France's wartime Tiger spent four formative years teaching and doctoring in America
The man who drove a hard bargain with Germany at Versailles once taught French in Massachusetts and gave riding lessons at a girls' school in Connecticut. Georges Clemenceau fled Napoleon III's police for New York after the American Civil War, and came home with a lasting faith in democracy and a knack for compromise.
He grew up in the Vendée, a remote, rural and poor corner of western France once known for royalist loyalties. His mother was a devout Protestant, but his father, from a long line of doctors, was an atheist radical who was twice arrested and who passed on to his son a love of books, left-wing politics and hostility to the Catholic Church. Clemenceau followed the family trade and qualified in medicine in Paris in 1865.
Politics had already got him into trouble. In 1862 the imperial police arrested him for putting up posters calling for a demonstration, and he spent 77 days in Mazas Prison. As the regime began shipping dissidents to the penal colony in French Guiana, he left for the United States. From 1865 to 1869 he practised medicine in New York while writing for the Paris paper Le Temps about Reconstruction, American democracy and the aftermath of slavery. He married Mary Plummer, one of his riding pupils, in 1869; the marriage later ended bitterly in an 1891 divorce.
After France's defeat at Sedan in 1870 he returned and became mayor of Montmartre's arrondissement. When the Paris Commune rose in 1871 he tried and failed to broker a compromise between its leaders and the government. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1876, his sharp tongue soon made him leader of the radicals, and he campaigned for years, alongside Victor Hugo, until an amnesty for deported Communards passed in July 1880.
He served as prime minister from 1906 to 1909 and returned in 1917, when the war had already cost France around 1,400,000 soldiers. Nicknamed the Tiger and Father Victory, he pressed at the peace conference for reparations, disarmament and the return of Alsace-Lorraine, lost in 1871. Some thought the resulting treaty too mild: Marshal Foch called it a twenty-year armistice.
Source: Georges Clemenceau
