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France and the Failures of National Defense, 1870–1914
An examination of the army before 1914 reveals that it was ruled more by confusion than by logic, afflicted by institutional malfunctioning rather than from the neat application of a coherent but wrongheaded system of thought inspired by professional principles and right-wing sentiments…. In the final analysis, the radical Republic got the army it deserved….
—Douglas Porch1
The issues that determined how the Great War would be fought stemmed from the French war with Germany in 1870, the postwar responses to the defeat by the new French government, and the responses of the German Army to meet France’s constantly shifting war plans. France’s confused and volatile national defense policies forced the German military to adopt a set of weapons, a military doctrine, and a plan of action that determined how it would fight a future war.
On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia, which immediately caused the German states allied with Prussia to declare war on France. Although France had forced the war on Prussia (something Bismarck had skillfully encouraged), and was thus the aggressor, the country had no coherent plan of action. Engels, writing in a London newspaper, pointed out that it hardly made any sense to declare war without then launching an invasion, but this is exactly what had happened.2
Three weeks after the French declaration of war, the French were still organizing at their frontier. The initial battles of early August were all fought right on the border, and mostly inside France: Wissembourg (the fourth), Wörth (the sixth), and Spicheren (the sixth). The French Army of the Northeast, defeated in all three engagements, retired in the direction of Châlons, a city located on the Marne River to the southeast of Reims. On the fifteenth, the French Army of the Center, based around Metz, was defeated at Vionville, and then, on the eighteenth, at Gravelotte, both small towns to the west of Metz.
The surviving French regrouped in Metz, waiting to be relieved. When the Germans defeated the relief forces on the thirtieth (at Beaumont), MacMahon left Bazaine to hold out in Metz, and withdrew to Sedan. There, in September 1870, he was wounded at the start of what both sides hoped would be the decisive battle of the war. Unlike Metz, Sedan is a city located in a bowl. Troops penned up there were helpless. The next day the emperor, Napoleon III, was forced to surrender, along with most of what was left of France’s army.
Broadly put, after 1870, France had three aims: to develop the capability to mount an effective defense of the frontier, to strengthen France militarily through alliances, and to develop a loyal and effective military. The initial effort was impressive. The first military planners of the Third Republic, of whom the military engineer Raymond-Adolphe Séré de Rivières was the most important, sought to build a coherent policy of national defense for the new post-1870 frontier. Séré de Rivières, who from 1872 to 1880 was France’s minister of war, laid down the basic plans that would determine France’s defense policy: a belt of fortifications that would protect the country from an invasion and allow France time to bring its armies onto the field. Over the next thirty years, starting with an appropriation of the then staggering sum of eighty-eight million francs in 1874, France poured an unprecedented amount of its resources into this project.3 By 1914 there were over one hundred independent forts on the northeastern frontier alone, and the Belgians, under the direction of another brilliant engineering officer, Brialmont, had mounted a parallel effort that they felt would ensure their neutrality in the event of a future conflict: the three most strategically important Belgian cities (Namur, Liège, and Antwerp) were encircled by no less than forty forts.
The main forts were supplemented by dozens of small reinforced structures, called fortins or ouvrages, and carefully sited so as to dominate the terrain. The French encircled key cities that lay at critical transportation junctures with fortifications. From north to southeast, the cities of Lille, Maubeuge, Reims, Verdun, Toul, Épinal, and Belfort were, like the three Belgian cities, turned into what the French termed places fortifiées, or fortified positions. A town like Verdun was the unfortified administrative center of a two-hundred-square-kilometer area protected by some twenty major forts and about twice that many smaller ouvrages.4
The most important path into France lay along the Meuse River, which began in the Vosges Mountains down by Switzerland and ran up through France and Belgium into Holland. Major rail and road links ran alongside, and the river itself, with its connecting canals, was an important transportation artery. In Belgium, the fortified areas surrounding Liège and Namur sat astride the Meuse, as did Verdun. But from Verdun on down the river there were no fewer than twelve isolated forts on the heights of the Meuse, guarding the major crossings.
