We believe that if Germany, far from making the slightest effort to carry out the peace treaty, has always tried to escape her obligations, it is because until now she has not been convinced of her defeat … We are also certain that Germany, as a nation, resigns herself to keep her pledged word only under the impact of necessity.
Raymond Poincaré, December 1922
THE THIRD REPUBLIC had actually come into being on 4 September 1870, when it had been proclaimed by Gambetta from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville; but as France slowly pulled itself together after war, siege and commune, it began to look as though it might not last very long. Thiers and Gambetta, both convinced republicans, had formed a reluctant alliance; but there was trouble looming – and that trouble was the monarchists. For a long time they had believed that the principal obstacle to the return of the monarchy was the rivalry between the two branches of the House of Bourbon. The Comte de Chambord, posthumous son of the Duc de Berry and therefore grandson of Charles X – he was already calling himself Henry V – had no direct progeny; why should he not reign and be succeeded by the Orléanist Comte de Paris? Thiers seemed to be riding high; but monarchists and Bonapartists together decided to get rid of him. They finally unearthed a leader, the Duc de Broglie, whose father had been minister under Louis-Philippe; he also happened to be, on his mother’s side, the grandson of Madame de Staël.* He set himself up against Thiers, and on 24 May 1873 won the election.
That same evening old Marshal MacMahon was elected President of the Republic. He was a monarchist through and through, and saw no reason not to have Chambord as King of France. But there was a reason, and a good one: Chambord had made it clear from the outset that his sympathies were well to the right of his grandfather. He would not come to terms with any assembly, nor would he accept the tricolour; it would be the white flag of the Bourbons or nothing. And so it turned out to be nothing. ‘Nobody will deny’, remarked Thiers, ‘that the founder of the French Republic is Monsieur le Comte de Chambord.’ At this point one might have expected the monarchists to turn to the Comte de Paris; but they apparently felt that they could not do so until after Chambord’s death;* instead, they agreed to accept MacMahon as a sort of uncrowned monarch, a ‘Lieutenant General of the Realm’ who would stand above party political strife. The term of his personal mandate was accordingly fixed for seven years, after which he might stand for re-election. This article was approved in the Assembly by 353 votes to 352. The fate of the Third Republic had been confirmed by a single vote; it was to last another sixty-seven years.
In 1886 the prime minister, Charles-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet, made the cardinal mistake of appointing General Georges Boulanger as his Minister for War on the recommendation of Georges Clemenceau, who had been the general’s fellow-pupil at the lycée in Nantes. Boulanger was an able administrator, but he was also a natural showman, with a bottomless talent for self-advertisement. A law had recently been passed forbidding entry into France to the head of any family that had previously reigned; the holding of any office or commission by other members of those families was also banned, but the law had never been intended to apply to those already on active military service. There was accordingly something of a sensation when Boulanger struck from the active list both General the Duc d’Aumale, the fifth son of Louis-Philippe who was then Inspector General of the Army, and the Duc de Chartres, Colonel of the 7th Chasseurs. He also introduced a series of radical reforms of the army, acquiring a reputation for his respect and concern for the simple soldier, whose food and lodging he considerably improved. He was arrogant and insufferably bumptious, but the general public took him to their hearts; many indeed saw him as a new Napoleon, who would rescue France from a series of ineffably dreary republican governments and lead her back to greatness and glory.
In 1887 Boulanger received 100,000 votes for an election in the Seine department, despite the fact that he had not stood for election. His supporters were jubilant, crying: ‘To the Elysée!’; many members of the Assembly, however, thought very differently. The minister of the interior, Charles Floquet, is nowadays remembered only for his taunt when Boulanger entered the Chamber: ‘At your age, Sir, Napoleon was dead!’ This, and other similar remarks which Boulanger took very much to heart, eventually led to a duel with Floquet, in which the general was slightly wounded. Then, quite suddenly, his confidence seemed to desert him. In particular, he became seriously – and probably quite unnecessarily – alarmed by new measures introduced by the government to deal with threats to the safety of the state. He was terrified of arrest, above all because it would separate him from his beloved mistress, the already consumptive Marguerite de Bonnemains. On 1 May 1889 the two of them fled to Brussels; his career was over, Boulangism was finished. When Marguerite died in his arms in 1891, he was utterly heartbroken. Two months later, he shot himself on her grave.
