On 6 July 1914, the 26-year-old French diplomat Louis de Robien left Paris for St Petersburg, where he had been appointed attaché at the French embassy. The date of his departure had been pulled forward so that he would arrive in good time to help with the preparations for the state visit by President Poincaré, which was scheduled for 20 July. To gain time, de Robien did not take the Nord Express, which did not leave every day, but boarded an ordinary sleeping car in the fast train to Cologne. There was time to look briefly at the Rhine and the great Gothic cathedral before the connecting train crossed the industrial region of the Ruhr, ‘always so impressive and not without a certain beauty’. From there the train made its way eastwards, traversing Germany at its widest point, until it reached Wirballen (today the Lithuanian town of Kybartai) on the eastern border of East Prussia. Here, much to his annoyance, de Robien had to leave his comfortable German sleeping car and change trains because of the difference between the Russian and European gauges. His first encounter with the locals on the far side of the border made a lasting impression: as soon as the train had stopped, the carriages were invaded by a ‘horde of bearded persons’ wearing boots and white aprons who took charge of his baggage with such haste that he was unable to follow them. De Robien and his fellow passengers were channelled towards a barricade before which stood ‘soldiers with great sabres’. Here their passports were verified, a procedure that astonished de Robien, because ‘in that era of liberty, one travelled everywhere in Europe except for Russia without carrying a passport’. After presenting his travel documents, de Robien waited in a vast room in whose corners were icons, lit by stands of burning candles, a ‘strange accoutrement’, he felt, for what was effectively a waiting room. At last the formalities were complete and the train passed through a countryside ‘of terrible sadness’ studded with villages over which loomed the onion domes of churches. He tried to speak with some officers, who appeared to be engineers, but they spoke only a few words of German. ‘We felt,’ he recalled, ‘as if we were in China.’1
His arrival in St Petersburg, where he would spend the war years and live through the cataclysm of two revolutions, did nothing to dispel the sense of strangeness. On the contrary, it merely ‘completed our disappointment’. The Russian capital was full of ‘horrible little carriages, long, poorly maintained roads, and bearded, exotic-looking coachmen’. He initially booked in at the Hotel France, where the rooms were large but the furniture so ugly and the ambience so comfortless and ‘different from what we were used to in Europe’ that he decided to cancel his reservation and move instead to the Hotel d’Europe on the ‘famous Nevsky Prospekt’. But even the Hotel d’Europe was not especially European and the shops along the great riverside avenue were disappointing – the best of them, the Parisian nobleman wrote, were reminiscent of a French provincial town.2
Getting about was difficult, because scarcely any passers-by could understand him, which was a shock, since his colleagues in Paris had assured him that the French language would be familiar to everybody. The food and drink of the city brought little comfort to the fastidious count: Russian cuisine, he reported, was awful, especially the fish soups, which were ‘detestable’; only borshch struck him as ‘a recipe worth keeping on the menu’. As for ‘their vodka’, drunk at one draught, it was ‘unworthy of a civilized palate educated to the slow enjoyment of our cognacs, our armagnacs, our marcs and our kirsch’.3
Having found his bearings in the city, de Robien made his way to his new place of work. There was some consolation in the fact that the French embassy, housed in a fine palace that had belonged to the Dolgoruki family, was situated at one of the most beautiful points along the banks of the Neva. De Robien was especially impressed by the footmen in their blue livery and short breeches. On the ground floor looking out over the river could be found the ambassador’s office, decorated with tapestries and paintings by Van der Meulen. Next door was a smaller room where the telephone was kept – it was here that the embassy staff gathered each afternoon for the ritual taking of tea. Next to this room was the office of the counsellor M. Doulcet, whose walls were decorated with portraits of all the ambassadors of France to the court of Russia. At the back, behind an office crowded with secretaries and archival files, was a door opening on to the embassy strongroom, where secret documents and the transmissions code were stored. The pride of the embassy was the reception room on the first floor, a fine boudoir with walls of green and gold damask hung with paintings by Guardi belonging to the ambassador, and gilt armchairs that were supposed to have furnished the rooms of Marie Antoinette.4
De Robien already knew Ambassador Maurice Paléologue, a larger-than-life figure who had been in post since January and would dominate the life of the embassy until his departure three years later. Photographs from 1914 show a dapper man of medium height with a shaven head and ‘very brilliant eyes deeply lodged within their sockets’. Paléologue was a ‘romancer, rather than a diplomat’, de Robien recalled. He viewed all events from their dramatic and literary angle. ‘Whenever he recounted an event or sought to retrace a conversation, he recreated them almost entirely in his imagination, endowing them with more vividness than truth.’ Paléologue was extremely proud of his name, which he claimed (speciously) to have inherited from the emperors of ancient Byzantium. He compensated for his ‘exotic’ ancestry (his father was a Greek political refugee and his mother a Belgian musician) with a passionate and demonstrative patriotism and a desire to project himself as the embodiment of French refinement and cultural superiority.
