The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  Caillaux resolved to negotiate. As Germany’s price for ceding Morocco to France, Kiderlen demanded the whole French Congo. That was too much. Jungle or desert, no real interests were at stake in either place. Agadir was a crisis of prestige. Neither side could lose. Neither dared to win.

  Caillaux sounded France’s allies. Russia’s ambassador was the redoubtable Izvolski, last seen blundering into the Bosnian crisis of 1908 in pursuit of the Turkish Straits; he told Caillaux that Russia was not ready for war. Caillaux publicly insulted him at the Paris Opera, claiming that the single-minded diplomat asked for the Straits as “compensation” for Russian diplomatic support on Morocco!55

  The British were at first no firmer, Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, suggesting that perhaps Germany should keep Agadir. Caillaux was alarmed. If the British deserted their entente partners in the crisis, he let it be known, France might be compelled to make territorial sacrifices to Germany opposed to British interests. Finally, after waiting fruitlessly for weeks for the Wilhelmstrasse to say what it was up to in Morocco, Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer, reputed to belong to the pacifist wing of the Liberal cabinet, delivered a belligerent anti-German speech at Mansion House. As Churchill wrote his wife, “The Germans sent their Panther to Agadir and we sent our little Panther to the Mansion House.”56

  In a “stormy interview” the following day, the German ambassador branded Lloyd George’s speech provocative and warned Grey that if France did not offer compensation, “German dignity as a great power” would require it to secure “if necessary alone, full respect by France for German treaty rights.” Grey heard that assertion of German prestige as an ultimatum. Shortly, panic gripped Whitehall when the admiralty lost track of the German fleet. Grey had the Royal Navy move to “high readiness,” an unprecedented militarization of a diplomatic conflict, heightening the risk of inadvertent war. This “naval alert” prompted Germany to increase the size of its fully manned battle fleet from two to three squadrons and Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, to respond by redeploying British warships from the Mediterranean to home waters as part of an agreement with France that, as we saw earlier, morally bound Britain to defend France’s Atlantic coasts from German attack. Thus did the jockeying for prestige in Africa raise the odds of war in Europe.57

  As tensions peaked, Caillaux found a path to settlement. It led through back-channel negotiations with the German embassy in Paris from which he excluded de Selves and the Quai d’Orsay. The German ambassador, Wilhelm von Schoen, cabled Berlin that Caillaux “would rather make a large-scale settlement of all the differences that have arisen between us in recent years. Such a settlement would help him justify before the public the cession of colonial territories.” Schoen included a list of potential concessions to Germany selected from France’s world portfolio, including the irresistible “possibility of ceding French possessions in Oceania.” The cable concluded, “[Caillaux] asks us urgently not to let Cambon know about his offers.”58

  The next morning de Selves presented Caillaux with a deciphered version of the telegram—the French had cracked the German diplomatic code. Caillaux laughed off the bit about not telling Cambon, suspecting that Schoen put this invention into the cable to test the code’s integrity. A rift between Caillaux and Cambon might have betrayed a breach in security. Taking no chances, Caillaux dispatched a messenger to Cambon in Berlin to report on his back-channel talks.59

  The French also gained an edge by reading Kiderlen’s letters to his mistress, a Russian baroness living in France. They recorded his disgust with “the two old women,” Bethmann and Kaiser Wilhelm, who flatly told Kiderlen that Germany would not go to war over Morocco. Knowing this, Caillaux could safely resist Kiderlen’s maximal demands.60

  But the kaiser could not long be expected to remain in the posture of an old woman. In August, a misunderstanding set him off. To his intermediary with the German embassy, the financier Hyacinthe Fondere, Caillaux remarked in passing that unless progress was made on an agreement it would be hard for him to restrain hotheads like de Selves, who was advocating sending French warships to Agadir. When Fondere repeated this at the German embassy, Berlin heard it as a threat from Caillaux. Wilhelm reacted in character, personalizing a matter of state. In the margin of Kiderlen’s report to him, he demanded that “the intermediary is to go at once to see M. Caillaux and to let him know that he is to apologize for having treated Me insolently, otherwise I break off negotiations!” When, next day, no apology had arrived, he wired Kiderlen to demand “the reparation d’honneur due to Us.” If Caillaux had not promptly assured Schoen that “he had not the slightest desire for this remark to be passed on to the German embassy,” the crisis might have escalated, for in his wrath the kaiser had requested “proposals for expediting a naval concentration” off Morocco to counter the imaginary French ships.61

