Raymond Poincaré

Early political career

Poincaré had served for over a year in the Department of Agriculture when in 1887 he was elected deputy for the Meuse département. He made a great reputation in the Chamber as an economist, and sat on the budget commissions of 1890–1891 and 1892. He was minister of education, fine arts and religion in the first cabinet (April – November 1893) of Charles Dupuy, and minister of finance in the second and third (May 1894 – January 1895). In Alexandre Ribot's cabinet, Poincaré became minister of public instruction. Although he was excluded from the Radical cabinet which followed, the revised scheme of death duties proposed by the new ministry was based upon his proposals of the previous year. He became vice-president of the chamber in the autumn of 1895 and, in spite of the bitter hostility of the Radicals, retained his position in 1896 and 1897.

Along with other followers of "Opportunist" Léon Gambetta, Poincaré founded the Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD) in 1902, which became the most important centre-right party under the Third Republic. In 1906, he returned to the ministry of finance in the short-lived Sarrien ministry. Poincaré had retained his practice at the Bar during his political career, and he published several volumes of essays on literary and political subjects.

"Poincarism" was a political movement over the period 1902–1920. In 1902, the term was used by Georges Clemenceau to define a young generation of conservative politicians who had lost the idealism of the founders of the republic. After 1911, the term was used to mean "national renewal" when faced with the German threat. After the First World War, "Poincarism" refers to his support of business and financial interests. Poincaré was noted for his lifelong feud with Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau and Poincaré absolutely detested one another and engaged in one of the longest running feuds in French politics. The British historian Anthony Adamthwaite described Poincaré as having an "obsession with Clemenceau verging on paranoia" and as a "cold fish whose one passion was cats".

First premiership

Poincaré became Prime Minister in January 1912, and began a policy meant to block Germany's ambitions for "world power status", and worked to restore ties with France's ally, Russia. During the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909, the Franco-Russian alliance had been badly strained when France refused to support Russia after Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, threatened war. During the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911, Russia refused to support France when Germany threatened war. The lack of French interest in supporting Russia during the Bosnia crisis was the nadir of Franco-Russian relations with Tsar Nicholas II making no effort to hide his displeasure at the lack of support from what was supposed to be his number one ally. At the time, Nicholas seriously considered abrogating the alliance, and was only stopped by the lack of an alternative. Russia's refusal to support France during the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911 reflected the enduring bitterness caused in St. Petersburg by France's refusal to support Russia during the Bosnia crisis which ended with humiliation. Poincaré believed a rift in the Franco-Russian alliance could only benefit Germany. Germany would be encouraged to think that it was possible to threaten war with France as the Russians might not honour the alliance. In August 1912, Poincaré visited Russia to meet Tsar Nicholas in order to strengthen diplomatic ties. Poincaré believed the rapprochement would deter Germany from risking a demarche to war, and thus avoid a repeat of the Second Moroccan crisis. Tsarist Russia, despite its Francophilia, was generally disdainful of most of the leaders of the Third Republic, but Poincaré was an exception, regarded in St. Petersburg as a strong leader who meant what he said. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, in a report to Nicholas wrote that, after meeting Poincaré: "Russia possesses a sure and faithful friend, endowed with a political spirit above the line and an inflexible will.".

At the same time, Poincaré hoped to pursue an expansionist policy at the expense of Germany's unofficial ally, the Ottoman Empire. For historical, economic and religious reasons, the French had traditionally been very interested in the Levant region of the Middle East. France had for centuries been the protector of the Maronite Christians, most recently in 1860, when France had threatened war following the massacres of the Maronites by local Muslims and Druze, while the Ottoman authorities did nothing. In the early years of the 20th century, there was an influential Levantine lobby within France to argue that it was France's mission to take over Ottoman Syria (roughly what is now modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Poincaré was a leading member of the Comité de l'Orient, the main group that advocated French expansionism in the Middle East. Poincaré's willingness to begin a rapprochement with Imperial Germany in order to allow France to pursue its ambitions in the Middle East was strengthened by the outcome of the First Balkan War, where Bulgaria - whose army had been trained by a French military mission - rapidly defeated the Sultan's army - whose forces had been trained by the German military. Bulgaria's swift victory over the Ottomans was a great blow to German prestige, and correspondingly boosted French confidence, something that allowed Poincaré to approach Berlin from a position of strength.

