Nothing collapses more quickly than civilization during crises like this one [the Revolution of June 1848]; lost in three weeks is the accomplishment of centuries. Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as soon as one stumbles.
—SAINTE-BEUVE, quoted by George Eliot in
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
Word that Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, had been shot dead in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip made front-page news in Paris on June 28, 1914. People were shocked. But to Frenchmen, who regarded Serbia, if they claimed to know anything about her, as the primitive underbelly of Europe, where peasants dug houses under hillsides, where pigs driven by swineherds armed to the teeth outnumbered people, and where Tumult was a house god, the assassination seemed very much in character. They would have readily agreed with Edmund Spencer, who toured European Turkey in 1850, that “the Servian [sic] is both by principle and inclination a man of war.” Was Serbia not constantly breathing fire at the two empires—Ottoman Turkey to the south and Austria-Hungary to the north—that still held fragments of the peninsula in their dying grasp? Had she not just fought two Balkan wars and won them both? Could she ever forget the Greater Serbia she once was or stop aspiring to be the prow of an independent South Slav confederation?
Still vivid in European memory were the gruesome circumstances under which King Alexander of the Obrenovic´ dynasty, a feckless monarch given by turns to cringing and terrorizing, had been overthrown eleven years earlier. On June 11, 1903, in the dead of night, some twenty or thirty military officers, one of whom, “Apis,” was to play a prominent role in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, had surrounded the royal residence with artillery and a regiment of troops. Henchmen doing palace duty let them in, and the slaughter began. Dozens of guards died. Queen Draga and Alexander were flushed out of a hidden alcove in their bedchamber and killed three times over. The conspirators riddled them with bullets, disemboweled them with swords, and threw them out the window. A similar fate awaited cabinet officers, including the prime minister. Belgrade rejoiced. Newspapers compared Alexander to Nero. Flags flew, fanfares blared, people paraded in the rain, and measures were taken to summon home from Geneva Peter Karageorgevic´, scion of the Obrenovic´’s rival clan, who became King Peter.
An American journalist, possibly drawing on the evolutionary theories of Lamarck, proposed in the New York Times that as the character of races showed most clearly during “moments of excitement,” when inborn nature rose to the surface, defenestration had to be a racial characteristic of Slavs. The reason for this, he continued, should be sought in the ancestral habits of “Russians, Poles, Servians, Sorbs, Polabians, Croats, Cassubes, Wends, Lusatians,” and other “forest-dwelling tribes.”
French correspondents may not have been quite so baldly racial in their accounts, but almost all laid emphasis on the outlandishness of the assassination, implying that Serbia cut an archaic or Asian figure in the community of civilized European nations. “The assassination of King Alexander of Serbia, following a military conspiracy, is one of those tragic events the shame of which one hoped would not visit our modern age,” declared Le Petit Parisien. “The horror of it surpasses that of an isolated murder. And one would have thought that we in Europe were unlikely ever again to witness a military coup d’état of the kind that once took place in ancient Rome, when emperors were proclaimed over the corpses of their predecessors.” Le Matin referred to the extinction of the Obrenovic´ dynasty as one of the most frightful tragedies yet recorded in the history of mankind. Characteristic of revolution in Balkan countries, it observed, was their particular “savagery” and “barbarity.” Le Gaulois noted that although five hundred years under Turkey’s yoke could not but leave its mark, it was still surprising to learn that the barbaric traditions honored by the Ottomans had been applied with such exuberance “in a Christian country.” Free within her own cramped borders since 1878, when the European powers pronounced it independent in the Treaty of Berlin, Orthodox Serbia hardly impinged on French consciousness (except, in certain quarters, as a virgin ripe for industrial development). One journalist assigned to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs heard a high official maintain, after Alexander’s assassination, that no more attention need be given to the tragic event than to items from the police blotter reported under the rubric of faits divers. It was irrelevant to France. “The Serbs change government in their own idiosyncratic ways,” the official declared. “That’s their business, not ours. Once the new regime has constituted itself, it will seek recognition from the Powers, and obtain it. I say again, we have no reason to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Others may; let them speak, or get involved.”