  The breakthrough came in late September: “In return for a little over one quarter of the Congo … Germany recognized the equivalent of a French protectorate in Morocco.” The 120,000 square miles of “primeval forest” gained by Germany was at best a place in the shade. There was no wider rapprochement. The Pan-German League decried the agreement as a “a Jena without war.” Germany’s colonial minister resigned. Kiderlen needed a solatium from his baroness.62

  “Caillaux had won the game,” concluded the diplomatic historian C. P. Gooch. Making a cryptic comparison to Disraeli at the Congress of Berlin, Prime Minister Asquith instructed his ambassador in Paris to “tell Mr. Caillaux he comes back from Berlin like Lord Beaconsfield bearing on his flag, ‘Peace with honour!’ ” Violating an international treaty and a separate bilateral agreement with Germany, France had ginned up a crisis at Fez to justify sending an army there to fasten a protectorate on the sultan. Caillaux inherited the angry German reaction and got France off the hook without war and without serious loss of face or territory. Yet Germany had got something out of the negotiations: Caillaux understood that France could not avoid war if he refused to deal, and the sacrifice of even a fly-infested jungle to the occupiers of Alsace-Lorraine affronted nationalist opinion. Gaston Calmette’s calumnies of 1914 were recycled from 1911, when even the sober Journal des Débats blamed “Caillaux’s secret negotiations … for the dismemberment of the French empire in Africa.” The sardonic observation of a Caillaux biographer captures the dynamic of Hun bashing: “Politics in France is largely a matter of competitive patriotism; in a crisis a Frenchman who hates Germans unreasonably can make one who hates them reasonably look like a traitor.”63

  Nevertheless, Caillaux might have held on if he had not been caught out in a lie by Clemenceau. The “Cabinet-breaker,” the Times reported, “knew the time had come to strike, and when he struck the blow was deadly.”64

  The Chamber of Deputies adopted the treaty solemnizing the agreement on December 21. The vote was 393–36, with a fourth of the deputies abstaining. On January 10, the Senate held a hearing on the treaty. Caillaux and de Selves were on hand to answer questions. “Spying Clemenceau, Poincaré, and Stephen Pinchon giggling in a corner of the hearing room, Caillaux had a fit of bravado.” On his “word of honor” he denied pursuing “unofficial negotiations” with the German embassy. At this the tiger pounced.

  Clemenceau as “The Tiger”

  CLEMENCEAU: Perhaps the Minister of Foreign Affairs has something to say on the subject.

  M. DE SELVES remained silent.

  CLEMENCEAU: But, Monsieur le Ministre you have something to say.

  M. DE SELVES: I have always been inspired by regard for truth and for the superior interests of our country.

  CLEMENCEAU: Were you and M. Cambon kept informed on all the negotiations between Paris and Berlin?

  M. DE SELVES: I cannot answer that question.

  CLEMENCEAU: You may give that negative answer to any one you like …, but you cannot give it to me.

  CAILLAUX (interjecting): I maintain my declaration. [Clemenceau replied that he had not addressed his question to
the prime minister but to the foreign minister.]

  M. DE SELVES: I cannot reply, because I stand between two duties—the duty of telling the truth and the duty of maintaining the solidarity of the Ministry.

  CLEMENCEAU: You may say this to anyone else, but not to me. (Lowering his incongruously squeaky voice): Because you have told me the contrary.

