Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [23]
Neither the British nor the Americans had wanted the Peace Conference to be in Paris. As House confided to his diary, “It will be difficult enough at best to make a just peace, and it will be almost impossible to do so while sitting in the atmosphere of a belligerent capital. It might turn out well and yet again it might be a tragedy.” The French were too excitable, had suffered too much and were too bitter against the Germans to provide the calm atmosphere needed. Wilson had preferred Geneva until alarmist reports coming from Switzerland persuaded him that the country was on the verge of revolution and riddled with German spies. Clemenceau did not waver in his insistence on Paris. “I never,” said Lloyd George later on, when he was particularly annoyed, “wanted to hold the Conference in his bloody capital. Both House and I thought it would be better to hold it in a neutral place, but the old man wept and protested so much that we gave way.”2
It may be only a legend that Clemenceau asked to be buried upright, facing Germany. It was certainly true that he had been on guard against France’s great neighbor for most of his life. He was only twenty-eight when the Franco-Prussian War started, and he was part of the group of young left-wing republicans who fought on in Paris after the French armies were defeated. He saw the city starve, the French government capitulate and the new German empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. As a newly elected deputy, he voted against the peace terms with Germany. As a journalist, writer, politician and finally prime minister, he sounded the same warning: Germany was a menace to France. “My life hatred,” he told an American journalist shortly before he died, “has been for Germany because of what she has done to France.” He did not actively seek war after 1871; he simply accepted it as inevitable. The problem, he said, was not with France: “Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom.”3
To have a chance, Clemenceau had always recognized, France needed allies. Before 1914, the new Germany had been a formidable opponent, its industry, exports and wealth all growing while France’s were static and its birthrate was declining. Today, when sheer numbers of soldiers matter less in battle, it is difficult to remember how important it was to be able to put huge armies into the field. As Clemenceau told the French senate during the ratification debate, the treaty with Germany “does not specify that the French are committed to have many children, but that would have been the first thing to include.” Those disadvantages were why France had reached out to its hereditary enemies, tsarist Russia in the east and Britain across the Channel, for Russian manpower and British industry and maritime power to balance against Germany. Much had changed by 1918, but not the underlying imbalance. There were still more Germans than French. How long would it take the German economy, with its largely intact infrastructure, to recover? And now France could not count on Russia.4
During the Peace Conference, France’s allies became exasperated with what they saw as French intransigence, French greed and French vindictiveness. They had not suffered what France had suffered. The war memorials, in every city, town and village, with their lists of names from the First World War, the handful from the Second, tell the story of France’s losses. A quarter of French men between eighteen and thirty had died in the