Eleven years later, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo inspired something of the same indifference. Strictly speaking, it too was an internal affair, as Austria had arbitrarily annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, with her large Serb population, in 1908. To be sure, there were strong grounds for believing that the plot had been hatched in Belgrade by Unification or Death, a clandestine organization of fanatical patriots also known as the Black Hand, which reached into court circles. Certainly, Vienna believed it. And lurking behind that belief was the suspicion that Russia, the guardian spirit of Balkan Pan-Slavism, had had foreknowledge of the event. But most French—indeed, most Europeans—assumed that even if Austria took drastic measures, she would quickly crush Serbia’s ill-equipped army in a war confined to that cramped corner of the continent. So it was that Winston Churchill could write, in The World Crisis, that an exceptional tranquillity prevailed in Europe during the spring and summer of 1914, when he attended to England’s relentless naval competition with Germany as first lord of the Admiralty. “There had been a score of opportunities had anyone wished to make war. Germany seemed, with us, to be set on peace.”
In July 1914, Paris was more deserted than tranquil. Sun scorched the city, heat waves rose from its streets, and a steamy mist veiled the sky. Working-class crowds found refreshment on Sundays in the guinguettes of the valley of the Marne. All who could afford it flocked to the seacoast after Bastille Day, or to spas such as Aix-les-Bains, where, according to Le Figaro, everything augured well: “Never has the season been more elegant, more attractive, more carefree. Never have nobler, more radiant guests graced the flower-lined walks and shady groves, the fragrant terraces, the sparkling salons of the Grand Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs. One can easily believe that the very heart of high society is present here.” On the front page of its July 15 issue, Le Figaro promised readers acquainted with Marcel Proust a long excerpt from the second volume of “that great and beautiful book,” Du Côté de chez Swann.
The grand monde at Aix-les-Bains did not include France’s president and premier. On July 16, Raymond Poincaré and Premier René Viviani (who was also minister of foreign affairs) boarded the battleship Le France at Dunkirk for a state visit to Russia. They pondered Austria’s intentions with “a shade of anxiety,” according to Poincaré, but otherwise enjoyed the leisurely, four-day cruise. And such anxiety as they felt may have been dispelled once Le France anchored at Kronstadt. Guns boomed an imperial salute, bands played “La Marseillaise,” pleasure craft swarmed around the French squadron, and Czar Nicholas welcomed his ally aboard the yacht Alexandria before depositing Poincaré and his entourage at the vast palace complex of Peterhof. A banquet held for them there on July 20 quite outshone Aix-les-Bains. France’s ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, remembered gorgeous uniforms and finery, in the midst of which Poincaré’s plain black frock coat looked like a republican smudge. While fountains played outside, precious jewels of every description made “a blaze of fire and flame” inside the Empress Elizabeth room. Politics waited until the following day, when, still at Peterhof, the czar and the president reviewed seriatim questions of moment on Europe’s diplomatic agenda. It was agreed that the Great Powers should meet sometime that year to set matters right in the Balkans.
On July 21, diplomats attended a banquet at the Winter Palace. President Poincaré exchanged pleasantries with the German ambassador, Count Friedrich von Pourtalès, who spoke of plans to visit his French relatives at Castellane. In conversation with Sir George Buchanan, Poincaré pressed the need for transforming Britain’s entente with France and Russia into a tighter military alliance. He chatted up Baron Motono of Japan and the Marquis de Carlotti of Italy. Alone among members of the diplomatic corps unresponsive to the president’s salutations was Austria’s ambassador, Count Frigyes Szapáry. Poincaré asked him about Serbia only to be told, cryptically, that the judicial inquiry into the circumstances of Ferdinand’s assassination was “under way.” Their brief encounter ended with Poincaré hoping that punishment of the assassins would not be inflicted upon an entire nation and Szapáry uttering (in Poincaré’s recollection) “commonplace assurances as to the inoffensive character of Austrian policy.” Poincaré’s memoirs make no mention of striking workers staging a huge demonstration on the streets of St. Petersburg.
Raymond Poincaré, 1860–1934, three times premier, and president of France from 1913 to 1920.
The “shade of anxiety” Poincaré had felt before reaching Russia now turned a shade darker, but not yet dark enough to spoil his delight in the vivid color of imperial pageantry. On July 22, at Krasnoye Selo, he saw sixty thousand troops drawn up in serried ranks for a prayer service attended by the czar, the czarina, the czarevitch, grand dukes, grand duchesses, and ladies of Petersburg society crowding the stands under white parasols. The next day he and Viviani watched that army march across a vast parade ground to the strains of “Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse” and “La Marche Lorraine” (Poincaré came from Lorraine). At a final banquet, this one on board Le France, the president concluded his toast to Nicholas by declaring that their two countries shared “the same ideal of peace in strength, honor, and self-respect.” It proved to be a sinister valediction.