Poincaré believed that the best policy was one of "firmness" where France would assert its interests forcefully while not excluding the possibility of better foreign relations. After defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, French elites concluded that France could never hope to defeat Germany on its own, and the only way to defeat Germany would be with the help of another great power. Besides its military superiority, Germany had demographic superiority with 70 million people compared with France's 40 million people (not including the colonies) together with economic superiority as the German economy was three times larger than France's. Poincaré therefore rejected Caillaux's proposal for a Franco-German alliance, arguing that Paris would be the junior partner, thus tantamount to ending France's status as a great power. By contrast, the Treaty powers known as the Triple Entente being between two more or less equal powers, would preserve the current status quo ante bellum. Poincaré's foreign policy was essentially defensive as he wished to maintain France as a great power in face of Germany's demands for Weltpolitik ("World politics") under which Germany sought to become the world's dominant power. Poincaré's entire foreign policy was based on the old Roman saying si vis pacem, para bellum ("if you want peace, prepare for war"). He wanted to strengthen both France and Russia to such a point that they presented such a decisive margin of superiority as to deter Germany from going to war with either power, but at same time his foreign policy was not relentlessly anti-German. Although he rejected Caillaux's ideas, he was prepared to improve Franco-German relations on specific issues. A fiscal conservative, Poincaré was deeply concerned about the financial effects of an ever more costly arms race. Being from Lorraine, whether he was a revanchard (revanchist) is disputed. His family house was requisitioned for three years during the war. His speeches warned of the "German menace" and believed Caillaux's policy of rapprochement with Berlin would create an impression of French weakness in Wilhelm II's mind, being a man who only respected the strong. The Canadian historians, Holger Herwig and Richard Hamilton, described Poincaré as: "Typically for a man on the right side of the republican center, Poincaré was anti-clerical, but not anti-religious, nationalist, but not bellicose, a defender of property rights, free markets and small government. No ideologue, he was a practical politician willing to work with any true Frenchmen but adamant in defending France from the Socialist Left, the Catholic Right and, of course, Germany".

Presidency

Pre-war

Poincaré won election as President of the Republic in 1913, in succession to Armand Fallières. The strong-willed Poincaré was the first president of the Third Republic since MacMahon in the 1870s to attempt to make that office into a site of power rather than an empty ceremonial role. He asserted his personality and took a special interest in foreign policy. On 20 January 1914, he became the first French president to visit the German embassy in Paris, a gesture clearly meant to show that he wanted to continue a policy of trying to improve German understanding of French aims.

In early 1914, Poincaré found himself caught up in scandal when the leftist politician Joseph Caillaux threatened to publish letters showing that Poincaré was engaged in secret talks with the Vatican using the Italian government as an intermediary, which would have outraged anti-clerical opinion in France. Caillaux refrained from publishing the documents after the President pressured Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, not to publish documents showing that Caillaux had been unfaithful to his first wife, was involved in questionable financial dealings implicating a pro-German foreign policy. The matter might have remained settled had not the second Madame Caillaux, upset that Calmette might publish love letters written to her while her husband was still married to her predecessor, gone to Calmette's office on 16 March 1914 and shot him dead. The resulting scandal known as the Caillaux affair was the major French news story of the first half of 1914 causing Poincaré to joke that from now on he might send out Madame Poincaré to murder his political enemies since this method was working so well for Caillaux.

