Georges Clemenceau - Last Years

Last Years

Clemenceau resigned as Prime Minister as soon as the Presidential election was held and took no further part in politics. In private he condemned the unilateral occupation by French troops of the German city of Frankfurt in 1920 and said if he had been in power he would have persuaded the British to join it.

He took a holiday in Egypt and the Sudan from February to April 1920, then embarking for the Far East in September, returning to France in March 1921. In June he visited England and received an honorary degree from Oxford. He met Lloyd George and said to him that after the Armistice he had become the enemy of France. Lloyd George replied: “Well, was not that always our traditional policy?” He was joking but after reflection Clemenceau took it seriously. After Lloyd George's fall from power in 1922 Clemenceau remarked: “As for France, it is a real enemy who disappears. Lloyd George did not hide it: at my last visit to London he cynically admitted it”.

In late 1922 Clemenceau gave a lecture tour in the major cities of the American north east. He defended the policy of France, including war-debts and reparations, and condemned American isolationism. He was well received and attracted large audiences but America's policy remained unchanged. On 9 August 1926 he wrote an open letter to the American President Calvin Coolidge, arguing against France paying all its war-debts: "France is not for sale, even to her friends". This appeal went unheard.

He condemned Poincaré's occupation of the Ruhr as undoing of the entente between France and Britain.

He wrote two short biographies of the Greek orator Demosthenes and the French painter Claude Monet. He also penned a huge two-volume tome, covering philosophy, history and science, titled Au Soir de la Pensée. Writing this occupied most of his time between 1923 and 1927.

During his last months he wrote his memoirs, despite declaring previously that he would not write them. He was spurred into doing so by the appearance of Marshal Foch's memoirs which were highly critical of Clemenceau, mainly for his policy at the Paris Peace Conference. He only had time to finish the first draft and it was published posthumously as Grandeurs et Misères d'une Victoire (The Grandeur and Misery of Victory). He was critical of Foch and also of his successors who had allowed the Versailles treaty to be undermined in the face of Germany's revival. He burned all his private letters.