The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (85 page)

One man in particular epitomised the new mood in France, Raymond Poincaré, the leading conservative politician who became Prime Minister in January 1912 when Caillaux fell in the aftermath of the second Moroccan crisis. At the start of 1913, Poincaré was elected President, an office he was to hold until 1920. Perhaps because he came from Lorraine, so much of which had been lost to Germany after 1871, Poincaré was a passionate French nationalist, determined to heal the divisions within French society and restore France to its rightful place in the world. Although he lost his early fervent Catholic faith, he accepted the Church as an institution which was important to the majority of his compatriots. As Prime Minister he did much to defuse the long-standing conflicts between the Catholics and the anti-clericals over education by supporting secular schools while insisting on tolerance for religious ones.
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The world, he believed, had much to gain from French influence. ‘Wisdom, sangfroid and dignity’, he said in a speech in 1912, were the marks of French policy. ‘Let us therefore endeavour to preserve and enhance the vital energy of our country, and I am not only referring to her military and naval strength but above all to this political confidence and this unity of national feeling which endows a people with grandeur, glory and immortality.’
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Although, as a man who valued reason, he opposed war he also believed in making France’s armed forces stronger. He became something of a hero for French nationalists and there was a surge in the number of babies christened Raymond.

Poincaré himself was no Napoleon or, in a later age, Charles de Gaulle, although he was always conscious of appearing well in public opinion. The opposite of flamboyant, he was small, neat, fussy and precise. He was also clever and exceptionally hard working. It seems to have been a family tradition; on both sides he was descended from bourgeois families who produced judges, civil servants, professors or, like his own father, engineers. A first cousin was Henri Poincaré, one of France’s leading mathematicians. Raymond for his part distinguished himself at his lycée in Paris and became the youngest lawyer in France in 1880 at the age of twenty. Although he followed the path of other ambitious young men and moved into journalism and politics, his legal training left him with a respect for forms and processes. In public Poincaré was unemotional and cool. The ferocious radical Georges Clemenceau, who could not bear him, said he was ‘A lively little beast,
dry, disagreeable, and not courageous.’
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This, like so much of what Clemenceau said, was unfair. In politics before 1914 and in the dark days of the Great War, Poincaré showed both courage and fortitude. And even Clemenceau could never accuse him of being corrupt, as so many other political figures in the Third Republic were.

Poincaré, unusually for his time and class, was a feminist and a strong supporter of animal rights, refusing, for example, to join the customary hunting parties at the presidential country estate. He loved the arts, the theatre and concerts in particular and in 1909 became a member of the French Academy.
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His copious diaries also reveal a man who was emotional and sensitive (he wept when he was elected President), and one who was frequently hurt by perceived slights and by the attacks of his enemies. When he announced just after Christmas in 1912 that he was standing for President he was attacked viciously by the radicals and the left. His wife, a divorcee, was said to have a chequered past, even, gossip had it, performing in a cabaret or a circus.
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Clemenceau claimed that she had been married to a postman whom Poincaré had dispatched to North America. ‘You wish to sleep with Madame Poincaré?’ Clemenceau would say loudly, ‘OK, my friend, it’s fixed.’
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The attacks so infuriated Poincaré that he once challenged Clemenceau to a duel. (Fortunately for the former it was never fought, for Clemenceau was an experienced dueller.)

