H-Diplo/ISSF Essay Number 3 | Published on 26 November 2010

French Foreign Policy in the July Crisis, 1914: A Review Article

Author: Marc Trachtenberg, UCLA
Published by H-Diplo/ISSF on 26 November 2010

Christopher Ball, H-Diplo/ISSF Managing and Commissioning Editor
Diane Labrosse, H-Diplo/ISSF Editor at Large
George Fujii, Web and Production Editor

URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/essays/3-Trachtenberg.html


When I was getting ready to take my Ph.D. exams forty years ago, I had
a meeting with my advisor, Raymond Sontag. What, he wondered, should
he examine me on? “Why don’t you ask me something about the origins of
the First World War?” I said. “I think I understand that now.” His
reply was devastating: “Oh really? I’ve been studying it for fifty
years and I still don’t understand it.” But over the years I’ve come
to feel the same way. The whole question of what caused that war, for
me at least, remains deeply puzzling. To be sure, we’re still learning
new and important things, even about what happened during the July
Crisis in 1914. But with every new insight, new problems come into
focus, and ultimate answers remain as elusive as ever. In fact, the
deeper you go into the issue, the more puzzling it becomes—or at least
that’s been my own experience in grappling with this particular
historical problem.

Stefan Schmidt’s new book on French foreign policy in the July Crisis
is a good case in point. He begins by arguing that the French
government—and above all, Raymond Poincaré, President of the Republic,
and the key French policy maker at the time—took a hard line during
the crisis, and in particular in the important meetings held with the
Russian leadership in St. Petersburg from July 20 to July 23. In
itself this argument is by no means new. Luigi Albertini, in his great
work on origins of the war, took much the same line. But given the
limited evidence on that episode that was available when he wrote that
book, Albertini’s interpretation was necessarily somewhat speculative.
“The St. Petersburg conversations,” he wrote, “ must have dealt above
all with the Austro-Serbian tension and the eventualities that might
result from it.”

But that interpretation was by no means universally accepted, and for
years there was a certain tendency in the historical literature to
play down the role that France had played during the crisis, and
especially to minimize the importance of the St. Petersburg talks.
France was often portrayed as caught up in events she was scarcely
able to control. As John Keiger, author of the most important
English-language study of the subject, put the point: “Far from
believing any more that France played a crucial role in the events
leading to war, recent scholarship suggests that she was the most
passive of the great powers, following events rather than creating
them.” That was certainly Keiger’s own view, and in recent years many
scholars have taken much the same line.

That argument about the passivity of French policy is supported by a
particular interpretation of what went on in the St. Petersburg
meetings. “There is no evidence,” Keiger said flatly, “that during his
visit to Russia Poincaré did anything other than reaffirm the
Franco-Russian alliance. He did not offer carte blanche in the event
of a Balkan war.” To the extent that Poincaré did anything at all, he
pursued a relatively moderate strategy: French policy in the crisis,
according to Keiger, was “predicated on the notion of restraining
Russia to avoid giving Germany a pretext for war.” Indeed, referring
to a report that came in late in the crisis to the effect that Russia
had decided to advise the Serbs not to resist an Austrian invasion,
Keiger writes: “This was the kind of restraint which Poincaré believed
should be reinforced.”

But all this was to no avail, that argument runs, and the French were
overwhelmed by forces they could not control. Poincaré, Keiger says,
“was finally constrained into taking his country into war—a defensive
war.” The French could scarcely control what was happening. Indeed,
they could scarcely affect the behavior of their own main ally.
“Russian decision-making,” says Hew Strachan in the first chapter of
his magisterial study The First World War, “was remarkably little
influenced by France.” The result was, as Eugenia Kiesling, for
example, writes, that “almost regardless of what it did, France would
be dragged into an unwanted war.”