  The room erupted; the hearing was adjourned. Within hours, de Selves resigned. The next day, unable to form a cabinet, Caillaux joined him. The Journal des Débats, which had been attacking Caillaux since September over his domestic reform program, saw him out with this: “We can understand the regret manifested this morning by Berlin and Vienna journals at the news of the fall of their great French Minister. For France his fall is the end of a nightmare.”65

  “I broke with my generation [in 1912], or rather it broke with me,” Caillaux wrote in his memoirs. By generation, he meant “his political and social class.” His class gravitated toward the Republican and Democratic Alliance (ARD), a Right-Center formation that in a society in which the number of strikes had tripled between 1901 and 1911 stood for a business nirvana: “The tranquil possession of this day’s profit and of that of the day before.” The Alliance opposed strikes, social spending, antitrust legislation, and the graduated income tax. Claims to be above party politics—to represent the “national interest”—disguised its class program. Its leading spokesman, Raymond Poincaré, advocated “nationalism”—“an anxiety for French unity and power and preparedness” seen by some historians as a political tactic, a way to “obliterate internal differences” and cover over existing social arrangements with a haze of consensus.* Postwar Fascism exploited fear of revolution to gain power; prewar conservatism exploited fear of war to retain it.66

  Caillaux’s income tax crusade, his moderate social reformism, found few followers in Poincaré’s Alliance, which frustrated his domestic program during his brief premiership. Whether he broke with his party or his party with him, before being tripped up by Clemenceau, he was moving Left, toward forming a new governing majority with the Radicals and the Socialists.67

  Caillaux adumbrated his break with Poincarisme in a January 1911 speech in Lille. “One of the dangers of the present time is this renewal of the old Conservative harping on the theme of the unity of all Frenchmen,” he declared, alluding to a staple of nationalist apologetics during the Dreyfus Affair. “I am well aware that the privileged few are readily satisfied with the harmony of a universally accepted status quo … These people … derive pleasure from their dreams of blending and absorbing all the citizens of France in a single immense Party … If political parties were to be broken up … the organized force of established interests would be the only politically effective power in the confusion that would inevitably result.” And these established interests “would be sufficiently powerful to obstruct democratic reforms right up to the day on which violent uprisings would break out.”68

  That is the voice of American Progressivism, of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and of British Liberals like Lloyd George. Adjusted to national tonality, it is also the voice of Peter Stolypin and Vladimir Kokovtsov in Russia, Francisco Madero in Mexico, and the Social Democrats in Germany. In Europe and the Americas, democratic reformism was emerging as an alternative to a market society organized for “the tranquil possession of this day’s profit.” A “swing to the left” was evident in elections in Germany, Austria, and the United States, while in Britain the Liberals and their allies held on against an extra-Parliamentary assault from Unionist radicalism.

  At the same time, the ascendant aristocratic classes used their political power in the state to resist changes to the status quo. As a result, just as Caillaux warned at Lille, “all the countries of Europe stood on the edge of civil strife.”69

  In France, Joseph Caillaux, his evolution from a vice president of the Alliance to leader of the Radical Party complete, was at one with this progressive moment. He had risen from the political grave of January 1912, making himself over into what his rival Aristide Briand called a “demagogic plutocrat.” In the April 1914 elections he would go to the country with a bold program: “It included stronger government control over religious private schools, social reform enacted with the Socialists, a peace initiative to Germany, the introduction of a progressive income tax, a return to two years military service … and making the presidency of France as unpolitical as [President] Poincaré claimed it should be—by removing Poincaré from office.”70

  The spring elections of 1914 would test the strength of the Radical-Socialist alliance. But unaffiliated voters in the broad middle of the electorate, fluid in their views and partisan loyalties, were swinging Left and Right, torn between toward “patriotic pacifism” and moderate nationalism, Joseph Caillaux and Raymond Poincaré.