Poincaré’s diplomatic tour was not yet over. After departing St. Petersburg on the evening of July 23, Le France charted a course toward Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Christiania (now Oslo). The vessel was in the Gulf of Finland when word came that Austria had handed Serbia an ultimatum to be answered within forty-eight hours. Poincaré knew less than he wanted of its contents, as wireless messages (which may have been jammed) were fragmentary and garbled. Austria’s ultimatum remained unread at Stockholm, as he and Viviani continued their Scandinavian tour ignorant of demands that Serbia could not possibly accept without forfeiting her sovereignty. Thus, the French ship of state was rudderless. Not until July 26, at the behest of colleagues whose desperate wire reached Le France intact, did the president and the premier decide to sail straight for home. The next morning they received a telegram in which Maurice Paléologue reported from Petersburg that Russia
had decided in principle to mobilize the thirteen army corps which are in the event destined to operate against Austria. This mobilization will only be made effective and public if the Austro-Hungarian Government means to bring armed pressure to bear on Serbia. Secret preparations will, however, commence already today. If the mobilization is ordered, the thirteen corps will immediately be concentrated on the Galician frontier, but they will not take the offensive, in order to leave Germany a pretext not to invoke the casus foederis immediately.… Russian opinion affirms her determination not to let Serbia be attacked.1
By then French who read their newspapers closely may have been better informed than Poincaré and Viviani. According to Le Figaro, the Russian minister of war had proclaimed in a long, detailed speech at Krasnoye Selo that his country was prepared for war. Le Matin enlarged upon this bulletin. Sergey Sazonov, Russia’s foreign minister, maintained that the community of views between France and Russia was impeccable.
Had Poincaré been at his post three days earlier, in time to make a difference, would he have challenged the perfect community of views alleged by Sazonov? Would he, who had fought in 1913 for passage of a law extending obligatory military service from two years to three, have vigorously opposed the lethal system of alliances suddenly whipping its coils around Europe? Did the eloquent Lorrainer, who had spoken of “honor” and “self-respect” in his toast to Czar Nicholas, lean more toward revanchism2 than an “ideal of peace” or conceive that ideal as Germany’s peaceful cession of the French provinces it had annexed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71? What moved him to tears, when he and Viviani finally stepped ashore at Dunkirk on July 29, hours after Austria had declared war against Serbia, was the “unanimity of patriotic resolution” he perceived in crowds of workmen standing on the jetty, the quays, and along the railroad tracks.
What moved him beyond tears was the reception he and Viviani received in Paris, where nationalist ideologues, about whom more will be said, had been declaiming the notion that war was a sacrament destined to save France’s soul and restore wholeness to a mutilated country—that collective sacrifice would be the supreme tonic for moral fatigue. Assembled at the Gare du Nord were ministers, prefects, senators, and deputies. Several thousand members of the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes, led by its president, Maurice Barrès, followed Poincaré’s open carriage across Paris, singing “La Marseillaise.” Crowds along the route hailed the president with vivats to France, to the Republic, to the army, to Poincaré himself. “Never have I felt so overwhelmed,” he wrote. “Never have I found it more difficult, morally and physically, to maintain an impassive bearing. Greatness, simplicity, enthusiasm, seriousness, all combined to render the welcome unbelievable and infinitely beautiful. Here was a united France. Political quarrels were forgotten.”
An account of this jubilant reception appeared on the front page of the mass-circulation daily Le Petit Parisien. But Le Temps did not even mention the president’s return to the Élysée Palace. A roving reporter observed that Paris looked its customary self: “no disorder, no panic.” Except for more clients than usual queuing up at banks to exchange notes for gold, litter remaining on the boulevards from pro-Serbian demonstrations held a day or two earlier, more brokers selling off stock in Russian railroads, more pedestrians pausing to read news dispatches posted outside major establishments, and specialty clothiers doing a boom business in officers’ uniforms, “one would not think that grave events impended.” Le Figaro felt confident that the French lawn-tennis team, which had departed for St. Petersburg, would “carry the French colors in triumph” across Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. And front-page news in July 1914 was not the distant mobilization of armies but the trial of Madame Henriette Caillaux.
Henriette Caillaux’s husband, Joseph Caillaux, had figured prominently in French politics since 1899, serving in four cabinets as finance minister, presiding over a fifth, and chairing the Radical Party. In 1914, he hoped that the premiership, a seat seldom warmed for long by its occupants during the Third Republic, would soon be his again. But Caillaux had made enemies, and his private life exposed him to ridicule. Georges Clemenceau was a vehement foe. Another was Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro. When love letters Caillaux had written thirteen years earlier, during an adulterous affair with Henriette (who became his second wife), were made available to Calmette, he dared publish one on the front page of the March 13 issue. Madame Caillaux visited him at the paper, drew a pistol from within her fur muff, and shot him six times—“because,” she said to stunned employees, “there is no longer any justice in France.”
