Years of Plenty, Years of Want

France and the Legacy of the Great War

Benjamin Franklin Martin

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781609090807
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

The Great War that engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1918 was a catastrophe for France. French soil was the site of most of the fighting on the Western Front. French dead were more than 1.3 million, the permanently disabled another 1.1 million, overwhelmingly men in their twenties and thirties. The decade and a half before the war had been years of plenty, a time of increasing prosperity and confidence remembered as the Belle Epoque or the good old days. The two decades that followed its end were years of want, loss, misery, and fear. In 1914, France went to war convinced of victory. In 1939, France went to war dreading defeat.

To explain the burden of winning the Great War and embracing the collapse that followed, Benjamin Martin examines the national mood and daily life of France in July 1914 and August 1939, the months that preceded the two world wars. He presents two titans: Georges Clemenceau, defiant and steadfast, who rallied a dejected nation in 1918, and Edouard Daladier, hesitant and irresolute, who espoused appeasement in 1938 though comprehending its implications. He explores novels by a constellation of celebrated French writers who treated the Great War and its social impact, from Colette to Irène Némirovsky, from François Mauriac to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And he devotes special attention to Roger Martin du Gard, the1937 Nobel Laureate, whose roman-fleuve The Thibaults is an unrivaled depiction of social unraveling and disillusionment.

For many in France, the legacy of the Great War was the vow to avoid any future war no matter what the cost. They cowered behind the Maginot Line, the fortifications along the eastern border designed to halt any future German invasion. Others knew that cost would be too great and defended the "Descartes Line": liberty and truth, the declared values of French civilization. In his distinctive and vividly compelling prose, Martin recounts this struggle for the soul of France.

Chapter 1

July 1914

Summer 1914: at the end of June in Sarajevo, Bosnia, a Serbian-trained assassin shot dead the heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary; at the beginning of August, the chanceries of the Great Powers exchanged declarations of war. Hell gaped open. The Great War, much predicted and much delayed, stalked forth. Blood and darkness enveloped Europe in the first cataclysm of what would become the century of catastrophe. A civilization constructed upon political, social, and economic revolutions broke apart. An abyss lay between what had been and what was to be.1

Rumors of war had circulated for almost a decade. In 1905 and 1911, Germany contested France’s protectorate over Morocco. In 1906, 1912, and 1913, Austria-Hungary and Russia squared off over claims in the Balkans. France prevailed in Morocco through support from Great Britain. Austria-Hungary extended its control in the Balkans through support from Germany. These five crises originated from two fundamental alterations in the European power structure. The first was the long-term deterioration of the Ottoman Empire, whose writ once ran across North Africa, throughout the Middle East, and north into Hungary. Its retreat before nationalist revolts and the encroachment of the European Great Powers began in the late 1600s and, by the middle nineteenth century, threatened to become a rout. Great Britain, France, Italy, and later Germany jostled for empire in North Africa. Russia and Austria-Hungary competed for control of the Balkans. The second transformation was the sudden emergence of Germany as a Great Power. Prussia unified the disparate German states under its rule by defeating the two previously dominant land powers in continental Europe, Austria-Hungary in 1866 and France in 1871. Diminished, France sought compensation through an overseas empire, Austria-Hungary through extension of power over Slavic regions rebelling against the Ottomans.

During the nearly five decades that preceded the Great War, Europeans fought almost continually—but not against each other except in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, which were brief and contained. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, they possessed modern weapons and modern transportation (supremely summed up in the “gunboat”), which made British and French colonial wars in Africa or Asia, and Russia’s war against the Ottomans in 1877–78, triumphal processions. Europeans, leaders and peoples, simply had no conception of general war among Great Powers. By 1914, modern weaponry was a synonym for “lethality”: machine guns, rapid-firing highly accurate artillery, massively armed battleships, military aircraft, and poison gas. Each Great Power expanded its standing army, with both France and Germany having roughly 7 percent of their adult males in uniform. The greatest innovation of the period was the formation of peacetime alliances—previously, they had been concluded during war or in anticipation of it. The greatest humiliation France suffered from defeat by Prussia in 1871 was the loss of two eastern provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, to the new Germany. Its chancellor and the genius behind German unification, Otto von Bismarck, recognized that France would be a permanent enemy and reconciled with Austria-Hungary by emphasizing the threat to both from Russia. The result was the 1879 Dual Alliance, which became the Triple Alliance in 1882 through the inclusion of Italy. Because Bismarck believed that the most serious threat to Germany lay in any new general war, the alliance promised assistance only if a member were attacked.

