July 1914: Countdown to War (10 page)

By the time the war-planning conference convened on 21 February, the immediate danger posed by the Liman affair had passed. But there was still a sense of strategic urgency to the proceedings, not least because Kokovtsov, the man who had blocked the war party in January, had been ousted on 12 February and replaced by an elderly figurehead, I. L. Goremykin, widely seen as Krivoshein’s creature. As the conference subject heading put it, Russia must reckon with the “Possibility of the Straits Question Being Opened, Even Quite Possibly in the Near Future.” No one knew, of course, precisely
how
the Straits question would be opened, but opened it would be at some point, and Russia would have to be ready.
¹⁶

As Sazonov recalled in his memoirs, everyone in attendance “considered an offensive against Constantinople inevitable, should European war break out.” To this end, Sazonov, Sukhomlinov, and Grigorevich had drawn up a detailed plan for readying Russia to seize Constantinople and the Ottoman Straits in case of war. The plan covered the expansion of amphibious forces available on the Black Sea littoral; heightened artillery training in the Odessa military district; the acceleration of the mobilization timetable, which would see the first day troops could put ashore at the Bosphorus speeded up from Mobilization Day (M) + 10 to M + 5; the acceleration of dreadnought construction in (or their sudden importation into) the Black Sea, where Russia did not currently have any (two state-of-the-art British dreadnoughts, made to order for Turkey, were expected
to arrive shortly in Constantinople, the first in July 1914); and finally the extension of rail lines in the Caucasus up to the Turkish Anatolian border. In May and June, Sazonov had fought a desperate rearguard campaign, via Russia’s ambassador in London, to block delivery of the British dreadnoughts to Turkey, only to be rebuffed. Time was running out. After learning the news from Sarajevo, Sazonov asked Grigorevich to tell him how soon Russia’s Black Sea dreadnoughts would be ready. More urgently, he wanted to know whether, in accordance with the measures ordered in February, the first Russian troops would now be able to land in the Bosphorus within “four or five days” of mobilization.
¹⁷

Sazonov may really have believed that Serbia had nothing to do with the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as he protested to the German ambassador. He does seem, however, to have clearly appreciated how serious the news was and to have expected that Austria-Hungary was going to lash out in reaction. By sending arms to Belgrade, Russia was preparing her ally for war with Austria-Hungary. By readying the Black Sea fleet, Sazonov was preparing for a European war, in which Russia’s key strategic objective was to seize Constantinople and the Straits.

If the Habsburg foreign minister Berchtold, despite his reputation for weakness, was, as the Hungarian minister-president Tisza feared, going to use Sarajevo as the pretext for a “settlement of accounts” with Serbia, so was the beleaguered Sazonov rising quietly to Berchtold’s challenge. The stage was being set for a diplomatic showdown.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, 28 J
UNE
1914, the better part of the French government, Europe’s ambassadors to France, and much of Paris society, were enjoying a resplendent spring afternoon at the Longchamp racetrack in the Bois de Boulogne. Longchamp was France’s answer to England’s Ascot, the place to see and be seen. The flowers surrounding the track and its famous windmill were in full bloom. The sun shone down brilliantly on the elegant patrons, all dressed to the nines, as they enjoyed the races over a four-course Sunday dinner—this was France, after all. In between the third and fourth course, an army officer quietly approached the president, Raymond Poincaré, and informed him that “the archduke heir to the throne of Austria and his morganatic wife were just assassinated in Sarajevo by a fanatic, believed to be of Serbian origin.” Although he was intrigued by the report, Poincaré did not leave his seat, not wishing to miss the finish of the race then underway. Certainly it was nothing to disturb his dinner over.
¹

Nor did the French papers think much of the story from the Balkans. The front pages that weekend were aglow with the incandescent Caillaux scandal, the most sensational cause célèbre to titillate France since the Dreyfus affair. Joseph Caillaux was the
leader of France’s center-left Radical Party and a prominent part of the furniture of the French government in the years before 1914. He had been premier for nearly six months in 1911–1912—a tenure that, in the election-mad Third Republic, almost qualified as legendary. Caillaux’s real brief was finance, which ministry he had headed under most of the left-leaning cabinets of the past decade. Caillaux was finance minister again in early 1914, with new elections approaching in May, when Gaston Calmette, editor of the nationalist
Le Figaro
, launched a smear campaign against him.