When he became President, Poincaré was determined that he would use the powers of his office to the utmost and manage foreign affairs himself. He visited the Foreign Ministry every day, received ambassadors, often on his own, wrote dispatches and selected trusted friends for key foreign posts. As his Foreign Ministers he chose men who were content to play second fiddle. On 12 July 1914, shortly before Europe’s final crisis erupted, René Viviani, a moderate socialist, assumed the office although he had no obvious qualifications unless patriotism and eloquence counted. He knew very little about foreign affairs and tended to blame his officials when he made mistakes while Poincaré simply intimidated him. For his part Poincaré was highly irritated by Viviani’s ignorance of diplomacy, even such a basic detail as the name of the Austrian-Hungarian Foreign Office. ‘When he is reading telegrams from Vienna’, Poincaré complained, ‘he cannot say the Ballplatz without making it the Bol-platz or the Baliplatz.’
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Poincaré’s determination to control France’s foreign policy did not always translate, however, into practical policies or leadership. From London Paul Cambon, who eventually came to have a grudging respect for him, accused him of ‘clear speaking at the service of a confused mind’.
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Poincaré did not want war but his goal was to make France stronger and more assertive, in Europe of course but also in the Middle East, where France already had strong interests in the Ottoman territories of Syria and Lebanon. In his inaugural address to the French parliament in February 1913 he said that peace was possible only if the country was always ready for war. ‘A diminished France, a France exposed by its own fault to challenges, to humiliation, would no longer be France.’
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Poincaré was willing nevertheless to work for a limited détente with Germany. While he regretted the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine he did not want to use war to get them back.
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France co-operated with Germany during the crises in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 and in January 1914 Poincaré dined at the German embassy in Paris, the first French head of state to have done so since the war of 1870. Poincaré even seems to have hoped that the alliance system dividing Europe into two camps might somehow bring a sort of stability and allow the European powers to work out agreements in the wider world, over the division of the Ottoman Empire, for example.
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At the same time, he believed, as did many of his compatriots, that Germans were bullies who had to be confronted with firmness. He gave Viviani one of his frequent tutorials: ‘With Germany it is always necessary to be steadfast and decided, that its diplomacy is given very much to “bluffing” and that it always tests us in order to see whether we are determined to resist or whether we are inclined to give way.’
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By 1914 Poincaré had grown more pessimistic about the possibilities of working with Germany. ‘More and more’, he wrote in his private diary, ‘Germany imagines that it was predestined to dominate the world, that the alleged superiority of the German race, the always increasing number of inhabitants of the Reich and the continuing pressure of economic necessities creates for it exceptional rights among nations.’ He also came to doubt that, in any future crisis, Germany would in fact back down.
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That made its friendships more than ever the key to maintaining France’s greatness and its position in the world. France’s military alliance
with Russia needed to be nurtured and deepened. With Poincaré’s approval France’s loans for Russian railway building increased by some 500 million francs in the two years before the war.
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He assured Izvolsky, still the Russian ambassador in Paris, that he would use his influence over France’s foreign policy, to ensure ‘the closest ties with Russia’.
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He was as good as his word, appointing Delcassé, the staunch French nationalist who had been forced out of office by Germany in the first Morocco crisis, as his ambassador to St Petersburg. Poincaré also made a point of visiting Russia himself, the first time when he was still Prime Minister. ‘The Emperor Nicholas,’ said Sazonov, ‘who often prized in others those qualities which he did not himself possess, was chiefly impressed by the determination and strength of will of the French Prime Minister.’
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Poincaré also shared the widespread view that the Triple Entente should be made even stronger with Britain tied in by military alliances with both France and Russia. The trouble was that Britain with Grey still firmly in charge of foreign policy showed little interest in moving beyond assurances of goodwill and support. Even more worrying were Britain’s domestic politics, which were looking, well, rather like those of France in unhappier times. There was even a complicated financial scandal with Lloyd George and several other leading Liberals being charged very enthusiastically by the Conservatives with exploiting inside knowledge to buy shares in the Marconi company which was about to be awarded a contract to build government wireless stations throughout the British Empire. Although a parliamentary investigation found that the accused were innocent, in part because they had bought shares only in the American branch of the company, which did not benefit from the contract, the matter looked bad and damaged the reputation of Lloyd George and the others as well as that of the government as a whole. In 1913 and the first half of 1914, which was even more worrying for the British and their allies, Britain was experiencing deep and bitter social and political divisions with violent demonstrations, bombs, barricades, even armed militias. And the Irish question had again grown acute to the point where Britain faced, for the first time since the seventeenth century, the possibility of civil war.