In addition, there were fortified towns and single forts stretching along the Belgian frontier from Lille to the new German frontier, and along that frontier down to Switzerland. The scheme of fortifications gave the Germans difficult choices. From the easternmost fort of Reims (Pompelle) to the westernmost fort of Verdun (Bois Bourrus) was only about forty kilometers, most of which was taken up by the Argonne Forest, a rough and dense tract of the sort European armies had traditionally avoided.
Below Verdun, there was another stretch between the river forts along the Meuse and the Moselle. But the French considered this area, the plain of the Woëvre, a swamp as unsuitable for maneuver as the Argonne. And from Épinal on down to Belfort, the forts formed a dense barrier. An invader (which could only be Germany) would either have to develop out of heavily forested areas (the Ardennes and the Argonne), try to move through the passes of the Vosges Mountains, blunder through major urban areas (such as Nancy), or mount a direct attack on one of the fortified areas.
All of the options would force an attacker to move slowly. The American Civil War had made it fairly clear that assaults against fortified positions, even when they were fortified only at the rudimentary level of, say, Vicksburg, were difficult propositions, and, as the decades wore on, the experiences in the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War reinforced this lesson.
Although there were successful sieges made, none of them were accomplished very quickly, and all of the developments in firepower after 1870 seemed to convey an advantage to the defender, who increasingly had the capability to stand back at long range and destroy the invader, first with artillery and then with infantry fire, since the rifles coming into widespread use were all accurate out to distances of four and five hundred meters (with much greater killing ranges).
This greater range (the killing range of the muskets of the turn of the century had been about fifty meters) forced gunners to stand back, while advances in explosives and metallurgy made for considerably more potent weapons. During the 1870s and 1880s most of the developments that made the breech-loading rifle a feasible mass weapon were applied to artillery pieces. Napoleon had been a gunner, and the French were anxious to assert their historic supremacy in the field. The military engineers DeBange and Baquet both perfected breech-locking mechanisms, which enabled the gun barrel to withstand very high stresses, and DeBange’s 120 millimeter gun of 1878, which fired an eighteen-kilogram shell containing over four kilograms of high explosive out to distances of slightly over eight thousand meters, was a remarkable weapon.
Such guns were powerful. But they were also extremely heavy, with a massive swollen casting at the rear of the gun, which was necessary for the mounts, since this was the place where all the rearward force generated by the firing of the gun was transmitted to the gun carriage. So DeBange’s gun, which weighed over eight thousand kilograms, couldn’t be pulled into action by the usual team of six horses. For the defenders, this was fine: the guns could be shipped in by rail, unloaded, mounted almost permanently, and then sighted in on possible targets.
But for an attacking army, simply moving such weapons onto the battlefield would take a great deal of time, and would involve the construction of roads and railroad spurs, as well as the strengthening of bridges—and obviously, very careful positioning. Even without the defenders taking any action, it might take ten days or more simply to transport the gun and get it into position. And the really heavy weapons, such as DeBange’s 270 millimeter siege mortar of 1878, weighed nearly twenty metric tons and had to be shipped to the site in pieces and then assembled, a procedure that took days.
Even when the barrel was of modest bulk, the process of assembly was cumbrous. After the site was prepared, the barrel, which weighed several tons on its own, had to be unloaded from its traveling mount and then mated with the mount, a process which one contemporary military journal called slow and laborious at best. At every level, technology favored the defense. Even though advances in explosives had made the original masonry forts of the 1870s seriously vulnerable to shellfire, a systematic program of reinforcement and modernization kept the key forts largely invulnerable to artillery fire.
By the turn of the century, France had one of the largest artillery parks in Europe. Screened by the forts, French gunners would simply destroy the enemy’s siege artillery before he was able to bring it onto the field, and infantry operating in the intervals between the forts would ensure the impossibility of infiltration. While the enemy laboriously moved up his own siege artillery—a process that in itself might take weeks—an army in the field would be mobilized and brought into play. But the army itself was subsidiary to the garrisons and the guns.
