Clemenceau presents Demosthenes, even in defeat, as the embodiment of Hellenic culture, of life
against death, of the future against the past, “of the civilizations that were preparing.” (D, 155).
Both Churchill’s sketch of Clemenceau and Clemenceau’s sketch of Demosthenes are in significant
measure self-portraits. Churchill’s is anticipatory. Clemenceau’s is retrospective. In drawing
Clemenceau, Churchill portrays himself less as he was than as he hoped to be, just as he had long
before portrayed Savrola in his novel of that name, only finding this time a real rather than
fictional model for an idealized portrait of himself as he wanted to become. Always a student of
political symbols, a topic he acutely and amusingly considers in his essay “Cartoons and
Cartoonists,” Churchill proposes an image of the elderly Clemenceau as a new and more
appropriate symbol of France: “Fancy paints nations in symbolic animals–the British Lion, the
American eagle, the Russian double-headed ditto, the Gallic Cock. But the Old Tiger, with his
quaint, stylish cap, his white moustache and burning eye, would make a truer mascot for France
than any barnyard fowl.” (GC, 302) As Churchill must have known, cartoonists reveled in putting
versions of Clemenceau’s head (complete with moustache) on the body of a tiger, though usually
for satiric purposes, not as an emblem of France. As Churchill also well knew, since at least 1912
cartoonists occasionally depicted him (not always fondly) as an English bulldog.
tiger never displaced the Gallic cock. Nor was the British lion chased away by the Churchillian
bulldog. For a time in the 1940s, however, Churchill as bulldog became the symbol of his country
and its best qualities. Not by design but in one of history’s few pleasingly ironic outcomes,
Churchill the old bulldog had succeeded in becoming precisely the kind of honored mascot he
thought the old tiger deserved to be.
History provided a less pleasing parallel in 1945 when Churchill’s wartime efforts as prime
minister did not prevent a wounding ejection from office. Of Clemenceau’s political fate Churchill
notes, without any apparent premonition about his own future, that “When the victory was won,
France to foreign eyes seemed ungrateful. She flung him aside and hastened back as quickly as
possible to the old hugger-mugger of party politics.” In an understated but accordingly all the
more cutting rebuke to the country that so often sets itself up as an arbiter and supreme example of
politeness, Churchill adds that “In principle one cannot blame the French; but they might have
behaved more politely.” (GC, 312-313) The essay as a whole, however, portrays the Tiger
Convention