French Demands For Security and Revenge, Clemenceau

• Wilson's promised "new world" clashes with French demands for security and revenge


• Almost all of WWI's fighting had taken place on French soil


• French industries and farmlands lay in ruins


• Many of France's young men had died in the fighting


• France had also been invanded by Germany in 1970 and 1914


• French believe that only crippling Germany could ensure thier security


• Premier Clemenceau, "The Tiger", rejects Wilson's visoin of a new world as a mere noble sentiment divorced from reality


• Clemenceau fights tneaciously for security for France


• In Grandeur and Misery of Victory (1930), written a decade after the peace conference, Clemenceau reveals his true hatred and mistrust of Germany