As it turned out, French justice bent over backward for her. At her trial, which opened on July 21 in High Court, she was defended by Fernand Labori, the lawyer who had defended Émile Zola against charges of libel after the publication of “J’accuse.” It lasted until July 28 and during that week held the French public spellbound. Newspapers, in Paris and the provinces alike, drove a thriving trade with stenographic accounts of the testimony and partisan portraits of the witnesses. Madame Caillaux’s wardrobe loomed larger than the fate of nations. On this page, journalists examined at length the issue of legal responsibility in a crime of passion.
On July 29, large crowds gathered at the Palais de Justice for the verdict. In his summation, Labori, anticipating what came to be known as the “Union Sacrée,” implored the jury to visit its anger on France’s external enemies rather than on Madame Caillaux, to “proceed united as one … toward the perils that threaten us.” The jury may have taken his plea to heart. It acquitted the murderess, and in so doing wrote the perfect denouement to a play from which neither the press nor the public could yet tear itself away. Henriette Caillaux’s acquittal inspired more intense coverage, more angry debate, more threats to the life of her husband. She walked free; her enthralled audience stayed put.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the novelist and physician, who once observed that most people don’t die until the last minute, was old enough in 1914 to remember how far minds still were, late in July, from thoughts of the abyss yawning just ahead. On July 25, Serbia agreed to almost all the outlandish stipulations set forth in Austria’s ultimatum. Austria, assured by Kaiser Wilhelm that Germany would honor its alliance if Russia should join the fray, demanded unconditional acceptance. A proposal by the British foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, that the ambassadors of France, England, and Italy convene to find a diplomatic solution went unheeded. He then urged Germany to mediate the quarrel. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg equivocated in the absence of the kaiser, who had not allowed ominous portents to interfere with his midsummer cruise aboard the imperial yacht Hohenzollern. On July 28, Wilhelm, home after three weeks at sea, proposed an expedient enabling Austria to take action without forcing Russia to mobilize. Serbia had indeed met the wishes of the Danubian monarchy, but the promises it made on paper would be worthless until translated into deeds. “The Serbs are Orientals, therefore liars, deceitful, and master hands at temporizing,” Wilhem asserted. “In order that these fine promises may become truth and fact, the exercise of douce violence [gentle violence] will be necessary. This will best be done by Austria’s occupying Belgrade as security for the enforcement and execution of the promises and remaining there until the demands are actually carried out. This is also necessary in order to give an outward satisfaction d’honneur to the army which has for a third time been mobilized to no purpose, an appearance of success in the eyes of the rest of the world and enable it to have at least the consciousness of having stood on foreign soil.” The Austrian war party led by Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold would thus be placated and the conflict “localized.”
No matter. Berchtold would ultimately have his way. Austria declared war on Serbia that same day, July 28. Russia, to whose “generous Slav heart” Serbia had appealed for support three days earlier, mobilized troops along her border with the Austrian province of Galicia. Meanwhile, General Joseph Joffre, France’s chief of staff, advised the Russian military attaché that his country was fully prepared to do everything expected of a loyal ally. The besetting fear of tactical advantages and surprise attacks, which dictated military strategy throughout Europe, set in motion a monstrously reflexive sequence of events. “My thoughts were utterly pessimistic,” Maurice Paléologue wrote in his diary on July 27. “Whatever I did to fight them they always brought me back to the one conclusion—war. The hour for combinations and diplomatic artifices had gone.… Individual initiative existed no longer; there was no longer any human will capable of withstanding the automatic mechanism of the forces let loose. We diplomats had lost all influence on the course of events.” On July 29, Austria bombarded Belgrade. At the request of the kaiser, whose chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, predicted that the embroilment of other nations would result in civilized Europe being torn apart, Czar Nicholas suspended an order for general mobilization, but eleventh-hour diplomacy failed.3 Austria kept bombarding; Nicholas took the crucial step of reinstating his order; France acquiesced in Russia’s mobilization; England waffled; and Germany, whose generals wanted as much time as possible to implement the revised Schlieffen Plan and invade neutral Belgium, threatened. Like gamblers guessing and bluffing in a game played for mortal stakes, European leaders spent late July frantically wondering who would be the first Great Power to withdraw, or the first to attack. War may have been inevitable, in their minds, but who would incur the blame of declaring it?
