Georges Clemenceau Quotes

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

I do not know whether war is an interlude in peace, or whether peace is an interlude in war.

[France] finds herself at this time in a particularly difficult situation. ... It is the country which is nearest to Germany. America is distant; it has taken her a long time to get here. And during that time we have been put to it, we have suffered...our cities and our towns have been devastated. Everyone says, rightly, that 'it must not happen again'. I think so too. But how? There was an old system, which seems to be condemned today, and to which I do not fear to say that I remain a faithful adherent at this time. ... This system—solid frontiers...and balance of power—today seems to be condemned by certain very high authorities.

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.

[W]hen at Versailles Brockdorff-Rantzau addressed me in the language of the bearer of a challenge, I was forced to realize that the German revolution was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected, in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy.

The great mistake made by the Governments that have succeeded one another in France since 1920 is to have dandled our people from concession to concession without making them understand, first of all, that a nation with a past like ours could not accept peace at any price—that is to say, at the cost of compromising their honour; secondly, that with neighbours like the Germans this peace could only be ensured by making the necessary sacrifices. Those means are the same since the world began and can be summed up in the words, Be strong. Germany remains faithful to this truth. Perhaps Germany does want peace, but this kind of peace will wipe out the last traces of her defeat. That is why she is preparing. The following figures are more eloquent than any possible dissertation. In 1928 France spent six milliards of francs on her military forces: Germany spent eight. Germany goes on arming: France goes on disarming. For what results?

If Germany, still obsessed by her traditional militarism, persists in her Deutschland über Alles, well—let the die be cast. We shall take up the atrocious War again at the point where we left it off. We must have the courage to prepare for it, instead of frittering away our strength in lies that no one believes, from conference to conference.

In truth, the bulk of the German nation, the Reich Government (so well personified in the circumstances by the late Herr Stresemann) is not at all eager to begin a new struggle with France. It is perfectly well aware—and the perpetual mutilations of the Treaty of Versailles have shown that it is right—that with patience, a great deal of boldness, and some cleverness, it will easily manage to obtain, from the weak and irresponsible Governments that have been succeeding one another in France since 1920, the almost complete annulment of the Treaty. During this time—that is to say, while Germany is preparing, that is, arming—what is the French Army doing? It is quite simple: it is disarming.

I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.

To ensure the execution of the Treaty [of Versailles] all we lacked later on was a statesman of some strength of purpose.

Is it not fairly clear that the very idea of a fatherland, which is still so potent among us, has lost some of its native strength in the hearts of those who have deliberately allowed themselves to be despoiled of that French pride so essential if the fatherland is to live and not die?

They talk of effecting a reconciliation between us and Germany: nothing would give me greater pleasure. But the German nation is unscrupulous, and the French like nothing so much as to forget. If one goes forward at every moment, while the other gives himself up to the enervating delights of going back, no two people will ever meet full face. As I have said, I was concerned with other things than the troopers’ tales of a victorious soldier dissatisfied with the share of victory assigned to him. As much as, and more than any other I should desire, if it were possible, never in any shape or guise to fall back into the bloody adventures of military conquests that are still a temptation haunting the feverish imaginations of the German peoples.

I will tell how the formula for the military consolidation of the victory of the three Allied and Associated nations was accepted on the proposal of England, only to be rejected without explanation by the American Senate, then quietly dropped by England, and left in oblivion by the French Government itself, without a word of protest. Not a word was uttered to recall that we had given our best blood, and that, after seeking for security in a better frontier, we had given up this strategical guarantee in exchange for the promise of Anglo-American military aid, which had been offered us as an exchange, and which was taken from us without compensation. Defeat substituted for victory, that was what we accepted without finding a single word to assert our right to our Continental life by the establishment of guarantees within the new order created by a most costly victory.

The [Anglo-American] Guarantee Pact thus assumed the position of the keystone of European peace, far above all theories. Its rejection, for that very reason, amounted to an indirect invitation for the thwarted aggressor to try again.