The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (28 page)

The Dreyfus affair also had international ramifications. Both sides
had supporters who believed that the affair was part of a larger international conspiracy. One prominent nationalist reflected the suspicions on the right when he said that ‘a gang of free-masons, Jews and foreigners are trying, by discrediting the army, to hand over our country to the English and the Germans’.
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Anti-clerical Dreyfusards, by contrast, saw the hand of the Pope at work, particularly through the Jesuits. Outside France the affair had a particularly unfortunate effect on British opinion at a time when relations between France and Britain were already very tense thanks to the Fashoda incident and then the Boer War which started in 1899, shortly after the unsatisfactory result of Dreyfus’s new trial. The British were generally Dreyfusards and by and large saw the affair as fresh evidence, if any were needed, for the unreliability and moral turpitude of the French. In Hyde Park, 50,000 people attended a rally to show their support for Dreyfus. Queen Victoria sent her Lord Chief Justice to Rennes to observe the court proceedings and complained to Salisbury about the ‘monstrous, horrible sentence against the poor martyr Dreyfus’. She cancelled her annual holiday to France in protest and many of her subjects followed suit. Businesses seriously considered boycotting the Paris Exposition of 1900.
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‘At least one can say for the Germans’, the head of the Paris Municipal Council told Barclay, ‘they are
des ennemis francs
. They don’t conceal that they want to swallow us up as soon as they dare. With them we know where we are. But with the English, nobody knows where he is. They are not even unconsciously hypocritical and perfidious. They deliberately lead you on with promises and sweet words, and after they have shoved you over the precipice turn their eyes to Heaven, thank God they are a moral people and pray for your soul!’
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As the new century started France was in a vulnerable state both at home and abroad. Its relations with Britain were abysmal, correct but cool with Germany, and strained with Spain, Italy and Austria-Hungary, all of which were rivals in the Mediterranean. Yet France had managed to break out of the quarantine in which Bismarck had placed it and make one, very important, alliance, with Russia. It was an unlikely friendship between the republic with its revolutionary past and the autocratic power in the east. It was also an important stage on the road which led Europe to the Great War. Although it was conceived by both France and Russia as a defensive alliance, it looked, as such alliances
often do, quite different from another perspective. Since Poland had not yet been reconstituted on the map of Europe, Germans could, and often did, see their country as encircled with a hostile power on each of its eastern and western borders. From the Franco-Russian alliance much would follow, not least Germany’s drawing closer to Austria-Hungary as the one sure ally it could count on to keep it from being further encircled.

Even Bismarck might not have been able to keep France isolated indefinitely but the failure in 1890 of his successors to keep Germany’s Reinsurance Treaty with Russia opened a door which the French were quick to go through. Russia offered an exit from isolation and its geography meant that in any future conflict with France, Germany would have to look eastwards over its shoulder. More, Russia held what France lacked – huge manpower. The demographic nightmare that the French faced, and were to face again in the 1920s and 1930s, was that their population was static while Germany’s was growing. By 1914, there were 60 million Germans to 39 million French. In an age when armies relied more on quantity than quality, that meant more potential soldiers for Germany.

What helped to make Russia receptive to the idea of an alliance was that France could provide what it badly needed: capital. The Russian economy was expanding rapidly and it needed more funds than the government could raise within Russia. While German banks had once been the chief source of foreign loans for Russia, they were now increasingly lending within Germany itself, where demand was also growing. London was another possibility for raising loans but the poor state of Russian–British relations meant the British government and British banks were reluctant to lend to a country which might at any moment become an enemy. That left France among the major European powers. Thanks to the thrift of its people, it was awash with capital looking for good investments. In 1888, two years, before the Reinsurance Treaty lapsed, French banks made the first of what were going to be many loans to the Russian government. By 1900 France was by far the biggest foreign investor in Russia (bigger than Britain and Germany combined), fuelling the rapid expansion of Russian industries and infrastructure. In 1914 the railway lines along which Russian armies moved to their frontiers had been largely built with French money.
French investors, as they were to discover to their cost when the Bolsheviks took over and cancelled all foreign debts, had a quarter of all their foreign investments in Russia.
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Both sides had to overcome the past: Napoleon burning Moscow in 1812, Tsar Alexander I and his troops marching in triumph through Paris two years later, or the Crimean War. Both had to swallow their suspicions whether Russia’s of French republicanism and anti-clericalism or France’s of tsarist autocracy and orthodoxy. Yet the Russian upper classes admired French styles and often spoke French more easily than they did Russian, and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the French discovered a taste for the great Russian novels and Russian music. More importantly, the Russian Foreign Ministry and its military leaders had grown alarmed by the end of 1880s at the possibility that Britain, considered an unfriendly power, might join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia would in that case be as isolated as France. Crucially, for he had the last word, the tsar at the time, Alexander III, was coming around to the idea of a French alliance. He was influenced by his wife, who, as a member of the Danish royal family, loathed Prussia for defeating her country and taking the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. He also seems to have been deeply affronted by the German decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. A month after the treaty lapsed, Russian generals talked about a possible military agreement to a French general who was attending their annual army manoeuvres.
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The following year France and Russia worked out a secret military agreement in which they agreed to come to each other’s defence if either was attacked by a member of the Triple Alliance. It was an indication of the boldness of the step for both parties that it took another year and a half to get the agreement ratified. And over the next decade there were going to be moments when the Franco-Russian alliance nearly fell to pieces when the interests of the two parties diverged or clashed. In 1898, for example, the French were deeply disappointed when the Russians refused to support them over Fashoda. The alliance in itself did not bring war in 1914 but its existence added to the tensions in Europe.

