable elements.” At Versailles in 1919, as in revolutionary Paris, “those whom ideology sends forward to the assault of phenomena will come up against too many people who are but the mass of incapacity in revolt,” while experienced statesmen, “those whom life has made modest,” are “glad to try” to come to some sensible arrangement. “I was there. My eyes met the eyes of friends. My hands touched brotherly hands. I hoped. I desired.” At home, in the Assembly, Poincaré and his allies have done their best to undermine his efforts. “What will remain of the greatest effort of the human civilizations for an enlargement of universal civilization I shall not attempt to foresee, after ten years of talk in which victors and vanquished have gone on the same tack to shatter, one by one, every guarantee of success.” Such are “the unchanging realities of international problems.” Their grandeur and misery are the human grandeur and misery, as discernible by the Christian Pascal as by the atheist Clemenceau.
“Our fathers awaited the Messiah. The Messiah is within us. The problem is to set him free.” That hasn’t happened; the self-governing peoples haven’t governed themselves well. Among the former Allies, “too many people prefer, in general, to let themselves drift with the times, while the overthrown enemy in the shadow, or even in the full light of day, is planning a turning of the tables.” Meanwhile, “our humanitarian countries, bound to unite willy-nilly against all excesses of violence, and finding themselves no longer linked by the immediate fear of a common enemy,” have returned to their petty rivalries amongst themselves. England pursues its imperial interests, America pursues its commercial and financial interests, and the French have abandoned “our own cause.” This could be seen at the Versailles Conference itself, where “the same sincerity, the same ardor in the preparation of mass murder,” exercised itself “in the fogs of verbal idealism.” Such are “the contradictions of this life of ours, ever doomed to disappointment.”
Versailles saw international regime struggles papered over with formulas of internationalist humanitarianism. Now, American commercial republic exhibits “a vehement energy that carries a population of a hundred millions to the excesses of a materialistic power, that, once let loose, no one will be able to master,” although this new economic mastery will result in “the same eventual outcome as the onslaughts of those conquerors, who, in spite of so many apparent triumphs, came to grief in the end. So it was with Napoleon….” As for President Wilson, “he had too much confidence in all the talky-talk and super-talky-talk of his ‘League of Nations.'” What could such an organization actually do, when denied “all executive power”? [3] The British delegation consisted not of idealists but of gentlemanly devotees of the main chance: Prime Minister David Lloyd George, with his “bright, two-fisted smile”; Arthur Balfour, “the most courteous of adamantine men”; Bonar Law, “the prince of balance, who would have been a first-class Frenchman had he not been wholly British”; Lord Robert Cecil, “a Christian who believes and is fain to live his belief, with a smile like a Chinese dragon to express a stubborn mind banged, barred, and bolted against arguments; and Lord Milner, “a brilliant intellect crowned with high culture that culminates in a discreet sentimentality,” a man of “extreme gentleness and extreme firmness.” As for the Germans, they are “unscrupulous,” a fact “the French like nothing so much as to forget.” This cannot end well, since “the progress of murder machines goes faster than that of organizations for peace.” “A good organization for butchery, functioning smoothly, could, with a sufficient number of Zeppelins, in a few seconds destroy a town—a whole people, in fact—without even some report from a secretary of maid-of-all work League of Nations being left for the eye of the historian of this last phase of progress.” It is true that “an assembly of widely varied individuals…all characterized by a common body of ideas as to the rights of peoples to govern themselves according to a representative system which, with all its imperfections, will nevertheless remain an achievement far and away nobler than the violences of conquest,” a “sign of an emancipation of human societies emerging from the realm of primitive violence to shape themselves to the reactions that establish freedom.” But how effective is it likely to be, when “the same opponent, who joins to his wealth of intellectual culture a fundamental lack of moral culture, who, with rare impudence, asks us to found the new peace upon the prodigious lie of Germany’s innocence” remains in the heart of Europe? “Our European countries, and those organized on European lines, need only go back to their familiar slipshod management of everyday life for the vanquished foe to dare to rear his head arrogantly as if he were the victor,” and “to demand a reckoning from those who had put an end to his wrongdoing.” “Most losers curse their judges, and as long as a loser can argue his point with big guns it will be well to walk warily.”
