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Article: Reconstruction, impeachment through Gallic eyes.(Saturday)(The Civil War)
- Article from:
- The Washington Times (Washington, DC)
- Article date:
- January 23, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Georges Clemenceau is known to Americans, vaguely, as the premier of France during the last year of World War I and the Versailles Peace Conference that followed, a man whose cynical realism contrasted with the idealism of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
The better informed know Clemenceau as a Socialist member of the Chamber of Deputies around the turn of the past century, so fierce a debater, journalist and duelist that he was nicknamed "the Tiger." He could skewer an opponent with pen, tongue or sword. Clemenceau had the born epigrammatist's talent for capturing a world in a phrase. His reaction to Wilson's Fourteen Points - "God himself stopped at 10" - ...