  “If looking for any one date from which to count the birth of nationalism as a widespread chauvinistic feeling,” Eugen Weber writes, “I would pick the fourth of November, 1911, the date of the signing of the Franco-German agreement on Morocco.” “Widespread” is misleading. “The German fife has rallied France,” the ARD deputy Paul Deschanel asserted, but the sound did not carry beyond a “politically significant minority” that spanned the political classes—officials, deputies, and Paris journalists of the right and center-right. For these roughly twenty to thirty thousand people, Agadir was a fire bell in the night. Declared a senator submitting the agreement for ratification: “We negotiated under the cannon of Agadir … and a French government accepted this, forty years after the Defeat … It is the counterpart of Fashoda!” A provincial paper noted sadly that the “cession of territory in the Congo … recalls the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the hearts of Frenchmen.” In this nationalist mood the French made Raymond Poincaré the first premier from one of the lost provinces.71

  During the Franco-Prussian War, Poincaré’s family took temporary refuge in the French interior. When Raymond returned to his Lorraine home in Bar-le-Duc, a Prussian officer was occupying his bedroom. “Disgusting soldiers are in the house,” the fourteen-year-old confided to his diary. “One paints a skull and crossbones on our sideboard, the other spits in our stew.” In a 1920 article in the University of Paris Review Poincaré recalled that “in all my years in school … I saw no other reason to live than the possibility of recovering our Lost Provinces.”72

  In a January 1912 interview, soon after replacing Caillaux as premier, he signaled a tough new tone in France’s relations with Germany: “Every time we have desired to show ourselves conciliatory toward Germany she has abused our good will; and on the other hand, every time that we have showed ourselves firm toward her, she has given way.” But what if Germany did not give way? That was the risk inherent in taking a firm line, and in an October speech in Nantes, Poincaré named it when he said the French were a people “which does not desire war but which nevertheless does not fear it.”73

  Raymond Poincaré. Leading American historians of the 1920s placed heavy blame for the war on Poincaré, French president from 1913 to 1920. His secret diplomacy encouraged Russia to be reckless—that was their line. Contemporary scholars, while fairer, have not completely abandoned it.

  Put nation before self, Poincaré adjured his countrymen: “We should undertake a crusade in this troubled and disoriented country—to remind it that a great nation has reasons for existence other than material interests.

  He established a national holiday honoring the symbol of French patriotism, Joan of Arc, and revived the retraités militaires, a weekly parade of troops through the streets of Paris, prohibited since the Dreyfus Affair. Poincaré’s call for a “national renaissance” commanded the admiration of leaders of metropolitan opinion like the editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette. The day after his murder, writing in his diary, Poincaré recalled Calmette’s fulsome praise: “I don’t have the right to forget [that] he was for me … before and after the pre-election last summer. Dining at the Elysee, he spoke to me with a sort of religious fervor. I had li
fted the prestige of France, I was necessary for the country; he should watch over me, care for me, keep me … Who knows? Perhaps he thought he was doing a service for me [in attacking Joseph Caillaux] and defending me against the enemy.”74

  The election was the close January 17, 1913, vote in the Chamber that elevated Poincaré to the presidency. “The fog is dissipating,” Calmette wrote when the outcome hung in the balance. “It is certain that M. Raymond Poincaré would be President of the Republic tomorrow if the country were consulted.”75

  Gaston Calmette’s ardor for Poincarisme was sincere; it was also inspired by bribes. Rumored at the time, Russian subsidies to the Paris press were revealed in the 1920s by L’Humanité, the journal of the French Communist party, the Bolsheviks having supplied the editors with the tsarist documents. By 1912, the subsidies, administered by the French finance minister, M. Klotz, totaled more than two million francs a year. For this sum, Russia got favorable publicity for its railroad loan requests, for the presidential candidacy of Raymond Poincaré, and for his pro-Russian policies as premier and president.76

  Always awkward, the Republic’s alliance with tsarist autocracy became so close under Poincaré that a Toulouse paper could plausibly ask: “Is France Republican or Cossack?” After Russia signaled that it would not go to war over Agadir, Poincaré grew concerned that it might not fight for France under any circumstances. To prime Russia to honor its treaty commitments, he “implicitly” indicated to St. Petersburg that France would go beyond its own commitments. If, because of threats to Serbia, Russia were forced to attack Austria and Germany intervened to support her ally, France would stand by her ally. When Jean Jaurès, the great Socialist leader, called Poincaré “more Russian than Russia,” he spoke truer than he knew.77