Raymond Poincaré

Premier (1912–1913, 1922–1924, 1926–1929) and president of France (1913–1920)

• Born: August 20, 1860
• Birthplace: Bar-le-Duc, France
• Died: October 15, 1934
• Place of death: Paris, France

Poincaré was perhaps the most important political figure of the French Third Republic. He had the distinction of moving from the premiership to the presidency before World War I and back to the premiership twice in the 1920s. He and Georges Clemenceau struggled to defend France against Germany during World War I, and Poincaré worked to enforce or at least salvage part of the Treaty of Versailles during the postwar decade.

Early Life

Raymond Poincaré (pwahn-kah-ray) was born on August 20, 1860, in Lorraine in northeastern France, a decade before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Nevertheless, his was a secure and comfortable childhood in a prosperous bourgeois family. He was a highly competitive and talented student, who started keeping a journal when he, his mother, and his brother fled Bar-le-Duc as the German troops advanced into their province. The brilliant lad would be haunted by the memory of the German occupation for the rest of his life. The evacuation of his province in 1874, after the French had paid a war indemnity of one billion dollars, was also etched in his mind. The young man, a cousin of the distinguished mathematician Henri Poincaré, was educated in Bar-le-Duc and Paris, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar.

Poincaré entered into politics in 1886 when he was appointed chief assistant to the minister of agriculture. That same year he was elected to the general council of the Meuse department and the following year to the Chamber of Deputies. During these turbulent years of the Boulanger crisis and the forced retirement of French president Jules Grévy, Poincaré seldom addressed the Chamber. In 1893, he was offered the ministry of finance in a “Progressist,” or moderate, government; however, he chose the ministry of public instruction. The government resigned after a few months, but Poincaré became minister of finance the following year, when he was only thirty-four. He held typical nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal principles as he favored governmental economy and opposed an income tax. He returned to the education ministry for several months in 1895 and attempted unsuccessfully a reorganization of the French university system. He was highly acclaimed for his many polished and erudite speeches, which he wrote rapidly and delivered from memory. At the funeral of Louis Pasteur in October 1895, he gave the only eulogy before an immense crowd in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. The premier, the press, and the public acclaimed his oration, but three days later the cabinet fell. Nevertheless, Poincaré’s second tenure at the education ministry greatly increased his prestige.

Life’s Work

Disenchantment with politics and financial need prompted Poincaré to develop his legal practice and reject cabinet positions from 1896 to 1906. The Dreyfus affair was raging during these years, and he reluctantly but dramatically broke with the “Progressists” in November 1898 and cautiously supported the Radicals when he realized that Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been unjustly convicted and that the French military had fabricated evidence against Dreyfus. Early the next year, Poincaré and several friends founded the Democratic Alliance (also known as the Democratic Republican Alliance), a loose grouping of “liberals” who advocated patriotism, religious and educational freedom, and opposition to socialism. His dissatisfaction with the extreme anticlerical legislation and socialist ties of the Radical cabinets from 1899 to 1905 led him often to abstain from important votes in the Chamber of Deputies. Therefore he was happy to accept election to the Senate in 1903. The following year he married divorcée Henriette Benucci in a civil ceremony, much to his pious mother’s displeasure; Benucci’s divorce and Poincaré’s anticlerical politics prevented a sacramental wedding even if the couple had desired it.

The Agadir crisis with Germany, which began when France broke the Franco-German Accord of 1909 by stationing French troops in Morocco in 1911, greatly undermined the government of prime minister Joseph Caillaux and helped provoke a passionate upsurge of French patriotism in many quarters. This carried Poincaré to the premiership in January 1912. As both foreign minister and prime minister, Poincaré vigorously sought to restrain Russia in the Balkans but also to strengthen the alliance with Russia and the Entente with Great Britain. During late 1912, Poincaré began to consider running for the presidency and was elected by the National Assembly to this largely symbolic office.

Poincaré’s major domestic goal in 1913 was to increase universal military service from two years to three. The Germans had twice in two years enlarged their standing army until it was virtually double the size of the French. In midsummer, the “three years law” was passed over the opposition of most radicals and socialists. An income tax and the “three years law” were the chief issues in the 1914 spring elections for the Chamber of Deputies. These were won by the leftists, but World War I prevented a return to two-year military service.