Calmette had chosen his target well. Caillaux had inevitably dipped his hand in the till during the years he had overseen France’s finances, and it was not hard to find opponents eager to stick in the knife. By rumor it was Caillaux’s disgruntled servants who produced the most damaging material, which began to embarrass his political allies as well. It was when Calmette began publishing love letters between Caillaux and his mistress, Henriette, however, that the affair truly caught the public’s attention.
*
The long-legged Henriette was now the second Mme Caillaux—but she had begun sleeping with him, it emerged, during his premiership, when he was still married to the first. Even this burning
scandale
might have grown stale eventually, had not Henriette Caillaux brought it to white-hot flame by taking matters into her own hands. At six
PM
on 16 March 1914, she called on Calmette in his
Figaro
office. “You know why I have come?” she asked. “Not at all, madame,” Calmette answered. Then, “without a word,” Mme Caillaux drew a small brown pistol she had “hidden amidst her expensive fur muffs” and pumped six shots into him at point-blank range.
²

Joseph Caillaux himself was not, most believed, guilty of abetting the crime. The stylish murder had, in effect, emasculated him: his wife had not trusted him to be man enough do his own fighting. Still, it was understood that Caillaux could not remain in office while his wife was prosecuted for a murder committed on his behalf. The trial of Mme Caillaux was scheduled to open in July, giving French news editors cause to run sensational headlines all spring, building anticipation for the trial of the century.

Adding political frisson to the scandal, the triumph of the Left in the May 1914 elections seemed to vindicate Caillaux’s cause. Caillaux himself was easily reelected to his parliamentary seat, but because of the scandal he remained ineligible to become premier as, by political right, he should have. Instead, Caillaux had to make do with forming a kind of shadow government, ready to take office if and when his wife’s name was cleared. His shadow foreign minister was Jean Jaurès, leader of France’s united Socialist Party (SFIO) and Europe’s leading pacifist orator, who thundered against militarism at international socialist congresses, advocating a “general strike” whereby laborers might stave off a European war if it ever came. Together, Caillaux and Jaurès had led the fight against Poincaré’s Three-Year Service Law in 1913, which had improved war-readiness against Germany by enlarging France’s army. Together, they planned, upon taking office, to “press for a policy of European peace,” beginning with rapprochement with Germany. A Caillaux-Jaurès ministry, locked in battle with President Poincaré, must rank as one of history’s greatest might-have-beens.
³

After several weeks of intrigue, Poincaré at last summoned René Viviani, a Radical (and former Socialist) flexible, or weak enough, to form a government not explicitly hostile to him. Like Caillaux and Jaurès, Viviani had voted against the Three-Year Service Law. Unlike them, however, he had not lit the skies with rhetorical fireworks against Poincaré’s militarism, had not accused
him of being “more Russian than Russia” (Jaurès), nor vowed to overturn the Three-Year Law and bring détente with Germany once in office. Viviani agreed to support the Three-Year Law as a condition of his taking office as both premier and foreign minister, as he did on 16 June 1914. Although he was respected inside the Radical Party for his earnest progressivism, Viviani had such a bland personality that most suspected his to be a caretaker government, which would step down for Caillaux as soon as Mme Caillaux was cleared.