The Versailles Treaty was “the work of President Wilson,” who wielded “the ultimate authority of his military help” along with “the outward power of language that broke away from past traditions.” The American president was “the inspired prophet of a noble ideological venture, to which he was unfortunately destined to become a slave.” Wilson “was a doctrinairian in the finest sense of the word: a man with excellent intentions, but with rigidly fixed and crystallized emotions.” He “had insufficient knowledge of the Europe lying torn to pieces at his feet” precisely because American foreign policy, enunciated in the Monroe Doctrine, ensured such ignorance by keeping European affairs at arm’s length. Clemenceau acknowledges that, under Wilson’s prodding, “for the first time in history, a search was made for firm ground on which to build a system of justice between nations who up till this time had lived by violence alone,” an “attempt at general reconstruction in a Europe completely out of joint.” But such a reconstruction needed a government to make it effective, and a government was neither arranged by the treaty nor likely to result in subsequent years. Wilson’s attempt in effect to substitute what eventually came to be called ‘transparency’—in his slogan, “open covenants openly arrived at” in the stead of the secret treaties that led to a war spurred by miscalculations on all sides—exemplifies a “misreading and disregarding of political experience” nearly unprecedented “in the maelstrom of abstract thought.” When reality began to set in, when the United States Senate recurred to America’s longstanding ‘isolationism’ by rejecting the treaty, this brought on “the disaster of a separate peace” between America and Germany. The Monroe Doctrine is “an empirical precaution against the enterprises of aggressive European conquerors” that “leaves the field open” in the rest of the world for “the enterprises of aggressive European conquerors.” The problem with this for Americans is that “America cannot renounce her connection of Europe.” “The nations of the world, although separated by natural or artificial frontiers, have but one planet at their disposal, a planet all the elements of which are in a state of solidarity.” You may intend to carry on with your worldwide trade, but “is it certain” that foreign countries “will never consider you from any other point of view?” “China and Japan have a history to work out”: Will those peoples, in working out that history, regard America with benevolence? Although “you may be able perhaps for a time to isolate yourself from your planetary fellow-citizens…I find you in the Philippines, where you do not belong geographically.” You yourselves must find some urgent reason to be there, in an Asia that evidently is not so distant from your shores as to lead you to ignore it. In the late war, you found yourselves confronted “with the alarming persistence of German aggression.” Small world. Reality imposed itself.
What is more, along with his misunderstanding of Europe, Wilson’s “knowledge even of America” proved “insufficient,” as seen in his failed negotiations with the senators who eventually refused to ratify the Versailles treaty. The isolationists of the U. S. Senate and the internationalism of Wilson both sought to settle that difficulty once and for all. “All or nothing. Friends, that is no motto for human creatures.” Idealist internationalism foundered, without the safety hoped for by the isolationists. “The Americans are fine soldiers. But their military preparedness was, and will always remain, insufficient to make them a decisive factor to be reckoned with at the psychological moment in case of war.” Even so, “they have come nearer to us on the path of friendship than they themselves believe and will never consent to lend themselves to the universal grabbing of Deutschland über Alles.” True, in 1796Washington recommended a policy of non-entanglement in European alliances. “There were at that time many reasons for this. But can it be said that circumstances may not change? Is there a man on the face of the earth capable of devising a recommendation in foreign policy for all eternity?” Having “left not only France, but the whole of a Europe founded upon right exposed to the dangers of a new outbreak of war, America will be judged by history to have too quickly turned a deaf ear to the call of her destiny.”
