The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  France’s “decline”—its low birthrate, lagging economy, and chaotic republican politics—was a cliché of German commentary on foreign affairs. A 1910 memorandum prepared by the German General Staff contrasted Germany’s population surge since 1880—from forty-two to sixty-two million—to France’s blip from thirty-seven to thirty-nine million. That birth dearth required the French to draft 80 to 85 percent of young men. Many were “inferior defenders of the fatherland.” Some weighed as little as eighty pounds. To fill out the army the government recruited soldiers from France’s overseas empire, but in German eyes, these were even poorer specimens. “A Picture of the Future,” a 1911 cartoon in the satirical journal Kladderadatsch, showed a line of snarling gorillas dressed in French uniforms.2

  France’s reproductive funk chiefly accounted for the slow growth of an economy hobbled by a chronic “deficiency of aggregate demand”—that is, a static supply of consumers. Between 1870 and 1914, the German economy grew almost two times faster than the French. Coal production went from two to five times greater in Germany, pig iron from parity to three times greater, steel from nothing in both countries to four times greater. The post-revolutionary inheritance laws and the morcellement of territory to peasant proprietors limited the size of the French farm, while the national preference for aesthetically pleasing labor-intensive goods had a similar effect on the French firm. German big business, the industrialist Hugo Stinnes was confident, had nothing to fear from French competition: “They are a people of small rentiers.”

  German critics of republican politics noted the instability of French governments—eleven between 1909 and 1914, four in 1913 alone—and traced it to a fundamental instability. A century after the great Revolution, the French remained divided over the terms of their polity. The Catholic Right hated the secular Republic; the socialist Left was uneager to defend the bourgeois Republic. On the fringes of politics, Bonapartists and monarchists schemed to undermine the revolutionary Republic. Fifteen years on, the Dreyfus Affair, recombining these antipathies in new polarities, still divided Frenchmen—and French soldiers. “One must ask oneself if an army which contained so many contradictory elements … will be united enough to succeed against an external enemy,” the retiring chancellor Bernhard von Bülow wrote his successor, Bethmann Hollweg, in 1909.3

  “Parisian Sigh,” Simplicissimus, July 8, 1912.

  “Have you heard that in Germany they have found a way to get babies without men?”

  “Mon dieu, and we don’t even get them with men!”

  Packing decades of derogation into a sentence, a German essayist observed: “A people whose men do not want to be soldiers and whose women refuse to have children, is a people benumbed in their vitality … fated to be dominated by a younger and fresher race.”4

  The Germans can hardly be blamed for getting the French so wrong. No moral seismograph could have revealed to them how the French would rally to their Republic on August 1, 1914. When at three fifty-five P.M. mobilization orders were wired to every marie in France and the notices kept for the occasion went up in the town squares, 3.7 million men, republicans, socialists, Catholics, monarchists, and Bonapartists alike, left for their regimental depots. Whereas the French General Staff had predicted that 10 percent of conscripts might not answer the call of mobilization, in the event only 1.5 percent failed to show up. Overnight, it seemed, what President Raymond Poincaré called the “Franco-French war” had been suspended. “So, this is it, then, Monsieur le Curé,” a lay schoolteacher in an Alpine village remarked to his longtime enemy. “Well, we are friends, we only hate the invader now.”5

  Historians are still probing the riddle posed by Jean-Jacques Becker in The Great War and the French People (1986): “How and why … did the French of La Belle époque, those people who were said … to be easy-going, fun-loving, and without ideals, bear and accept fifty-one months of sorrow and destruction?”6

  One answer is because pleasure was their ideal: Love, conversation, the table, the grape, the countryside, the light, these blessings of the good life were worth fighting for.* In absolute terms, France boasted the highest standard of living on the continent. The birthrate was low partly because French men and women wanted to enjoy life and prized belonging to a society whose genius that was. “Many of them knew and the rest felt,” André Maurois wrote of the men who without incident gathered at the depots and boarded the trains to war, “that the civilization they were about to defend was one of the loveliest and the happiest in the world.”7

