Abstract
In the debate on the origins of the First World War, France has been more distinguished by its absence than its presence. Extraordinarily, no significant work on France’s entry to the war at the political level (putting to one side Jean-Jacques Becker’s groundbreaking study of French popular reactions) has appeared in French since 1945. The great doyen of French historians of the war, himself a mutilé de guerre, Pierre Renouvin, wrote a great deal about French foreign policy in the era of 1914–18, but – as Stefan Schmidt makes clear – he did not dwell on the crisis of July 1914 itself. This, Schmidt suggests, is because he knew more than he was letting on.
The recent major contributions have been written in English, by Mark Hayne on the French foreign office, and especially by John Keiger, the biographer of Poincaré. They have followed Renouvin in putting the French president at the centre of French foreign policy in 1914. Poincaré overshadowed the prime minister, René Viviani, and argued that a strong alliance structure, with France and the Triple Entente holding its unity against the provocations of the Triple Alliance, could keep the peace. Schmidt’s work does not dissent from this interpretation, but he argues that the president was not just calling for restraint during the July crisis. Poincaré reckoned that, if war broke out in the Balkans, it was not in France’s interest for it to be limited, and that by late July what dominated his thinking was not how to preserve the peace but how to fight the war on the best possible terms. Schmidt argues that in 1914 the alliance structure looked more volatile than the stable, Cold War-like international system portrayed by Keiger. The rise of Russia, however universally exaggerated by all European observers, ought to have been good news for France. But it created long-term worries. Saddled with an ally, Austria-Hungary, whose power seemed to be in retreat, Germany – or so France feared – would itself confront relative decline. So it might seek an alliance with Russia itself. Both after all were monarchical powers, whereas France was not. These fears were allayed by the Liman von Sanders affair in January 1914, but that in turn meant that for the moment France found itself in a more favourable position to fight a war, if war were to come.
For Schmidt this is the heart of the problem. France’s policy in July 1914 was to preserve the peace, but it was also to position itself so that, if war broke out, France could win. It meant that France could not afford to allow Austria-Hungary to achieve a local success against Serbia, both because that would swing the balance of power back towards the Triple Alliance, and because it would increase the likelihood that Russia would commit its troops to its south-western front at the expense of its front with Germany. Schmidt stresses that in 1912 Poincaré widened the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance to the point where, if a general war followed an Austro-Serb war, Russia could rely on France’s full support.
One of the attractions of a war opened on such terms would be that Austro-Hungarian forces would be committed in the Balkans, and so Russia would be freer to concentrate its forces against Germany. Schmidt highlights the political pressures created by the needs of the French army’s war plans. His image of Plan 17 owes little to the argument of Henry Contamine that this was a deployment plan more than a commitment to the offensive. Instead he argues that in 1911 the French army favoured an offensive into Belgium as most likely to bring rapid operational success, because the alternative, Alsace-Lorraine, was both too well fortified and too geographically contained. So the army needed the Russian army to proceed to a rapid and general mobilization against Germany, and it wanted Britain to make a firm commitment to France, not for its military contribution but so that France could infringe Belgian neutrality. Schmidt sees these as the key French considerations in the last week of July.
For most commentators the big unresolved issue is what was agreed when Poincaré and Viviani visited Russia on 20–23 July. Schmidt does not come up with startling new revelations about who knew what when, but argues that both powers were aware that war was likely, in particular because Germany was not restraining Austria-Hungary, and that both were resolved on the need to defend Serb sovereignty. Poincaré repeatedly stressed the need for firmness in dealing with Germany, not least in order to call its bluff, but when he boarded the France for the journey home it was Maurice Paléologue who spoke for France in Russia. Schmidt exculpates the French ambassador of the worst of the charges brought against him, that he egged both powers on to war, arguing that at this late stage Paléologue said and did no more than Poincaré himself would have done.
Schmidt trails his coat in suggesting the army had more influence in the making of French foreign policy than might be seen to be compatible with the ideals of the Republic. On 30 July de Castelnau, the deputy chief of the general staff, wrote to his son that ‘from the strategic point of view, we shall never find ourselves in a better position’ (p. 209). Having flirted with the notion of a French preventive war, Schmidt pulls back. Nonetheless, no scholar since Jules Isaac in 1933 has put France so centre stage in the July crisis, and nobody has shown how thoroughly one power in particular had thought through the implications of the probable course of events in what can too easily be seen as a chaotic stampede to war. For all the recurrent political crises of the Third Republic, the France that emerges from Schmidt’s careful and thorough exposition is a country clear about where it was going.