In Paris, the voice protesting most eloquently against the alliance that tied France to Russia’s foreign policy and made her a partner in the maneuvers of czarist government belonged to Jean Jaurès, leader of the French Socialist Party. From the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies, where he represented the Tarn region, and in the paper L’Humanité, which he had founded with Aristide Briand in 1904, Jaurès denounced revanchists, unreconstructed anti-Dreyfusards, and apostles of animal drive. On January 22, 1914, at a memorial service for his colleague Francis de Pressensé, he exhorted students in the audience to reject the preachers of “vitalism” and ignore the “reactionary dilettantes” who had made it their credo.
Today you are told: act, always act! But what is action without thought? It is the barbarism born of inertia. You are told: brush aside the party of peace; it saps your courage! But I tell you that to stand for peace today is to wage the most heroic of battles.… Defy those who warn you against what they call “system”! Defy those who urge you to abandon your intelligence for instinct and intuition!
An article Jaurès published in L’Humanité six months later sounded the keynote of innumerable speeches and essays: “If all of Europe does not understand that the true strength of States no longer resides in the pride of conquest and the brutality of oppression but in the respect for liberties, in the concern with justice and peace, the East of Europe will remain a slaughterhouse in which the blood of the butchered will mingle with that of their butchers.” By mid-July, when the SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International) held its annual congress, everyone with eyes to see knew that the whole continent might become that slaughterhouse. Jaurès argued zealously, and in vain, for a general strike. On July 25, the day Austria rejected Serbia’s reply to her ultimatum, he delivered his last speech on French soil, at a political rally near Lyon, incriminating French imperialism, Austria’s crude ambition, and Russia’s “devious policy.” Only the masses could save Europe from ruin. “Think of what it would mean for Europe.… What a massacre, what devastation, what barbarism! That is why I still fervently hope that we can prevent the catastrophe.”
Even after Germany issued a proclamation anticipating war (the Kriegsgefahr Zustand) on July 31, Jaurès continued to hope against hope that disaster could be averted. There was no more time for ponderation and rallies, but the leader, with his sights set on a full meeting of the International to be held in Paris on August 9, didn’t know it. On July 31, he primed himself to write a manifesto demanding once again France’s repudiation of her entente with Russia; denouncing the machinations of the czar’s ambassador, Alexander Izvolsky; and urging upon lackluster ministers a Franco-German rapprochement. He might have wanted to reiterate what his German colleague Hugo Haase had recently declared in Brussels:
The ultimatum sent to Servia must be regarded as a provocation to long-desired war. As you know, Servia’s answer was so conciliatory in tone that if Austria had had the honest desire peace could have been brought about. Austria wanted war. The most fearful thing about it all is that this criminal sport may deluge all Europe with blood.
Jean Jaurès, 1859–1914, leader of the French Socialist Party and cofounder of its daily newspaper L’Humanité. Clara Malraux, née Goldschmidt, was his neighbor in the early 1900s and wrote of him: “What did I know of this gentleman when, at the age of six, I was confronted with him, with his broad beard like dark parsley, with his arms and their sweeping gestures, and his close attention that was as if you were being given a present? I was struck by the fine ring of his voice, but hardly at all by his southern accent. He was short, rather thick-set, and both brisk and heavy at the same time” (Clara Malraux in Memoirs).
He would likely have written it had his hand not been stayed by Fate in the person of a twenty-nine-year-old drifter suffering from delusions of grandeur and crazed by the patriotic demonology of rabid nationalists. On Friday, July 31, as the last week of peace drew to a close, Jaurès sat down to dinner at a café near L’Humanité in Montmartre. Raoul Villain approached him from behind and blew his brains out. Jaurès was fifty-four.
Whereas Henriette Caillaux’s crime anesthetized the public, Villain’s shot woke them up.4 The war that ultimately left Europe in shambles came as a bolt from the blue to many people. Events may have overtaken everyone, including men in power, but it did not help that newspaper publishers who squeezed as much print as possible out of Henriette Caillaux had consigned diplomatic dispatches to relative obscurity. Midway through July, when the government issued orders for the recall of soldiers on leave, the press was strongly advised to keep mum. “Care must be taken to avoid being conspicuous about measures likely to alarm the public,” declared the minister of the interior. Fearful of pacifist rallies, the War Ministry made “silence and discretion” its watchwords.
