May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 38

Churchill on Clemenceau: His Best Student? Part II

Churchill’s entire career as a writer demonstrates that the past must be studied even though it does not neatly offer rules and models to follow. Clemenceau was such a model, and we have no better student of Frances Tiger than Britains Lion, Winston Churchill.

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By Paul Alkon

Dr. Alkon is Leo S. Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. This is a condensed text of his original paper, which will appear in full in Finest Hour Online, and is also available by email from the editor.

The final version of Churchill’s second essay on France’s Tiger, entitled simply “Clemenceau,” was published in 1937 in his book Great Contemporaries. The first version, “Clemenceau—the Man and the Tiger,” appearing in 1930, included a cartoon satirizing in a friendly way Clemenceau’s postretirement big game hunting in India. It shows the great Frenchman with pith helmet, rifle and bandolier, confronting a tiger; the caption reads “Both (together): Tiens! Le Tigre.”⁵

An interim version, published by a newspaper in 1936, was a historical workshop, wherein Churchill tried to define the essential nature of France, with its own unique beginning: “Whenever I hear the Marseillaise, I think of Clemenceau. He embodied and expressed France.”⁶ For Churchill, the man and the nation were symbolically interchangeable.

All three versions, and their surviving manuscripts in the Churchill Archives, reveal that Churchill lavished great care on this biographical sketch, making many small and large revisions. Here as elsewhere, the future Nobel laureate shows himself to have been very much a professional writer, intent on polishing style as well as substance.

Churchill’s metaphors are expressive. Clemenceau is a ghost of the 1789 French Revolution, come to haunt tyrants of the present time in France. But only the 1936 text includes an explanation of how Clemenceau’s attitudes were shaped by his upbringing and first experience of political tyranny when his father was wrongly imprisoned by Napoleon III.

In the 1930 Strand and 1937 Great Contemporaries versions, Churchill begins by praising Clemenceau’s much criticized Grandeurs et Misères de la Victoire, his posthumously published reply to the posthumously published General Foch: “We are the richer…that Foch flings the javelin at Clemenceau from beyond the tomb, and that Clemenceau, at the moment of descending into it, hurls back the weapon with his last spasm.”⁷

Despite Churchill’s comic tone here, he argues more soberly in Clemenceau’s defense that history is best served by showing great men as they really were, even in their petty moments, rather than as mere monuments, “upon which only the good and great things that men have done should be inscribed” (GC, 301). In The Strand and Great Contemporaries, Churchill retains but greatly amplifies and complicates his equation of Clemenceau with France:

He represented the French people risen against tyrants— tyrants of the mind, tyrants of the soul, tyrants of the body; foreign tyrants, domestic tyrants, swindlers, humbugs, grafters, traitors, invaders, defeatists—all lay within the bound of the Tiger; and against them the Tiger waged inexorable war. Anti-clerical, anti-monarchist, anti-Communist, anti-German—in all this he represented the dominant spirit of France. (GC, 302)

This list of tyrannies fought against is also a catalogue of what Churchill regards as characteristic and mainly admirable French attitudes. These stemmed ultimately from the French Revolution “at its sublime moment” (not, of course, the reign of terror that followed), when defining new ideals for its country and the world.

Always a student of political symbols, Churchill also added to the expanded passage an image of the elderly Clemenceau as a more appropriate symbol of his country than the Gallic cock. After asserting that Clemenceau “was France,” he writes that “the Old Tiger, with his quaint, stylish cap, his white moustache and burning eye, would make a truer mascot for France than any barnyard fowl” (GC, 302).

Emblematic Imagery

As Churchill must have known, cartoonists enjoyed putting Clemenceau’s head satirically on a tiger, just as they had long depicted him (not always fondly) as an English bulldog.⁸ Neither tiger not bulldog ever displaced the cock or lion, though in the 1940s the bulldog became the symbol of Britain and its best qualities.

A less pleasing parallel came in 1945 when Churchill’s wartime achievements did not prevent a wounding ejection from office. Of Clemenceau’s similar fate Churchill noted, without premonition: “When the victory was won, France to foreign eyes seemed ungrateful. She flung him aside and hastened back as quickly as possible to the old hugger-mugger of party politics” (GC, 312-13).

