Raymond Poincaré, 1860–1934, three times premier, and president of France from 1913 to 1920.
The “shade of anxiety” Poincaré had felt before reaching Russia now turned a shade darker, but not yet dark enough to spoil his delight in the vivid color of imperial pageantry. On July 22, at Krasnoye Selo, he saw sixty thousand troops drawn up in serried ranks for a prayer service attended by the czar, the czarina, the czarevitch, grand dukes, grand duchesses, and ladies of Petersburg society crowding the stands under white parasols. The next day he and Viviani watched that army march across a vast parade ground to the strains of “Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse” and “La Marche Lorraine” (Poincaré came from Lorraine). At a final banquet, this one on board Le France, the president concluded his toast to Nicholas by declaring that their two countries shared “the same ideal of peace in strength, honor, and self-respect.” It proved to be a sinister valediction.
Poincaré’s diplomatic tour was not yet over. After departing St. Petersburg on the evening of July 23, Le France charted a course toward Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Christiania (now Oslo). The vessel was in the Gulf of Finland when word came that Austria had handed Serbia an ultimatum to be answered within forty-eight hours. Poincaré knew less than he wanted of its contents, as wireless messages (which may have been jammed) were fragmentary and garbled. Austria’s ultimatum remained unread at Stockholm, as he and Viviani continued their Scandinavian tour ignorant of demands that Serbia could not possibly accept without forfeiting her sovereignty. Thus, the French ship of state was rudderless. Not until July 26, at the behest of colleagues whose desperate wire reached Le France intact, did the president and the premier decide to sail straight for home. The next morning they received a telegram in which Maurice Paléologue reported from Petersburg that Russia
had decided in principle to mobilize the thirteen army corps which are in the event destined to operate against Austria. This mobilization will only be made effective and public if the Austro-Hungarian Government means to bring armed pressure to bear on Serbia. Secret preparations will, however, commence already today. If the mobilization is ordered, the thirteen corps will immediately be concentrated on the Galician frontier, but they will not take the offensive, in order to leave Germany a pretext not to invoke the casus foederis immediately.… Russian opinion affirms her determination not to let Serbia be attacked.1
By then French who read their newspapers closely may have been better informed than Poincaré and Viviani. According to Le Figaro, the Russian minister of war had proclaimed in a long, detailed speech at Krasnoye Selo that his country was prepared for war. Le Matin enlarged upon this bulletin. Sergey Sazonov, Russia’s foreign minister, maintained that the community of views between France and Russia was impeccable.
Had Poincaré been at his post three days earlier, in time to make a difference, would he have challenged the perfect community of views alleged by Sazonov? Would he, who had fought in 1913 for passage of a law extending obligatory military service from two years to three, have vigorously opposed the lethal system of alliances suddenly whipping its coils around Europe? Did the eloquent Lorrainer, who had spoken of “honor” and “self-respect” in his toast to Czar Nicholas, lean more toward revanchism2 than an “ideal of peace” or conceive that ideal as Germany’s peaceful cession of the French provinces it had annexed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71? What moved him to tears, when he and Viviani finally stepped ashore at Dunkirk on July 29, hours after Austria had declared war against Serbia, was the “unanimity of patriotic resolution” he perceived in crowds of workmen standing on the jetty, the quays, and along the railroad tracks.
What moved him beyond tears was the reception he and Viviani received in Paris, where nationalist ideologues, about whom more will be said, had been declaiming the notion that war was a sacrament destined to save France’s soul and restore wholeness to a mutilated country—that collective sacrifice would be the supreme tonic for moral fatigue. Assembled at the Gare du Nord were ministers, prefects, senators, and deputies. Several thousand members of the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes, led by its president, Maurice Barrès, followed Poincaré’s open carriage across Paris, singing “La Marseillaise.” Crowds along the route hailed the president with vivats to France, to the Republic, to the army, to Poincaré himself. “Never have I felt so overwhelmed,” he wrote. “Never have I found it more difficult, morally and physically, to maintain an impassive bearing. Greatness, simplicity, enthusiasm, seriousness, all combined to render the welcome unbelievable and infinitely beautiful. Here was a united France. Political quarrels were forgotten.”