Poincaré's policies were certainly not responsible for the outbreak of World War I, despite some postwar accusations. Poincaré successfully increased presidential power, his major reason for seeking the office, during 1913 and the first three years of the war. He played a very active role in military and foreign affairs and was not an impotent “prisoner in the Élysée” palace, as he often complained. He, of course, selected the premiers but also influenced ministerial choices and policy decisions as he presided over the Council of Ministers. Yet the great popularity that he had enjoyed in 1912 and 1913 evaporated, and he was often criticized for his leadership and even ridiculed for his “chauffeur’s uniform,” which he adopted to visit the troops.

In his memoirs, Poincaré called 1917 the année trouble (the confused year), but it was also a troubled year for France, with widespread French mutinies and three ineffectual cabinets. During November, Poincaré was confronted with an unpalatable choice for premier, either the defeatist Joseph Caillaux and a possible peace compromise or the domineering Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau in his newspaper had constantly criticized the government and especially Poincaré. The president, however, inevitably chose the “tiger,” who would become a great popular hero as “Father Victory,” whereas Poincaré would be somewhat forgotten. Poincaré had very little influence on the peace conference, since Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson made the decisions. The president thought the final treaty was a poor one and that Clemenceau had won the war but lost the peace.

Centrist cabinets, attempting to lead a rightist Chamber of Deputies after the December 1919 elections, were confronted with a Germany determined to avoid reparations and a Great Britain concerned about alleged French hegemony in Europe. Several ephemeral ministries were finally replaced in February 1922 by a Poincaré government that survived for twenty-six months. He was once again widely popular, for his dedication to strictly enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. After the Germans defaulted on reparation payments, Poincaré reluctantly ordered the occupation of the Ruhr Valley by French troops in January 1923 and tried to obtain reparations by coercion. In 1922, French per capita taxes were almost twice those in Germany, and French per capita governmental debt was greater than that across the Rhine River. Poincaré’s goals in the Ruhr have been questioned, but undoubtedly he wanted German payments so that the French budget, overburdened by reconstruction costs, could be balanced.

The occupation began in January 1923, after the Reparation Commission found Germany in default; therefore, Poincaré had sound legal if not wise diplomatic grounds for action. Poincaré’s Ruhr policy drew criticism from the British and Americans and triggered vitriolic attacks on him by Parisian intellectuals and French communists. Nevertheless, he was generally popular and had a large majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The hyperinflation crisis in Germany, Anglo-American resistance to the occupation, and French fiscal problems led Poincaré to accept an international investigation and eventually the Dawes Plan, which brought an end to the Ruhr occupation and implemented a staggered payment plan for German reparations. Most French conservatives thought Poincaré had won the Ruhr “war” but lost the peace. Moreover, Poincaré insisted on a 20 percent tax rise in March 1924. The increase was not to pay for the Ruhr occupation, which was profitable, but to cover the budget deficit and reverse the critical decline of the franc.

Not surprisingly, the Cartel des Gauches (cartel of leftists) of socialists and radicals won a majority in the 1924 spring elections as voters rejected Poincaré’s higher taxes. The leftist government of Édouard Herriot was divided on financial policy and soon confronted a dangerous flight of capital abroad. The franc began to fall precipitously. In April 1925, Poincaré vigorously attacked Herriot in the Senate and provoked his resignation. A series of Cartel ministries failed to stanch the fiscal hemorrhage.

Poincaré now became known as the “savior of the franc.” He was sixty-six years of age but still had an impeccable memory and prodigious energy for work. He resumed the premiership in July 1926 and formed a government containing Herriot and four other former premiers, representing all parties except the extremes of left and right. Following the recommendations of a committee of experts, excise taxes were raised, expenses were reduced, and a budgetary deficit became a surplus. Higher interest rates coaxed fugitive French capital to return, and within several months the franc had risen to twenty-five to the dollar. The premier wisely stabilized it officially in 1928 at that rate. Stabilization was achieved smoothly after Poincaré’s supporters in the chamber were successful in the spring elections. The committee of experts had also urged ratification of treaties regularizing the repayment of French war debts to Great Britain and the United States. Poincaré sought ratification by the National Assembly for several weeks in the summer of 1929, but he became seriously ill in July and was forced to resign permanently from the cabinet and active political life. He died five years later, on October 15, 1934, in Paris.

