The Sleepwalkers (54 page)

The French practised at home what they preached to the Russians. The appointment of Joseph Joffre as chief of the General Staff in July 1911, at the height of the Agadir crisis, placed French strategy in the hands of a man committed to the theory of the ‘offensive school'. French strategists had tended to adopt a defensive approach to the prospect of a confrontation with Germany: campaign plans XV (1903) and XVI (1909) both envisaged defensive deployments in the first phase, followed by a decisive counter-stroke once the enemy's intentions were known, rather in the manner of the Sukhomlinov deployment plan of 1910. But Joffre altered campaign plan XVI to allow for an aggressive thrust through Alsace into German territory, in the belief that ‘the offensive alone made it possible to break the will of the adversary'. He also worked much more proactively with France's alliance and Entente partners than his predecessors had done. Joffre was the driving force on the French side at the inter-staff meetings of 1911, 1912 and 1913; his partnership with his Russian counterpart Zhilinsky was crucial to their success. There were also intense discussions with the English military commanders, and especially with Henry Wilson. Joffre was the first French strategist to integrate the British Expeditionary Force into his dispositions – his revisions to Plan XVI included detailed stipulations on the concentration of British troops along the Belgian border.
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In Joffre, Poincaré found a fitting military partner for his own strategic concept. There were points of disagreement, to be sure. One of the most revealing concerned the question of Belgian neutrality. Leaked German documents and other military intelligence suggested that in the event of war the Germans would attack France through neutral Belgium. On 21 February 1912, when Poincaré, newly installed as premier, convened an informal meeting at the Quai d'Orsay to review French defence arrangements, Joffre advocated a pre-emptive strike through Belgian territory. This, he argued, was the only way to offset French numerical inferiority vis-à-vis Germany. The British would surely understand the need for such a measure, and recent signs of coolness between Belgium and Germany suggested that it might even be possible to arrive at an understanding with Belgium beforehand. But Poincaré flatly refused to consider Joffre's case, on the grounds that an invasion of Belgium would risk alienating British public opinion and make it impossible for Edward Grey to deliver on his promises to Paris. It was a striking demonstration of the primacy of civilian over military authority in the French Republic, but also of Poincaré's foresight and brilliance in combining a highly aggressive understanding of the
casus foederis
in the east with a strategically defensive approach on the French frontier. That was how Paris solved a conundrum that faced several of the belligerents of 1914, namely the ‘paradoxical requirement that a defensive war open aggressively'.
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The hardening of commitments continued after Poincaré ascended to the presidency of the Republic. The appointment of Théophile Delcassé as ambassador to St Petersburg in the spring of 1913 was an unmistakable signal. Delcassé's was to be a short posting – he made it clear from the outset that he intended to stay in St Petersburg only until the 1914 French elections. Nevertheless, the choice of this eminent, long-serving former foreign minister who had fallen from office at the height of the first Moroccan crisis left little doubt as to the orientation of French policy. With Delcassé in St Petersburg and Izvolsky in Paris, both parties to the alliance were represented by ambassadors with a strong personal animus against Germany. Delcassé had grown even more Germanophobic in recent years – when he met with Jules Cambon on his way to the east via Berlin, it was noted that he refused to step out of his train so that he could avoid touching German soil with the sole of his shoe.
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The new ambassador was known for his expertise in the area of strategic railways (as foreign minister at the turn of the century, Delcassé had pressed the Russian government to build them against the British empire!).
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Small wonder that the Russian press welcomed the news of his appointment, noting that his ‘combative temperament' would be an asset to the Triple Entente.
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Poincaré's letter of introduction to the Tsar announced that the new ambassador's objective would be ‘to tighten further the bonds of the Franco-Russian alliance', and there followed the inevitable reminder of the importance of reinforcing with the greatest possible speed the Russian strategic routes to the empire's western frontiers.
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Ignatiev reported that Delcassé had been authorized by the French government ‘to propose to us whatever loan we need for this purpose'.