Schmidt, however, takes issue with all these claims. French policy, in
his view, was by no means passive or irrelevant. Very important
choices were made. Above all, the French government—and that meant
essentially Poincaré—made it clear to the Russians that France would
support Russia if an armed conflict broke out over the Serbian
question. The policy could have been different. France could have
tried to restrain Russia, but Poincaré especially chose not to. René
Viviani, who served as both prime minister and foreign minister at the
time, although utterly out of his depth, in fact leaned toward a
moderate policy: he very much disliked the idea of going to war for
the sake of Serbia. But instead, Schmidt argues, Russia was in fact
given the equivalent of a blank check at the St. Petersburg talks and
after. France was not “dragged into” the war. As Maurice Paléologue,
the French ambassador to Russia at the time, wrote in a 1936 letter to
the historian Pierre Renouvin (published in a relatively obscure
journal in 1997), what the French were afraid of at the time was not
that they would be “dragged in” by Russia, but rather that France
would be “poorly supported by Russia, in the event of a German
attack.” And that basic French decision to support Russia
unconditionally was of profound importance. Schmidt argues—and here
again he follows in Albertini’s footsteps, but with a somewhat
stronger argument—that Russia would scarcely have pursued the policy
she did if the French had taken a more moderate line.

The evidence that Schmidt gives to support that interpretation, which
he found in all sorts of places, is in fact really quite
extraordinary, and it’s marshalled very effectively in the book. The
two sections developing that argument about French policy during this
key phase of the crisis (pp. 65-104) are in fact a model, to my mind,
of what historical analysis should be. What evidence exactly is given
here that goes beyond what Albertini had presented? Schmidt shows,
first of all, that Poincaré had come to understand, shortly his
arrival in Russia, how serious the Austro-Serbian dispute was, and how
in fact Austria was about to present the Serbs with a sort of
ultimatum—a “démarche comminatoire,” to use Poincaré’s own term at
the
time. This implied that in the St. Petersburg talks, Poincaré and the
Russian leaders would have had to talk seriously about what Russia
would do in such a case and the degree to which France would support
those actions. And indeed it seems quite clear that this was exactly
what happened. As Paléologue pointed out in his 1936 letter to
Renouvin: “ ‘war’ was certainly discussed in these talks, but only
defensive war. M. Poincaré, at the time, by no means concealed the
fact that in these conversations he was thinking about the possibility
of a conflict. Later on, in the context of the campaign about
‘Poincaré-la-guerre,’ he thought it would be better to give a
different version.” Louis de Robien, in 1914 the attaché in the French
embassy in St. Petersburg, made the same point: by July 22, he wrote,
the French and Russian leaders were “talking openly of a war, which no
one had even dreamt of a few days earlier.”

And what had Poincaré said in his talks with the Russian leaders? It
seems quite clear, from the evidence Schmidt presents, that Poincaré
used very firm language in a meeting he had with the Tsar just before
leaving St. Petersburg. It is hard to avoid the conclusion, reading
this section, that Poincaré had given the Russian monarch the
assurance that France would support his country unconditionally, not
just diplomatically, but militarily as well. The Tsar, for example,
would scarcely have been as grateful as Schmidt shows he was if
Poincaré had merely urged the Russians to stand firm, without making
any commitment of his own.

The basic point here is supported by some additional evidence Schmidt
presents about Poincaré’s worries about Russian weakness in the
crisis. He was particularly upset—and this point directly contradicts
one of the Keiger claims noted above—when he heard that Russia had
decided to advise the Serbs not to resist an Austrian invasion, but to
trust their fate to the great powers. He considered this an
“abdication,” a “black day” for the Franco-Russian alliance. He was
worried also by all the emphasis the Russians were placing on the
importance of making sure that Britain was on their side. He wondered
whether this was a “dérobade”: the Russians, it seemed to him, might
well be trying to evade their responsibilities. He was clearly not
trying to restrain Russia. If anything, to his mind the Russians were
not tough enough—and that was his impression even when he was in St.
Petersburg. But if he was worried about Russian weakness, then that
implies that he would have wanted to do what he could to make sure the
Russians would stand firm in the crisis—namely, by taking a tough line
himself.

It is in this context that one has to try to figure out what to make
of the assurances that Paléologue gave the Russians right after the
French leaders left St. Petersburg and news of the Austrian ultimatum
was received in that city. The French ambassador gave the Russians a
“formal assurance that France placed herself unreservedly on Russia’s
side.” But was Paléologue simply acting on his own? That was Keiger’s
view: “it is clear that Paléologue was acting independently of Paris.”
But Albertini found it hard to believe that the ambassador’s promises
were to be understood in such terms. And in fact it seems quite
likely, given everything that Schmidt was able to show about Poincaré
and especially about the line he took in St. Petersburg, that
Paléologue was carrying out what he knew to be the French president’s
policy—a policy, to be sure, which he was personally in sympathy with.
If Paléologue kept Paris in the dark—and he certainly did not give an
adequate account of what he had told the Russians and of what he was
learning from them—that was not because he was temperamentally
inclined to play the lone cowboy. Schmidt thinks that his aim in doing
so was to keep Viviani from pursuing a more moderate policy, not to
act independently of Poincaré—and that interpretation seems quite
plausible.

