Jørgen Knudsen

Biographe de Georg Brandes

Georg Brandes and Georges Clémenceau

It is rarely seen that two so self-assured men as Brandes and Clemenceau appreciate the company of each other, but when they met for the first time, in Paris 1899, the sympathy was spontaneous. Both still possessed the ability to admire, and the pleasure to do so. Brandes found in Clemenceau that man of action whom he missed in his own writing life, Clemenceau found in Brandes the author with a European horizon and a sense for grandeur. What courage, wit and resolution each missed in his daily environment they found in each other. Besides, they were on one line in their engagement in the Dreyfus-affair, in their view on the church, in their reservations about democracy, in their contempt of caution and pettiness in all relations, and in their liking of men of action. Even in the love of Hellas they found each other. Brandes quickly wrote a laudatio of his new friend and also lectured about him. In L'Aurore Clemenceau calls Brandes “a European in the greatest and noblest meaning of the word”. From 1902 on the two friends meet almost every summer through ten years at Karlsbad, where they stay in the same hotel and share meals. There exist a few fascinating accounts. Brandes edited two pamphlets about his French hero, whose struggle with the Catholic church inspired him to similar attacks in a Danish connection. In 1911, however, he wrote critically about this struggle in an article meant for a Danish public, but soon printed in Paris , where it arose Clemenceau's anger.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 set a definite end to the friendship. Clemenceau tried to provoke the neutral Dane to remember his wellknown French sympathies and his just as wellknown criticism of German suppression of the Danish minority in South-Jutland, but Brandes insisted – as a “European in the greatest and noblest meaning of the word” – to deem all parties in this desastrous war equally guilty in the crime against the loved common Europe, which they now carried out in so bloody a way. Their exchange of open letters led to a break which cost Brandes almost all the sympathy which he had gained in the French cultural elite. In his articles about the war, later about the Treaty of Versailles, he carefully evades all that criticism of his old friend which he expresses in private letters, where he considers Clemenceau as the main guilty in the humiliation of the beaten Germany, the consequences of which he fears. In his last years Clemenceau, in return, still talks bitterly about his Danish ex-friend, who had failed in the hour of need.