Once installed in St Petersburg, Paléologue, who had never held such a senior post before, soon filled out the dimensions of his new office. De Robien observed the ways in which the ambassador would make his importance felt to the representatives of ‘lesser’ countries: when the secretary announced the arrival of the Belgian envoy Buisseret or his Dutch colleague Sweerts, it was Paléologue’s habit to go out by the back door for a walk, in order to greet them in the anteroom an hour later with arms opened, saying ‘My dear fellow, I’ve had so much on today . . .’ He displayed a taste for extravagance and ostentation that was exceptional, even in the world of the senior ambassadors. Much was made in St Petersburg society of the fact that embassy dinners were prepared by the chef Paléologue had brought with him from Paris. De Robien put all this down to Paléologue’s ‘oriental’ ancestry, adding archly that, as with many parvenus, Paléologue’s love of magnificence had something affected and unnatural about it.5
Paléologue had a horror of the kind of detailed dispatches that were the bread and butter of workaday diplomacy, preferring to shape his impressions into lively scenes invigorated by dialogues in which catchy phrases replaced the long and often ambiguous verbal circumlocutions that were the day-to-day traffic of diplomats working in Russia. De Robien recalled one particular day on which the ambassador was scheduled to be received in audience by the Tsar for a conversation on an important military matter. Paléologue wished the dispatch to be sent as soon as he returned to the embassy, so that it would reach Paris at the time when it would ‘have the greatest effect’. In order to achieve this he composed the account of his meeting before he had even left the embassy to see the Russian sovereign. De Robien and his colleagues got busy encoding the detailed narative of a conversation that had never taken place. Amid all the faux-reportage, the count remembered one highly characteristic Paléologian phrase: ‘At this point, the interview reached a crucial turning point and the Emperor offered me a cigarette.’6
De Robien’s comments on the ambassador, though hostile, were probably fair. Paléologue was one of the most iridescent personalities to hold ambassadorial office in the French service. For many years he had languished in the Parisian Centrale, condemned to tedious copying tasks. Later he was placed in charge of keeping the secret files, especially those relating to the Franco-Russian Alliance and liaison between foreign ministry and army intelligence services, work that he relished. His long years as the custodian of the ministry’s accumulated understanding of the alliance and of the military threats facing it – he had access, for example, to French intelligence on Germany’s two-pronged mobilization plan – imbued him with a view of French foreign relations that was tightly focused on the German threat and the paramount importance of allied cohesion.7 His historical writings convey a romantic conception of the great man as one who gives himself to moments of world-historical decision:
In certain cases [Paléologue wrote in his biography of Count Cavour], the wise man leaves much to chance; reason prompts him to follow blindly after impulses or instincts beyond reason, that seem to be heaven-sent. No man can say when these should be dared or when deserted; nor book, nor rules, nor experience can teach him; a certain sense and a certain daring alone can inform him.8
Paléologue’s pronounced and unwavering Germanophobia was coupled with a taste for catastrophic scenarios that many colleagues recognized as dangerous. During his stint in Sofia (1907–12), one of the few foreign posts he held before accepting the mission to St Petersburg, a colleague there reported that Paléologue’s dispatches and conversation alike were full of wild talk of ‘horizons, of clouds and menacing storms’. Indeed it is hard to find any contemporary comment on the future ambassador that unequivocally praises him. There were simply too many bad reports, one senior foreign office functionary observed in May 1914, for there to be any question of ‘confidence’ in the new ambassador.9 Izvolsky characterized him as a ‘phrase-maker, a fantasist and very smooth’. Even his British colleagues in Sofia described Paléologue in 1912 as ‘excitable’, ‘inclined to spread sensational and alarmist rumours’ and a ‘trafficker in tall tales’.10
