by Jack Beatty
When Poincaré was still premier, Izvolski asked St. Petersburg to increase the “press fund” by three hundred thousand francs ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov took the matter up with Poincaré personally, writing, “If in your judgment a direct action … is indispensable in this matter, I will join in the opinion dictated by your great influence and judgment.” After delivering this letter to Poincaré, Izvolski reported back to Kokovtsov: “I have reason to think that M. P. considers it desirable that we have recourse to this method.” St. Petersburg wired the money, and tributes to Poincaré, like the one quoted above from Calmette, no doubt flowed from the presses. On Poincaré’s election, Izvolski assured St. Petersburg that “we are therefore, for the period of his seven year term of office, perfectly safe from the appearance of such persons as Caillaux … at the head of the French Government.”78
Besides conviction and cash Calmette may have targeted Caillaux over a woman. The day after Calmette’s murder, the Swiss ambassador to France wrote to his government that “from the very beginning of Calmette’s campaign in Le Figaro against M. Caillaux, everyone in Parisian high society has been saying that the campaign owed its origins to an histoire de femme.” According to the gossip, Caillaux wanted to divorce his wife to marry a woman he was pressing to divorce her husband. Gaston Calmette was said to be “equally interested in this lady.” While the ambassador did not credit these “slanderous” rumors, Madame Caillaux did and “lost her head” over them. But as Edward Berenson notes in his fascinating 1992 book, The Trial of Madame Caillaux, why would Henriette have “wanted to eliminate her husband’s rival for possession of this other woman”? Why not eliminate her husband instead?79
“Madame Caillaux feared in 1914 that she would undergo the same fate as had Madame Gueydan [divorce],” according to the son of the Calmette’s lawyer. A close friend, Louise Weiss, once asked Henriette what went through her mind as Calmette crumpled to the floor. She replied “that I did not love the president [Caillaux],” her use of the title, short for president of the council or premier, suggesting a chill formality in their marriage. Perhaps she felt that way because Joseph was no longer in love with her. In murdering Calmette, Berenson speculates, she may have been trying to murder Joseph politically or by killing for him to reclaim his love. “I was driven by a will that had taken the place of my own,” she testified. If Henriette’s fantasy was to bind Joseph to her, she succeeded but not in the way she hoped. “These pistol shots welded together two human beings who would soon come to hate each other,” Weiss wrote. “Their marriage was their true punishment … [for] the trial had rendered it indissoluble.”80
Caillaux himself lent the histoire de femme scenario some credibility, boasting that he had behaved honorably by excluding from the trial dirt obtained from Calmette’s “mistresses” If the gossip was accurate, he knew at least one of them.81
The bad behavior of all concerned in the Caillaux affair presented an irresistible teaching moment for nationalists alarmed over the crisis of the French family. “When I heard Madame Caillaux say ‘the first wife of my husband’ or ‘the son of my husband’s first wife’ I took my head in my hands, certain that this case represents nothing less than the trial of our secular society, of the rotten and immoral existence that the republic has inflicted on France,” one right-wing journalist lamented. Nationalists believed the fate of France was tied to the family, “the essential foundation for the life of a nation and its necessary expansion,” Yet the French family was notoriously barren (in 1895 more deaths than births were recorded). Blame fell on familiar targets.82
Nationalists arraigned “Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism,” carrier of the “plague of feminism.” As early as the 1880s, a professor at the Paris Faculty of Medicine had disparaged “voluntary sterility”—birth control. And an economist was only half joking when he ventured that the best way to resist Germany would be to declare war on French abortionists. Divorce, championed as a guarantor of personal freedom by Radicals, came in for the severest strictures. “Divorce is at this very moment working to bring about the fall of the Third Republic,” a woman writing under a pseudonym maintained in a Figaro-hosted debate. In the individualistic society held up to the national mirror in the Caillaux scandal, she argued, it was too risky for young women to start families. To nationalists Joseph and Henriette Caillaux, pursuing pleasure above all other values were symptoms of social narcissism. Others resented them for giving purchase to scolds.83
The months of publicity over the murder, hearing, and trial left Caillaux vulnerable. A parliamentary committee investigating Calmette’s charges censured Caillaux for interfering in a judicial inquest on behalf of a swindler. When his opponent for the Mamers seat put up posters warning voters against becoming “accomplices to a crime,” Caillaux challenged him to a duel, fought without effusion of blood in the Parc des Princes in Paris. Unable to defeat him in electoral politics, his nationalist opponents felt they could end his career by wielding cultural politics against him. With Henriette in jail awaiting trial and the press opening their private life for public scrutiny, Caillaux and his party faced the electorate.84
Henriette Caillaux in the dock.
