Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [21]
Wilson was coming to the conclusion that he and the French were not as close in their views as House had encouraged him to believe. The French government had drawn up an elaborate agenda which placed the League of Nations well down the list of important issues to be decided. Paul Cambon, the immensely experienced French ambassador in London, told a British diplomat, “The business of the Peace Conference was to bring to a close the war with Germany.” The League was something that could easily be postponed. Many in the French official establishment thought of a league that would be a continuation of the wartime alliance and whose main role would be to enforce the peace terms. No matter, said an internal memorandum, that much of the French public thought in more idealistic terms: “that can help us.” Clemenceau was publicly skeptical. The day after Wilson had made a speech in London reiterating his faith that a League of Nations was the best way to provide security for its members, Clemenceau had spoken in the Chamber of Deputies. To loud cheers he asserted: “There is an old system of alliances called the Balance of Power—this system of alliances, which I do not renounce, will be my guiding thought at the Peace Conference.” Wickedly, he had referred to Wilson’s noble candeur, a word that can mean either candor or pathetic naïveté. (The official record transformed it into grandeur. ) The American delegation saw Clemenceau’s speech as a challenge. 14
In that speech and the American reaction to it were sown the seeds of what grew into a lurid and enduring tableau, especially in the United States. On the one hand, the Galahad, pure in thought and deed, lighting the way to a golden future; on the other, the misshapen French troll, his heart black with rage and spite, thinking only of revenge. On the one side, peace; on the other, war. It makes a good story, and it is not fair to either man. Both were liberals with a conservative skepticism of rapid change. What divided them was temperament and their own experience. Wilson believed that human nature was fundamentally good. Clemenceau had his doubts. He, and Europe, had been through too much. “Please do not misunderstand me,” he once said to Wilson, “we too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.” Wilson had lived in a world where democracy was safe. “I have lived,” Clemenceau explained, “in a world where it was good form to shoot a democrat.” Where Wilson believed that the use of force ultimately failed, Clemenceau had seen it succeed too often. “I have come to the conclusion that force is right,” he said over lunch one day to Lloyd George’s mistress, Frances Stevenson. “Why is this chicken here? Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!” Clemenceau was not opposed to the League; he simply did not put much trust in it. He would have liked to see greater international cooperation, but recent history had shown all too clearly the importance of keeping the powder dry and the guns primed just in case. In this he faithfully reflected French public opinion, which remained overwhelmingly suspicious of Germany. 15
By the second week of January Wilson was back in Paris, waiting for the preliminary conference to start. He was living in great state at the Hôtel Murat, a private house provided by the French government. (One of Wilson’s little jokes was that the Americans were paying indirectly through their loans to France.) The hotel was owned by descendants of the great soldier Joachim Murat, who had married one of Napoleon’s sisters, and lent by them to the French government. Later, when relations soured between France and the United