Paléologue’s appointment to the St Petersburg embassy, the most strategically sensitive and important posting in French diplomacy, might thus seem rather remarkable. He owed his rise through the service more to the prevalent political alignment than to the usual array of professional qualifications. Delcassé discovered Paléologue and energetically promoted him, mainly because they shared the same views on the German threat to France – in Paléologue, Delcassé found a subordinate who could echo and reinforce his own ideas. Paléologue’s star waned after Delcassé’s fall in 1905 and he wound up making do with various minor posts. It was Poincaré who rescued him; the two men had been intimate since the days when they were both pupils at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. Paléologue’s ‘great gift’, de Robien unkindly remarked, consisted in having been one of Poincaré’s and Millerand’s classmates at high school – ‘it was to their friendship that he owed his astonishing career’.11 As prime minister, Poincaré recalled Paléologue from Sofia in 1912 and appointed him political director at the Quai. This dramatic promotion – an amazing leap in seniority for such a quirky and controversial man – shocked many of the veteran ambassadors. The French ambassador to Madrid commented to Bertie that Paléologue was ‘not of the right stuff for the directorship’, while the French ambassador to Japan described him as a ‘lamentable choice’.12 These were strong words, even by the standards of the diplomatic service, where the upwardly mobile often attract envious sniping. ‘We must hope,’ Eyre Crowe noted in London, ‘that the atmosphere of Paris will have a sedative effect on M. Paléologue, but this is not usually the effect of Paris’.13
Poincaré was aware of Paléologue’s reputation and did what he could to curb his excesses, but the two friends entered into a close working relationship based on a profound agreement on all key questions. Poincaré came to depend on Paléologue’s judgement.14 Indeed, it was Paléologue who encouraged Poincaré to commit France more firmly in the Balkans. Paléologue did not believe that a reconciliation between Austrian and Russian interests in the region would be possible and his obsession with the nefarious designs of Berlin and Vienna made him blind to the machinations of Russian policy. He saw in the two Balkan Wars an opportunity for Russia to consolidate its position on the peninsula.15 The close link with Poincaré was one reason why Sazonov, although he knew of Paléologue’s idiosyncrasies, welcomed the new ambassador’s appointment to St Petersburg.16 Here was a man who could be trusted to take up in January 1914 where Delcassé had left off. In a conversation with a Russian diplomat who happened to be passing through Paris, Paléologue declared on the eve of his departure that he was taking the St Petersburg post so that he could put an end to the policy of concessions that had hitherto prevailed, and that ‘he would fight for a future hardline policy without compromise or vacillation’. ‘Enough of all this, we should show Germany our strength!’17 These were the convictions, attitudes and relationships that would guide the new ambassador during the summer crisis of 1914.
At 11.30 p.m. on Wednesday 15 July, the presidential train left the Gare du Nord in Paris for Dunkirk. On board were Raymond Poincaré, the new prime minister René Viviani and Paléologue’s successor as political director at the Quai d’Orsay, Pierre de Margerie. Early the following morning, the three men joined the battleship France for the journey through the Baltic to Kronstadt and St Petersburg. Viviani was new in post – the former socialist had been prime minister for only four weeks and had no experience or knowledge whatsoever of external affairs. His principal utility to Poincaré consisted in the fact that he had recently converted to the cause of the Three Year Law, commanded a sizeable following in the chamber and was prepared to support Poincaré’s views on defence. As the state visit to Russia unfolded, it would quickly become apparent that he was politically out of his depth. Pierre de Margerie, by contrast, was an experienced career diplomat who had been brought to Paris by Poincaré in the spring of 1912, at the age of fifty-one, to occupy the post of associate director at the Quai d’Orsay. Poincaré had created this watchdog post in the hope that de Margerie would keep an eye on Paléologue and check any major indiscretions. As it happened, this proved unnecessary. Paléologue performed to Poincaré’s satisfaction, and when his reward came in the form of the posting to St Petersburg, de Margerie succeeded to the political directorship. In this role he proved himself efficient and – most importantly of all in the president’s eyes – politically loyal.18 Neither Viviani nor de Margerie was capable of mounting an effective challenge to the president’s control over policy.