Although the agreement was a secret one, it was evident to onlookers that there had been a significant shift in Europe’s international
relations. In 1891 the tsar gave Russia’s most important decoration to the French President. That summer the French fleet paid a courtesy visit to the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, just west of St Petersburg, and the world saw the extraordinary sight of the tsar standing to attention while the Marseillaise was played, although, as a revolutionary song, it was banned in Russia. Two years later, a Russian fleet called in at Toulon for a return visit. The French crowds shouted ‘Vive la Russie! Vive le Tsar!’ and the visitors were entertained with dinners, receptions, luncheons, toasts, and speeches. ‘There was scarcely a woman in Paris’, reported one journalist, ‘who would not have been ready to forget her duties to satisfy the desire of any of the Russian sailors.’
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The British ambassador was amused at the enthusiasm shown by good republicans for the tsar and his regime but felt that the outpouring of French emotion was understandable: ‘The people of France, like all Celtic nations, are sensitive and morbidly hungry for sympathy and admiration. The German war and its results wounded their vanity to the quick, and though they have borne their humiliation with patience and dignity they do not the less resent it.’
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In 1898, shortly before the Fashoda crisis, the man who would steer France into another improbable alliance, this time with its old enemy Britain, became Foreign Minister. Unusually, for the Third Republic, Théophile Delcassé, was going to stay in office for seven years until another crisis, this time over Morocco, forced him to resign. From a modest background, he came from the south near the Pyrenees. His mother had died in 1857 when he was five and, when his father – a minor court official – remarried, the new wife was cool towards the boy, who was often sent away to stay with his grandmother. He obtained a university degree in French and classical literature and tried, with little success, to be a playwright. To support himself he took up first teaching and then journalism, which, like many ambitious young men in France, he saw as a vehicle to enter politics. In 1887 he married a rich widow who was prepared to devote her fortune to his career and two years later he was elected to the French parliament as a moderate radical. He chose to make his first speech on foreign policy and it was, by his own account, a great success.
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Plain featured, dark-complexioned and small (he wore shoes with elevated heels), Delcassé was an unprepossessing Foreign Minister. His
enemies called him ‘The Gnome’ or ‘The Hallucinated Lilliputian’. Nor did he have marked intellectual abilities. Nevertheless he was very effective through a combination of determination, persuasiveness, and hard work. He claimed that he frequently got to his office before dawn and left after midnight. He was also fortunate that Loubet, who was President of France for much of his tenure, left him alone to do as he pleased. (Loubet’s presidency, said Paul Cambon, one of France’s most important diplomats, was ‘no longer anything but a decoration which is useful for nothing’.)
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Delcassé’s failings were his contempt for most politicians and much of the Quai d’Orsay and his love for secrecy, which meant that those who should have known key French policies and initiatives were often kept in the dark. ‘How many times’, said Maurice Paléologue, French ambassador for many years in Russia, ‘have I heard an anxious voice behind me as I was leaving the room: “Don’t put anything on paper!” or “Forget everything I’ve just told you,” or “Burn it.”’
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Although he had learned self-control, Delcassé was a man of strong passions and the greatest of these was France itself. He was fond of quoting the words of his nationalist hero Léon Gambetta that France was ‘the greatest moral personality in the world’. As a journalist he had written articles urging that French schoolchildren be taught that they were superior to little Germans and British children.
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Like others of his generation, he had been heartbroken at France’s defeat in 1870–71; his daughter noticed that he could never bring himself to talk of Alsace and Lorraine. Unusually, though, he did not hate Germans or German culture; he was a great admirer of Wagner.
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He nevertheless took it as given that France could not have a rapprochement with Germany and was therefore an early and enthusiastic supporter of the alliance with Russia.

Delcassé saw France’s national revival lying in part in the acquisition of colonies and from an early stage in his political career worked closely with the powerful colonial lobby. He also shared the increasingly popular view that France had a Mediterranean destiny which was one of the reasons that he found it so hard to forgive the British for seizing Egypt. Like other French nationalists of the period, he dreamed of French influence extending itself into the Arab territories of the creaking Ottoman Empire. And, like many of his compatriots, including those on the left, he believed that French rule would confer the benefits
of civilisation. As Jaurès, the great socialist leader, said of Morocco, ‘France’s right to do so is all the greater since there is no question of surprise attack and military violence and because the civilization which she represents to the natives of Africa is certainly superior to the present state of the Moroccan regime.’
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In pursuit of empire, Delcassé, the strong anti-clerical, discovered an enthusiasm for protecting the Christian minorities under Ottoman rule in such areas as Syria and Palestine. And he looked southwards to North Africa, where France already had the large colony of Algeria, at Morocco, which was increasingly falling into anarchy. In pursuit of French goals, he was prepared to work with France’s neighbours, Italy and Spain, with Germany possibly, but more importantly, with Britain.

As early as the mid 1880s, Delcassé had wanted a better understanding with Britain. More, he had an even grander scheme: to bring about what eventually became the Triple Entente between France, Russia and Britain. The conclusion of the Franco-Russian Agreement in 1894 was for him an important first step and when he took up the post of Foreign Minister in 1898, he told the British ambassador that he thought it ‘eminently desirable’ that there should be a cordial understanding between Britain, France, and Russia. ‘I really do believe that the little man is honest in saying this,’ the ambassador told Salisbury. The British Prime Minister, however, was not prepared to abandon his policy of isolation and at the end of the decade Fashoda and the Boer War sent France’s relations with Britain into an even deeper freeze.
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