Georges Clemenceau

From Philosopedia

Clemenceau, Georges [Premier] (28 September 1841 - 24 November 1929)

French statesman and journalist Clemenceau was born in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, Vendée, France. He followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a physician and a freethinker. At 16, he was briefly suspended from school for debating Christianity with a teacher.

Clemenceau began writing for Emile Zola's newspaper, Travail, advocating a republic and free speech, and served 63 days in jail in 1862 as a student demonstrator under the reign of Napoleon III.

Trained as a physician, he was in conflict with Napoleon III because of a belief in republicanism, so he went (1865) to the United States as a journalist and teacher. In Stamford, Connecticut, according to Marc Pachter and Frances Wein's Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776 - 1914 (Addison-Wesley, 1976), Clemenceau

• . . . accepted a position as professor of French and riding master at a young ladies' boarding school, Miss Aiken's in Stamford, Connecticut. He also managed to be named foreign correspondent for the republican newspaper, Le Temps - quite a departure for that paper. Clemenceau first found lodgings in a house in Greenwich Village owned by the librarian of the French community; then he lived in a room which had formerly been occupied by his arch-enemy Louis Bonaparte, who was to become Napoleon III. Clemenceau frequented the Union League as well as Tammany Hall and was a close friend of Horace Greeley, the editor-in-chief of the New York Tribune. He went quite frequently to Washington - where he met the future President, General Ulysses S. Grant - and to nearby Virginia. He also went to see the newly pacified South, and spent some time with a Florida planter. . . . Clemenceau fell in love with one of his pupils, Mary Plummer, and asked her to marry him, but insisted that, he being an atheist, there be no religious ceremony. The family refused, and he returned to France. However, she soon summoned him back, he sailed for New York, married there without a religious ceremony, and brought his bride to France in August of 1870, just as the Franco-Prussian war was breaking out. It must be mentioned that after a few years of happiness, the birth of two girls and one boy, this marriage went awry, and after some infidelities here and there, it ended in a divorce in 1884 (the very year divorce was again made legal in France).

The Catharine Aiken Seminary for Young Girls, on Clark's Hill in Stamford, Connecticut, was founded in April 1855 by Miss Aiken, a Quaker school teacher from Cape Cod:

• In 1867, through acquaintances in New York, Catharine Aiken employed a 26-year-old political exile from France named George [sic] Clemenceau to teach French and horseback riding at her school. The suave, dashing young Frenchman fascinated both faculty and students. Soon he fell in love with student Mary Plummer. The couple was married by New York Mayor A. Oakly Hall in June 1869 and sailed immediately for France.

Upon his return to France, he had a stormy life in politics, once being implicated in a Panama Canal scandal. A passionate defender of Alfred Dreyfus, he later led France during World War I and was a main antagonist of Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference.

During an interlude when he left politics, Clemenceau returned to journalism. His newspaper articles, permeated with anti-clericalism and the promotion of rationalism, eventually were bound into 19 volumes. Clemenceau contributed to L'Aurore, and worked tirelessly for the release of Alfred Dreyfuss, writing more than a thousand influential articles about the case.

Known as "The Tiger," the politician returned to the Chambre in 1902, became Minister of the Interior, then premier (1906-1909). Clemenceau was again elected Prime Minister in 1917-1920, and was toasted as Pere Victoire (Father Victory) at the close of World War I. Clemenceau was a connoisseur of the arts, and a personal friend of Auguste Rodin.

He became Mayor of Montmartre, served as a member of the Paris Municipal Council (1871-1876), and was elected five times to the National Assembly. Clemenceau's book, The Great God Pan (1869), described how superstitions live on under new guises. He also translated John Stuart Mill's book, Auguste Comte and Positivism.

E. M. Forster said of the Tiger who “urged millions to die” that

• pinch the book where you will, and it does not move. Not only are the characters "dead" . . . being mere bundles of qualities, but the scenery, the social face of Paris, is also defunct.

A little known fact is that he led a simple life, making his own meals if at all possible, and eating gruel for breakfast, boiled eggs for lunch, and milk and bread for supper during his entire life.

In a chapter on "Gods and Laws," Clemenceau wrote in In the Evening of My Thought (Au Soir de la pensee),

• Not only have the "followers of Christ" made it their rule to hack to bits all those who do not accept their beliefs, they have also ferociously massacred each other, in the name of their common "religion of love," under banners proclaiming their faith in Him who had expressly commanded them to love one another.

“As a result of quarrels over heresies,” Clemenceau wrote, “what massacres followed among Christians in the name of the common God of universal charity.”

The humanist historian Geoffrey Bruun wrote a definitive biography, Clemenceau (Harvard University Press, 1943), as did Wythe Williams, The Tiger of France (1949).

Clemenceau was a member of the French Academy and was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association.

Before dying, he asked for no burial procession, no official or religious ceremony, and a tomb without inscription and surrounded by a simple iron railing. He was buried in Le Colombier, Vendée, Mouchamps.

(Information about the school in Stamford, Connecticut, was suggested by Peter Knize, Robert Mosley, and Don Souden.) (For more about Clemenceau, see Prof. Clark's article, "George Clemenceau: Journalist: Statesman, Atheist," Freethought Today, August 2002. )

{CE; Robert Craft, The New York Review of Books, 6 May 1999; BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}