Poincaré had much to think about as he boarded the France at Dunkirk at 5.00 a.m. on 16 July. First there was Charles Humbert’s sensational indictment of the French military administration. In a speech before the Senate of 13 July to mark the submission of his report on the special budgetary vote for army matériel, Humbert, senator for the Meuse (a department on the border with Belgium), had delivered a swingeing attack on the French military administration. French forts, he claimed, were of poor quality, fortress guns lacked ammunition and the wireless installations for fort-to-fort communications were faulty. Whenever the German wireless installation at Metz was transmitting, Humbert claimed, the station at Verdun went on the blink. French artillery was quantatively inferior to the German, especially in heavy guns. One detail above all caught the attention of the French public, and particularly of the nation’s mothers: the army was woefully short of boots; if war broke out, Humbert declared, French soldiers would have to take to the field with only one pair of boots, plus a single thirty-year-old reserve boot in their knapsacks. The speech triggered a political sensation. In his reply, Minister of War Adolphe Messimy did not deny the substance of the charges, but insisted that rapid progress was being made on all fronts.19 The deficiencies in artillery provision would be made good by 1917.
This was all the more annoying for the fact that the man at the forefront of the resulting parliamentary agitation was Poincaré’s old enemy Georges Clemenceau, who was claiming that the incompetence revealed in the report justified withholding parliamentary support for the new military budget. It had only just been possible to resolve the issue and pass the new military budget in time to avoid a postponement of the president’s departure. On the day they left for Dunkirk, Viviani seemed nervous and preoccupied by the thought of intrigues and conspiracies, despite Poincaré’s efforts to calm him.20
As if this were not enough, Madame Caillaux’s trial was due to open on 20 July and there was reason to fear that exposures and revelations in court might trigger a chain of scandals that would shake the government. The scope of the threat became apparent when rumours circulated that the murdered newspaper editor Calmette had also had in his possession deciphered German telegrams revealing the extent of Caillaux’s negotiations with Germany during the Agadir crisis in 1911. In these communications – according to the telegrams, at least – Caillaux had spoken of the desirability of a rapprochement with Berlin. Caillaux also claimed to possess affidavits proving that Poincaré had orchestrated the campaign against him. On 11 July, three days before the president’s departure for Russia, Caillaux threatened to make these known to the public if Poincaré did not press for the acquittal of his wife.21 The occult machines of Parisian political intrigue were still turning at full throttle.
Despite these concerns, Poincaré embarked on his journey across the Baltic Sea in a surprisingly calm and resolved mood. It must have been a huge relief to escape Paris at a time when the Caillaux trial had thrown the newspapers into a frenzy. He spent much of the first three days of the crossing on the deck of the France briefing Viviani, whose ignorance of foreign policy he found ‘shocking’, for the mission in St Petersburg.22 His summary of these tutorials, which gives us a clear sense of Poincaré’s own thinking as he left Paris, included ‘details on the alliance’, an overview of ‘the various subjects raised in St Petersburg in 1912’, ‘the military conventions of France and Russia’, Russia’s approach to England regarding a naval convention and ‘relations with Germany’. ‘I have never had difficulties with Germany,’ Poincaré declared, ‘because I have always treated her with great firmness.’23 The ‘subjects raised in St Petersburg in 1912’ included the reinforcement of strategic railways, the importance of massive offensive strikes from the Polish salient and the need to focus on Germany as the principal adversary. And the reference to England is an indication that Poincaré was thinking in terms not just of the alliance with Russia, but of the embryonic Triple Entente. Here in a nutshell was Poincaré’s security credo: the alliance is our bedrock; it is the indispensable key to our military defence; it can only be maintained by intransigence in the face of demands from the opposing bloc. These were the axioms that would frame his interpretation of the crisis unfolding in the Balkans.
To judge from the diary entries, Poincaré found the days at sea profoundly relaxing. While Viviani fretted over the news of Parisian scandal and intrigue arriving in fragments via the radio-telegraph from Paris, Poincaré enjoyed the warm air on deck and the play of the sunshine on a blue sea brushed by ‘imperceptible waves’. There was just one small hitch: while approaching the harbour at Kronstadt, the France, steaming along at 15 knots in the early morning darkness of 20 July, managed to ram a Russian tugboat towing a frigate towards its berth. The incident woke Poincaré in his cabin. How vexing that a French warship sailing in neutral waters under the command of an admiral of the fleet should have struck and damaged a tugboat of the allied nation. It was, he noted irritably in the diary, ‘a gesture lacking in dexterity and elegance’.