Then came the Panama scandal. Ferdinand de Lesseps had done a splendid job with the Suez Canal, and when he announced that he intended to dig another one through the isthmus of Panama there was no shortage of investors. Work began on the site on New Year’s Day, 1881. De Lesseps’s original intention was to build a sea-level canal as he had at Suez, and he had paid several visits to Panama to reconnoitre the site. All his visits, however, had been in the dry season, which lasts only four months of the year. He and his men were thus totally unprepared for the eight-month rains, during which the Chagres river became a furious torrent, rising by 35 feet and causing constant landslides. The only hope was to build locks, at vast additional expense. The jungle through which the canal had to run was alive with poisonous snakes and spiders, and by 1884 malaria and yellow fever together were claiming over two hundred victims a month, while the steel equipment rusted almost as soon as it was unpacked. It was never like this at Suez. De Lesseps kept the project going as long as he could, but in December 1888 the Panama Canal Company declared itself bankrupt. Some 800,000 Frenchmen lost their investments, which amounted to some 1.8 billion gold francs.
And worse was to come. In 1892–3, 510 deputies and several ministers (including Clemenceau) were accused of taking bribes, either from de Lesseps and his son Charles in return for authorising further stock issues, or from the Panama Canal Company to hide its financial position from the public. Of these 104 were found guilty. De Lesseps and his son were both sentenced to long periods of imprisonment, as was the engineer Gustave Eiffel,* who had been made responsible for the design of the locks. Their sentences were eventually remitted; but one of the ministers served three years in gaol and Baron Jacques de Reinach, who handled the government’s relations with the Canal Company, committed suicide.
Before his death Reinach, though himself Jewish, gave a list of all those implicated in the affair to the violently anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, which overnight became one of the most popular and influential newspapers in the country. This list was published every day in very brief instalments, so that for months hundreds of deputies had to live on tenterhooks. It was unfortunate that Reinach’s principal collaborator, Cornelius Herz, and several other of their associates were also Jewish – giving the Parole plenty of opportunities for scurrilous articles, which may well have had their effect on the events which were shortly to follow.
For the dust of Panama had scarcely settled when there came another disastrous affair – one, this time, which was to rock France to its foundations. French intelligence employed a cleaner working at the German Embassy, who was instructed to watch carefully for any documents that might look to her suspicious. Thus it was that in September 1894 she found in the waste-paper basket of the military attaché, Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, a document – it was known as the bordereau – torn into six pieces, which strongly suggested that a French officer of the General Staff was acting treasonably. Because of a dissimilarity in handwriting* – but also because of the fervent anti-Semitism that was rife in the French army – suspicion fastened on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a thirty-five-year-old artillery officer of Alsatian-Jewish descent. He was arrested, and on 5 January 1895 was brought before a court-martial. Since, throughout the proceedings, he was denied the right to examine – let alone to question – the evidence against him, he was not surprisingly found guilty. He was then forced to appear in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire before silent rows of soldiers, while his sword was broken in front of him and his badges of rank, buttons and braid stripped from his uniform, after which, still fervently proclaiming his innocence, he was transported to spend the rest of his life on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana.
In the following year, thanks primarily to an investigation ordered by the head of counter-espionage Colonel Georges Picquart, new evidence came to light identifying the real culprit as a certain Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. But the army, reluctant to admit that it had been responsible for so serious a miscarriage of justice and having first silenced Picquart by transferring him to the deserts of south Tunisia, suppressed as much of this evidence as it could: after a trial lasting only two days, Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted. Already, however, rumours were widely circulating to the effect that an innocent man had been deliberately framed and that the army had been guilty of a cover-up; and these suspicions were most forcibly voiced in ‘J’Accuse!’, a vehement open letter to the president of the Republic by the novelist Emile Zola, published in January 1898 by Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore.