Confronted by this coalition of Great Powers in central Europe, French diplomacy worked to encircle it. The first step was a defensive pact with Russia in 1894, a triumph of expediency: reactionary Russian tsardom allied with republican France because Germany was the danger each feared the most. The second was an agreement with Great Britain, the Entente Cordiale (Friendly Understanding) in 1904, which settled all disputes between the world’s two largest empires—and would lead afterward to semiformal pledges of mutual defense in a war against Germany. The third, almost simultaneously, was a détente with Italy, estranging it from the Triple Alliance. Never mind that what was increasingly called the “Triple Entente” also provided certain support only if a member were attacked, the European Great Powers had divided themselves into competing blocs.

The inevitable conclusion was that a war between two might easily become a war among all. Certainly Germany thought so, its military general staff now forced to plan for war on both the eastern and western frontiers. With boldness crossing over to grave risk, its leaders decided against fighting two wars simultaneously and for fighting two wars consecutively. Called the Schlieffen Plan after its formulator—General Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the general staff from 1891 until 1905—it relied on the differences in mobilization time and population. With their modern, dense rail networks, both France and Germany could assemble and equip their armies within two weeks, but Russia, vast and underdeveloped, required six weeks or more. The French population was c. 40 million, the German c. 64 million, the Russian c. 165 million. The Schlieffen Plan called for a sudden attack on France at the outset of any war by almost all of Germany’s military might, destroying the smaller French army within six weeks. German forces would then turn to face the Russians, who were more numerous but had inferior weaponry and training.

How to deal with these foreign policy, diplomatic, and military issues became the essential political debate in France beginning in the summer of 1911. Seven years earlier through the Entente Cordiale, British and French leaders had ended their competition in North Africa by granting Great Britain a free hand in Egypt, France a free hand in Morocco. Spain asserted rights to northwestern Morocco but had little means of backing them up. When Germany contested France’s free hand in 1905, Great Britain sided firmly with its new imperial partner. Since then, the French had used Morocco’s sultan, Moulay Hafid, as a puppet as they pursued greater commercial interests and increasingly exercised police powers. This intervention stimulated a nationalist revolt that swept through the country, besieging Hafid and the European colony in Fez. The dispatch of French troops relieved the city on 21 May 1911 and made clear how close France was to imposing its will through a protectorate. Six weeks later on 1 July, the German destroyer Panther dropped anchor in the Moroccan Atlantic port of Agadir and was soon after replaced by the much larger and more powerful cruiser Berlin. The claim of protecting German merchants was absurd because none were within two hundred miles of Agadir. Instead, Germany was making a heavy-handed bid for some piece of the Moroccan action.

France’s prime minister was Joseph Caillaux, who had been elevated from his position as minister of finance by a freak accident at the Paris Air Show that severely injured the prime minister, Ernest Monis, and killed the minister of war, Maurice Berteaux. Caillaux was a millionaire who sat with the center-left Radical party and was well-known for his proposal to replace France’s old system of indirect taxes (both inelastic and hard to estimate) with a single levy on all income. He became prime minister on 28 June, only two days before the Panthersprung, the “Leap of the Panther.” The minister of foreign affairs, Justin de Selves, was all for sending a French vessel as a counter, but Caillaux quashed any bellicose response. Although he had no experience in diplomacy, he had long believed that France should seek an accommodation with Germany, which had now far surpassed Great Britain as the industrial and commercial powerhouse in Europe, even if the cost was a certain subservience. By mid-July, Germany offered to recognize a French protectorate over Morocco in return for “compensation,” meaning France’s possessions in the Congo region of central Africa. To de Selves, the German demand was extortion. The British agreed, with David Lloyd George, the influential chancellor of the exchequer, delivering a speech at the Mansion House on 21 July 1911 making clear Great Britain’s support for France and declaring that peace without honor was no peace.