  Another answer to Becker’s riddle is that for the duration of the war “barbarian” invaders exacted tribute in labor and treasure and sex from the people of the northern departments of France overrun by the German army. Outraged at newspaper accounts of Frenchmen shipped to Germany as forced labor and at propaganda drawings of simian boche debauching French girls, Frenchmen held out because the Germans held on to one fifth of their country. Not until France bled itself white defending Verdun in 1916 would “They shall not pass” become a national credo, but from August 1914, the French lived and died by it.8

  In August 1914 the government ordered newspapers not to print the name of Joseph Caillaux lest it remind the French of the road not taken—the road to peace. The German invasion had swept away the Caillaux scandal, which had transfixed France since Henriette Caillaux shot Gaston Calmette on March 16 up to her trial, which only ended days before the war began.

  “Sous La Botte” (Under the Boot) by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen

  Surveying opinion in the days following the crime, the Times of London judged that “Not since the Dreyfus Affair has any event in French history stirred the imagination of the French people as has the shooting of Gaston Calmette.” Germans viewed the publicity surrounding the July trial, unfolding during a grave international crisis, as evidence that the French were terminally frivolous.10

  Venomous politics lay behind affaire Caillaux. In the spring 1914 elections, Joseph Caillaux’s Radical-Socialist Party, allied with the socialists in a puissant coalition, was likely to win a parliamentary majority. Once in power, Caillaux pledged to move toward détente with Germany. To prevent this, between December 1913 and March 1914 Gaston Calmette published 110 articles, anecdotes, and cartoons attacking Joseph Caillaux as a thief and “traitor”—the former for abusing his power as finance minister to benefit himself and his friends, the latter for pursuing secret negotiations with Germany as premier during the Morocco crisis of 1911. Extending from President Raymond Poincaré, who talked of Caillaux in private in terms as bitter as those used by Calmette in Le Figaro, to the protofascists of the Action Française, who mounted violent street demonstrations against Caillaux on the night of Calmette’s murder, the French right hated and feared Caillaux for speaking to the self-interest of the French to their desire to curb a tax-eating arms race with Germany that fueled an 85 percent increase in French military spending, which absorbed over half the total budget.11

  “[Caillaux] knows his countrymen through and through,” Belgium’s ambassador in Paris reported to Brussels in January 1914, “and is well aware that outside the official political cliques and a handful of chauvinists … by far the greater number of Frenchmen, the peasants, shopkeepers and industrialists, are impatient under the excessive expenditure and personal liabilities imposed on them.” The ambassador added, “Caillaux’s presence in power will lessen the acuteness of international jealousies and will constitute a better base for relations between France and Germany.” Such views were rarely heard in “official Paris” where “everybody that you meet tells you that an early war with Germany is certain and inevitable.”12

  Joseph-Marie-Auguste Caillaux was born, just below the top, in 1863. His father, Eugène, an engineer and high civil servant, served as minister of finance in the cabinet of the royalist Marshal McMahon and Joseph lived briefly in the Ministry, then housed in the Louvre. Joseph spent his childhood on the family estate at Mamers, near Le Mans. The Caillaux family had acquired its wealth af
ter the Revolution by speculating in land seized from aristos. Joseph’s mother’s ancestors were Huguenots persecuted for their faith, and, a biographer surmises, “Joseph grew up craving convictions of his own to suffer for.”13

  The mature Caillaux refused to suffer for his infidelities. He lived by a code of untrammeled desire, juggling wives and mistresses with defiant unconcern for public opinion. He thought “no rule was made for him,” a journalist observed. Yet Republican politicians were expected to live by the rules, to wear masks of dignity, and to keep their transgressions private. French society was under intense pressure to change from workers, students, feminists, artists, and “it was as if the elites believed they could be unorthodox only when the masses were orderly.” Caillaux caught the difference between the republican style and his own in his memoirs when telling of a trip he and Raymond Poincaré took to Italy with their mistresses—“mine I displayed, his he kept hidden.” In a 1905 Chamber of Deputies debate over the silk tariff, he talked knowledgeably about women’s changing taste in underwear, contrasting the “rich fabrics of thick silk, fabrics that hung heavy on the body” of “ten, twenty, thirty years ago,” and the “soft and supple silks, mousselines” that “have since become the favored materials of dresses as well as undergarments (applause).”14