Since the clamour refused to die down, in 1899 the army brought Dreyfus back from his exile for a further court-martial, at which still more accusations were to be thrown at him. By this time, Paris was talking of little else. Families were split down the middle; old friends swore never to speak to each other again; furious guests left dinner-parties, slamming the door behind them. The Dreyfusards included Georges Clemenceau and Henri Poincaré, the writer Anatole France and the actress Sarah Bernhardt; the anti-Dreyfusards comprised most of the Catholic Church and its journal La Croix, most of the military, much of the aristocracy and a large number of journalists – notorious among them Edouard Drumont, publisher of La Libre Parole. There were also some 60,000 members of the so-called League of Patriots, a proto-fascist organisation founded by General Boulanger and the rabble-rouser Paul Déroulède, and another large group from the recently founded Catholic, monarchist and anti-Semitic Action Française. This new trial was, from the point of view of the army, a grave mistake. Resulting, as it was intended to result, in another conviction and an additional sentence (although the previous sentence was for life) it simply showed up the duplicity and dishonesty which had ruined a perfectly innocent man. Dreyfus never returned to Guiana; instead, that same year, he was offered – and accepted – a pardon by President Emile Loubet. He thus regained his freedom – but that, he declared, was nothing to him without his honour, and in the eyes of the law he was still a traitor. Yet still the government dithered; it was not until 12 July 1906 that he was officially exonerated, readmitted into the army and promoted to the rank of major. A week later, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. After twelve years, the affaire Dreyfus was over at last.*
Through much of the Dreyfus case, the President of the Republic was Félix Faure. He had been elected in January 1895 – largely because he was the only candidate who offended no one – and remained at the Elysée Palace until his sudden and somewhat embarrassing death on 16 February 1899. This occurred as the result of an apoplectic stroke, which he suffered in the Salon Bleu of the palace while in flagrante with one of his several mistresses, Madame Marguerite Steinheil. His secretaries, who were in the room adjoining and who were perfectly well aware of what was going on, were alerted by the lady’s screams and burst into the room. They found her hysterical, unable even to extricate herself since the president’s convulsed hands were inextricably tangled in some of her hair; she had to be cut free before she could get dressed.* She was then hastily removed from the palace before the presidential widow could be informed. (The story goes that Madame Faure sent at once for a priest, in case her husband had some life left in him and could be given extreme unction. On the priest’s arrival the door was opened by the butler, to whom he breathlessly asked: ‘Monsieur le Président, a-t-il encore sa connaissance?’ ‘Non, monsieur,’ replied the butler. ‘On l’a fait sortir par la porte du jardin.’)†
Finding a priest in a hurry had not been so easy; the Church was having a hard time. Much of the hierarchy were fervent monarchists and came from aristocratic families; it was thus only natural that the republicans should see the Church as a threat, both to republicanism and to progress. Already in 1882 religious instruction in schools had been suppressed, and members of religious orders were forbidden to teach in them. Civil marriages only were permitted, divorce was introduced and chaplains were removed from the armed services. The situation became even worse when Emile Combes was elected prime minister in 1902. Almost immediately after taking office he closed down all parochial schools. He then banned every one of the fifty-four religious orders that existed in France at that time; about twenty thousand monks and nuns left the country, many of them settling in Spain. There was a further crisis in 1904 when Emile Loubet, who had succeeded Faure as president, paid a state visit to King Victor Emmanuel, only to evoke a strong protest from Pope Pius X, who did not recognise the Kingdom of Italy. Combes replied by withdrawing the French ambassador to the Holy See. In 1905 the Assembly declared that ‘the attitude of the Vatican’ had rendered inevitable the separation of Church and State, and in December another law was passed to this effect. For the Church, there was one advantage: it could no longer be dictated to, and could henceforth elect its own bishops without government interference. But a quarter of a century of what effectively amounted to persecution had left it gravely weakened, and it has never entirely recovered.
The second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly its last two decades, saw the spectacular growth of the second French Empire. The first, consisting of the colonies in North America, the Caribbean and India, had been subsequently lost; France had started again with the capture of Algiers in 1830; she had subsequently absorbed Algeria to such a point that it had become three French départements; technically, it was part of France. This time she concentrated on Africa and its outlying islands – notably Senegal, Tunisia, Mauretania, Mali, Ivory Coast, Chad, Gabon, Morocco (a protectorate), Madagascar and Réunion; on Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia; and on the South Pacific – New Caledonia, the Marquesas Islands and much of Polynesia. The Republicans had originally opposed the whole idea of territorial expansion, but when Germany began her own programme they changed their minds; and before long, as trade with the new colonies developed, the empire was seen as a powerful force for good, spreading Christianity, French culture and the French language and generally acquiring prestige for the motherland – what was known as ‘the civilising mission’, la mission civilisatrice.