The monarch who now presided over this suddenly turbulent Britain was George V, who had succeeded Edward VII in 1910. In many ways
he was the opposite of his father. He had simple tastes, disliked foreign countries, and was bored by fashionable society. His court, as he said himself with pride, was dull but respectable. With this king, there would be no scandals about mistresses or unsuitable friends. In appearance he looked very like his cousin the tsar of Russia (the two men were sometimes mistaken for each other) and in manner he remained very much the naval officer he had been. He ran his court as much like a ship as possible with attention to uniforms, routine, and punctuality. He was devoted to his wife but expected her to obey his orders; he liked the fashions she had worn when he first met her in the 1890s so she wore long dresses until she died in 1953. ‘The Paris mob went mad about her’, reported a courtier after the royal couple visited early in 1914, ‘and it was rumoured that her out-of-date hats and early Victorian gowns would become next year’s fashions!’
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Although George found his office a burden and dreaded making his annual address from the throne, he did his work conscientiously. He also understood and accepted that he was a constitutional monarch, bound to take the advice of his ministers. His own politics were those of a Tory country squire with an instinctive aversion to anything that smacked of socialism and he suspected that many of the leading Liberal politicians were not really gentlemen – including his Prime Minister, although he came to like and respect Asquith.
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Herbert Asquith, who was in office as Britain went from peace to war, was a clever and ambitious man who came from a prosperous manufacturing family in the north of England. What had been a secure childhood was suddenly shattered when their father died leaving his young family dependent on the charity of his wife’s brothers. Herbert and one of his brothers were taken in by an uncle and then farmed out to different families while they went to school in London. Unlike his sickly brother, Herbert flourished, winning a prestigious scholarship to Balliol, the most intellectual of all the colleges at Oxford University and one which was known for producing leading figures in public life.
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There Asquith made a name for himself as a clever and hard-working scholar as well as a formidable debater, qualities which served him well as he launched his highly successful career as a lawyer. He had married young, for love, and by all accounts was a devoted father and husband. By the time his first wife died of typhoid in 1891, however, Asquith had
already fallen in love with Margot Tennant, the vivacious and self-willed daughter of a very rich businessman. Margot, who was both an intellectual and social snob, had a reputation for being outspoken, often to the point of rudeness, physically brave – she adored riding to hounds – and unpredictable. Asquith sat next to her at a dinner party in the House of Commons a few months before his wife’s fatal illness. ‘The passion’, he told a friend later, ‘which comes, I suppose, to everyone once in life, visited and conquered me.’ (He was to be conquered in that way again in 1914.) Margot found that he reminded her of Oliver Cromwell (who had led the Parliamentary forces against the king in the Civil War) and felt ‘this was the man who could help me and who would understand everything’.
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In fact she hesitated for over two years after Asquith first told her of his love, some few weeks after he buried his wife. In 1894, after Margot had reviewed her other suitors, she decided, abruptly as she often did, to marry him. She threw herself into managing her stepchildren (who did not invariably appreciate her domineering ways) and furthering Asquith’s promising political career.

In 1886 he had been elected as a Liberal to Parliament and over the next years had risen steadily through the party and in British society, acquiring new and influential friends, including Margot herself, among the upper classes. When the Liberals returned to office at the end of 1905, Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer and then, in 1908, Prime Minister. He was a skilful leader, keeping together a disparate group of Liberals which included pacifists and radical reformers such as Lloyd George on the one hand and imperialists such as Grey on the other. When a prolonged battle broke out in the last years of the peace between Churchill and Lloyd George over the naval estimates for 1914–15, Asquith managed to contain it. Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, had now reversed himself and was pushing for more spending on the navy, while his old ally Lloyd George who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was determined to hold the line. Their dispute was not finally settled until January 1914 when, with Asquith’s backing, Churchill got the increases he wanted.