Europeans did no better, given “the eternal problem of mankind”: “to live in society is to be always in a state of mutual confronting, with fleeting periods of mutual agreement.” [4] “The War, officially finished, went on under new guises.” After all, Clausewitz was right to think that “war and peace, springing from the same state of mind, are identical fundamental activities both aiming at the same end by different means.” This being so, “after Germany’s brute act of force in 1914, accompanied as it was by every villainy at the command of barbarism,” only two “possible forms of peace” were available to Europe: “the maintaining of military domination”—the permanent occupation of most of German soil—or “a grouping of states banded together to represent abstract justice in Europe, and capable of forming an impassable barrier to the unruly outbursts of the spirit of conquest,” an alliance that could not itself “become a force for domination” because comprised of commercial republics uninterested in such domination. Such an alliance became possible when anti-republican Russia dropped out of the alliance against Germany, as “the Russian champions of oppression in Europe collapse[d] before the German champions.” “Freed from the so-called help of allies who upheld oppression,” the French “could build up our higher moral forces again,” appealing to “the right of nations to govern themselves, which is the basis of all civilization” and “implied the total freeing of all nations” from imperialism. This “assertion of his own personal dignity for each man and every man under the aegis of the individuality of his nation, admitted to the concert of civilized peoples,” in turn implies that “liberation must not be translated by the annexation of a conquered territory.” Poland, “suddenly set free and recreated,” became the first such liberated nation; “then all over Europe oppressed peoples raised their heads, and our war of national defense was transformed by force of events into a war of liberation,” a war that made possible “a peace of justice, a Europe founded upon right, the creator of independent states whose military power is augmented by all the moral energies generated by the necessity for asserting themselves in all spheres of international life,” a “body of forces superior to anything that could come from a powerfully organized frontier.” Under such conditions, “throughout Europe the words right, liberty, and justice would mean something,” unlike the prevailing conditions today: a League of Nations impotent in the face of German war preparations—these, under the sham republicanism of the Weimar regime, before the political triumph of Hitlerism, which came a few years later. “Defeat substituted for victory, that was what we accepted without finding a single word to assert our right to our Continental life by the establishment of guarantees within the new order created by a most costly victory.”
Across the channel from the Continent, England has yet to understand that its empire, which has remained intact since the war—unlike those of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—cannot survive. After witnessing the ceremonial victory march of American soldiers in Paris beneath a statue of George Washington, Prime Minister Lloyd George turned to Clemenceau to say, “Do you know that you have just made me salute one of England’s greatest defeats,” the loss of its North American colonies, a loss ably assisted by the French? As a matter of fact, Clemenceau did know that. “There have been plenty of victories and defeats between us” (England had won the Seven Years’ War, expelling France from its own colonies.) But “it is pretty obvious that today you could never govern America from London.” More, “already your Dominions are asking you for a reckoning” and “India is becoming burdensome” to you. “The conqueror is prisoner to his conquest; that is the revenge of conquered nations.” Looking back at this exchange, Clemenceau finds nothing to recant. “Historically, England was our oldest enemy.” But “now that we have each saved the other, and the best of the blood of both nations has been freely spilt in doing it, why not “try to make a lasting peace in honor of those but for whom we should be no more?” As of now, however, England prefers to play its old game of “offshore balancer” on the Continent, even as the Americans prefer to play their old game of military isolation combined with commercial and financial intervention.
As for France, “It is high time for the French nation to take a firmer grip on itself and to substitute a policy of determination for this confusion born of timidity, through which the threat of a compact mass of barbarism is kept hanging over our heads.” “You must have courage enough to face responsibilities and strain every nerve to action; our people, however, when they get to the bottom of their own minds, find mere velleities, not wills.” But “it is easier to reform our neighbors than ourselves.” “France, now asleep, will no doubt wake up one day,” and “France will not die.” After all, “prudence and courage are not mutually exclusive, as many people choose to think.”