As for the British, who were of course the principal rivals in the business of empire-building, they viewed the steady French expansion with equanimity and perhaps a moderate degree of admiration. Even when Napoleon III had built fifteen powerful new propeller-driven battlecruisers, the French navy remained smaller and palpably inferior to their own; and besides, the two spheres of influence seldom seriously overlapped. Perhaps the most dangerous moment came in 1898, when a French expedition to Fashoda on the White Nile tried to gain control of the whole river basin, blocking Britain from the Sudan. On the spot the British – ostensibly acting in the interests of the Khedive of Egypt – outnumbered the French by about ten to one, and the two sides remained perfectly friendly; but in London and Paris tempers ran high. At last the French backed down, realising just in time that Germany was growing ever more powerful and that in the always-possible event of another war they would be lost without British friendship; but they could not conceal the fact that they had been publicly humiliated, and it was to be several years before the ‘Fashoda affair’ was forgotten.
In the first years of the twentieth century, France’s foreign policy was dominated by a fear of Germany – whose larger size and faster-growing economy she could not hope to match – combined with a determination to recover what she considered her birthright: Alsace-Lorraine. (Since 1871 the statue representing Strasbourg, capital of Alsace, in the Place de la Concorde had been draped in black.) In an attempt to isolate so dangerous a neighbour, France entered into alliances with Britain and Russia, giving rise to the Triple Entente of 1907. Six years later the prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, was elected president of the Republic. Determined to make the presidency something more than purely ceremonial, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Entente, having made two visits to Russia to strengthen strategic ties; he was not, however, as anti-German as is often believed – indeed in January 1914 he was the first French president to enter the German Embassy.
Two months later, however, he was involved in a serious scandal which almost cost him his position. A former prime minister, Joseph Caillaux, now minister of finance, threatened to publish letters indicating that the president had been engaged in secret talks with the Vatican – a revelation that would have outraged the deeply anti-clerical left. Fortunately, Caillaux was himself vulnerable: the editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette, possessed documents showing that the minister had been having an affair with his future second wife while still married to his first. An arrangement was thus easily made: Caillaux would agree not to publish Poincaré’s letters after all; Poincaré in return would put presidential pressure on Calmette similarly to remain silent. All would have been well had not the second Madame Caillaux, fearful for her own reputation, walked into Calmette’s office on 16 March and shot him dead. Astonishingly, she was acquitted four months later on the grounds of crime passionel. Poincaré’s secret remained safe.
On 28 June the president was at the Longchamp races when he heard of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. He ordered an aide to send a letter of condolence and returned to his race-card – and why not? It was not after all the assassination that triggered the war, but the Austro-Hungarian government’s decision a day or two later to make it a pretext for hostilities with Serbia, through Serbia with her ally Russia, and consequently with the Triple Entente. France contemplated the outbreak of war with mixed feelings. The intellectuals on the whole welcomed it as an opportunity at last to avenge the humiliating defeat of 1870; so, it need hardly be said, did Déroulède’s infamous League of Patriots, which had been agitating for a guerre de revanche, a war of revenge, since the 1880s. The socialists had long opposed war as a matter of principle; but when their pacifist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a deranged fanatic in a Paris restaurant on 31 July, they changed their tune. On 4 August Poincaré addressed a message to the French people: ‘In the coming war, France will be heroically defended by all its sons, whose sacred union will not break in the face of the enemy.’
The Germans had hoped that the war would be short and sharp: they invaded from the north-east, and advanced through central Belgium to enter France near Lille – the site of much of the heavy industry – counting on striking a mortal blow to French steel and coal production within a matter of months. Their basic strategy was to turn west near the Channel and then south to cut off the French retreat; the French army would be surrounded and Paris left without defence. But then, in early September, when their army was only some thirty miles from the capital, and just after the government had left Paris for Bordeaux, came the Battle of the Marne. By this time the German forces were exhausted; some of them had marched more than 150 miles. They had also – like Caesar almost two thousand years before – dramatically underestimated the French spirit: they found all bridges demolished, all the railways disabled. But their morale remained high; their ultimate victory was never in doubt.
