Titans of History

Like his mother, Tchaikovsky most probably died from cholera, contracted from drinking contaminated water in a St. Petersburg restaurant in October 1893. It was just days after the premiere of perhaps his most outstanding and tragic work, the Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique.” Requiem services and tributes were held throughout Russia in his memory. He created a passionate, highly charged, intensely emotional musical world, which still has an immediate appeal to listeners everywhere.

CLEMENCEAU

1841–1929

We present ourselves before you with the single thought of total war.

Georges Clemenceau

Georges Clemenceau was France’s greatest war leader during the First World War. Clemenceau’s bullishness, his lifelong tenacity and his insistence on a punitive settlement with Germany earned him his nickname the Tiger.

Clemenceau was born in a village in the Vendée, in western France, in 1841. He grew up among peasants and received his political education from his father, who shaped his republican views. In 1861 he went to Paris to study medicine, where he became involved in radical republican politics and journalism, critical of the regime of Emperor Napoleon III, and thus attracted the attention of the police.

In 1870–1 France lost the Franco-Prussian War. Clemenceau was involved in the overthrow of Napoleon III and elected to the provisional government. He vehemently but unsuccessfully opposed the imposition on France of a harsh treaty, by which France lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German empire. In May 1871 Clemenceau tried, but failed, to mediate between the government and the rebels of the Paris Commune.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s Clemenceau continued to serve in both politics and journalism. One of his triumphs was his support between 1894 and 1906 of the young Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, a victim of anti-Semitism in the government, army and press, who was wrongly accused of being a German spy. Clemenceau’s newspapers exposed the corruption and injustice in that notorious case. In 1902 he was elected as a senator.

Clemenceau served as prime minister in 1906–9. In the lead-up to the First World War he argued for rearmament against Germany, and after war broke out he became a vociferous critic of successive governments and of the military high command, hurling accusations of ineptitude, defeatism and closet pacifism.

In November 1917, at the age of seventy-six, Clemenceau accepted the invitation to become prime minister. Ruthless and belligerent, he forced through his belief in “war until the end” and dealt severely with those he regarded as traitors and defeatists. He insisted on a unified Allied command under General Foch as the only way to win the war. By November 1918 his views had been proven right.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Clemenceau remembered the events of 1870–1, and in negotiations with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson he insisted on Germany being disarmed, accepting “war guilt” and agreeing to pay massive reparations. He made sure that the treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the very place where Wilhelm I, having humiliated France, had declared himself German emperor in 1871. Clemenceau’s force of character and decency made him a fighter for justice and a superb war leader, but his vindictive demands at Versailles were a mistake.

Clemenceau lost the presidential election of 1920 and retired. Before he died, nine years later, he published his memoirs, in which he predicted another war with Germany, sometime around 1940.

SARAH BERNHARDT

1844–1923

There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses—and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.

Mark Twain

Born in Paris, the actress famed across the world as the Divine Sarah was as tempestuous in life as she was on stage. With boundless resilience—possibly a result of her insecure childhood as the illegitimate child of a Dutch courtesan—she was first a successful actress in France, before storming the London stage in 1876. Even the loss of her leg in later life posed no major obstacle to her flamboyant acting. And as soon as she had recovered from the amputation, she made a morale-boosting tour of the First World War front, conveyed about in a litter chair. She entertained no thoughts of retirement but just made sure that henceforth her parts could be played sitting down.