“Peace is a disposition of forces, supposed to be in lasting equilibrium, in which the moral force of organized justice is surrounded by strategical precautions against all possible disturbances.” Since “the idea of force is deeply rooted in man, as in the whole universe,” and “law is controlled and ordered force,” it is crucial that conquerors, who impose ordered force upon the vanquished, adjure “a sham and invented equity,” an unjust law. Under the terms of the Armistice, Clemenceau, Foch, and Poincaré all wanted the Rhine to become the border between France and Germany, reclaiming Alsace and Lorraine. They also wanted the Rhineland to become an independent state after a period of occupation by French troops. This raised the question of “what we should do with the inhabitants of the Rhineland” who, after all, were “living in their own home, which, in modern ties is sometimes not a bad argument.” The “open violation of peaceful territories” with accompanying “massacres, deportation of all who resisted, enslavement of the rest” (“as we saw in Belgium under the German occupation”) would not do, given “the principles of the French Revolution”—among the most prominent of which was popular sovereignty. “Gladly would I have seen them become French. But I was not sure of their consent,” in view of their refusal “to be Prussians under compulsion.”
None of this troubled Foch or Poincaré, however. “Foch, being a soldier, [was] loth to abandon the tradition of conquest,” contending in defense of his policy that “a peace that gave Alsace-Lorraine back to us,” without the addition of the Rhineland, “would only give us ‘a frontier of defeat.'” “From the most distant times warriors of all countries have had nothing but a system of annexation for their policy of aggressive defense, and this conception of an organization of military disequilibrium has merely maintained the warlike habits it had been intended to abolish. That is how Europe was brought into the state of anarchy from which the happy issue of our great war might make it possible to save her.” Such is the issue of regimes of “military autocracy,” a point Napoleon had already driven home, or should have driven home, to all Europeans, a century before. While “the keynote of the Treaty of Versailles is the liberation of the peoples, the independence of nationalities…the keynote of the policy of Marshal Foch and M. Poincaré was the occupation of a territory by force of arms against the will of its inhabitants,” a policy no longer feasible under modern conditions and never just in the long term.
A sounder solution had already been found. At Versailles, in response to Foch’s territorial ambitions, Prime Minister Lloyd George had proposed the Treaty of Guarantee, which “unit[ed] us with England and America for the assured maintenance of peace where Germany was concerned.” This treaty “gave us what was nothing less than the ultimate sanction of the Peace Treaty,” “the keystone of European peace, far above all theories.” “The English House of Commons, “which had never pledged its military help in advance to any people, had readily grasped the fact that a new situation called for decisions of a new character” and accordingly ratified the treaty unanimously. “France will never forget this.” But when the U. S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, it voided the Guarantee Treaty as well. “Such are the risks that democracies run with their frail Parliaments.” Germany now has “an indirect invitation” to “try again.”
Germany will accept that invitation, having given itself over to a “monstrous explosion of the will to power, which threatens openly to do away entirely with the diversities established by many evolutions, to set in their place the implacable mastery of a race whose lordly part would be to substitute itself, by force of arms, for all national developments.” As proof, Clemenceau cites a manifesto signed by ninety-three German intellectuals justifying the war, “the bloodiest and the least excusable of military aggressions,” at its outset. In this, they followed the claims of the Prussian general and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardi, who regarded war as an instrument of progressive historical development, necessary for Germany, a country “condemned, by her very greatness, either to absorb all nations in herself or to return to nothingness.” Adding to this chorus was the chemist and philosophy professor Wilhelm Ostwald, who averred, “Germany has reached a higher stage of civilization than the other peoples, and the result of the War will be an organization of Europe under Germany leadership”; zoologist and ‘race scientist’ Ernst Haeckel, who “demanded the conquest of London, the division of Belgium between Germany and Holland, the annexation of Northeast France, of Poland, the Baltic Provinces, the Congo, and a greater part of the English colonies; and the Prussian Hegelian Adolf Lasson, who assured his readers that “we are morally and intellectually superior to all men,” “peerless” in our nature, our organizations, and our institutions”—Germany being “the most perfect creation known in history.” To which Clemenceau can only reply, “Ordinary laymen who talked in this strain would be taken off to some safe asylum.” He is unkind enough to add, as proof of his own experience with Germans, “I have sometimes penetrated into the sacred cave of the Germanic cult, which is, as everyone knows, the Bierhaus.” There, “the popular rumblings of a nationalism upheld by the sonorous brasses blare to the heavens the supreme voice of Germany.” Despite Hindenburg’s later protestations that the war was only “the supreme measure resorted to in preservation of our existence against a host of enemies,” Clemenceau cites the former German ambassador in London, Karl Max, Prince Lichnowsky, who published My Mission to London 1912-1914 in America in 1917, giving evidence that the Kaiser Reich had indeed intervened in Serbia, knowing “that it meant running the risk of a universal war.” Looking next to the future, Clemenceau goes on to cite the German General Hans von Seekt, who had served as Chief of staff to General August von Mackensen on the Eastern Front during the war, who wrote, in his 1929 book, The Future of the German Empire, that Germany seeks to reestablish itself “as a great military power,” one that can settle what he takes to be the “grotesque” existence of “the Polish corridor,” which is “already considered impracticable by England. “Solving” this and other treaty restrictions, van Seekt writes, “is the battlefield of Germany foreign policy,” a “struggle now beginning” in which “we need force.” “The principal discovery” we French need to make “is that it needs at least two to maintain an honest peace.