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Delcassé worked as hard as ever during his brief posting (23 March 1913 to 30 January 1914), indeed he was so busy that he was rarely seen in St Petersburg society. At his very first audience with the Tsar, only a day after his arrival, he stressed the importance of ‘completing the network of railways, in conformity with the wishes of the Chief of Staff' and took the unusual step of requesting directly that the requisite funds be provided by Kokovtsov.
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Throughout his time in St Petersburg, Delcassé scarcely ever met with anyone except Sazonov and Kokovtsov – even the British ambassador found it difficult to arrange a meeting with him. ‘I run the whole of Russian foreign policy,' he boasted to his French colleagues. ‘The people around here haven't the slightest clue.'
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Delcassé oversaw the negotiations that bore fruit in a massive new French loan: 2,500 million francs, to be issued on the French capital market by private Russian railways companies over a five-year period in yearly instalments of 500 million, on condition that the strategic railways in the western salient were strengthened in the manner envisaged at the joint staff discussions of 1913.
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Maurice Paléologue, Delcassé's successor at the St Petersburg embassy from January 1914, was a man in the same mould who intended to combine strategic reinforcement with a firmer approach to foreign policy questions.

Throughout the first eighteen months of his presidency (until the outbreak of war), Poincaré reinforced the offensive orientation of French military planning. He supported the campaign for the Three Year Law, passed by the French Chamber and Senate in the summer of 1913, which raised the French standing army to around 700,000 men, reducing the gap in troop numbers between France and Germany to just 50,000 and demonstrating to the Russians that the French were serious about playing their part in the joint effort against the ‘principal adversary'.
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By choosing compliant prime ministers, taking control of the Higher Council of War and deploying to maximum effect his powers under the
secteur réservé
pertaining to the president's right to shape decisions in the field of foreign and military policy, Poincaré became one of the strongest presidents the Third Republic would ever see.
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There was a public dimension to all of this activism. The chauvinism of government propaganda since the formation of the Poincaré– Millerand–Delcassé ministry was a recurring theme in the dispatches of the Belgian minister in Paris, Baron Guillaume. Guillaume was particularly struck by the rhetorical vehemence of the campaign in support of the Three Year Law, which, having helped to secure Poincaré his election to the presidency of the Republic, now continued apace, ‘heedless of the dangers to which it gives birth'.
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‘It was Mssrs. Poincaré, Delcassé and Millerand,' Guillaume observed in January 1914, ‘who invented and pursued the nationalist, jingoistic and chauvinist politics' whose renaissance was now such a marked feature of public life in France. He saw in this ‘the greatest peril for peace in today's Europe'.
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Poincaré was not just a Parisian grandee, the Belgian minister wrote in May 1914, but a truly national politician who worked extremely hard and with great skill to build his support base in the provinces. He was an excellent orator who frequently travelled the length and breadth of France, gave numerous speeches and was acclaimed in every town he visited.
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Notwithstanding these provincial successes, the intrinsic volatility of the French political system ensured that Poincaré's position in Paris remained fragile. Among other things, the revolving door of French ministerial office continued to turn and Poincaré's pet foreign minister, Charles Jonnart, fell from office after only two months. Under his successor, the languid Stéphen Pichon, the mechanisms examined in
chapter 4
began once more to make themselves felt: Pichon aligned himself with the dominant ambassadors and their allies within the Centrale. The consequence was a temporary drift back in the direction of a more conciliatory – or at least a less intransigent – approach to Berlin. When Pichon fell from office with the Barthou government in December 1913, Poincaré looked for a straw man to replace him. The new prime and foreign minister, Gaston Doumergue, had to agree before taking office that he would maintain the Three Year Law and Poincaré's foreign policy. The president hoped that Doumergue, who lacked any experience whatsoever in external relations, would be obliged to defer to him on all important matters. But this tactic backfired, for while Doumergue was a staunch supporter of the Russian alliance, he also worked against Poincaré, installing the latter's arch-rival Joseph Caillaux as minister of finance and gradually shutting the president out of foreign policy discussions.