Their proximity to the capital was alarming indeed for the French; but it had its advantages. The Marne is the only battle in the history of the world in which some three thousand of its combatants arrived by taxi. On the evening of 7 September General Joseph Gallieni gathered about six hundred Paris cabs at the Invalides, to carry the soldiers to the front. Each cab carried five men, four in the back and one next to the driver. Only the rear lights were lit: the drivers were ordered to follow those of the cab ahead. Obedient to the city regulations, they dutifully ran their meters; the total of 70,012 francs was reimbursed by the Treasury – a small price to pay for a story that has now become a legend, and for the first use of motorised infantry in battle.*
The Battle of the Marne was a victory. How complete a victory is still a matter of dispute – the French suffered a quarter of a million casualties and Germany gained a large part of the industrial north-east – but it was victory enough: it saved Paris. It was followed by a ‘race to the sea’, during which both armies moved towards the north-west, each trying to side-step the other. Despite fierce battles, the race was lost by both sides; the front was eventually stabilised from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Meanwhile, the armies had dug into the ground to such an extent that it became little more than a double network of trenches, separated by an occasionally almost non-existent no-man’s-land.
Thus it was that the French – and the British – were condemned to four years of attrition, causing unspeakable devastation and the death of one and a half million French soldiers – one Frenchman in twenty – with, at least until the beginning of 1918, virtually no territorial gains or losses for either side. It had, of course, its milestones. There was, for example, the second Battle of Ypres in April and May 1915, which saw the first use (by the Germans) of poison gas. This was directed against a French unit, consisting mostly of colonial troops. At about 5 p.m. on 22 April, French sentries noticed a greenish-yellow cloud moving towards them. A British rifleman remembered:
I saw … the dusky warriors of French Africa; away went their rifles, equipment, even their tunics that they might run the faster. One man came stumbling through our lines. An officer of ours held him up with a levelled revolver, ‘What’s the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?’ says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer’s feet.
The battle was indecisive, though of the city of Ypres there was barely one stone left on another. And after that, the gloves were off: ‘the war to end wars’ became increasingly terrible.
Virtually all 1916, from February until December, was given over to the Battle of Verdun. This time the British were not directly involved: the fighting was between the French and the Germans. Its 303 days made it the longest and perhaps the costliest battle in human history; the French lost 377,000, the Germans almost as many. It was at Verdun that the world first heard of General Philippe Pétain,* who commanded fifty-two divisions, which he rotated after keeping them only two weeks in the front line. He also organised day-and-night transport by lorry, bringing a constant stream of arms, ammunition and troops into the town. ‘On les aura!’ was his order of the day: ‘We shall get them!’ Known as the ‘Hero of Verdun’ and a Marshal of France, he was, between the wars, one of the most respected Frenchmen alive; it must be left to the following chapter to record his decline and fall.
Despite the appalling losses, Verdun was technically a French victory; but it was far more than that. In French minds it has come to represent the entire war – and not only the war but all the suffering and sacrifice that the war entailed. In the 1960s the battlefield also became the symbol of Franco-German reconciliation; there is an intensely moving photograph of President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the Douaumont cemetery, their heads bowed, holding hands in the driving rain.
During the fighting at Verdun the British army was engaged, between July and November, at the Battle of the Somme – which saw, incidentally, the first appearance of a new and formidable weapon: the tank. Few battles have been bloodier: out of more than three million combatants, a million were killed or wounded. On its very first day the British army alone suffered 57,470 casualties; never before had such a figure even been approached. By November the French had lost another 200,000. The battle had been planned jointly by General Sir Douglas Haig – who had recently replaced Sir John French as the British commander-in-chief – and his French opposite number General Joseph Joffre, affectionately known by the army as ‘Papa’. Joffre had had an adventurous early career, with battle honours ranging from Madagascar to Timbuktu; on his promotion to supremo in 1911, however, he had never commanded an army and cheerfully admitted that he had no knowledge of staff work – a fact which was all too soon to show: already by the end of 1914 Gallieni – who had once been his superior – was being tipped to take his place. Joffre’s relations with Haig, however, were poor, and there were constant rows: when Haig suggested that the Somme offensive should be delayed until August to allow for more training and more artillery, Joffre shouted that in that case ‘the French army would cease to exist!’, and had to be calmed down with ‘liberal doses of 1840 brandy’. He was in fact to be replaced (by General Robert Nivelle) at the end of the year, but was promoted to the rank of marshal of France to make up for it.