So the basic argument Schmidt develops in the first part of the book
strikes me as very solid. The French government—and that meant
essentially Poincaré personally—did take a hard line in the crisis:
Russia, in fact, had effectively been given a blank check. But how is
that policy is to be understood? To show what French policy was was
just a beginning. The real problem has to do with the question of
motivation. Why, exactly, did the French pursue the policy they did?

Fully half of the Schmidt book is devoted to that question, and more
than half of that part of the book—over a hundred pages—deals with the
question of whether French policy was essentially shaped by military
considerations. Here he addresses himself directly to arguments made
by American political scientists like Stephen Van Evera, Robert Jervis
and Jack Snyder, about the political implications of offense-oriented
military strategies. And Schmidt’s view is that military
considerations played a fundamental role in shaping French policy at
that point. The French, as is well known, were committed to a strategy
that placed an extraordinary premium on rapid, offensive action. The
problem was that the French army had to be superior to the German
force it faced if the offense was to have any hope of succeeding.
French military leaders thought at the time that their prospects would
be brightest if they could take the initiative and be the first to
violate Belgian neutrality—indeed, the General Staff thought in 1912
that that was the only course of action that might succeed—but an
invasion of Belgium at the beginning of the war was ruled out for
political reasons. It would alienate the British, and the French
wanted to do what they could to bring Britain into the war on their
side. They thus planned instead for an offensive into Lorraine, even
though they knew full well that that strategy, even in purely military
terms, did not make much sense. Schmidt, in this section, quotes the
conclusion the French military historian Guy Pedroncini reached in his
study of Chief of Staff General Joseph Joffre’s strategic planning.
Joffre, Pedroncini wrote, in the final analysis had decided upon a
plan—the famous Plan XVII—“the ineffectiveness of whose strategic
solutions . . . he himself had demonstrated.”

The French nonetheless remained committed to the idea of an offensive
à outrance. Given that commitment, the German force France had to face
needed to be as small as possible. Russia therefore had to attack
Germany as quickly as possible, and in a way that would force the
Germans to move a large part of their army east. That meant that
Russia would have to launch a large attack in the direction of Berlin.
But the French military authorities were far from convinced that the
Russians intended to do any such thing. Many signs, in fact, pointed
in exactly the opposite direction—and indeed the archival evidence
Schmidt presents on this point is quite remarkable. Nor was it clear
that the Russians could launch such an attack even if they wanted to.
Indeed, just a few months before the war the French general staff had
reached the conclusion that the Russian army was simply incapable of
mounting the sort of attack the French considered essential.

And all this, according to Schmidt, was of absolutely fundamental
political importance. It meant that France was dependent on Russia; it
meant that French policy was more anti-German, more incapable of
accommodating Germany’s own security needs, than it would otherwise
have been. It was largely for military reasons of this sort, in his
view, that people like Poincaré and Paléologue felt that France had to
take a hard line in the crisis. The basic idea here, evidently, was
that the way to get Russia to move quickly and massively against
Germany, in order to shift the balance in the west in France’s favor,
was to make it clear to the Russians how far France herself was
willing to go. Given how tough France herself was on the
Austro-Serbian question—that is, on an issue of primary interest to
Russia—the Russians themselves might have felt under a certain
pressure to give France whatever military support they could in
exchange.

But there is another way to look at this whole business, a way that to
my mind in a rational world should have carried far more weight. The
French could have looked at the military situation, seen how
unsatisfactory it was—that is, how hard it would be to implement
successfully the offensive à outrance strategy they had adopted—and
thought about whether it really made sense under such circumstances to
actually go to war. If the military situation was so deeply
unsatisfactory, then wasn’t that a reason to avoid war and press for
some sort of compromise?