  Contemporary profiles of Caillaux betray an envious incredulity. “What a man!” a 1918 biographer exclaimed. “Businessman, ladies’ man, political man. He’s excessive and rash in all he does, from finance to love to politics … This bald Don Juan … insolent as a tax farmer of the ancien regime,… acknowledges the acclamations of Jacobin revolutionaries, while counting the votes of his elegant female followers watching from the reserve gallery above.”15

  Caillaux studied economics while earning a law degree, served as an inspector of finance examining municipal government books, wrote “the definitive work” on France’s byzantine tax system, and taught at the École Libre des Sciences politiques—all that before, in 1898, winning a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, France’s House of Representatives. Campaigning around Le Mans on a bicycle, the thirty-five-year-old candidate did not dispel the impression among the peasants that he was his father, nor the hope among the royalist gentry that like his father he rejected the Republic. French politicians tended to be lawyers and journalists. Caillaux was an expert in public finance. It was enough, a year after entering the Chamber, to elevate him to the cabinet as minister of finance.16

  By inheritance Caillaux was of the right, but his interest in rationalizing French taxation, three fourths dependent on indirect taxes discouraging to economic growth, made him champion a graduated income tax, a cause of the left. He first brought it forward in 1901, but the time was not ripe and, as he wrote his mistress at the time, Berthe Gueydan, “I crushed the income tax while seeming to defend it.” She kept his letter, signed “Ton Jo” [Your Jo]. Gaston Calmette printed a photographic reproduction of it on the front page of Le Figaro on March 13, 1914; three days later, certain that Joseph’s letters to her were about to receive the same treatment, Henriette Caillaux pulled a pistol from her muff and shot him.17

  In 1904, Gueydan, a notable beauty, divorced her husband to marry Caillaux. Soon Caillaux discovered that he had mistaken the frisson of illicit passion for love. Moreover, while French political society was still buzzing over Berthe, his restless eye had already fallen on another married woman, Henriette Claretie. “The case of Caillaux seemed … shocking,” a historian of the Republic’s elite writes. “To marry a former mistress after her own divorce was hardly acceptable to the public opinion of 1906.” Yet his constituents kept voting for him. At Le Mans’ train station, “the stationmaster himself always hurried to meet me,” Caillaux recalled. He did not want to give the honor of carrying my bags to anyone else.” Nor did Caillaux’s amours discourage Georges Clemenceau, whose notorious love affair with an American woman had slowed his rise to the premiership, from appointing Caillaux as finance minister in his new government.*18

  A friend had warned him about Clemenceau, quoting Léon Gambetta, the great public man of the early Republic: “Where Clemenceau has set his foot the grass never grows again.” They served cordially together in government (1906–09), Clemenceau remarking to a colleague that Caillaux “was one of those rare people with whom he did not have an argument.” Clemenceau became Cailluax’s nemesis later, over Germany.19

  In 1909, anticipating that Joseph would divorce Berthe, Henriette Claretie divorced her husband. But Berthe would not go quietly. Breaking into Joseph’s desk, she discovered a letter he had written to Henriette, who returned it at his urging lest it fall into the wrong hands, promising to divorce Berthe after the coming election campaign. “There is only one consolation,” Joseph wrote and Berthe read. “It is to think of my little one, to see her in my arms as at Ouchy (God, what delicious moments!) … A thousand million kisses all over your adored little body.”20