And what, after those five nightmare months, did we and the French have to show for the massacre of the Somme? Precious little. For some time after the war it was seen as a hard-won victory, which robbed the German army of its strategic initiative and led to its eventual collapse. More recently, historians have been less sure. In any event, it has become for the British something like Verdun for the French; and the six footling miles gained of German territory – the most since the Battle of the Marne – serve only to emphasise the obscenity of it all.
In April 1917 Pétain became commander-in-chief of the French army, just in time to deal with a series of mutinies. They were hardly surprising; even among the survivors, Verdun and the Somme had taken their toll. The cold, the rain, the mud, the rats, the whole misery of the trenches had simply become too much. The soldiers were exhausted, many of them severely shell-shocked. On the whole Pétain dealt with them sympathetically. Although some 35,000 soldiers were involved, he held only 3,400 courts-martial, at which 554 men were sentenced to death but over 90 per cent had their sentences commuted. The mutinies, it need hardly be said, were kept secret from the Germans; full details were revealed as recently as 1967.*
That same month of April saw the entry of the United States into the war, after which it made substantial contributions in terms of raw materials and supplies, though it was not till the summer of 1918 that the arrival of vast numbers of fresh, rested American troops changed the whole balance of the war and was largely responsible for the German defeat. In July there was a last despairing assault on the Marne, but the offensive was crushed by about forty French divisions, assisted by British and American units. After this the war was as good as over; and on 11 November, as all the world knows, the armistice was signed.
The following year saw the peace conference in Paris, culminating with the Treaty of Versailles. The terms of this agreement, essentially drawn up by the Big Four – David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy and our old friend Georges Clemenceau, now seventy-eight and prime minister, who drove the hardest bargain of them all – were certainly punitive: France took back Alsace-Lorraine and occupied the German industrial Saar basin; the German African colonies were partitioned between France and Britain; Germany meanwhile was largely disarmed, obliged to take full responsibility for the war and ordered to pay savage reparations.* Although only a small fraction of these reparations was ever paid, France needed every penny of them. The country, already burdened with a heavy public debt, was faced with a vast reconstruction programme to rebuild its coal and steel industries in the north-east and to repair the damage done in Lille, Douai, Cambrai, Valenciennes and those other cities and towns which had been under German occupation throughout the war. Then, in 1918, came the calamitous outbreak of Spanish flu, which devastated the remaining population of Europe and accounted for another quarter of a million French deaths – so many that serious initiatives were set up to increase the birth rate: mothers who raised four or five children ‘with dignity’ were awarded the bronze médaille de la famille française; those with six or seven received the silver; those with eight or more, the gold. France was in serious crisis. Nor was the situation helped by the fact that in 1920 the president of the Republic went off his head.
Paul Deschanel had enjoyed, like all his predecessors, a distinguished political career. For years he had been a member of the Académie Française, and had written a number of well-received books on literature and history. He had been president of the Chamber as early as 1898, and was re-elected in 1912, holding the position until February 1920, when he became president, having beaten Clemenceau to the post. He began his term of office respectably enough; but his staff became a little anxious after some weeks when, being presented by a delegation of schoolgirls with a bouquet, he hurled the flowers back at them one by one. On another occasion he is said to have received the British ambassador wearing nothing but his ceremonial decorations. There was also an extraordinary incident when, late in the night of 24–25 May, he fell out of the window of the presidential train near Montargis. He was found wandering about in his nightshirt by a platelayer, who took him to the cottage of the signalman at the nearest level crossing, where his aides subsequently retrieved him. Later in the summer he walked out of a meeting straight into a lake fully clothed. He resigned on 21 September, and was the only president to have moved straight from the Elysée Palace to a mental home.