The president’s good cheer was restored by the brilliant scene that greeted the France as it sailed into Kronstadt harbour. From all directions, naval vessels and festively decorated packet and pleasure boats motored out to welcome the visitors and the imperial launch pulled alongside to transfer Poincaré to the Tsar’s yacht Alexandria. ‘I leave the France,’ Poincaré noted, ‘with the emotion that always overcomes me when, to the noise of cannonfire, I leave one of our warships.’24 Across the water, standing beside the Tsar on the bridge of the Alexandria, where he had an excellent view of the entire scene, Maurice Paléologue was already mentally composing a paragraph for his memoirs:
It was a magnificent spectacle. In a quivering, silvery light, the France slowly surged forward over the turquoise and emerald waves, leaving a long white furrow behind her. Then she stopped majestically. The mighty warship which has brought the head of the French state is well worthy of her name. She was indeed France coming to Russia. I felt my heart beating.25
The minutes of the summit meetings that took place over the next three days have not survived. In the 1930s, the editors of the Documents Diplomatiques Français searched for them in vain.26 And the Russian records of the meetings, less surprisingly perhaps, given the disruptions to archival continuity during the years of war and civil war, have also been lost. Nevertheless, it is possible by reading the accounts in Poincaré’s diaries alongside the memoirs of Paléologue and the notes kept by other diplomats present during those fateful days, to get a fairly clear sense of what transpired.
The meetings were centrally concerned with the crisis unfolding in Central Europe. It is important to emphasize this, because it has often been suggested that as this was a long-planned state visit rather than an exercise in crisis summitry, the matters discussed must have followed a pre-planned agenda in which the Serbian question occupied a subordinate place. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Even before Poincaré had left the France, the Tsar was already telling the ambassador how much he was looking forward to his meeting with the president of the Republic: ‘We shall have weighty matters to discuss. I am sure we shall agree on all points . . . But there is one question which is very much in my mind – our understanding with England. We must get her to come into our alliance.’27
As soon as the formalities were done with, the Tsar and his guest made their way to the stern of the Alexandria, and entered into conversation. ‘Or perhaps I should say a discussion,’ wrote Paléologue, ‘for it was obvious that they were talking business, firing questions at each other and arguing.’ It seemed to the ambassador that Poincaré was dominating the conversation; soon he was doing ‘all the talking, while the Tsar simply nodded acquiescence, but [the Tsar’s] whole appearance showed his sincere approval’.28 According to Poincaré’s diary, the conversation in the yacht touched first on the alliance, of which the Tsar spoke ‘with great firmness’. The Tsar asked him about the Humbert scandal, which he said had made a very bad impression in Russia, and he urged Poincaré to do whatever was necessary to prevent the Three Year Law from falling. Poincaré in turn assured him that the new French chamber had shown its true will by voting to retain the law and that Viviani too was a firm supporter. Then the Tsar raised the matter of the relations between Sergei Witte and Joseph Caillaux, who were said to be the exponents of a new foreign policy based on rapprochement between Russia, France, Germany and Britain. But the two men agreed that this was an unfeasible project that posed no threat to the current geopolitical alignment.29
In short, even as they made their way to shore, Poincaré and the Tsar established that they were both thinking along the same lines. The key point was alliance solidarity, and that meant not just diplomatic support, but the readiness for military action. On the second day (21 July), the Tsar came to see Poincaré in his apartments at the Peterhof and the two men spent an hour tête-à-tête. This time, the conversation focused first on the tension between Russia and Britain in Persia. Poincaré adopted a conciliating tone, insisting that these were minor vexations that ought not to compromise good Anglo-Russian relations. Both men agreed that the source of the problem did not lie in London or St Petersburg, but with unspecified ‘local interests’ of no broader relevance. And the Tsar noted with some relief that Edward Grey had not allowed Berlin’s discovery of the naval talks to scupper the search for a convention. Some other issues were touched on – Albania, Graeco-Turkish tension over the Aegean islands and Italian policy – but the Tsar’s ‘most vivid preoccupation’, Poincaré noted, related to Austria and to her plans in the aftermath of the events at Sarajevo. At this point in the discussion, Poincaré reported, the Tsar made a highly revealing comment: ‘He repeats to me that under the present circumstances, the complete alliance between our two governments appears to him more necessary than ever.’ Nicholas left soon afterwards.30