The government was all too successful. Its strategy did more than disarm most pacifists. It gave wings to the myth that the Teuton was a predator with an insatiable appetite for French innocence. Suddenly set upon during her midsummer repose, France had done nothing to invite aggression, or to suggest that forty-three years of peace weighed heavily on her. This construction of events found almost immediate purchase in the national psyche. Surprise begot indignation, and indignation led to a wave of bellicose patriotism that swept through the country in the early days of August. Bishops, pastors, financiers, and factory workers all joined in the chorus of outraged virtue. “All civilized people will pay homage to the loyalty, to the dignity of our attitude,” declared the bishop of La Rochelle. A prefect reported that everyone in the region he administered, the Var, understood that “the conflict became inevitable despite France’s best efforts to promote peace.” The mayor of a small town, following his party’s line, assigned the principal cause of the conflict to “the criminal maneuvers of imperialism” but exonerated France, which had “sought to bring about a peaceful solution.” Departmental archives, from Savoie to the Charente, abound in irate commentary, often recorded by schoolteachers: “This Wilhelm, who has the gall to provoke all nations, must be a barbarian. He deserves to die”; “Germany has long been spoiling for war”; “War had to erupt, since Germany has wanted it forever and at all costs.” The racial cant of a Maurice Barrès or his friend Charles Maurras (leader of the royalist movement L’Action Française) was echoed at the village level in references to Germany as the “ancestral” enemy, the “hereditary” enemy, the “eternal” enemy.
Socialists were another matter. Had Villain missed his mark on July 31, Jaurès would have lived to see comrades who had only recently been standard-bearers of antimilitarism rallying around the flag—as he himself intended to do if all else failed—and conferring the virtue of revolutionary evangelism upon their newfound ardor. When France had been besieged by Austria and her allies in 1792–93, had she not, in her victorious retaliation, brought Enlightenment to the benighted Europe of kings and autocracies? Patriotism displaced internationalism in pronouncements—patriotism construed not as an expression of xenophobic intolerance but as internationalism in another guise. (Many Germans, notably Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, were professing their love of country just as ardently across the Rhine). Jean Longuet, Karl Marx’s grandson, declared on August 2 during a rally at the Salle Wagram:
If France is invaded, how could Socialists not be the first to defend the France of the Revolution and of Democracy, the France of the Encyclopédie, of 1793, of June 1848, the France of Pressensé, of Jaurès? They know that in doing so they will be reviving the motto of ’93: “Peace for the world’s peoples! War against its kings!”
Four years later, when Socialists were reciting mea culpas over 1,385,000 French graves, including that of Jean Jaurès’s only son, a steadfast antimilitarist named Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, who had nothing to repent of, reviewed the enthusiasms of 1914 from a sober perspective. “The truth of the matter is,” he declared at a union congress,
that if we had wished to resist [as he in fact had done] on July 31, 1914, we would have been swept away by the torrent of chauvinism surging through the country. The truth is, and one must have the courage to admit it, that one cannot stage a general strike without strikers; there can be no insurrection without insurrectionists. Even if we had tried to apply the resolutions of our union congress, we would have been repulsed by those same laboring masses who, now weary of the war, reproach us for not having acted back then. Comrades, we did nothing, because we could do nothing.
The occasion was not appropriate to air another truth, that many who might have stood firmer in the chauvinist tide lost their footing with Jaurès’s departure. The “great tribune” had been the Socialists’ backbone and compass.5
On the morning of August 4, Raymond Poincaré, René Viviani, ministers, senators, and fellow deputies, including Maurice Barrès, president of the ultranationalist Ligue des Patriotes, gathered with leaders in Passy, where Jaurès had lived, to deliver eulogies over his coffin. A large crowd had come at the behest of the CGT,6 which promised that the funeral ceremony would be the ultimate demonstration of pacifist vigor.
