Free PARIS 1919 by Margaret MacMillan

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.” 6
    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!” 7
    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. 8
    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. 9
    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