Free PARIS 1919 by Margaret MacMillan Page B

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.” 14
    France, of all the Great Powers, had the most at stake in the German peace terms. Britain already had most of what it wanted, with the German fleet and the major German colonies safely in its hands, and the United States, protected from Germany by the Atlantic Ocean, was eager to pack up and go home. France not only had suffered the most; it also had the most to fear. Whatever happened, Germany would still lie along its eastern border. There would still be more Germans than French in the world. It was an ominous sign that even the souvenir penknives engraved with “Foch” and “La Victoire” being sold in France in 1919 had been made in German factories. France wanted revenge and compensation, but above all, it wanted security. No one was more aware of this than its prime minister.
    Clemenceau was convinced that the only safety for France was in keeping the wartime alliance alive. As he told the Chamber of Deputies in December 1918, “To preserve this entente, I will make any sacrifice.” During the Peace Conference he held firm to that, even through the worst disagreements. The French public must remember, he told his closest advisers, that “without America and England, France would perhaps no longer actually exist.” As he remarked to Lloyd George, when the two were engaged in one of their many quarrels, “my policy at the conference, as I hope you will acknowledge, is one of close agreement with Great Britain and America.” 15
    Clemenceau’s policy was one thing; persuading the rank and file of French officials to follow it was another. “I find them full of intrigue and chicanery of all kinds,” complained Hankey, the British secretary to the conference, “without any idea of playing the game.” Memories of past greatness, a conviction of the superiority of French civilization, resentment of Anglo-Saxon prosperity and fears of Germany did not make the French easy to deal with. “One could not help feeling,” wrote a British expert when he visited the French occupation forces in the Rhineland, “that in a moment all that has happened in the last fifty years was wiped away; the French soldiers were back again in the place where they used to be under the Monarchy and the Revolution; confident, debonair, quick, feeling themselves completely at home in their historical task of bringing a higher civilization to the Germans.” The Americans, like the British, found the French intensely irritating at times. “Fundamental trouble with France,” wrote an American expert in his diary, “is that as far as she was concerned the victory was wholly fictitious and she is trying to act as if it were a real one and to make herself believe that it was.” American officers clashed repeatedly with their French counterparts and the ordinary soldiers brawled in the streets and cafés. 16
    It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Clemenceau himself