But what they heard, for the most part, on the day after Germany declared war against France and only hours after a German army violated Belgian neutrality, were orations posthumously enlisting Jaurès in the cause of national solidarity. “At this tomb, on which the most passionate of men lies inanimate,” declared Premier Viviani, “I summon all French to reconcile their differences, to unite and achieve supreme concord. The great tribune, if he could rise, trembling, would express himself no differently.” Édouard Vaillant, a venerable Socialist who had fled France after the 1871 Commune of Paris, had lived abroad until 1880 (when Communards received amnesty), and had fought the good fight since 1893 as a deputy fiercely opposed to national armies, projected his support of the government through Jaurès. “What he would say, how he would advise us, if he were present?” he asked. “He would say that at this moment, when, facing the prospect of a general catastrophe, all the forces of barbarism, all the powers of imperialist militarism are being unleashed against us, we must not lose our internationalist faith, nor even allow it to slacken. He would recommend poise. He would have us bear in mind the battles that will follow the great battle now upon us, and remember that afterward we shall have to contend with the spirit of militarist reaction that may vanquish the victor. That is what he would tell us.… So, let us swear to do our duty, for our Fatherland, for the Republic, for the Revolution.” Equally confident that Jaurès would have wanted workers to do their duty in a war justified as an Armageddon-like contest against imperialism was Léon Jouhaux, secretary-general of the CGT.7 Others followed, making similar pledges of allegiance, much to the satisfaction of Maurice Barrès, whose seat in the National Assembly had placed him, ideologically, at the farthest remove from Jean Jaurès.
Jean Jaurès’s funeral cortège proceeding from Passy to the Gare d’Orléans on August 4, 1914.
In 1924, Jaurès’s remains were interred near Zola’s in the Panthéon. Until then he lay buried at Carmaux in the Tarn valley, his birthplace. On August 4, 1914, thousands of Parisians lined the streets to bid him farewell as the funeral cortège wended its way from Passy, along the Avenue Henri Martin, past the Trocadéro, to the Place de la Concorde, and thence to the Gare d’Orléans for the long train voyage south. Later that day, fellow deputies who normally sat on either side of him in the National Assembly commemorated his absence by leaving the bench empty. They had reconvened there after the funeral to hear the government rally France and prescribe measures needed in defense of the homeland.
Poincaré declared that France had been the object of a brutal, premeditated aggression; that for forty years the French, in repressing their desire for “legitimate reparations,” had set an example of an impeccably peaceful, conciliatory nation, had pulled France up by her bootstraps and used her renewed strength “to advance progress and the good of humanity.” France’s heroic sons, charged with defending her, would present the picture of a “sacred union.” No mortal enemy could pry apart the brotherhood. They would stand “as one” in their patriotic faith and their “indignation against the aggressor.”
Premier Viviani, in a much longer address reviewing the events of recent European history, bestowed upon France the virtues of a medieval knight. She was “sans peur et sans reproche” (fearless and irreproachable). She was the guardian of liberty at war with the powers of night. “Under siege,” he declaimed, “are the freedoms of which France, her friends and allies are proud to be the defenders. They are what is at stake; everything else is a pretext.” Lest France’s foes think the less of her as a physical force for prizing peace, piety, and enlightenment above military prowess, Viviani insisted that virtue was not without the strength to wield a mighty sword.
A strong, free people who uphold an age-old ideal and are indissolubly one in safeguarding its existence; a democracy which has been able to discipline its military effort and did not fear, during this past year, to increase the weight of it to match neighboring armaments; an armed nation fighting for its own life and the independence of Europe—that is the spectacle we honorably offer witnesses to this formidable struggle.… France has often proved, in less favorable conditions, that she is a most redoubtable adversary when she fights for liberty and justice, as is the case now.
The Gallic cock at its most combative, clawing back the two provinces ceded to Germany in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War. “Enfin!”—At last!—expresses the sentiments of revanchists, zealots bent on avenging their loss.
Ovations punctuated every sentence. Newspapers across the political spectrum describe a revival meeting rather than a parliamentary session, and conservative reporters found nothing but glory in this anomalous communion. Where parties—each with more than one mind of its own—had traditionally wrangled, here politicians exemplified the “Union Sacrée.” Now that Parliament had ceased to be a forum for cranky debate, the institution was at last “worthy of France,” opined Le Figaro. And the French could now be French, imbued with common ideals of brotherhood, salvation, and sacrifice. It was as if war, under a Republic forever teetering at the brink, abolished the threat of revolution. Older deputies exempt from military service embraced younger ones. Spectators in the galleries applauded. It was great theater, according to a journalist reporting for Le Figaro. After the last words had been spoken, people filed silently out of the hall in which had occurred “one of the grandest, most beautiful things that we veteran observers of party strife have ever been privileged to witness.”
In Berlin, where only two members of the German Reichstag had voted against war credits, Kaiser Wilhelm said, “Henceforth I know no parties; I know only Germans.”
· · ·
September 1914. An Englishwoman offering cigarettes to a grateful cuirassier.
