ABSTRACT
Clemenceau was born to a staunchly republican family in Mouilleron-en-Pareds (in royalist western France) on September 28, 1841. Clemenceau's implication in the Panama Scandal (which involved bribery of deputies by the nearly bankrupt promoter of the Panama Canal) allowed his many enemies to unify and defeat him in the elections of 1893. For the next nine years, Clemenceau concentrated on journalism, founding another newspaper, L'Aurore (The Dawn). Georges Clemenceau's impact was both positive and negative. The republican democracy he championed was adopted by much of Western Europe in the twentieth century; however, his virulent anti-German policy during the Paris Peace Conference contributed, ultimately, to the outbreak of World War II. Clemenceau sought to eliminate Germany as a threat by crippling that country militarily and economically. During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Clemenceau demanded that Germany take fiill responsibility for the outbreak of the war, pay steep reparations to France and other Allied countries.