Because de Selves was intransigent, Caillaux negotiated behind his back with Baron Oskar von der Lancken-Wakenitz, a counselor at the German embassy in Paris. France’s foreign ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, was aware of the duplicity because French intelligence had broken the German diplomatic code. Jules Cambon, the ambassador to Berlin, and Maurice Paléologue, the secretary general of the ministry, cautiously filed away the deciphered telegrams, the so-called Greens (documents verts) from the colored diagonal bar in the margin. On 4 November, Caillaux announced that he had ended the crisis by signing the Treaty of Fez: Germany accepted a French protectorate; France ceded some 120,000 square miles of the French Congo linking the German Cameroons to the Congo and Ubangi Rivers. An explosion of indignation followed among the French public. In the lower house of the legislature, the Chamber of Deputies, only the fear of immediate war stemmed a revolt against the treaty, and even then, on 21 December a quarter of the deputies preferred to abstain rather than vote to endorse it. Before the turn of the upper house, the Senate, discreet whispers from the Quai d’Orsay alerted its most ferocious nationalist, Georges Clemenceau. When Caillaux and de Selves appeared before the Senate’s foreign affairs committee on 12 January 1912, Caillaux formally denied conducting any unofficial negotiations. Clemenceau then asked de Selves for confirmation, but the foreign minister refused to reply and resigned. Caillaux resigned as well, two days later.

The episode and its revelations were a significant shock to the French public and their political system. The moment cried out for a leader with a reputation for energy, honesty, and patriotism. Count Albert de Mun, leader of the Catholic conservatives, captured the mood in his column for the newspaper L’Echo de Paris: “Antimilitarism and pacifism had grown like poisonous plants in a fen when suddenly the coup of Agadir struck the torpid hearts of France and in a moment her sons saw in one another’s eyes their ancestral heritage. Among them ran the cry, like an electric shock, Enough!” The answer to “Enough!” was Raymond Poincaré, a brilliant attorney renowned for his assiduous attention to detail, cultured, literate, elected, like de Mun, to the Académie française, but most of all, possessed of an austere patriotism, and unwilling to forgive the Germans for seizing his native Lorraine. As the new prime minister, Poincaré pushed the Treaty of Fez through the Senate but called it a disgrace. Clemenceau declared that Caillaux had misunderstood his patriotic duty when dealing with the Germans.2

A sense of national revival was in the air. Poincaré took the Quai d’Orsay for himself and sharpened the tone of French foreign policy. He accelerated the takeover in Morocco and appointed General Hubert Lyautey, recommended by de Mun, as its governor. In August 1912, he traveled to St. Petersburg to strengthen alliance ties with Russia. When the union of French schoolteachers voted to endorse the spread of antimilitarist propaganda among army recruits, he angrily ordered its dissolution. His minister of war, Alexandre Millerand, restored the military tattoo in Paris and named General Joseph Joffre, known for his toughness and nerve, as commander of military forces. Alarmed by German bluster over Morocco, Great Britain’s military leaders quietly expanded the meaning of the Entente Cordiale if war with Germany came. The navies would split responsibilities, France taking the Mediterranean, Great Britain the north Atlantic, and the British army would send its Expeditionary Force to join the French army near the border with Belgium. War in the Balkans, beginning in 1912 and continuing into 1913, heightened tensions in general. De Mun wrote, again in the conservative newspaper L’Echo de Paris, “There are, in the history of a people, decisive hours. We touch one of those hours. . . . No one in Europe wants war, and yet it moves closer and closer, despite intentions, fears, exertions, and resolutions, led by the blind force of situations and events.”3