No one rejoiced more exuberantly than Maurice Barrès, a militant in party warfare since 1889. This Lorrainer gave full voice to his belief that blood was needed to reconsecrate France, to regenerate it, to liberate the energy held in thrall by arid philosophy, to do everything Jaurès had condemned as “vitalism.” For Barrès, the curtain had fallen on individual consciousness. August 4, 1914, was a day on which true Frenchmen, practicing Catholics and lapsed alike, could not tell God’s blessing from the warm sun. “Even if it involves the awful lessons of battle,” proclaimed Barrès, “I’ve wanted nothing more than for Frenchmen to unite around the great ideas of our race. So they have. Blood has not yet rained upon our nation and war has already made us [at the Assembly] feel its regenerative powers. It is a resurrection.”
The army—whose prestige, Barrès and others felt, ought to have taken precedence over considerations of justice for one wretched soul, Alfred Dreyfus—had been grievously insulted; but war would set France straight. The celebrants prophesied in chorus that a decadent nation would regain its health once released from the drear monotony—the horrible quotidien—of peacetime. Fire, mortal danger, and the common enemy would enforce a collective truth. At the front, disparate elements would fuse into the “organic” society so loathsome to Kant-besotted intellectuals, for whom France’s honor had depended upon the exculpation of a Jew. Men suddenly plucked out of civilian life and thrown together in their hundred thousands would not suffer from anomie. On the contrary, the battlefield would seat them in their Frenchness. Those who died would die as martyrs to the cause of national rebirth.
August 1914. Departing for the front.
Almost everywhere, religious fervor sounded the call to arms along with bellicose patriotism, ignoring Pope Benedict XV’s effort to reconcile the warring parties. “The task of Christians consists in preparing, stimulating, hastening, in the bosom of our Churches first of all, then of all our people, a government of repentance and of faith,” declared one eminent ecclesiastic. Joan of Arc rode again. Church joined state in the sacred union, the sacredness of which rested upon the moral certainty that France stood for civilization and Germany for barbarism. Barrès called the Germans “Orientals,” soon to be vulgarized as “Huns.”8
1Casus foederis describes a situation in which the terms of an alliance come into play. A country may be compelled to declare war, for example, if its ally is attacked.
2“Revanchism,” or “revengism,” was the term for a political agenda based on the abiding desire to gain revenge for the military defeat of 1870–71 and recapture Alsace and Lorraine.
3Moltke shared Paléologue’s feeling of inevitability: “This is the way things will and must develop, unless, one might almost say, a miracle takes place to prevent at the eleventh hour a war which will annihilate the civilization of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come. Germany does not want to bring about this terrible war. But the German Government knows that it would fatally wound the deeply rooted sentiment of allied loyalty, one of the finest traits of the German spirit, and place itself at variance with all the feelings of its people.”
4Like Henriette Caillaux, Villain was acquitted, but only after spending the entire war in prison. His trial took place in March 1919. The defense attorney, Alexandre Zévaès, addressed the jurors as follows: “Your sentence will have no political significance. It will be a verdict of pardon and forgetfulness effacing our prewar hatreds.” In L’Humanité, Marcel Cachin asked what the true meaning of the jury’s “lamentable gesture” may have been. “Perhaps it meant to affirm that … the real assassin [the warmongering demagogues], who had found a mere instrument in Villain, was not in court, that they didn’t want to incarcerate the poor stooge who, on a day of lunacy, had held the revolver that killed our friend. Or perhaps this jury of Parisian bourgeois privately approved of his abominable act. We are told that the verdict was reached quickly.”
5After the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, at which Lenin organized opposition to the “imperialist war,” he wrote the pamphlet Socialism and War, denouncing Socialists who collaborated with their national governments as “social-chauvinists.”
6The Confédération Générale du Travail—a large confederation of unions.
7Jouhaux delivered a feeble palinode after the war, in 1918, at the thirteenth congress of the CGT. “What was the psychological phenomenon, so to speak, that oriented my thought in the direction it took?” he asked, referring to his eulogy at Jaurès’s funeral. “I’m hard put to say what it was. There are circumstances in the life of a man that make him evoke more or less forcefully thoughts that seemed foreign to him but which are the baggage of traditions he carries within himself. Perhaps I lived one of those moments.” His capitulation to the war effort was, he implied, attributable to the martial impulse of his revolutionary unconscious. On the Right and Left, the unconscious was invoked for good and ill, as a responsible party.
8A young soldier writing from the front formulated a German version of the received idea: “We know full well that we are fighting for the German idea of the world, that we are defending German feeling against Asiatic barbarism and Latin indifference.”