It was fortunate for France that for the first decade of the peace her government – if not always her presidency – was in safe and efficient hands, usually those of Aristide Briand* and Raymond Poincaré, a leader of the so-called Bloc National, a right-wing political coalition whose watchword was ‘Germany will pay!’ He showed the world that he meant it when in January 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments and Poincaré, then prime minister, ordered the invasion of the Ruhr. He firmly maintained that he did this not only for purely financial reasons, but also because the reparation payments had been a firm undertaking in the Versailles Treaty; if the Germans defaulted on this, it would create the most dangerous of precedents: what then would prevent them from dismantling the rest of the treaty and plunging the world into another war? Germany naturally protested, staging furious demonstrations in Düsseldorf in the course of which 130 civilians were killed. There is a popular theory – which may be partly, though not entirely, true – that it was the Ruhr occupation that led to the hyperinflation which was to destroy the German economy later that year: by November, the United States dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 marks.
From the French point of view, the occupation of the Ruhr achieved its object; but France paid a heavy price in foreign disapproval of her conduct, and in a consequent wave of sympathy for Germany. Nothing could be done by the newly established League of Nations, since her action did not technically contravene the Versailles Treaty; she was however obliged to agree to what was known as the Dawes plan, which provided for the withdrawal of her troops and substantially reduced the German payments; the last French military units were to leave Düsseldorf and Duisberg on 25 August 1925.
Briand was a very different sort of man from Poincaré. He was above all a conciliator, and after 1918 devoted his political life to the establishment of lasting peace in Europe. He at first put himself at the disposal of the League of Nations, but the organisation was hamstrung in its very beginnings by the absence of the United States and a marked lack of enthusiasm on the part of Britain. In 1925 he succeeded in negotiating the Locarno Pact, by the terms of which France, Britain, Italy, Poland and Germany mutually guaranteed one another against aggression. This would technically have drawn Britain in against France at the time of the Ruhr occupation; but that was now over, and Briand was fairly certain that it would never happen again. In 1926 he was awarded, with his friend the German statesman Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize; but his own country was to show him little gratitude for his efforts; when in 1931 he stood for the presidency he was easily defeated. He died in 1932, at the age of seventy.
Briand had only recently gone to his grave when France was shaken by the Stavisky affair – not perhaps quite as serious as the Dreyfus case or the Panama scandal, but throwing nevertheless an unwelcome light on corruption among not a few politicians and judges. Serge Alexandre Stavisky – le beau Sasha, he was called – was a Ukrainian Jew whose parents had moved to France. His past had been nothing if not chequered: he had been a café singer, a nightclub manager, the operator of an illegal casino and a worker in a soup factory. By the 1930s he was running the municipal pawnbrokers in Bayonne. He was also active in the financial world, and his considerable charm had made him several rich and influential friends. He had first run foul of the law in 1927 when he was arrested on a charge of fraud, but his trial was postponed again and again; he was granted bail nineteen times. Meanwhile a judge who claimed to possess secret documents proving his guilt was found decapitated. According to the American journalist Janet Flanner,
The scheme which finally killed Alexandre Stavisky … was his emission of hundreds of millions of francs’ worth of false bonds on the city of Bayonne’s municipal pawnshop, which were bought up by life insurance companies, counselled by the Minister of Colonies, who was counselled by the Minister of Commerce, who was counselled by the Mayor of Bayonne, who was counselled by the little manager of the hockshop, who was counselled by Stavisky.
In December 1933 Stavisky saw that the game was up and fled. In January the police reported that they had found him in a chalet in Chamonix, dying from a gunshot wound. They claimed that he had committed suicide, but it was widely believed that they had killed him. These suspicions, the revelations of his long criminal record as an embezzler and a confidence trickster, the losses suffered by vast numbers of his victims and his close involvement with several ministers, led to nasty clashes in the Assembly, finally resulting in the resignation in January 1934 of the prime minister, Camille Chautemps. Chautemps was succeeded by Edouard Daladier, and Daladier took immediate action. First, unsurprisingly, he dismissed the Prefect of Police, Jean Chiappe, who was notorious for his right-wing sympathies and suspected of encouraging anti-government demonstrations; then, for reasons rather more obscure, he dismissed the director of the Comédie-Française, apparently for staging an ‘anti-democratic’ play, which happened to be Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. He replaced him, equally unaccountably, with the head of the Sûreté Générale.