Significance

Raymond Poincaré fought valiantly for his nation with his probity, diligence, and ardent republican patriotism. On the eve of World War I, Poincaré incarnated and led the national revival, and in the postwar years he attempted to ensure war reparations from Germany, although his strong anti-German attitudes often clouded his foreign policies. He was the savior of the franc in 1926, but, more important, he rescued a floundering parliamentary republic. Poincaré was also the founder of the Democratic Republican Alliance, one of the most powerful and influential parties under the Third Republic.

His career may appear to have been relatively unsuccessful. France was victorious in World War I by 1918 but proportionately suffered the heaviest losses. The Ruhr was occupied from 1923 to 1925, but the occupation weakened France's ties with its allies, namely Great Britain and the United States, and reparation payments were never productive and were ultimately a factor in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Then the liberal Third Republic collapsed in 1940 from the onslaught of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, Poincaré’s method of approaching problems with studious, precise analysis and solving them by the honest, equitable administration led the French Third Republic through a time of great upheaval and instability.

Bibliography

Barry, Gearoid. "Marc Sangnier and 'The Other Germany'" The Freiburg International Democratic Peace Congress and the Ruhr Invasion, 1923." European History Quarterly 41.1 (2011): 25–49. Print.

Carrol, Alison, and Louisa Zanoun. "The View from the Border: A Comparative Study of Autonomism in Alsace and the Moselle, 1918–1929." European Review of History 18.4 (2011): 465–486. Print.

Gooch, George P. Before the War: Studies in Diplomacy. London: Longmans, 1938. Print. This book contains a lengthy sixty-three-page essay on Poincaré’s conduct of foreign policy as premier and foreign minister during 1912. Gooch admires Poincaré’s ability and integrity and says that he did not desire or work for war but sought to maintain the balance of power by closer cooperation with Russia and Great Britain.

Huddleston, Sisley. Poincaré: A Biographical Portrait. Boston: Little, 1924. Print. This book by a correspondent of The Times of London is not a biography of Poincaré. It is a journalistic account that stresses his honesty, patriotism, incredible memory, and legalistic attitude. It was written during the Ruhr occupation.

Keiger, J. F. V. Raymond Poincaré. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Based on new archival material, this biography provides new details about Poincaré’s life and career and the history of France during the Third Republic.

Keiger, J. F. V. “Raymond Poincaré and the Ruhr Crisis.” French Foreign and Defence Policy, 1918–1940: The Decline of a Great Power. Ed. Robert Boyce. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. This essay, written by a Poincaré biographer, is included in this examination of France’s policies of appeasement and protection during the period between the two world wars.

Keiger, John. "Wielding Finance as a Weapon of Diplomacy: France and Britain in the 1920s." Contemporary British History 25.1 (2011): 29–47. Print.

McDougall, Walter A. France’s Rhineland and Diplomacy, 1914–1924. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. This excellent study describes the failure of the French, in their view, to secure a satisfactory peace and then the failure of their allies to help enforce the treaty. Most of the book is devoted to Poincaré’s Rhenish policy and occupation of the Ruhr. The author argues that, as a result of British opposition and German passive resistance, Poincaré sought to revise the treaty. Includes an exhaustive bibliography.

Martin, Benjamin F. Count Albert de Mun: Paladin of the Third Republic. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1978. Print. This valuable biography of an aristocratic Roman Catholic leader describes his change from a royalist to a moderately conservative supporter of the republic. There is considerable information about Poincaré during the decade before World War I and an extensive bibliography.

Poincaré, Raymond. The Memoirs of Raymond Poincaré. Trans. George Arthur. 4 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1926–1931. Print. Covers the years 1912 through 1918. Unfortunately, this English edition of the memoirs has been adapted and compressed, but it does include most of Poincaré’s first seven volumes.

Schuker, Stephen A. The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1976. Print. This superbly researched book presents essential economic information about reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, the French financial crisis of 1924, and the Dawes Plan. Schuker revises Poincaré’s reputation upward and Herriot’s downward. There is an extensive bibliography.

Weber, Eugen J. The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959. Print. Weber argues that patriotism became respectable and widespread after 1905 because of domestic and foreign factors. Concern about German aggressiveness resulted in widespread chauvinistic nationalism after November 1911. Poincaré is often mentioned as a patriotic leader.

Wright, Gordon. Raymond Poincaré and the French Presidency. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1942. Print. Wright’s book is not a biography even for the years 1913 to 1920; it is a detailed consideration of Poincaré’s attempt to strengthen the presidency without constitutional amendment. Nevertheless, it is a well-documented account of his presidential activities and includes a helpful biography.