July Crisis

On 28 June 1914, Poincaré was at the Longchamp Racecourse when he received news of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, at 17:30 from his assistants. The President remarked that the assassination was a tragedy, ordered an aide to draft a message of condolence to the people of Austria-Hungary and stayed on to enjoy the rest of the races. The American historian, David Fromkin, has noted that the term "July Crisis" is actually a misnomer as it suggests that Europe was plunged into a crisis with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June, but in fact the July crisis only began with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, containing terms patently intended to inspire rejection, on 23 July 1914. The crisis was caused not by the assassination but rather by the decision in Vienna to use it as a pretext for a war with Serbia that many in the Austro-Hungarian government had long advocated.

In 1913, it had been announced that Poincaré would visit St. Petersburg in July 1914 to meet Tsar Nicholas II. The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, decided it was too dangerous for Austria-Hungary to present the ultimatum while the Franco-Russian summit was in progress and decided to wait until Poincaré was on board the battleship France that would take him home. Accompanied by Premier René Viviani, Poincaré went to Russia for the second time (but for the first time as president) to reinforce the Franco-Russian Alliance. The transcripts of the St. Petersburg summit have been lost, but the surviving documentary evidence suggests that neither Nicholas nor Poincaré were particularly concerned about the situation in the Balkans. At the time of the St. Petersburg summit, there were rumours, but little hard evidence, that Vienna might use the assassination to start a war with Serbia. When the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was presented to Serbia on 23 July, the French government was in the hands of Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin, Minister of Justice and acting Premier. Bienvenu-Martin's inability to make decisions was especially exasperating to Philippe Berthelot, the most senior man in the Quai d'Orsay present in Paris, who complained that France was doing nothing while Europe was threatened with the prospect of war. Furthermore, Poincaré's attempts to communicate with Paris were blocked by the Germans who jammed the radio messages between his ship and Paris.

It was not until Poincaré had arrived back in Paris on 30 July 1914 that he finally learned of the crisis, and immediately attempted to stop matters from escalating into war. With Poincaré's full approval, Viviani sent a telegram to Nicholas affirming that:

in the precautionary measures and defensive measures to which Russia believes herself obliged to resort, she should not immediately proceed to any measure which might offer Germany a pretext for a total or partial mobilization of her forces.

Additionally, orders were given for French forces to pull back six miles from the frontier with Germany.

The next day, 31 July, the German ambassador in Paris, Count Wilhelm von Schoen, presented to Viviani an ultimatum warning that, if Russian mobilisation continued, Germany would attack both France and Russia within the next 12 hours. The ultimatum also demanded that France abrogate at once the alliance with Russia, allow German troops to march into France unopposed and turn over the fortresses in Verdun and Toul to the Germans to be occupied as long as Germany was at war with Russia. In response, the French government ordered its ambassador in St. Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, to find what was going on in Russia while refusing a request from General Joseph Joffre to order French mobilisation.

However, the German ultimatum of 31 July 1914 left the French with two options: either to accept the humiliation of accepting the ultimatum, which would be the effective end of France as an independent nation, or go to war with Germany. The American historian Leonard V. Smith, together with the French historians Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, wrote that France had no option but to go to war as the prospect of accepting Schoen's ultimatum was too humiliating for the vast majority of the French people. After Germany declared war on France following the rejection of the ultimatum, Poincaré appeared before the National Assembly to announce that France was now at war forming the doctrine of the union sacrée in which he announced that: "nothing will break the union sacrée in the face of the enemy."

Later war

Poincaré became increasingly sidelined after the accession to power of Georges Clemenceau as prime minister in 1917. He believed the Armistice happened too soon and that the French Army should have penetrated far deeper into Germany. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, he wanted France to wrest the Rhineland from Germany to put it under Allied military control.

Ferdinand Foch urged Poincaré to invoke his powers as laid down in the constitution and take over the negotiations of the treaty due to worries that Clemenceau was not achieving France's aims. He did not, and when the French Cabinet approved of the terms which Clemenceau obtained, Poincaré considered resigning, although again he refrained.