A dramatic rendering of the assassination of Gaston Calmette by Mme Henriette Caillaux, from
Le Petit Journal. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

By 1914, the rivalry between Caillaux and Poincaré was so explosive that Viviani would have been well advised to get out of the way once the trial ended. President Poincaré, founder of the center-right Democratic People’s Alliance, was a lawyer of middle-class origins, short, fastidious, and shy—the kind of man who preferred reading official documents in his study at night to socializing at banquets. A Lorrainer, born in territory lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, Poincaré had reached the pinnacle of French politics because of the purity of his nationalist convictions,
*
his keen intelligence, and an extraordinary work ethic. Or, as critics believed, he had won the presidency in 1913 owing to Russian bribes—as much as two million francs a year were wired in from Petersburg—and the help of corrupt journalists such as Calmette. As Russia’s ambassador, Alexander Izvolsky, boasted to Foreign Minister Sazonov after helping grease the wheels for Poincaré’s triumph: “We are therefore, for the period of his seven year term of office, perfectly safe from the appearance of such persons as Caillaux . . . at the head of the French Government.”
⁴

Caillaux was everything the president was not: rich, well-connected, a dashing ladies’ man-about-town. He had gone to the best schools, culminating in the Institut d’études politique de Paris (Sciences Po), then as now a training ground for France’s political elite. Despite their differences in background and temperament, Caillaux and Poincaré had once been close. In their bachelor days, they had cavorted around Italy together with their mistresses. Even here, however, the contrast in styles was striking. As Caillaux recalled, “Mine I displayed, his he kept hidden.” Poincaré had always respected Caillaux as his equal in political stature—and unquestionably his superior in charisma.
⁵

In recent years, the two rivals had begun to clash sharply over foreign affairs. As prime minister, Caillaux’s concessions to Germany in Africa had helped defuse the Moroccan crisis of 1911 while lighting a fuse under nationalists like Poincaré who believed in France’s
réveil national
, a sort of national awakening in which there would be no more backing down to the Germans. The two had drawn political swords again over the Three-Year Law in 1913, when Caillaux had begun to sound almost as radical as Jaurès. By 1914, nationalists such as the
Figaro
editor Calmette viewed Caillaux as a pacifist menace to the republic’s military readiness, if not an outright traitor taking bribes from Germany.
Le Figaro
was rumored to possess documents linking Caillaux to German officials. Many believed that Caillaux, possessing compromising material of his own linking Poincaré to Izvolsky and the Russians, had blackmailed the president into suppressing them. Aside from rumors dogging him about Russian bribes, Poincaré had, as foreign minister, visited Russia in 1912 to strengthen military ties, a gesture seen as almost sacrilegious by the French Left, which viewed Tsarist Russia as the most backwards, antilabor country in Europe, the land of the knout and the pogrom. Now, as president, Poincaré was planning an even grander sovereign summit with Tsar Nicholas II in July 1914: preparations for it had been underway since January.

In France, just as in Austria and Russia, foreign and domestic policy were intertwined in this era of constant international tension. At the time of the Sarajevo outrage, however, it was domestic, not foreign, affairs that were in the ascendant in Paris. The victory of the Left in the May polls threatened to ruin the upcoming summit in Petersburg, as Poincaré would have to bring along Viviani—a man who, despite his reluctant acceptance of the Three-Year Law, had no love for foreign or military affairs and thought about as ill of autocratic, labor-unfriendly Russia as did Caillaux and Jaurès. As Izvolsky reported to
Sazonov, it was Viviani, not Poincaré, who was the man of the hour, and Viviani was bad news for the Russians (if not quite as bad as Caillaux would have been).
⁶

Minister of education before he was plucked from obscurity by Poincaré, Viviani scarcely bothered to feign an interest in foreign policy, let alone in alliance obligations to Russia, on which subject President Poincaré was now trying, and largely failing, to enlighten him. If the assassination of the Habsburg heir was not enough to knock Mme Caillaux off the front pages, nor to rouse even Poincaré from his seat at Longchamp, it was certainly not going to turn the milquetoast Viviani into a warrior. At the first cabinet meeting held after the Sarajevo incident, one minister recalled afterwards, the murders were “hardly mentioned.”
⁷
Viviani, no less than Poincaré and the French public, remained preoccupied with the Caillaux affair—to which he owed his recent promotion. Viviani’s political fate, like Caillaux’s, Jaurès’s, and Poincaré’s, would depend on the verdict of the Mme Caillaux trial in July. He would not want to miss any twist or turn in the story. Nor would the partisans of Caillaux and Poincaré, who were already, on occasion, brawling in the streets.