The essay as a whole, however, portrays the Tiger triumphant by outlining a career that, only eight years after his death, had in Churchill’s opinion made it “already certain that Clemenceau was one of the world’s great men” (GC, 302). His outline of Clemenceau’s life provides a clear though far from easy model for imitation, and is evidently designed partly as such. Great men were never far from Churchill’s thoughts.

In his Great Contemporaries sketch of Clemenceau, Churchill creates another emblematic figure, France’s victorious general, Marshal Foch, representing the aristocratic virtues of pre-revolutionary France. Churchill’s explanation of the aristocratic strain of French history symbolized by Foch is among his most memorable set pieces. Its romantic eloquence rivals in effect—some might say in excess— Edmund Burke’s famous recollection of Marie Antoinette at Versailles during the height of her glory.⁹

In his Clemenceau essay, however, Churchill prudently picks Joan of Arc as a more acceptable 20th century emblem of ancient French virtues. Supplementing the France embodied by Clemenceau, Churchill writes, “There was another mood and another France”:

It was the France of Foch—ancient, aristocratic; the France whose grace and culture, whose etiquette and ceremonial has bestowed its gifts around the world. There was the France of chivalry, the France of Versailles, and above all, the France of Joan of Arc. It was this secondary and submerged national personality that Foch recalled….But when [Foch and Clemenceau] gazed upon the inscription on the golden statue of Joan of Arc…and saw gleaming the Maid’s uplifted sword, their two hearts beat as one. (GC, 303)¹⁰

Here Churchill’s nostalgia is in full flood: his sentimental yearning for the “grace and culture” of old aristocratic eras, viewed through very rose-colored glasses indeed. But Churchill the historian knew better than most the sordid realities that were also a big part of those days. Even Churchill’s paean to ancient France includes a reminder of “the blood-river” it engendered. He also reminds us of a conflict only temporarily set aside between Catholicism, as exemplified by the devoutly religious Foch, and fierce anti-clericalism, exemplified and often led by the skeptical Clemenceau who, as Churchill explains, “had no hope beyond the grave” (GC, 312).

In Churchill’s survey of Clemenceau’s career there is only realism, which suggests his considerable knowledge of French history in Clemenceau’s time. Starting with his courageous action trying to save generals Thomas and Lecomte from execution while he was “Mayor of Montmartre amid the perils of the Commune” in 1871, Churchill portrays Clemenceau as politician and journalist with equal displays of moral and often physical courage: over French colonies, the Grévy affair, arguments over Boulanger, the Panama frauds and accusations that Clemenceau was implicated, and not least the Dreyfus Affair, in which “Clemenceau became the champion of Dreyfus,” having consequently “to fight, to him the most sacred thing in France—the French Army” (GC, 303, 309). “All the elements of blood-curdling political drama were represented by actual facts…which find their modern parallel only in the underworld of Chicago” (GC, 305).

Clemenceau led “a life of storm, from the beginning to the end; fighting, fighting all the way” (GC, 303). The key word that fascinates Churchill to the point of repetition is “fighting.” It was not only Clemenceau’s combative nature, but some of his rhetorical methods that appealed to Churchill, who later adapted them to his own purposes at a crucial moment.

They became friends while Churchill was Minister of Munitions, just as the French reluctantly turned to Clemenceau at “the worst period of the War….He returned to power as Marius had returned to Rome; doubted by many, dreaded by all, but doom-sent, inevitable” (GC, 309-10). Churchill, who in 1940 thought of himself as “walking with destiny,” here uses the phrase “doom-sent” in a way that shifts the latter part of his biographical sketch toward the mood, though not the denouement, of a Greek tragedy.

Churchill from this point on is eye-witness and commentator. He approves of Clemenceau’s way of dealing with an unfriendly parliament chamber:

To do any good you have got to get down to grips with the subject and in human touch with the audience. Certainly Clemenceau seemed to do this…He looked like a wild animal pacing to and fro behind bars, growling 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. (GC, 310-11)

The importance of projecting the right mood in a crisis was certainly a lesson learned by Churchill. He remembered too some particular words that had served Clemenceau to good effect. By trying them out on Churchill before using them in the French Assembly, Clemenceau provided a kind of private tutorial for what proved to be his most apt pupil:

He uttered to me in his room at the Ministry of War words he afterwards repeated in the tribune: “I will fight in front of Paris; I will fight in Paris; I will fight behind Paris.” Everyone knew this was no idle boast. Paris might have been reduced to the ruins of Ypres or Arras. It would not have affected Clemenceau’s resolution. (GC, 312)

Here of course is a model for Churchill’s speech about Dunkirk to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”¹¹

In adapting Clemenceau’s trope, Churchill amplified it, hammering home his point by widening and also particularizing its geographical scope to provide a memorable vignette of future war, waged relentlessly on sea, on land and in the air. Churchill also evidently took to heart Clemenceau’s explanation of how in war’s most perilous time he cast away the axioms of party politics in favor of pragmatism:

One day he said to me, “I have no political system, and I have abandoned all political principles. I am a man dealing with events as they come in the light of my experience,” or it may be it was “according as I have seen things happen”…. Clemenceau was quite right. The only thing that mattered was to beat the Germans. (GC, 311-12)

Later, when beating the Germans was again all that mattered, Churchill’s inspired and energetic muddling through must surely have been fortified by recollection of Clemenceau’s approach in equally dire times.

Churchill’s sketch winds down with recollection of visits to Clemenceau during his retirement and, in the final version, with part of a letter from Clemenceau’s daughter correcting a legend: that although Clemenceau wanted to be buried upright, his wish was not honored. In the 1930 and 1936 essays Churchill had accepted and recounted this tale as fact, and stoutly ended with a ringing declaration: “If I were a Frenchman, I would put it right—even now.”

Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire took no umbrage at this, but did kindly inform Churchill that her father had left no such wish. In his final version Churchill quotes her, ending with her description of the simple unmarked grave “where one only hears the wind in the trees and murmuring of a brook in the ravine,” where at last The Tiger “returned alone to his father’s side, to the land whence his ancestors came, les Clemenceau du Colombier, from the depths of the woodlands of La Vendée, centuries ago” (GC, 313).

These haunting words, selected from an English translation of the letter Madeleine had written in French, nicely evoke the long and important sweep of French local history and Clemenceau’s place in it.¹²

Madeleine’s letter had ended with a matter-of-fact statement that “the old manor house close by is there to bear witness.” By deciding to omit this rather flat sentence, Churchill heightens the evocative quality of his conclusion.

Likewise, he keeps in French within the quoted sentence, rather than translating into English, the phrase “les Clemenceau du Columbier.” Here, as in the very few other bits of French that are sprinkled in his essays on Clemenceau, Churchill adroitly heightens the local color and French flavor appropriate to his topic without either flaunting his French (such as it was) or creating problems for those whose French is rusty or non-existent. That Churchill gave such careful thought to stylistic issues is one more indication of his superb skill as a writer.¹³

Churchill’s last verbal image of Clemenceau comes “a year before he died” in his unheated library-sitting room in Paris on a winter day:

The old man appears, in his remarkable black skull-cap, gloved and well wrapped up. None of the beauty of Napoleon, but I expect some of his St. Helena majesty, and far back beyond Napoleon, Roman figures come into view. The fierceness, the pride, the poverty after great office, the grandeur when stripped of power, the unbreakable front offered to this world and to the next—all these belong to the ancients. (GC, 313)

Without retracting his equation of Clemenceau with revolutionary France at its best, Churchill turns finally to a more vague but equally laudatory displacement of Clemenceau into the far more remote past—a modern whose true place is now in the pantheon of admirable ancients.

Summary

In The World Crisis, Churchill’s World War I memoir, Clemenceau receives only brief, laudatory comments. Except for Churchill’s account of the peace conference, Clemenceau’s actions are remarked only in connection with military events. Churchill’s visit to the front with Clemenceau is described in just one sentence.¹⁴

Clemenceau’s resolve to fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris is quoted to illustrate not primarily his temperament, as in Great Contemporaries, but the importance of his support for Foch—who was willing to lose Paris if necessary to win the war—rather than for Pétain, who wanted to defend Paris at all costs even if it meant allowing a potentially fatal gap to open between the British and French armies. And thus, wrote Churchill, “we found the path to safety by discerning the beacons of truth” (WC, II, 449).