Second premiership

In 1920, Poincaré's term as president came to an end, and two years later he returned to office as prime minister. Once again, his tenure was noted for its strong anti-German policies.

Frustrated at Germany's unwillingness to pay reparations, Poincaré hoped for joint Anglo-French economic sanctions against it in 1922, while opposing military action. In April 1922, Poincaré was greatly alarmed by the Treaty of Rapallo, the beginning of a German-Soviet challenge to the international order established by the Treaty of Versailles. He was disturbed that British Prime Minister David Lloyd George did not share the French viewpoint, instead almost welcoming Rapallo as a chance to bring Soviet Russia into the international system. Poincaré came to believe by May 1922 that if Rapallo could not convince the British that Germany was out to undercut the Versailles system by whatever means necessary, then nothing would, in which case France would just have to act alone. Further adding to Poincaré's fears was the worldwide propaganda campaign started in April 1922 blaming France for World War I as a means of disproving Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which would thereby undermine the French claim to reparations.

In the German-Soviet propaganda of the 1920s, the July Crisis of 1914 was portrayed as Poincaré-la-guerre (Poincaré's war), in which Poincaré put into action the plans he had allegedly negotiated with Emperor Nicholas II in 1912 for the dismemberment of Germany. The French Communist newspaper L'Humanité ran a front-page cover-story accusing Poincaré and Nicholas II of being the two men who plunged the world into war in 1914. The Poincaré-la-guerre propaganda proved to be very effective in the 1920s.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1922, the British continued to spurn Poincaré's offers of an alliance with Britain. Poincaré's attempt to compromise with the British on German reparations failed in 1922. By December 1922 Poincaré was faced with British-American-German hostility and saw coal for French steel production and money for reconstructing the devastated industrial areas draining away.

Poincaré decided to occupy the Ruhr on 11 January 1923, to extract the reparations himself. This, according to historian Sally Marks, "was profitable and caused neither the German hyperinflation, which began in 1922 and ballooned because of German responses to the Ruhr occupation, nor the franc's 1924 collapse, which arose from French financial practices and the evaporation of reparations." The profits, after Ruhr-Rhineland occupation costs, were nearly 900 million gold marks. During the Ruhr crisis, Poincaré made a failed attempt to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Poincaré lost the 1924 French legislative election "more from the franc's collapse and the ensuing taxation than from diplomatic isolation."

Hines H. Hall argues that Poincaré was not a vindictive nationalist. Despite his disagreements with Britain, he desired to preserve the Anglo-French entente. When he ordered the French occupation of the Ruhr valley in 1923, his aims were moderate. He did not try to revive Rhenish separatism. His major goal was the winning of German compliance with the Versailles treaty. Poincaré's inflexible methods and authoritarian personality led to the failure of his diplomacy.

Third premiership

Financial crisis brought him back to power in 1926, and he once again became prime minister and finance minister until his retirement in 1929. As prime minister, he enacted a number of franc stabilization policies, retroactively known as the Poincaré Stabilization Law. His popularity as prime minister rose considerably following his return to the gold standard, so much so that his party won the April 1928 general election.

As early as 1915, Raymond Poincaré introduced a controversial denaturalization law which was applied to naturalized French citizens with "enemy origins" who had continued to maintain their original nationality. Through another law passed in 1927, the government could denaturalize any new citizen who committed acts contrary to French "national interest".

Resignation and death

Due to his ill health, Poincaré resigned as prime minister in July 1929, refusing to serve another term as prime minister. He died in Paris on 15 October 1934 at the age of 74.

Family

His brother, Lucien Poincaré (1862–1920), a physicist, became inspector-general of public instruction in 1902. He is the author of La Physique moderne (1906) and L'Électricité (1907).

Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), an even more distinguished physicist and mathematician, was his first cousin.