when Georges Clémenceau spent his holidays in Vendée

Georges Clemenceau discovered his fisherman’s house at the end of 1919, while taking a stroll in his native Vendée. His long political career has just ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. With the Great War behind him, the Tiger will be able to retract his claws. Belébat, with its immense view of the Ocean, will be, he feels, the perfect place to catch one’s breath and write. Without delay, he signed a life lease with the owner, although he was ready to graciously transfer his “shack” to “Father Victoire”!

Surrounded by shrimp and lobsters

From then on, Clemenceau divided his life between his Parisian apartment on rue Benjamin-Franklin and Belébat in the summer. “For three days, I have taken possession of my sky, my sea and my sand,” he wrote to a friend (1). I returned without any further effort to the flow of Vendée life which pleased me greatly. I live surrounded by shrimp and lobsters. » A sweet life, especially since the former Minister of War and President of the Council installed modern comforts there: running water, electricity, car garage (including a Rolls Royce) and water closet! The cook Clotilde Benoni reigns over the kitchen-dining room with a view of the waves, where he takes all his meals. The Tiger has a small armchair near the fireplace where he sits to talk with her. On the rack, the three rifles with which Albert Boulin, his valet, often goes hunting for lunch. When Albert and Clotilde go to the Sables-d’Olonne market, Clemenceau willingly accompanies them.

A long corridor lined with history, geography and philosophy books leads to two rikiki but charming guest rooms with their boat cabin furniture, their vases overflowing with garden flowers and their Japanese prints. They are reserved for very close people, like the editor-confidant-friend and last love Marguerite Baldensperger, who came to Belébat in 1923. Or the painter Claude Monet: Clemenceau rarely goes to Belébat without a stop at Giverny. And, from his bedroom-office facing the sea, he wrote his friend a thousand letters to encourage him or scold him! And a biography: “Claude Monet – Les Nymphéas”. Because it is to Clemenceau, a lover of the arts, that we owe these paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie.

A garden with studied disorder, facing the Ocean

Its exotic bazaar tells of the great traveler that Clemenceau was to the end.

“My room is becoming more and more a sort of Louvre museum, but with fewer pretensions. » Its exotic bazaar tells of the great traveler that Clemenceau was to the end. In 1920, at almost 80 years old, he was invited to Egypt by the English government. He leaves to “see if Cleopatra is still as pretty”, to hunt the crocodile and the antelope too. It grows as far as Sudan, where shields and assegais come from, and, in September of the same year, it leaves for six wonderful months in South-East Asia. He visited the holy places of Buddhism like Borobudur for his book “At the Evening of Thought”, hunted for rare teapots and killed tigers with the Maharajah of Bikaner.

1 hour 15 minutes away, Mouilleron-en-Pareds saw Georges Clemenceau born on September 28, 1841, in his grandfather’s house.

To other visitors, tea was instead served, according to the Japanese ritual, under the “Petit-Trianon” kiosk dressed in brandes. Or in the summer living room, very New England – let’s not forget that, with his medical diploma in hand, the young Clemenceau lived four years in the United States where he taught in Connecticut, while writing for the newspaper liberal “Le Temps”. Pale gray paneling, precious furniture, Chinese porcelain and tiger skin: it looks like a Ralph Lauren ad, with the added bonus of a backgammon table, facsimiles of Venice by Canaletto and a print by Hokusai, “Fresh wind by morning clear “. A garden with studied disorder faces the Ocean. Clemenceau composed it without worrying about the taste of his time for well-groomed paths, nor the warnings of Henry de Vilmorin and Monet who hardly believed in it, but still contributed with rose bush plants and Giverny bulbs interposed.

1 hour 15 minutes away, Mouilleron-en-Pareds saw Georges Clemenceau born on September 28, 1841, in the house of his grandfather François Gautreau, Republican and Protestant mayor of the village. Clemenceau lived there with his parents for the first three years. He then spent his summer holidays there and, until the end of his life, stopped there every time he went to Vendée. A border village between the plain and the bocage, Mouilleron was also between the royalist White Vendée and the Republican Blue Vendée. Among the Clemenceaus, we were clearly in the second camp. Also the beautiful modern museum, opened on June 16, 2018, focuses on the commitment and modernity of the Tiger’s ideas.

A feather

Here we go for fifty years of fighting on the left to which Clemenceau puts his eloquence and his pen.

His American years (1865-1869) gave the young doctor fiercely opposed to Napoleon III a desire for democracy that was all the stronger as he studied it closely for “Le Temps”. Returning to Paris with the Republic, Clemenceau became involved in politics: in 1870, he was elected mayor of the 18th arrondissement, and deputy for the Seine in 1871. This set off for fifty years of left-wing struggles to which Clemenceau put his eloquence and his pen. He launched a number of magazines and/or wrote for them, including “L’Aurore”. He would have found the title of the famous “J’accuse…!” » by Zola. Ardent defender of justice and freedoms, alerted by his profession as a doctor (which he practiced until 1885) to the suffering of the people, he defended the Communards whom he wanted to amnesty and Dreyfus, castigated colonialism, anti-Semitism , racism in general and advocates secularism.

Appointed Minister of the Interior and President of the Council at the age of 65 in 1906, he managed the separation of Church and State, launched progressive reforms on the one hand (income tax, workers’ pensions, ten-day working day). hours) but must maintain the public order of the other, quell revolts, break strikes. He created a scientific police force, regional brigades with cars and telephones, the famous “Tiger brigades”. Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Armed Forces Committee when the Great War broke out, he was at the front, among the troops, commanding respect until victory and the Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919. He died ten years later. years later and he is buried in Mouchamps, in Vendée, near his father.

(1) Letter from Clemenceau to his friend Piétri, August 10, 1920.