“Too many public men, blinded by too high an opinion of themselves, have not realized the profound problems of a lasting peace,” which requires “both sides to have the same fundamental ideas of right and the same quality of good faith.” Exactly so, one notices, a century later.
This is why, “whether by spoken word or written word the preaching of universal love so far has principally produced mere empty echoes.” Defeat brought Germany “to words of quasi-peace, soon belied by a renewal of implacable activity,” even as “the victors, divided, are drowning themselves in a deluge of verbose invocations to a metaphysics of peace, adapted to all kinds of immediate self-interest.” And so, the United States aimed to make “a new Europe,” only to walk away, taking with it the military guarantees that could have perpetuated that Europe. Americans have made a “separate peace” with Germany, establishing profitable trade relations, then demanded repayment of loans it made to France, monies that it used to hold Germany back “during four interminable years”—thereby “securing for itself the advantages of the battles that it had never fought,” having made, by its intervention, “a great and heroic gesture” but nonetheless paying “but a mere comparative trifle of shed blood, in return for which you have had a prodigious recompense of gold, owing to the stupendous development of your industries while ours were being systematically destroyed.” “That was a high emprise of downright materialism the like of which had never been seen” and “America has broken us in the economic sphere for an indeterminate time.” Clemenceau advises Americans, “Do not despise Europe. Your judgments might prove double-edged. Do not treat us too badly. No one knows what fate history has in store for you. A weaker brother is often useful in time of need.”
Specifically, Anglo-Americans heeded the advice of John Maynard Keynes in his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes argues that “world prosperity was dependent on the prosperity of Germany, and that Germany would suffer from a disastrous economic instability so long as Germany should be called on to meet obligations beyond her capacity to pay.” This argument also persuaded Clemenceau’s successor as Prime Minister, the socialist Alexandre Millerand. Negotiations with Germany commenced, fruitlessly, with the later Poincaré Administration insisting that there must be no moratorium on German payments without securities. Under Poincaré’s orders, France occupied the industrial Ruhr region of Germany, which concentrated German minds on settling matters. In 1924, the Allied Reparations Commission produced the Dawes Plan (named for Commission chairman and U. S. Vice President Charles G. Dawes), which traded German reparations for French and Belgian withdrawal from the Ruhr. (Clemenceau does not let the fact that an American chaired the commission that settled a point contained in the Treaty of Versailles, which America hadn’t ratified.) But these terms were soon abrogated, after the League of Nations, now “in charge of the question of disarmament,” set up a new commission of financial experts headed by another American, Owen D. Young, which in 1929 further reduced German reparations in exchange for yet another French military withdrawal—this, from the Rhineland. All France now had to rely on for its security was the Locarno Treaty of 1925, pledging to guarantee existing boundaries between France and Germany, a pledge that Clemenceau rightly supposed would prove useless. To the Americans, he writes, “Come to our villages and read the endless lists of their dead and make comparisons, if you will.”