  The political calendar gave Berthe the upper hand. A second “divorce scandal could easily turn [Joseph’s] peasant constituents against him.” During Henriette Caillaux’s trial, Berthe testified that she “had never suspected that my husband had a mistress.” She first knew it “when he threw himself at my knees and asked my pardon. He humbled himself and I pardoned him … I believed that the evil surrounding my home had gone, for I thought I saw the bottom of his heart in his tears.” Joseph begged her not to divorce him. She agreed, exacting his pledge to break with Henriette (“only the day after he returned to this person”) and insisting on a second honeymoon. He required Berthe to burn the incriminating letters (two more had come to light) in front of his lawyer. She complied, but not before mailing them to her sister, who had them photographed.21

  Reelected, Joseph walked out on Berthe. Addressing her in court, he explained why: “Between a man to whom everyone grants authority, vigor, and power and you in whom these qualities are overdeveloped as well, it was impossible that things would last.” Edward Berenson suggests that Caillaux’s acknowledgement of his “candid desire for intellectual and emotional precedence over the woman he married” was calculated to appeal to the desires of the all-male jury. “Demoralized by the acceptance of defeat,” in the words of Le Gaulois, Frenchmen of the Third Republic needed boosting. To expunge the memory of Germany’s conquest of France in the war of 1870–71, they conquered colonies abroad and wanted wives who made them feel like conquerors at home—wives like Henriette, who, Joseph declared in court, possessed “a character and a nature I could attach myself to.”

  Berthe Gueydan testifying at the trial of Henriette Caillaux. Their marriage foundered on your “vigor and power,” Joseph Caillaux told her in court. Men of the Third Republic needed soft women like Henriette (who was hard enough to take target practice before shooting Gaston Calmette).

  They were married on October 31, 1911. Joseph was premier. Nineteen eleven would have been his triumphant year if imperialist rivalry had not brought France closer to war with Germany than at any other time since The Defeat of 1870, where the road to Morocco begins.22

  In his memoirs, Charles de Gaulle evoked the desolate France of 1870–71, its army routed, Paris torn by fighting between Frenchmen, the king of Prussia crowned emperor of Germany at Versailles: “An immense disaster, a peace made of despair, loss of life that nothing compensated, a state without foundations, no army other than that which was leaving the enemy’s prisons, two provinces torn away, billions to be paid, the victor’s troops garrisoned in one-fourth of the territory, the capital streaming with blood in a civil war, a Europe ice cold or ironic: Such were the conditions in which a vanquished France resumed the march to its destiny.”23

  Following Gambetta’s admonition, the French thought of revenge “always” but spoke of it “never.” In school classrooms a swag of black and purple cloth covered Alsace-Lorraine, the two provinces torn away by Bismarck, on the map of France. “You have no idea of the somber atmosphere in which we grew up, in a humiliated and wounded France—bred for bloody
, inevitable and perhaps futile revenge,” the novelist Romain Rolland recalled. The young de Gaulle wrote a story set in 1930 in which, as “General Charles de Gaulle,” he liberated Lorraine.24

  “Must we hypnotize ourselves with the lost provinces, and should we not take compensation elsewhere?” Premier Jules Ferry asked a leading revanchard. Beginning under Ferry in the 1880s, France embarked on a distinctly military form of imperialism, the “vile scramble for loot” that, between 1876 and 1915, saw six industrial powers carve colonies out of roughly one in every four acres of the earth’s surface. The inhabitants of those acres were pretty well carved up themselves. Writing in 1890 and of Africa only, a British observer estimated that “twenty millions of human beings underestimates the number killed or captured for European gain.”25

  For France, a Republican politician declared, to fail to “carry wherever she can her language, her way of life, her flag, her arms … would be the high road to decadence.” Unable to extrude the enemy from Alsace-Lorraine without war, the French army conquered lesser breeds without artillery. In this way the French way of life was brought to Indochina, West Africa, Tunisia, and Morocco as earlier to Algeria. Ferry might lament: “All that interests the French public about the Empire is the belly dance.” Still, Frenchmen avidly followed newspaper accounts of colonial adventures, which furnished anecdotes against decadence. Conquest was therapy for the culture of defeat. For General Lyautey, the hero of the conquest of Morocco, colonialism was more than a cure. It was a cause: “North Africa is for our race what the Far West is for America.”26