It turns out, however, that French policy was rooted in an assessment
of the military situation—but in an assessment that scarcely made
sense given the real military situation in which the French found
themselves. French leaders, it turns out, viewed their chances in a
European war that broke over the Balkan conflict as “extraordinarily
favorable.” Even in 1912, the French General Staff thought a war that
broke out over an Austrian intervention in the Balkans would put the
Germanic powers “at the mercy of the Entente.” On July 30, 1914, on
the very eve of the war, a prominent French general wrote his son that
“a better occasion would never be found”—a view echoed at the time by
both Doulcet in St. Petersburg and the French military attaché in
Berlin. And Poincaré himself wrote in his diary on August 6, just
after the fighting had begun, that an early negotiated peace would be
just about the worst thing that could happen, because it would deprive
his country of the fruits of a victorious war.

All this is deeply puzzling, given all the problems of a military
nature Schmidt had discussed earlier in the book. There was obviously
something wrong here—an enormous disconnect between the hard-headed
technical military analysis and the rosy overall assessment of the
military balance that people had come to accept. One thinks in this
context of Fritz Fischer’s comment at the very end of his chapter on
the July Crisis in his famous book Griff nach der Weltmacht, published
in English under the title Germany’s Aims in the First World War. He
referred there to “Germany’s real ‘guilt,’ her constant
over-estimation of her own powers, and her misjudgment of realities.”
But by that measure, wasn’t France equally “guilty”?

And indeed it makes sense to revisit some of the key arguments Fischer
made to support his basic claim about Germany’s responsibility for the
war in the light of what we now know about French policy in the
crisis. The German military, Fischer pointed out, talked a lot about
the need for a preventive war, about how it was a question of “now or
never.” This was certainly true, but the French military made the same
sorts of arguments. Schmidt cites a number of British reports to the
effect that many people in France, and especially in the French
military, were thinking in preventive war terms; one leading French
general told an important British officer in 1913 that he “was in
favour of a war now as being a good opportunity, France [and] Russia
being ready [and] Austria in a state of confusion.” Other scholars, in
fact, had argued years ago that French military leaders were thinking
along those lines at the time.

Fischer, to support his general argument, had also pointed out that
German officers were delighted when they heard that war had broken
out, and he argued that the German leadership had been more interested
in making it seem that Germany was fighting a purely defensive war
than in avoiding an armed conflict—a policy he views as successful, at
least in internal political terms. He quotes a diary entry dated
August 1, 1914—that is just as the storm in its full fury was about to
break—written by an important German naval officer, Admiral von
Müller: “The mood is brilliant. The government has managed brilliantly
to make us appear the attacked.” But again it is quite clear that the
same sort of thing was happening on the French side. On July 30, for
example, the Russian military attaché reported on feelings within the
French general staff: he referred to the “unconcealed joy” that France
could now take advantage of the strategically favorable position in
which she now found herself.

The French, moreover, were certainly concerned with making it seem,
again both with an eye to Britain and for domestic political reasons,
that they were fighting a purely defensive war. That goal was clearly
more important to them than avoiding an armed conflict. People like
Poincaré were under no illusion that the French people would happily
go to war for the sake of Serbia; the fact that the war began with a
German attack on France and that Germany declared war on their country
before they had to declare war on Germany, was exactly what they
wanted. Poincaré noted the reaction in the French cabinet when on
August 3 news of the German declaration of war was received: “never
has a declaration of war been greeted with such satisfaction.” Other
scholars have taken much the same view. Robert Doughty, for example,
quotes some notes of the July 30 cabinet meeting—“for the sake of
public opinion, let the Germans put themselves in the wrong”—and then
goes on to point out how successful that strategy was. And John Keiger
writes that Poincaré’s strategy in the crisis “did not waver from
ensuring that France should appear the injured party to unite the
country in a defensive war and to ensure that she obtained the
necessary diplomatic and military support from countries such as
Britain and Italy.”

Finally, Fischer, especially in the Germany’s Aims book, blamed
Germany for having “deliberately faced the risk of a conflict with
Russia and France.” (By the time he wrote War of Illusions his views
had hardened, and in that book he made the more extreme claim that the
Germans had deliberately engineered the war.) But again, as Schmidt
makes quite clear, French leaders also accepted the risk of a European
war with open eyes. None of this meant that Poincaré and others of his
ilk actually wanted a war, and indeed no one thinks they did. If,
however, the sort of evidence I’ve been talking about here does not
warrant that kind of conclusion in France’s case, you have to wonder
about whether similar points about Germany really bear out Fischer’s
claims about that country’s responsibility for the war.