Napoleon Ill’s talented wife had desperately tried to enlist the support of foreign powers during the 1870 war. None of Bismarck’s neighbors were particularly keen on seeing Prussia beat France, but after Prussia’s triumphs over Denmark and Austria, neither were they keen to enter the field. After 1870, it was clear that no European power, on its own, could match Germany.
Bismarck had made Russo-German alliance the cornerstone of his foreign policy, and when he was dismissed in 1890 by the young emperor Wilhelm II, the coalition headed by his new chancellor, Caprivi, was either incapable or unwilling to preserve this alliance. Wilhelm II, for all his mental instability, understood clearly enough the catastrophic effect of this shift on Germany’s national security. When Nicholas II assumed the Russian throne in 1894, Wilhelm intervened personally in an attempt to forestall the new alliance, but to no avail. By 1894, the French had slipped deftly into the middle, and signed a treaty with Russia.
Overnight the new treaty changed France’s defense policy. If Germany attacked, Russia would come to France’s aid. France and Russia together were considerably more powerful militarily than Germany. It did not take a major strategist to see that while the Germans tried to batter their way through France’s fortifications, Russian field armies would be invading East Prussia.
There was another side to this equation, of course. If Germany attacked Russia, France was bound to come to her aid. That meant standing on the offensive. And that in turn meant the development of an army that was able to mobilize promptly and take to the field. Consequently, the next logical priority was the development of the army.
But the triumphs of French foreign policy were far from over. In 1902, France concluded a secret agreement with Italy that effectively ruled out any Italian military action against France (or vice versa). As Germany had invested a good deal of effort in developing ‘an alliance with Italy and Austria-Hungary, this was another significant setback for the Germans. The Italian arrangement was so secret that the central staff of the French Army, the Grand Quartier Général (GQG), didn’t find out about it until 1909, seven years after the Foreign Ministry had concluded the bargain.5
As secret arrangements went, the best was yet to come. In January 1906, a series of talks began between representatives of the French and British high commands regarding the landing of a British force in France or possibly Belgium. Although these talks were supposedly secret, unofficial, and nonbinding, by June 1906, the Committee of Imperial Defence had decided that, in the event of a war breaking out,
Any military cooperation on the part of the British Army, if undertaken at the outset of the war, must take on the form of an expedition to Belgium or in direct participation of the defense of the French frontier. A German violation of Belgian territory would apparently necessitate the first course. The possibility of such violation taking place with the consent of the Belgian government must not be overlooked. In any case, the views of the French would have to be considered, as it is essential that any measure of co-operation on our part should harmonize with their strategic plan. Whichever course was adopted, a preliminary landing on the French northwestern coast would be advantageous.6
Thus, while officially denying it, Great Britain had tied its entry into a Continental war to whatever the French policy of the moment was, and committed itself to land an expeditionary force in support. As most of the people present at the meeting were aware—some of them more gloomily than others—this was a commitment to a Continental war, particularly since the document quoted begins by ruling out any immediate naval action.
The only country that might conceivably go to war with France and be in a position to invade French soil was Germany. So now France had a formal alliance with Russia, a secret agreement of neutrality with Italy, and an even more secret understanding with Great Britain that committed Great Britain to fight Germany on the Continent. France’s advantage in this was quite clear: Germany could hardly expect to emerge victorious in a war against all three of the other major powers. It would face a war on two fronts with no real allies to speak of. How any advantage accrued to Great Britain is difficult to explain.
Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations and the eminence grise behind these talks, of course felt he was right to involve his country in a Continental war. He envisioned a great Continental war in which the sides would be so evenly matched that six divisions of the BEF would provide the margin of difference. His arithmetic was faulty on three or four different levels, but no one felt able to challenge him, so his theory prevailed. Both the idea and the way it was pushed would prove symptomatic of a military mindset in the British General Staff which elevated numbers (usually the wrong ones) over all else.
But Great Britain’s and Germany’s loss was France’s gain. The country had a formidable defensive network of fortifications, which w...