“Reactionaries of all sorts had been confident of triumph,” Caillaux wrote of the April elections. “But all their calculations were upset. The elections gave the parties of the Left, the Radicals, at whose head I stood, and the Socialists led by Jaurès, an irresistible majority; I myself was reelected by an enormous lead.” If Caillaux’s Radicals joined forces with Jaurès’s Socialists following the second round of voting in June, a government of the Left would take power. Early in June, Caillaux and Jaurès conducted a long conversation on one of the settees lining the corridor of the Chamber. Caillaux made an unprecedented offer: Set aside the Socialist ban on serving in government and join my cabinet as minister of foreign affairs. “As soon as possible we must form a strong Leftist ministry which will press for a policy of European peace,” Caillaux said.85
“The proposal was breathtaking,” a Jaurès biographer writes. Consider its implications for Armageddon. Both men feared the alliance with Russia would drag France into a war over the infinitely remote Balkans, Jaurès asking, “Has [France] no other glory and no other purpose than to serve the rancors of M. Isvolsky?” On July 29, at the apex of the war crisis, Jaurès addressed an emergency meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels. French socialists, he declared, must “insist that it [the French government] speak with force that Russia may abstain” from mobilization. “If, unfortunately, Russia does not abstain, it is our duty to say, ‘we do not know of any other treaty than the one which binds us to the human race.’ ” Had Jaurès been foreign minister at that decisive moment, would he have carried through on his threat to break the treaty with Russia to save the peace of Europe? That “breathtaking” question belongs to the alternative history of 1914.86
In their discussion in the Chamber corridor, Jaurès, who called Caillaux “the most capable man we have in France,” agreed to join his government—with one stipulation. Mme. Caillaux must first be acquitted. “If his wife is condemned in the trial, which is about to open, that will be an obstacle to his return to politics,” he explained to a German socialist.87
If her trial had been scheduled for June, the Caillaux-Jaurès ministry would have been in office during the July Crisis instead of the team of President Raymond Poincaré and his weak temporary premier, René Viviani. But the trial unfolded in late July, and Poincaré, during his three-day state visit to St. Petersburg in late July, stiffened Russia’s will to stand up to Austria. Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, summed up his discussions with Poincare this way: “France … is not inclined to tolerate a humiliation of Serbia unwarranted by the circumstances.”*88
Courtroom sketches of Fernand Labori (Caillaux’s lawyer), Berthe Gueydan, and Henriette Caillaux
Did Madame Caillaux kill Gaston Calmette? On the evening of July 29,
five days before Germany declared war on France, eleven of the twelve male jurors answered no. She had only intended to frighten Calmette, who unfortunately fell to the floor where she aimed and when she fired—that was her claim and the jurors believed it. They also believed Henriette when she said she feared Calmette was about to publish her “intimate letters”—the same ones Berthe Gueydan’s sister had photographed in 1909—and that this would disgrace her before her young daughter, striking at her “woman’s honor.” Paris juries favored leniency for women whose crimes—poisoning husbands who beat them, for example—accommodated that defense. Jurors accepted her lawyer’s picture of a woman overcome by volatile emotions that her frail-sex reason was too weak to resist. Although the shooting was a premeditated act (Henriette stopped at a gun shop on the way to the Figaro offices and tested the Browning in the basement), it was nevertheless a “crime of passion” in that Henriette was “the victim of an inconceivable overexcitement.”89
With newspaper hawkers outside the courtroom shouting that Austria had declared war on Serbia, with stray shouts of “To Berlin!” heard on the streets, perhaps, too, the jurors were stirred by the closing appeal delivered by her lawyer, Fernand Labori, who had defended Alfred Dreyfus. Save your anger “for our enemies without,” he told the jury. It was time for French men and women to “proceed united as one … toward the perils that threaten us.” To a nation at war five days later, Raymond Poincaré echoed Labori’s words. France would “be heroically defended by all her sons; nothing will break their sacred union” until the invader was driven from their land.90
The jurors were also swayed by Joseph Caillaux, who, speaking passionately for hours at a stretch, commandeered the eight-day trial. To the Daily Express his “curious high-pitched voice,” recalled “the voice of Mr. Winston Churchill, but without the lisp.” Stopping to dab his eyes with his handkerchief, he blamed himself for ignoring Henriette’s mounting fear that Calmette would expose their affair: “I failed to realize the ravages Calmette’s calumnies had made in the soul of my wife.” Responding to the gossip that he had tired of Henriette, he declared that his marriage surpassed his hopes: “Never could I feel a happiness more complete than the one I have found in this union … We have lived and will continue to live in a close intimacy of heart and spirit.” Caillaux spilled out his feelings so nakedly that the British reporters covering the trial could not believe their ears. Such words would be spoken in England, one wrote, only in stage dialogue—in a French play. Sitting in the defendant’s box wearing a black dress, long black kid gloves, and a mauve corsage, her blond hair edging a black hat topped with a long blue ostrich feather, Henriette gasped and cried and even fainted on cue.91
Caillaux on the stand. He commandeered the trial. The judge and jurors were in his camp. Still, the verdict was shocking.