Here again, the central theme was the unshakeable solidarity of the Franco-Russian Alliance in the face of possible provocations from Austria. But what did this mean in practice? Did it mean that the alliance would respond to an Austrian démarche against Serbia with a war that must, by necessity, be continental in scope? Poincaré offered a coded answer to this question on that afternoon (21 July), when, together with Viviani and Paléologue, he received the various ambassadors. The second in line was the Austro-Hungarian ambassador Fritz Szapáry, newly returned from Vienna, where he had been at the bedside of his dying wife. After a few words of sympathy on the assassination, Poincaré asked whether there had been any news of Serbia. ‘The judicial enquiry is proceeding,’ Szapáry answered. Paléologue’s account of Poincaré’s reply accords closely with that given in Szapary’s dispatch:
Of course I am anxious about the results of this enquiry Monsieur l’Ambassadeur. I can remember two previous enquiries which did not improve your relations with Serbia . . . Don’t you remember? The Friedjung affair and the Prochaska affair?31
This was an extraordinary response for a head of state visiting a foreign capital to make to the representative of a third state. Quite apart from the taunting tone, it was in effect denying in advance the credibility of any findings the Austrians might produce in their enquiry into the background of the assassinations. It amounted to declaring that France did not and would not accept that the Serbian government bore any responsibility whatsoever for the murders in Sarajevo and that any demands made upon Belgrade would be illegitimate. The Friedjung and Prochaska affairs were pretexts for an a priori rejection of the Austrian grievance. In case this was not clear enough, Poincaré went on:
I remark to the ambassador with great firmness that Serbia has friends in Europe who would be astonished by an action of this kind.32
Paléologue remembered an even sharper formulation:
Serbia has some very warm friends in the Russian people. And Russia has an ally, France. There are plenty of complications to be feared!33
Szapáry, too, reported the president as saying that an Austrian action would produce ‘a situation dangerous for peace’. Whatever Sazonov’s exact words, the effect was shocking, and not just for Szapáry, but even for the Russians standing nearby, some of whom, de Robien reported, were ‘known for their antipathy towards Austria’.34 At the close of his dispatch, Szapáry noted – and it is hard to fault his judgement – that the ‘tactless, almost threatening demeanour’ of the French president, a ‘foreign statesman who was a guest in this country’, stood in conspicuous contrast with the ‘reserved and cautious attitude of Mr Sazonov’. The whole scene suggested that the arrival of Poincaré in St Petersburg would have ‘anything but a calming effect’.35
In commenting on the contrast between Sazonov and Poincaré, Szapáry identified a raw nerve in the Franco-Russian relationship. During an embassy dinner that evening – a splendid affair in honour of the president – Poincaré sat next to Sazonov. In stifling heat – the room was poorly ventilated – they discussed the Austro-Serbian situation. To his dismay, Poincaré found Sazonov preoccupied and little disposed to firmness. ‘The timing is bad for us,’ Sazonov said, ‘our peasants are still very busy with their work in the fields.’36 In the meanwhile, in the petit salon next door, where the less important guests were being entertained, a different mood prevailed. Here, a colonel from Poincaré’s entourage was heard proposing a toast ‘to the next war and to certain victory’.37 Poincaré was unsettled by Sazonov’s irresolution. ‘We must,’ he told Paléologue, ‘warn Sazonov of the evil designs of Austria, encourage him to remain firm and promise him our support.’38 Later that night, after a reception by the municipal assembly, Poincaré found himself sitting at the back of the imperial yacht with Viviani and Izvolsky, who had travelled back from Paris to take part in the meetings. Izvolsky seemed preoccupied – perhaps he had been talking with Sazonov. Viviani appeared ‘sad and surly’. As the yacht sailed along towards the Peterhof in virtual silence, Poincaré looked up into the night sky and asked himself, ‘What does Austria have in store for us?’39
The next day, 22 July, was particularly difficult. Viviani appeared to be having a breakdown. It came to a head in the afternoon, when the French prime minister, who happened to be seated at lunch to the left of the Tsar, seemed to find it impossible to answer any of the questions addressed to him. By mid-afternoon, his behaviour had become more outlandish. While Nicholas and Poincaré sat listening to a military band, Viviani was seen standing alone near the imperial tent muttering, grumbling, swearing loudly and generally drawing attention to himself. Paléologue’s efforts to calm him were of no avail. Poincaré’s diary registered the situation with a lapidary comment: ‘Viviani is getting sadder and sadder and everyone is starting to notice it. The dinner is excellent.’40 Eventually it was announced that Viviani was suffering from a ‘liver crisis’ and would have to retire early.