An account of this jubilant reception appeared on the front page of the mass-circulation daily Le Petit Parisien. But Le Temps did not even mention the president’s return to the Élysée Palace. A roving reporter observed that Paris looked its customary self: “no disorder, no panic.” Except for more clients than usual queuing up at banks to exchange notes for gold, litter remaining on the boulevards from pro-Serbian demonstrations held a day or two earlier, more brokers selling off stock in Russian railroads, more pedestrians pausing to read news dispatches posted outside major establishments, and specialty clothiers doing a boom business in officers’ uniforms, “one would not think that grave events impended.” Le Figaro felt confident that the French lawn-tennis team, which had departed for St. Petersburg, would “carry the French colors in triumph” across Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. And front-page news in July 1914 was not the distant mobilization of armies but the trial of Madame Henriette Caillaux.
Henriette Caillaux’s husband, Joseph Caillaux, had figured prominently in French politics since 1899, serving in four cabinets as finance minister, presiding over a fifth, and chairing the Radical Party. In 1914, he hoped that the premiership, a seat seldom warmed for long by its occupants during the Third Republic, would soon be his again. But Caillaux had made enemies, and his private life exposed him to ridicule. Georges Clemenceau was a vehement foe. Another was Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro. When love letters Caillaux had written thirteen years earlier, during an adulterous affair with Henriette (who became his second wife), were made available to Calmette, he dared publish one on the front page of the March 13 issue. Madame Caillaux visited him at the paper, drew a pistol from within her fur muff, and shot him six times—“because,” she said to stunned employees, “there is no longer any justice in France.”
As it turned out, French justice bent over backward for her. At her trial, which opened on July 21 in High Court, she was defended by Fernand Labori, the lawyer who had defended Émile Zola against charges of libel after the publication of “J’accuse.” It lasted until July 28 and during that week held the French public spellbound. Newspapers, in Paris and the provinces alike, drove a thriving trade with stenographic accounts of the testimony and partisan portraits of the witnesses. Madame Caillaux’s wardrobe loomed larger than the fate of nations. On this page, journalists examined at length the issue of legal responsibility in a crime of passion.
On July 29, large crowds gathered at the Palais de Justice for the verdict. In his summation, Labori, anticipating what came to be known as the “Union Sacrée,” implored the jury to visit its anger on France’s external enemies rather than on Madame Caillaux, to “proceed united as one … toward the perils that threaten us.” The jury may have taken his plea to heart. It acquitted the murderess, and in so doing wrote the perfect denouement to a play from which neither the press nor the public could yet tear itself away. Henriette Caillaux’s acquittal inspired more intense coverage, more angry debate, more threats to the life of her husband. She walked free; her enthralled audience stayed put.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the novelist and physician, who once observed that most people don’t die until the last minute, was old enough in 1914 to remember how far minds still were, late in July, from thoughts of the abyss yawning just ahead. On July 25, Serbia agreed to almost all the outlandish stipulations set forth in Austria’s ultimatum. Austria, as
sured by Kaiser Wilhelm that Germany would honor its alliance if Russia should join the fray, demanded unconditional acceptance. A proposal by the British foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, that the ambassadors of France, England, and Italy convene to find a diplomatic solution went unheeded. He then urged Germany to mediate the quarrel. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg equivocated in the absence of the kaiser, who had not allowed ominous portents to interfere with his midsummer cruise aboard the imperial yacht Hohenzollern. On July 28, Wilhelm, home after three weeks at sea, proposed an expedient enabling Austria to take action without forcing Russia to mobilize. Serbia had indeed met the wishes of the Danubian monarchy, but the promises it made on paper would be worthless until translated into deeds. “The Serbs are Orientals, therefore liars, deceitful, and master hands at temporizing,” Wilhem asserted. “In order that these fine promises may become truth and fact, the exercise of douce violence [gentle violence] will be necessary. This will best be done by Austria’s occupying Belgrade as security for the enforcement and execution of the promises and remaining there until the demands are actually carried out. This is also necessary in order to give an outward satisfaction d’honneur to the army which has for a third time been mobilized to no purpose, an appearance of success in the eyes of the rest of the world and enable it to have at least the consciousness of having stood on foreign soil.” The Austrian war party led by Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold would thus be placated and the conflict “localized.”