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Poincaré still had powerful and unscrupulous enemies. How vulnerable he was to their political machinations had become clear in May 1913, when a cabinet crisis broke out over the discovery of diplomatic intercepts exposing secret negotiations between the president and officials of the Catholic Church. In the spring of 1913, Poincaré and Pichon had entered into these talks in the hope of securing the election of a successor to the papal throne who would support France. This might seem harmless enough, given France's interest in consolidating its influence over its religious protectorates in the Levant. But contacts of this kind between a senior politician of the Republic and the Catholic Church were matters of the greatest delicacy in pre-1914 France, where anti-clericalism was the default setting of the political culture. The discussions were kept absolutely secret in order to deny the Radicals and their allies ammunition for an anticlerical campaign. But in April and May 1913, the Sûreté at the ministry of the interior intercepted and deciphered three telegrams from the Italian ambassador in Paris referring to negotiations between Poincaré, Pichon and the Vatican. On 6 May, Louis-Lucien Klotz, the minister of the interior, produced the telegrams at a meeting of the cabinet. In the ensuing uproar, Pichon threatened to resign if the interception and leaking of telegrams continued. The interceptions were stopped, but the damage had been done, since this sensitive material could potentially be exploited in future by unscrupulous hands to smear Poincaré as a ‘clerical' unfit for public office.

There was a further, personal, aspect to the problem: Poincaré had married his wife Henriette – a double divorcée – in a strictly civil ceremony, as was expected of senior office-holders in the Republic. But in May 1913, after it became known that Henriette's first two husbands were dead, he agreed under pressure from his wife and in deference to the wishes of his much loved and recently deceased mother to solemnize their union with a religious ceremony. Here again was a decision with the potential to scandalize anticlerical opinion. The ceremony was conducted in the strictest secrecy, but Poincaré lived thereafter in fear of an anticlerical campaign that would devastate his popularity. He was spied and informed upon, he confided to a colleague, even within the walls of the Élysée, where ‘police agents, servants, ushers, visitors, more than a hundred people each day, have their eyes on me, observe all my gestures and broadcast them more or less exactly'.
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So concerned was he at this prospect that he went to great lengths to buy off the leading Radicals. To the huge chagrin of the Cambon brothers, he even offered the London embassy to the Anglophile Radical leader and Poincaré-baiter Georges Clemenceau (who refused it).
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Anxiety about behind-the-scenes intrigue and hostile revelations continued to dog the president until the outbreak of war.

In other words: Poincaré remained vulnerable. And it even seemed that the moment for the man and his policies might be passing. The wave of nationalist
élan
on whose crest he had entered high office in the aftermath of Agadir was already ebbing by early 1914, making way for a new and complex alignment of forces.
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Poincaré was ‘more and more hated' by the socialist and unified radicals, and his rivals Clemenceau and Caillaux never missed any opportunity to attack and goad him.
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Most worrying of all was the prospect that a new oppositional formation might force the repeal of the Three Year Law and thereby loosen the joist-work of the Franco-Russian Alliance.
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In a country distinguished – especially after the Dreyfus affair – by strong currents of anti-militarist feeling, the extension of service was an extremely controversial measure. The results of the tumultuous general elections of 26 April and 10 May 1914 were difficult to read, but they suggested that majority support for the Three Year Law hung by a thread. Following the fall of the Doumergue government on 2 June 1914, Poincaré had to find a political combination that would save the law. After several false starts – including the collapse of one government on the day of its first appearance in parliament, an event with few historical precedents
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– Poincaré reached out to the ex-socialist René Viviani, who formed a new cabinet on 12 June, in which ten of the seventeen ministers supported three-year service. When the new government won a majority in the Chamber on 16 June, it seemed that the crisis had passed. The Three Year Law was safe, at least for the moment. But who could say how long it would survive?