At decisive hours, strong leadership is compelling. In the structure of France’s Third Republic, the office of president was a ceremonial figurehead, elected to a seven-year term by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate sitting together for the vote as the National Assembly. The political left especially feared the threat of a strong executive to legislative independence, citing Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Poincaré believed that he could transform the office into a center of power without jeopardizing republican traditions. The term of President Armand Fallières expired in January 1913, and Poincaré declared his candidacy. For ideology and for his treatment of Caillaux, the left, Radicals and Socialists, opposed him. He had many supporters among the center—and for the rest, he would need the right, whose allegiance to republican principles the left doubted. Clemenceau’s Jacobin heritage meant that he worshiped at two altars, rude nationalism and legislative predominance: Poincaré could be prime minister but not president. On 17 January 1913, the votes of the conservatives, delivered by de Mun, were sufficient to sweep away tradition—proof of how much the issues made stark by the Agadir crisis had come to dominate life.

Poincaré sought the presidency to argue for a significant national sacrifice. In 1912, Germany had begun expanding the size of its standing army to c. 860,000 men, nearly double that of the French army at 480,000. With a population one and a half times greater than France, the Germans could add to their forces merely by expanding the draft. Already requiring two years of military service from every male at the age of twenty-one, France could match them only by adding a third year to the conscription term. Doing so would increase the number of draftees by 50 percent and the army as a whole by 30 percent, raising the total to c. 625,000, certainly better odds. But asking young men to serve an additional year, to take them from families, farms, businesses, and schools, would be a severe test of revived patriotism—and expensive. Poincaré’s term was seven years, but he suspected that he had less than three in which to prepare France for war.

Two of his closest political supporters, moderates Aristide Briand and Louis Barthou, were his choices to guide three-year service through the legislature. The opposition came from the left, led by Caillaux among the Radicals and Jean Jaurès among the Socialists. They had first worked together opposing Poincaré’s election and now had a score to settle. Caillaux burned with resentment over his humiliation a year earlier, and he joined his anger to the argument that France should regard Germany with friendship instead of hostility. Jaurès rejected traditional military conceptions, favoring instead a “nation in arms,” which his 1910 book L’Armée nouvelle (The new army) described: every Frenchman would keep a rifle above the mantel to take down if war came. He thought war between France and Germany unlikely, even impossible—not because their ruling classes would keep the peace to maintain their profits but because their working classes would join hands across the border to threaten a general strike. Poincaré exerted his influence to the maximum, reviving the allegation that he sought an extension of presidential power. He used up political favors, reducing his leverage in the future. He relied on a majority including so much of the right that his centrist allies were uncomfortable, but he won the passage of three-year service in December 1913. With an additional provision: the enormous new expenses could not be covered by the traditional indirect taxes, which forced Poincaré and his allies to accept some form of tax on income, the details to be worked out later, and during the interim, the return of Caillaux to the ministry of finance.

This result set the stakes in the elections some five months later in April and May 1914 for the Chamber of Deputies. Victory for the center-right and right meant maintenance of the three-year service law and a watered-down income tax. Victory for the center-left and left meant possible reversal of the service law and a progressive income tax. Against this risk, Poincaré, Briand, and Barthou took a fateful decision. At their instigation, Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, the Parisian daily of the French bourgeoisie, began a series of vituperative editorials against Caillaux. Calmette’s aim was not just to damage Caillaux politically but to ruin him personally. For that purpose, he used every resource to gain possession of three highly incriminating documents. First, he had copies of the Quai d’Orsay Greens, proving Caillaux’s secret contacts with the Germans. Poincaré explicitly denied him permission to use them, because the Germans would then learn that their code had been broken. Calmette could, however, hint that he had proof of Caillaux’s “treason.” Second, he ha...