David Lloyd George is usually considered to have lived up to his reputation for wiliness at the Paris Peace Conference. Woodrow Wilson remains the principled man, despite having succumbed to the tricks of corrupt Europeans. And Georges Clemenceau is generally believed to have led France well during the war, but to have been no more than an ineffective and irritated old man during the peace conference. I would like to revise this judgment and to argue that Clemenceau, the man who coined the phrase “politicians never resign and seldom die,” was, on the contrary, at the height of his political and intellectual power and extracted probably the most that could have been expected for France, a country among the victors, on the one hand, but, on the other, exhausted far more than its allies or enemies.

french War Aims

It is first of all necessary to keep in mind French war aims as they had evolved since the beginning of the war and been agreed upon by the government during the autumn of 1916. Apart from the return of Alsace-Lorraine, there was general agreement that German geopolitical, military, and economic power should be drastically reduced. Germany was widely considered to have striven for, and largely achieved, a hegemonic position in Europe. Thus it would be necessary to reduce its territory: Russia would take the Polish part of Prussia; France would retake Alsace-Lorraine and annex the Saar. There was no complete agreement in government circles on the Rhineland. Some favored annexation. Others thought this went too far and suggested that it should instead be cut off from Germany and transformed into two states closely linked to France and Belgium. At the very least it would be permanently occupied by French forces