Meanwhile, the Germans had been manufacturing arms in excess of the terms set by the Treaty, including what later came to be called ‘dual use’ aircraft (passenger planes that could be equipped with bombs), adding to these imported arms from the Soviet Union, which at the time expected the German Communists to seize power, as they had nearly done in the aftermath of the war. Evading the cap on army size, the German government had also authorized “so-called sports clubs,” offering military training for soldiers and future officers. While “unquestionably and naturally, in Germany, as everywhere else, the workmen, peasants, and lower middle class are true pacifists, and view the possibilities of new butcheries, with horror…all the sons of the governing classes, all the young men who attend the high schools, the colleges, and the universities of Germany find there Nationalist or Populist professors who continually din into their ears the Deutschland über Alles,” and “in this lies the great danger to peace,” as “it will be these same young men who will direct the destinies of Germany.” German policy has reversed a Christian teaching: “A lie sets her free.” With the assistance of the Anglo-Americans, who fail to see the future political and military consequences of their economic policy, Germany prepares, “with the most scientific preparations,” at that, to “start on another criminal venture before she has expiated the last.” As for France, “We shall take up the atrocious War again at the point where we left it off.”
But will the French “have the courage to prepare for it, instead of frittering away our strength in lies that no one believes, from conference to conference”? “Since the world began,” the means to peace “can be summed up in the words, Be strong.” While “Germany remains faithful to this truth,” “the Governments that have succeeded one another in France since 1920…have dandled our people from concession to concession without making them understand, first of all, that a nation with a past like ours could not accept peace at any price..[and] secondly, that with neighbors like the Germans this peace could only be ensured by making the necessary sacrifices.” The “Fortified Regions” strategy, seen in the soon-to-be infamous Maginot Line, has prevailed, while “ten years have been lost in useless wrangling” at the negotiating table over reparations, disarmament, and finances. France has seen a fatal divorce between patriotism and republicanism, its leading liberal and socialist politicians and intellectuals having committed themselves to an internationalism that will leave the country helpless against the coming German onslaught, with Aristide Briand, the socialist politician then enjoying his eleventh term as Prime Minister, as “the leading light of French defeatism.” Co-author of the Locarno Treaty with the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann, “M. Briand has perhaps a sense of responsibility—but he shows no signs of it.” Surely, “is it not fairly clear that the very idea of a fatherland, which is still so potent among us, has lost some of its native strength in the hearts of those who have deliberately allowed themselves to be despoiled of that French pride so essential if the fatherland is to live and not die?” This weakness among the governing classes of France has resulted in “a retrograde peace” owing primarily not to economic, military, or even political defects (although all of those are present) as to “flaws of character,” which “are as much to be dreaded in peace as in war, since they lead a man just as inevitably to surrender his dignity his will, his personality, everything that constitutes his worth in the widely differing circumstances of peace and of war.”
Today’s France has no Napoleon, “no man of genius” (who nonetheless flung “all his victories down the abyss on the plain of Waterloo, where for a time a semblance of order was established in Europe”). “My wish would simply be that the French people should dare to trust itself, and that is precisely what it is denied my eyes to see.”
Finally, then, “it is not Foch’s gossip that haunts me, it is the future of France.” Like all men, he is “good and bad—together.” “Let us accept,” with Pascal, “the fact of our human condition, with its greatnesses and its failings.” (“We are constantly hearing of the superman. And what of the subman —what of him? It is easier to come together for developments of barbarism than for the refinements of civilization.”) As always, however, Clemenceau will not take the Pascalian wager, contenting himself by saying that if we accept the human condition of grandeur and misery we will “have no need of so many fictions to create for ourselves a figure designed to our own vanity.” In the end, “France will be what the men of France deserve.”
Notes
- In English, The Memoirs of Marshal Foch (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1931).
- See Georges Clemenceau: In the Evening of My Thought. Charles Miner Thompson and John Heard, Jr. translation. (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1929).
- Charles de Gaulle thought much the same of the proposed ‘United States of Europe’: “Good luck to this federation without a federator!”
- Or, as de Gaulle put it, “Treaties are like jeunes filles. They last as long as they last.”
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