Clemenceau’s only other wartime comment in The World Crisis has for us now a very Churchillian ring that again illustrates his affinity with The Tiger: “The spirit of Clemenceau reigned throughout the capital. ‘We are now giving ground, but we shall never surrender…'” (WC, II, 456). Clemenceau’s credo here could certainly pass for Churchill’s in 1940.

Churchill as Prime Minister would probably have acted and spoken as he did even if he had not known or studied Clemenceau. Many other aspects of his experiences, studies, and psychology pointed him in the same direction. It was their affinities that prompted Churchill to study Clemenceau, and not the study of Clemenceau that prompted those affinities. Nevertheless Churchill’s instincts as leader, and occasionally the very words of his public pronouncements, were surely fortified by his deep and abiding understanding of Clemenceau’s career.

Of course Churchill also studied many other people who offered examples relevant to his own career. His histories and biographies are replete with such exemplary figures, as is Great Contemporaries—so much for the canard that he cared nothing for others. Perhaps the most important of these is his ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, to whom he devoted four volumes of eminent biography. In Marlborough, Churchill insists, “the success of a commander does not arise from following rules or models….every great operation of war is unique.”¹⁵

Winston Churchill’s entire career as a writer demonstrates that the past must be studied even though it does not neatly offer rules and models to follow in the future. Clemenceau was such a model. Although more detailed biographies are available in English, none are from authors whose experiences equipped them as well as Churchill to understand and to parallel Clemenceau’s achievements. The English-speaking peoples have no better student of The Tiger than Sir Winston.

End Notes

5. Winston Churchill, “Clemenceau—the Man and the Tiger,” The Strand Magazine, December, 1930: 582-93. Subsequent citations to this work will be documented in endnotes with the abbreviation SM.

6. CHAR 8/542: manuscript, and News of the World, 15 March 1936: 5 (with slightly different paragraphing), part of Churchill’s series on “Great Men of Our Time.” Subsequent citations will be documented parenthetically as CHAR 8/542 & NOTW.

7. Winston S. Churchill, “Clemenceau,” Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937), 301-02. Subsequent citations will be documented parenthetically with the abbreviation GC.

8. See back cover for Henri Guignon’s American World War II poster “Holding the Line,” which depicts Churchill as a bulldog guarding the Union flag.The first bulldog caricature was in Punch, 29 May 1912. For other examples see Fred Urquhart, W.S.C.: A Cartoon Biography (London: Cassell, 1955), 105, 121, 131, 242; and Churchill in Caricature (London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2005), 44. Bulldog Churchill cartoons are memorable not because there were many, but because the image stays in mind with its simplicity and aptness.

9. Burke’s passage was likely in Churchill’s mind when he paid his nostalgic tribute to old France. In his essay on George Bernard Shaw for Great Contemporaries, he engaged in a literary flourish by announcing that he would “parody Burke’s famous passage,” by substituting his first memory of Lady Astor for Burke’s of Marie Antoinette (GC, 54).

10. Churchill invokes an imaginary moment when Clemenceau and Foch view Fremiet’s statue of Joan and either read the inscription on its base or, more likely (as Danielle Mihram has suggested to me), recall that famous phrase, which had achieved the status of a proverbial saying. It was sometimes attributed to Joan’s vision of Saint Michael telling her about the distressed state of France and expressing compassion, which of course she too was to feel as motivation for her mission.

11. Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 297.

12. CHAR 8/548. Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s letter, dated 12 November 1936, was apparently prompted by the News of the World version of Churchill’s essay (the only one to mention the Marseillaise) because she includes her hope that whenever Churchill hears the Marseillaise he will continue to think of her father. Churchill’s reply, on 13 January 1937, ends with the hope that England and France will remain united to avert the new peril facing civilization.

13. Another example: I have mentioned where, in the final version, he proposes the tiger as a better mascot than the cock (GC, 302). In the 1930 version, Churchill wrote that the tiger “would make a truer oriflamme…” (SM, 584). “Oriflamme” is a word redolent of French history, though hardly familiar to English readers, or even many French readers, in the 1930s. It refers to the ancient banner of French kings from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Churchill was fond of antique words, a hallmark of his style; but he displayed sound professional judgment by replacing “oriflamme” with “mascot.”

14. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1916-1918, 2 parts, (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), II, 470-71. Subsequent citations to this work are cited parenthetically with the abbreviation WC.

15. Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 2 vols. (London: George G. Harrap, 1947), I, 105.