Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins

Author:Roy Jenkins [Jenkins, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780330476072
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2012-12-12T23:00:00+00:00

Churchill’s next visit to Paris was in the third week of July. This was occasioned by the state visit to France of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, one of the great Götterdämmerung occasions of 1930s history. It was intended to symbolize the strength, unity and calm elegance of the two Western democracies in the face of the harsh challenge from across the Rhine. The spirit of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, Foch and Haig was to be re-created. The new King, the Queen and the weather did their best, as did the more elderly and very Third Republican President Lebrun, forever in an evening tail-coat and white tie, morning and night, who was to be cast aside like an old glove within two years. The Churchills were not part of the royal suite but were invited to all the main events as the guests of the French government, an unusual French mark of esteem for an unofficial Briton. They were given high precedence at the Elysée banquet and Clementine sat next to Marshal Pétain, who was not to resume in the Second World War his hero status of the First. Churchill, by no means for the first time (that had been at least forty years before) but effectively for the last, combined the roles of honoured guest and newspaper correspondent. He wrote for the Daily Telegraph in elegiac terms:

The entertainment offered to the British Sovereign had a charm and elegance, a quality of gentle peace and culture, of art and poetry, of music and dance, which only French genius can command. The scenes at Bagatelle, at the Opéra, in the chapel of Versailles, in the Bosquet d’Apollon, might well have been devised to show how much there is in human life above and beyond the blare of trumpets or the webs of diplomacy. . . . Poor indeed must be the heart which could not delight in this day-dream amid the mellow sunshine of Freedom and of France.21

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