To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, came President Wilson, and found its gathering forces dominated by a personality narrower, in every way more limited and beyond comparison more forcible than himself: the French Premier, M. Clemenceau. At the instance of President Wilson, M. Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference. “It was,” said President Wilson, “a special tribute to the sufferings and sacrifices of France.” And that, unhappily, sounded the keynote of the Conference, whose sole business should have been with the future of mankind.
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau[522] was an old journalist politician, a great denouncer of abuses, a great upsetter of governments, a doctor who had, while a municipal councillor, kept a free clinic, and a fierce, experienced duellist. None of his duels ended fatally, but he faced them with great intrepidity. He had passed from the medical school to republican journalism in the days of the Empire. In those days he was an extremist of the left. He was for a time a teacher in America, and he married and divorced an American wife. He was thirty in the eventful year 1871. He returned to France after Sedan, and flung himself into the stormy politics of the defeated nation with great fire and vigour. Thereafter France was his world, the France of vigorous journalism, high-spirited personal quarrels, challenges, confrontations, scenes, dramatic effects, and witticisms at any cost. He was what people call “fierce stuff,” he was nicknamed the “Tiger,” and he seems to have been rather proud of his nickname. Professional patriot rather than statesman and thinker, this was the man whom the war had flung up to misrepresent the fine mind and the generous spirit of France.[523] His limitations had a profound effect upon the conference, which was further coloured by the dramatic resort for the purpose of signature to the very Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in which Germany had triumphed and proclaimed her unity. There the Germans were to sign. To M. Clemenceau and to France, in that atmosphere, the war ceased to seem a world war; it was merely the sequel of the previous conflict of the Terrible Year, the downfall and punishment of offending Germany. “The world had to be made safe for democracy,” said President Wilson. That from M. Clemenceau’s expressed point of view was “talking like Jesus Christ.” The world had to be made safe for Paris. “Talking like Jesus Christ” seemed a very ridiculous thing to many of those brilliant rather than sound diplomatists and politicians who made the year 1919 supreme in the history of human insufficiency.
(Another flash of the “Tiger’s” wit, it may be noted, was that President Wilson with his fourteen points was “worse” than God Almighty. “Le bon Dieu” only had ten....)
M. Clemenceau sat with Signor Orlando in the more central chairs of a semicircle of four in front of the fire, says Keynes. He wore a black frock-coat and grey suede gloves, which he never removed during these sessions. He was, it is to be noted, the only one of these four reconstructors of the world who could understand and speak both French and English.
The aims of M. Clemenceau were simple and in a manner attainable. He wanted all the settlement of 1871 undone. He wanted Germany punished as though she was a uniquely sinful nation and France a sinless martyr land. He wanted Germany so crippled and devastated as never more to be able to stand up to France. He wanted to hurt and humiliate Germany more than France had been hurt and humiliated in 1871. He did not care if in breaking Germany Europe was broken; his mind did not go far enough beyond the Rhine to understand that possibility. He accepted President Wilson’s League of Nations as an excellent proposal if it would guarantee the security of France whatever she did, but he preferred a binding alliance of the United States and England to maintain, uphold, and glorify France under practically any circumstances. He wanted wider opportunities for the exploitation of Syria, north Africa, and so forth by Parisian financial groups. He wanted indemnities to recuperate France, loans, gifts, and tributes to France, glory and homage to France. France had suffered, and France had to be rewarded. Belgium, Russia, Serbia, Poland, Armenia, Britain, Germany, and Austria had all suffered too, all mankind had suffered, but what would you? that was not his affair. These were the supers of a drama in which France was for him the star.... In much the same spirit Signor Orlando seems to have sought the welfare of Italy.
Mr. Lloyd George brought to the Council of Four the subtlety of a Welshman, the intricacy of a European, and an urgent necessity for respecting the nationalist egotism of the British imperialists and capitalists who had returned him to power. Into the secrecy of that council went President Wilson (leaving Point I at the door) with the very noblest aims for his newly discovered American world policy, his rather hastily compiled Fourteen (now reduced to Thirteen) Points, and a project rather than a scheme for a League of Nations.
The Second Point was presently observed to be missing. It may have fallen into the Atlantic on the way over. It may have been thrown into the sea as an offering to the British Admiralty.
“There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more incompetent than the President in the agilities of the Council Chamber.”[524] From the whispering darknesses and fireside disputes of that council, and after various comings and goings we cannot here describe, he emerged at last with his Fourteen Points pitifully torn and dishevelled, but with a little puling infant of a League of Nations, which might die or which might live and grow—no one could tell. This history cannot tell. We are at the end of our term. But that much, at least, he had saved....
Let us now consider briefly this Covenant of the League of Nations, and recapitulate the terms of the quasi-settlement of the world’s affairs of 1919-20; and let us indicate here and there where the latter departs from the promised standard of the Fourteen Points, and where it is most dangerous to the future peace and most manifestly contrary to the welfare of mankind. Because just as the history of Europe in the nineteenth century was largely the undoing of the Treaty of Vienna, and as the Great War was the necessary outcome of the Treaty of Frankfort and the Treaty of Berlin, so the general history of the twentieth century henceforth will be largely the amendment or reversal of the more ungenerous and unscientific arrangements of the Treaty of 1919, and a struggle to establish those necessary impartial world controls of which the League of Nations is the first insufficient and unsatisfactory sketch.