No matter. Berchtold would ultimately have his way. Austria declared war on Serbia that same day, July 28. Russia, to whose “generous Slav heart” Serbia had appealed for support three days earlier, mobilized troops along her border with the Austrian province of Galicia. Meanwhile, General Joseph Joffre, France’s chief of staff, advised the Russian military attaché that his country was fully prepared to do everything expected of a loyal ally. The besetting fear of tactical advantages and surprise attacks, which dictated military strategy throughout Europe, set in motion a monstrously reflexive sequence of events. “My thoughts were utterly pessimistic,” Maurice Paléologue wrote in his diary on July 27. “Whatever I did to fight them they always brought me back to the one conclusion—war. The hour for combinations and diplomatic artifices had gone.… Individual initiative existed no longer; there was no longer any human will capable of withstanding the automatic mechanism of the forces let loose. We diplomats had lost all influence on the course of events.” On July 29, Austria bombarded Belgrade. At the request of the kaiser, whose chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, predicted that the embroilment of other nations would result in civilized Europe being torn apart, Czar Nicholas suspended an order for general mobilization, but eleventh-hour diplomacy failed.3 Austria kept bombarding; Nicholas took the crucial step of reinstating his order; France acquiesced in Russia’s mobilization; England waffled; and Germany, whose generals wanted as much time as possible to implement the revised Schlieffen Plan and invade neutral Belgium, threatened. Like gamblers guessing and bluffing in a game played for mortal stakes, European leaders spent late July frantically wondering who would be the first Great Power to withdraw, or the first to attack. War may have been inevitable, in their minds, but who would incur the blame of declaring it?
In Paris, the voice protesting most eloquently against the alliance that tied France to Russia’s foreign policy and made her a partner in the maneuvers of czarist government belonged to Jean Jaurès, leader of the French Socialist Party. From the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies, where he represented the Tarn region, and in the paper L’Humanité, which he had founded with Aristide Briand in 1904, Jaurès denounced revanchists, unreconstructed anti-Dreyfusards, and apostles of animal drive. On January 22, 1914, at a memorial service for his colleague Francis de Pressensé, he exhorted students in the audience to reject the preachers of “vitalism” and ignore the “reactionary dilettantes” who had made it their credo.
Today you are told: act, always act! But what is action without thought? It is the barbarism born of inertia. You are told: brush aside the party of peace; it saps your courage! But I tell you that to stand for peace today is to wage the most heroic of battles.… Defy those who warn you against what they call “system”! Defy those who urge you to abandon your intelligence for instinct and intuition!
An article Jaurès published in L’Humanité six months later sounded the keynote of innumerable speeches and essays: “If all of Europe does not understand that the true strength of States no longer resides in the pride of conquest and the brutality of oppression but in the respect for liberties, in the concern with justice and peace, the East of Europe will remain a slaughterhouse in which the blood of the butchered will mingle with that of their butchers.” By mid-July, when the SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International) held its annual congress, everyone with eyes to see knew that the whole continent might become that slaughterhouse. Jaurès argued zealously, and in vain, for a general strike. On July 25, the day Austria rejected Serbia’s reply to her ultimatum, he delivered his last speech on French soil, at a political rally near Lyon, incriminating French imperialism, Austria’s crude ambition, and Russia’s “devious policy.” Only the masses could save Europe from ruin. “Think of what it would mean for Europe.… What a massacre, what devastation, what barbarism! That is why I still fervently hope that we can prevent the catastrophe.”
