The elder Clemenceau, a Jacobin, philanthropic physician and anticlerical rebel was 'never seen [by his son] except in one state: anger'. Until Georges Clemenceau had attained the age of fifty-six, his attitude and behavior were dominated by both opposition and paternal identification. This accounts for the many contradictions during his rich and stormy life. When called to the prime ministry in 1906, Clemenceau, hitherto the wrecker of governments, finally was ready. A few years before, following the death of his father, he had sublimated his Oedipal conflict in the writing of a novel, The Strongest. Thus France's 'Father of Victory' could succeed in a total identification with the omnipotent father and so passionately avenge the mother country as once his father, in his revolt against the empire, had ordered him to do.