Georges Clemenceau

Biography

Georges Clemenceau was born on 28 September 1841 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds in the Vendée, into a family of republican sympathies. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in Paris in 1865 and wrote for radical publications opposed to Napoleon III. From 1865 to 1869 he lived in the United States, working as a correspondent and teacher, and married an American, Mary Plummer.

Back in France, he became mayor of the Montmartre district of Paris in 1870 and was elected to the National Assembly in 1871. From 1876 he sat in the Chamber of Deputies, where he led the Radicals, pressed for the separation of church and state and an amnesty for the Communards, and gained a reputation for bringing down governments. His links to a figure in the Panama scandal cost him his seat in 1893.

He turned to journalism and, as editor of L'Aurore, published Émile Zola's "J'Accuse...!" in 1898 during the Dreyfus affair. Elected senator in 1902, he became interior minister in 1906 and then prime minister from 1906 to 1909, using troops against strikes and the winegrowers' revolt in the south.

Recalled as prime minister and war minister in November 1917, he drove France on to victory in the First World War and presided over the Paris Peace Conference, where he pressed for reparations and the return of Alsace–Lorraine. After losing the republican caucus for the presidency to Paul Deschanel in January 1920 he retired from politics. He died on 24 November 1929.