Indignation, however, refused to die down. People had seen what had happened in Italy and what was now happening over the border in Nazi Germany, and their fears of a fascist conspiracy were real. But so too were the several fascist groups who longed only to follow the German and Italian example. On the night of 6–7 February 1934 they came out on the streets, all of them, left and right together – monarchists and republicans, radical socialists, anti-Semitic reactionaries, together with members of the Action Française, the Mouvement Franciste and the Croix-de-Feu.* The Palais Bourbon was literally besieged by the mob, and to defend the Concorde bridge the troops were obliged to open fire. Fifteen were killed. Nothing of the kind had happened since the Commune, sixty-three years before. What was it all about? What, exactly, did the demonstrators want? It is hard to say. ‘A bas les voleurs!’† they cried, but there was more to it than that. Many, it now seems clear, were bent on nothing less than the destruction of the Third Republic. Daladier was forced to resign after just ten days in office.‡ He was followed by Gaston Doumergue, who finally succeeded in forming a coalition cabinet.
A trial of twenty important people associated with Stavisky opened in 1935. Among those in the dock were his widow, two deputies and a general. All were found not guilty; but France had been seriously weakened and remained deeply divided for the rest of the decade. This was a tragedy, the more so because in those years the country was called upon to face the deadliest challenge in all its history – a challenge from which it failed, alas, to acquit itself with great distinction.
* See p. 188.
* Chambord lived on until 1883, by which time enthusiasm for the monarchy had faded. Two years later the crown jewels were broken up and sold.
* Eiffel had completed his magnificent Tower in 1889.
* The graphologists’ assertion was that ‘the lack of resemblance between Dreyfus’s writing and that of the bordereau was a proof of “self-forgery”’.
* Though by then in his mid-fifties, Dreyfus was to fight in the First World War and to live on until July 1935. There is a statue of him, holding his broken sword, in the Boulevard Raspail, outside the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station; a second was erected in 1988 in the Tuileries Garden and a third is under construction in his home town of Mulhouse.
* Rumour had it that they were engaged in oral sex. For ever after Mme Steinheil was known as the pompe funèbre (funeral).
† This pun is untranslatable, since connaissance can mean ‘friend’ or ‘consciousness’. It was not the last time that Mme Steinheil screamed for help. On 31 May 1908, the police were called to her house to find her husband and her stepmother dead, the former by strangling, the latter by choking on her false teeth. She herself was found gagged and tied, most inexpertly, to a bed. Her evidence about four black-robed strangers was palpably untrue, and she was arrested. Her subsequent trial for murder was the cause célèbre of 1909. She was acquitted and subsequently came to England, where she married the 6th Lord Abinger. Having passed the last forty-five years of her life in unshakeable rectitude, she lived in Hove – where I once met her – until her death in 1954.
* The other hero of the Marne was Gallieni’s commander-in-chief, Marshal Foch, remembered chiefly for his famous telegram: ‘My left is broken; my right is weakening; the situation is excellent: J’attaque!’
* At the beginning of the battle, he is said to have been fetched during the night from a Paris hotel by a staff officer, who happened to know with which of his countless mistresses he could be found.
* Guy Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917.
* But perhaps Germany got off more lightly than we think. Far from hanging the Kaiser as Lloyd George had advocated, the Allies allowed him to live in comfortable exile for nearly a quarter of a century until his death; barely a dozen German war criminals were brought to trial, and most of them were acquitted; although Germany ceded some 10 per cent of its territory, it lost less than 2 per cent of its native population; and of the 132 billion gold marks demanded, all but 50 billion had been already written off. Germany finally paid only about 2 billion – a tiny fraction of what Hitler would later spend on rearmament.
* Briand was eleven times prime minister. He was also famous for his long affair with Princess Marie Bonaparte, later Princess George of Greece. This appears not to have been entirely satisfactory: after it ended the princess devoted the rest of her long life to sexual research.
* The Mouvement Franciste, founded in 1933, was a fascist organisation funded by Mussolini. The Croix-de-Feu began as an association of war veterans but later moved steadily to the right. It included among its members the young François Mitterrand.
† ‘Down with the thieves!’
‡ He was back again in 1938, in time for the Munich conference – to which he made remarkably little contribution.