Why the prime minister was feeling so poorly is impossible to establish with certainty. His collapse may well, as some historians have suggested, have been precipitated by his anxieties about developments in Paris – a telegram had arrived on Wednesday reporting that Caillaux had threatened to expose various sensitive transcripts in court.41 But it is more likely that Viviani – a deeply pacific man – was alarmed by the steadily intensifying mood of belligerence at the various Franco-Russian gatherings. This is certainly what de Robien thought. It was clear to the French attaché that Viviani was ‘overwrought by all these expressions of the military spirit’. On 22 July, de Robien noted, the talk was of nothing but war – ‘one felt that the atmosphere had changed since the night before’. He laughed when the marines who crewed the France told him that they were worried about the prospect of coming under attack on the home crossing, but their nervousness was an ominous sign. The highpoint was Thursday 23 July – Poincaré’s last day in Russia – when the heads of state witnessed a military review involving 70,000 men against a backdrop of military music consisting mainly of the Sambre et Meuse and the Marche Lorraine, which the Russians appeared to consider ‘the personal hymn of Poincaré’. Particularly striking was the fact that the troops were not wearing their elaborate ceremonial uniforms, but the khaki battledress they had worn for training – de Robien interpreted this as yet another symptom of a general eagerness for war.42
Poincaré and Paléologue witnessed one of the most curious expressions of alliance solidarity on the evening of 22 July, when Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, commander of the Imperial Guard, gave a dinner for the guests at Krasnoye Selo, a recreational suburb of St Petersburg with many handsome villas, including the summer residences of the Tsars. The scene was picturesque: three long tables were set in half-open tents around a freshly watered garden bursting with fragrant blooms. When the French ambassador arrived, he was greeted by Grand Duke Nikolai’s wife, Anastasia, and her sister Militza, who was married to Nikolai’s brother, Pyotr Nikolaevich. The two sisters were daughters of the remarkably energetic and ambitious King Nikola of Montenegro. ‘Do you realise,’ they said (both talking at once), ‘that we are passing through historic days!
At the review to-morrow the bands will play nothing but the Marche Lorraine and Sambre et Meuse. I’ve had a telegram (in pre-arranged code) from my father to-day. He tells me we shall have war before the end of the month . . . What a hero my father is!. . . He’s worthy of the Iliad! Just look at this little box I always take about with me. It’s got some Lorraine soil in it, real Lorraine soil I picked up over the frontier when I was in France with my husband two years ago. Look there, at the table of honour: it’s covered with thistles. I didn’t want to have any other flowers there. They’re Lorraine thistles, don’t you see! I gathered several plants on the annexed territory, brought them here and had the seeds sown in my garden . . . Militza, go on talking to the ambassador. Tell him all to-day means to us while I go and receive the Tsar . . .43
Militza was not speaking figuratively. A letter of November 1912 from the French military attaché in St Petersburg, General Laguiche, confirms that in the summer of that year, while her husband was attending the French manoeuvres near Nancy, the grand duchess had sent someone over the border into German-controlled Lorraine with instructions to collect a thistle and some soil. She brought the thistle back to Russia, cared for it until it germinated, then planted the seeds in the Lorraine earth, watered it carefully until new thistles grew, then mixed the Lorraine soil with Russian soil to symbolize the Franco-Russian Alliance and passed it to her gardener for propagation with the warning that if the thistles died, he would lose his job. It was from this garden that she harvested the samples she showed to Poincaré in July 1914.44 These extravagant gestures had real political import; Anastasia’s husband Grand Duke Nikolai, a pan-Slavist and the first cousin once removed of the Tsar, was among those most active in pressing Nicholas II to intervene militarily on Serbia’s behalf, should Austria press Belgrade with ‘unacceptable’ demands.