And if not, we still have to confront the very basic issue of how war
could come if no one really wanted it to. People try to get at that
kind of problem by talking about the role of the “system”—about how
the “system” can lead to outcomes that no one at the start of the
crisis really wanted. People talk in particular about the role the
military system that was in place at the time played in bringing on
the war. But the great premium that was placed on the offense in
prewar military planning, especially in the French case, meant that
the bar was placed very high—that it was very difficult to generate
the sort of military superiority that would allow such plans to
succeed. And if they had little chance of success, one would think
that (if they were rational) there would be a certain reluctance to go
to war in such a world—that in other words, a world in which military
planning was based on the belief that offensive military action was
essential in the event of war might be more stable than many people
think.

But when people talk about the “system,” what they often have in mind
is the political system that existed in Europe before World War I—a
world in which no one could feel totally secure, and in which everyone
therefore struggled for power political advantage. It is often assumed
that serious problems were bound to develop in such a world—that the
struggle for security put states at odds with each other, that states
responding rationally to the pressures they felt in that kind of world
would pursue policies that could easily lead to war.

It’s in that context that it makes sense to ask some basic questions
about French policy in 1914—about whether the hard-line policy pursued
by Poincaré was rational in power political terms, about whether it
was in some sense natural, given the kind of great power political
system that existed at the time, for France to pursue the sort of
policy she did. Is Poincaré’s policy, in other words, to be understood
in realist terms? Or should one criticize it for not being realist
enough?

To get at that issue, one has to begin with a somewhat different
question: in the circumstances in which France found herself before
the war, what would a realist policy have been? The French, like the
Germans, were dazzled by what they saw as the rise of Russian power.
They felt that improved relations with Germany might compromise their
relationship with their great ally to the east, and with the British
as well. If France were cut off from the other powers in that way, she
would be at the mercy of Germany. It would mean the end of French
independence. But was that the sort of calculation a realist would
have made? Wouldn’t both Russia and Britain have had an interest in
maintaining France as a great power no matter what, so that France
could serve as a counterweight to Germany, and couldn’t the French
count on them pursuing policies based on that fundamental political
interest—policies that would have provided a certain basis for French
security and independence? Didn’t France have an interest in better
relations with Germany, if only to avoid too much dependence on
Russia, a country which was viewed as having less and less need for
France? Didn’t France have an interest, above all, in avoiding war
with Germany, since German power might serve as a counterweight to
growing Russian power in Europe? In other words, from a realist point
of view, didn’t France have an interest in balancing between the other
powers, and avoiding excessive dependence on any of them?

That’s the sort of yardstick you can use to see whether French policy
made sense in realist terms. And what’s quite striking, judging from
the analysis in the Schmidt book, is how little of this was present in
French thinking before the war. One gets the sense that that policy
was rooted not in cold power political analysis but in a visceral
dislike of Germany. Instead of adopting the realist view that tends to
take political conflict philosophically, French leaders like Poincaré
tended to view the Franco-German relationship in black-and-white
terms: what France wanted was just, and German goals were essentially
illegitimate. There was little sense, for example, that France did not
have a God-given right to take over Morocco, or that Austria might
have had a real case against Serbia and that it was in some measure
understandable that Austria might want to deal with the problem on her
southern border before it was too late. After all, as Schmidt shows,
the French government knew quite well what Serbian policy was—that is,
it knew from the reports of its own representatives in Belgrade how
violent and warlike that policy was. But a sense for this sort of
thing played little role in shaping French policy during the July
Crisis, or toward Germany more generally.

Albertini, after spending years of his life trying to understand the
coming of the First World War, concluded that the “utter lack of
political horse-sense” was the “main cause of European disorders and
upheavals.” The Schmidt book leaves you with much the same impression.
These people in 1914 were not the victims of forces they were unable
to control. The tragedy did not come because they were reacting in the
only way they reasonably could to the situation in which they found
themselves. It came because of decisions they made, decisions that
could easily have been different—decisions, in fact, that remain
deeply puzzling.


Marc Trachtenberg , a historian by training, is currently a professor
of political science at UCLA. He is the author of a number of works on
twentieth century international politics, most notably A Constructed
Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (1999).

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