If, as Carl von Clausewitz has pointed out, all wars are the products of the societies that fought them, then arguably they could be said to be the products of the individual leaders who directed their operation. As Frances foremost political leaders during the Great War, Raymond Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau s actions are thus crucial to an understanding of that country's reaction to the war. Very different men they might have been, but they shared an unbending commitment to total victory. Of course, the term total victory is as elusive as that of total war. Total victory here is meant to indicate an unbending commitment to fight for a victor s peace and thus a refusal of any compromise settlement; but what that victors peace would consist of is less than clear. Nevertheless, an analysis of Poincaré and Clemenceau's actions - as president of the republic and premier, respectively - may help to explain why France was unwilling to halt the war and instead continued to fight even after the setbacks of 1916 and 1917. What motivated Poincaré and Clemenceau in their quest for total victory, and how did they go about it?

Both men shared a commitment to total victory from a personal point of view. Although separated by an age difference of nineteen years, Clemenceau and Poincaré were of the generation that had experienced the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). Clemenceau noted in his Grandeurs et misères d'une victoire: “I belonged to the generation that had witnessed the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and I could not get over it.” On April 15, 1916, he told General Ferdinand Foch's officier d'ordonnance and fellow parliamentarian, Charles Meunier: “ I am old, I am not clinging to life, but I have sworn that my old body will last until total victory because we will have victory.”