Georges Clemenceau

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

To-day Germany is once more trying to construct, by methods of peace, a Germanic Empire that she failed to bring into being by means of war. That she could never do without eventualities that may change the destinies of a France exposed to every hostile enterprise. What will become of us in this welter of countries the development of whose strength in the future no man can foresee? There are nations that are beginning. There are nations that are coming to an end. Our consciousness of our own acts entails the fixing of responsibilities. France will be what the men of France deserve.

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

What are we doing, then, if not proceeding, article by article, to restore Germany's power, which, by a truly miraculous exercise of will, after its complete collapse during the War, is about to be built up again in the retrograde peace, which is surrendering, stage by stage, everything that human justice had gained by our victory? After the restoration of Germany's moral prestige by a lie we have the upsetting of the financial reparations by the progressive series of mutilations of the Treaty down to the payment of the so-called debts to America!

From the German point of view the monstrous problem thus set must inevitably be solved by the apotheosis of the German peoples. In the meantime, far from ‘German culture’ seeming disposed to reform itself, we hear it proclaiming louder than ever a universal right to supreme domination, which confers on it the right of life and death over the nations, to be asserted and enforced by all possible means. Ought we not all to feel menaced in our very vitals by this mad doctrine of universal Germanic supremacy over England, France, America, and every other country?

Breakers of their sworn faith, the Germans seriously offer us their signature on a “scrap of paper” as a guarantee, with the unalterable intention of later taking up again the work of assimilation by force where they have left off. They destroy towns, ravage the fields, and let loose among men evils by the side of which the most cruel exploits of the greatest devastators grow pale and trivial. We take them by the throat, and they promise to make reparation. But, as they do not make reparation, America, who has made a separate peace after growing incredibly rich through the War, claims for her treasury the contributions earmarked for restoring French soil to a productive state.

I ask myself whether there is to be found a single Frenchman who could admit that we should refrain from exacting from the Germans their obligations, the burden of which is about to be transferred to a victor ruined by the systematic plunderings of the conquered invader. When I ask for an explanation I am generally met with a shrug of the shoulders, accusations against the Press, Parliament, the politicians, and an assurance that after a few more concessions every one will be satisfied. As a result of which we give way to-day, after having given way yesterday, to the demands of Germany, who is only awaiting the additional last concessions to render an account that will never be the final one until we are completely despoiled.

Who need wonder in these circumstances that the Germans tried, without loss of time, to evade the most important of their obligations? The history of the last ten years is a series of surrenders on the part of the Allies, of successes for Germany.

Anyone who retains as much education as the average boy can pick up in a continuation elementary school can understand that General Foch's chief preoccupations were not concerned with the generalizations of universal justice embodied in war or peace. Had he opened the annals of our past at whatsoever page he might choose, he would have found that our life throughout history, bandied about between battles and truces in the unending oscillation of all things, is at any moment but preparing for or stabilizing a new transient form of society for the momentary advantage of the strongest.

And if our recent victory had merely been one of territorial conquests that were fated to call us out to the battlefield again to meet attempts to take revenge for our revenge, our success of the moment would have been as fruitless as every success before it. What was more to be desired in the interests of Europe striving for civilization was a victor capable of controlling himself so as to replace armed might by right in the fluid equilibrium of a peace capable of enduring.

The enemy is at the gates of the city. The day is perhaps not far off when our breasts will be the last defence for our country. We are the children of the Revolution. Let us take inspiration from our fathers of 1792, and, like them, we will conquer.

La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.