Even after Germany issued a proclamation anticipating war (the Kriegsgefahr Zustand) on July 31, Jaurès continued to hope against hope that disaster could be averted. There was no more time for ponderation and rallies, but the leader, with his sights set on a full meeting of the International to be held in Paris on August 9, didn’t know it. On July 31, he primed himself to write a manifesto demanding once again France’s repudiation of her entente with Russia; denouncing the machinations of the czar’s ambassador, Alexander Izvolsky; and urging upon lackluster ministers a Franco-German rapprochement. He might have wanted to reiterate what his German colleague Hugo Haase had recently declared in Brussels:
The ultimatum sent to Servia must be regarded as a provocation to long-desired war. As you know, Servia’s answer was so conciliatory in tone that if Austria had had the honest desire peace could have been brought about. Austria wanted war. The most fearful thing about it all is that this criminal sport may deluge all Europe with blood.
Jean Jaurès, 1859–1914, leader of the French Socialist Party and cofounder of its daily newspaper L’Humanité. Clara Malraux, née Goldschmidt, was his neighbor in the early 1900s and wrote of him: “What did I know of this gentleman when, at the age of six, I was confronted with him, with his broad beard like dark parsley, with his arms and their sweeping gestures, and his close attention that was as if you were being given a present? I was struck by the fine ring of his voice, but hardly at all by his southern accent. He was short, rather thick-set, and both brisk and heavy at the same time” (Clara Malraux in Memoirs).
He would likely have written it had his hand not been stayed by Fate in the person of a twenty-nine-year-old drifter suffering from delusions of grandeur and crazed by the patriotic demonology of rabid nationalists. On Friday, July 31, as the last week of peace drew to a close, Jaurès sat down to dinner at a café near L’Humanité in Montmartre. Raoul Villain approached him from behind and blew his brains out. Jaurès was fifty-four.
Whereas Henriette Caillaux’s crime anesthetized the public, Villain’s shot woke them up.4 The war that ultimately left Europe in shambles came as a bolt from the blue to many people. Events may have overtaken everyone, including men in power, but it did not help that newspaper publishers who squeezed as much print as possible out of Henriette Caillaux had consigned diplomatic dispatches to relative obscurity. Midway through July, when the government issued orders for the recall of soldiers on leave, the press was strongly advised to keep mum. “Care must be taken to avoid being conspicuous about measures likely to alarm the public,” declared the minister of the interior. Fearful of pacifist rallies, the War Mini
stry made “silence and discretion” its watchwords.
The government was all too successful. Its strategy did more than disarm most pacifists. It gave wings to the myth that the Teuton was a predator with an insatiable appetite for French innocence. Suddenly set upon during her midsummer repose, France had done nothing to invite aggression, or to suggest that forty-three years of peace weighed heavily on her. This construction of events found almost immediate purchase in the national psyche. Surprise begot indignation, and indignation led to a wave of bellicose patriotism that swept through the country in the early days of August. Bishops, pastors, financiers, and factory workers all joined in the chorus of outraged virtue. “All civilized people will pay homage to the loyalty, to the dignity of our attitude,” declared the bishop of La Rochelle. A prefect reported that everyone in the region he administered, the Var, understood that “the conflict became inevitable despite France’s best efforts to promote peace.” The mayor of a small town, following his party’s line, assigned the principal cause of the conflict to “the criminal maneuvers of imperialism” but exonerated France, which had “sought to bring about a peaceful solution.” Departmental archives, from Savoie to the Charente, abound in irate commentary, often recorded by schoolteachers: “This Wilhelm, who has the gall to provoke all nations, must be a barbarian. He deserves to die”; “Germany has long been spoiling for war”; “War had to erupt, since Germany has wanted it forever and at all costs.” The racial cant of a Maurice Barrès or his friend Charles Maurras (leader of the royalist movement L’Action Française) was echoed at the village level in references to Germany as the “ancestral” enemy, the “hereditary” enemy, the “eternal” enemy.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 2