The Montenegrin rhapsody continued during dinner, as Anastasia regaled her neighbours with prophecies: ‘There’s going to be a war . . . There’ll be nothing left of Austria . . . You’re going to get back Alsace and Lorraine . . . Our armies will meet in Berlin . . . Germany will be destroyed . . .’45 and so on. Poincaré, too, saw the princesses in action. He was sitting next to Sazonov during an entràcte in the ballet when Anastasia and Militza approached and began upbraiding the foreign minister for insufficient ardour in Serbia’s support. Once again, the limpness of the foreign minister’s manner gave pause for thought, but Poincaré noted with satisfaction that ‘the Tsar, for his part, without being quite as ecstatic as the two grand duchesses, seems to me more determined than Sazonov to defend Serbia diplomatically’.46
These dissonances did not prevent the alliance partners from agreeing on a common course of action. At 6 p.m. on 23 July, the evening of the departure of the French, Viviani, who seemed somewhat recovered from his ‘attack of liver’, agreed with Sazonov the instructions to be sent to the Russian and French ambassadors in Vienna. The ambassadors were to mount a friendly joint démarche recommending moderation to Austria and expressing the hope that she would do nothing that could compromise the honour or the independence of Serbia. These words were of course carefully chosen to interdict in advance the note that both parties already knew the Austrians were about to present. George Buchanan agreed to suggest that his own government send an analogous message.47
That evening, during the pre-departure dinner held on the deck of the France, there was a highly emblematic dispute between Viviani and Paléologue over the wording of a communiqué to be drawn up for the press. Paléologue’s draft ended by alluding to Serbia with the words:
The two governments have discovered that their views and intentions for the maintenance of the European balance of power, especially in the Balkan Peninsula, are absolutely identical.
Viviani was unhappy with this formulation – ‘I think it involves us a little too much in Russia’s Balkan policy’, he said. Another more anodyne draft was drawn up:
The visit which the president of the Republic has just paid to H.M. the Emperor of Russia has given the two friendly and allied governments an opportunity of discovering that they are in entire agreement in their views on the various problems which concern for peace and the balance of power in Europe has laid before the powers, especially in the Balkans.48
This was a fine exercise in the art of euphemism. Yet despite its prudent tone, the revised communiqué was easily decoded and exploited by the liberal and pan-Slav Russian papers, which began pushing openly for military intervention in support of Belgrade.49
Poincaré was not especially happy with how the dinner had gone. The heavy afternoon rain had virtually torn down the marquee on the aft deck where the guests were supposed to be sitting and the ship’s cook did not cover himself in glory – the soup course was late and ‘no one praised the dishes’, Poincaré later noted. But the president could afford to be satisfied with the overall impact of the visit. He had come to preach the gospel of firmness and his words had fallen on ready ears. Firmness in this context meant an intransigent opposition to any Austrian measure against Serbia. At no point do the sources suggest that Poincaré or his Russian interlocutors gave any thought whatsoever to what measures Austria-Hungary might legitimately be entitled to take in the aftermath of the assassinations. There was no need for improvisations or new policy statements – Poincaré was simply holding fast to the course he had plotted since the summer of 1912. This may help explain why, in contrast to many of those around him, he remained so conspicuously calm throughout the visit. This was the Balkan inception scenario envisaged in so many Franco-Russian conversations. Provided the Russians, too, stayed firm, everything would unfold as the policy had foreseen. Poincaré called this a policy for peace, because he imagined that Germany and Austria might well back down in the face of such unflinching solidarity. But if all else failed, there were worse things than a war at the side of mighty Russia and, one hoped, the military, naval, commercial and industrial power of Great Britain.
De Robien, who observed all this from close quarters, was not impressed. Poincaré, he felt, had deliberately overridden the authority of Viviani, who as premier and minister of foreign affairs was the responsible office-holder, pressing assurances and promises upon Nicholas II. Just before they separated, Poincaré reminded the Tsar: ‘This time we must hold firm.’
At almost exactly the same moment [de Robien recalled], the Austrian ultimatum was presented to Belgrade. Our opponents, too, had decided to ‘hold firm’. On both sides they imagined that ‘bluffing’ would suffice to achieve success. None of the players thought that it would be necessary to go all the way. The tragic poker game had begun.50
It was in the nature of great men, Paléologue would later write, to play such fateful games. The ‘man of action’ he observed in his study of Cavour, becomes ‘a gambler, for each grave action implies not only an anticipation of the future, but a claim to be able to decide events, to lead and control them’.51