Caillaux the lover shared the stage with Caillaux the avenger. His monocle bobbing on its black cord as he chopped the air with his hands, he savaged the reputation of the victim, charging that Calmette took bribes disguised as health spa advertisements from the government of Hungary. His emotionality, eloquence, and ferocity might have persuaded any set of jurors. But these weren’t any set of jurors.
Every month from a sealed wooden box containing the names of three thousand Parisians a six-judge panel pulled seventy-two names to sit as jurors. The box was then publicly resealed. On May 24, 1914, the bailiff dropped the box as he carried it into the courtroom. When he handed it to the judges, the seals were found to be broken. “No one could recall such a circumstance. Had the seals broken when the box hit the floor? Or had someone tampered with the names inside, and then contrived the bailiff ’s accident?” After anxious discussion, the judges decided to go ahead and pull the seventy-two names for July. Of those picked, court records reveal, “almost every one is identified as politically sympathetic to Caillaux.” So was Judge Louis Albanel, a “close friend of the Caillaux’s,” who let Caillaux virtually conduct the trial by himself.92
The not guilty verdict after less than an hour of deliberation engulfed the courtroom in a “ferocious melee of shouts, howls, applause, raised fists,” Le Figaro reported. “The roar of the crowd echoing like thunder in the corridors of the Palais [de Justice] already suggested the roar of distant gunfire.” On the streets around the Palais, Caillaux haters shouted “As-sas-sin! As-sas-sin!” at Caillaux supporters, many of them “Corsican toughs” imported by Caillaux, who shouted back, “Vive Caillaux!” Outside Caillaux’s house, where he was holding a reception for his friends, crowds chanted “Death to Caillaux!”93
Acquitted! Henriette embraces her lawyer
Before the trial, Poincaré conceded that if the jury returned a verdict of not guilty he would have no choice but to name Caillaux premier. But that was in an expired world. With Austria at war, Russia mobilizing, and German troops entraining for the Belgian and French frontiers, Caillaux, the man of peace with Germany, could not lead France in a war with Germany. Moreover, there was no place for the paladin of individualism in war’s stern social order: “When France endeavored to recreate itself as one holy family … Joseph Caillaux had come to represent the antithesis of the values embodied in the union sacrée.”94
Jean Jaurès by Félix Vallotton
Two days after the Caillaux verdict, Caillaux’s putative partner in a new government, France’s matchless orator and anti-militarist, Jean Jaurès, “exploded” before a group of journalists gathered in the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies, “Are we going to unleash a world war because Isvolski is still furious over Aehrenthal’s deception in the Bosnian affair?” Early that evening, at the Foreign Ministry, he learned that Germany had given Russia two hours to cease mobilization; war was imminent. “Everything is finished. There is nothing left to do,” a colleague said.
Jaurès, the Socialist of the will, would concede nothing to inevitability. “It will be like Agadir,” he said. “There will be ups and downs but things will arrange themselves.” That evening, his step slow, his massive brow creased, he walked to the offices of L’Humanite to prepare an appeal to the French people to save the peace. “I’m going to write a new J’accuse,” he told associates, referring to Emile Zola’s history-changing outcry against the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus. “I will expose everyone responsible for this crisis,” he vowed, his voice charged with moral anger. He broke from his writing to enjoy a late dinner with colleagues at a café in Montmarte. It was a hot night and the café windows were open to the street. At nine forty, a young nationalist fanatic, Raoul Villain, crossed the street and shot Jaurès twice in the back. Minutes later he died. Villain belonged to a revanchard group allied with Action Française, whose newspaper, fixing a bull’s eye on Jaurès, slandered him as a German agent. “One day in July, ignoble calumnies transformed an imbecile into an assassin,” Anatole France wrote.95
After Calmette’s murder, Villain had bought two revolvers. On the handle of one he carved the initial J and on that of the other C, for Caillaux.96
Agadir was “the most arduous adventure that France had known,” Joseph Caillaux wrote in a postwar book detailing the secret negotiations with Germany through which he kept the peace. Agadir is remembered today in those terms, as a Great Power crisis, significant only as a place name, the port where the Panther and its relief ships, pawns in a test of wills with France, spent fourteen uneventful weeks. Nothing happened there; nothing there mattered; nobody died at Agadir in 1911.97
Many died there in March 1912, but few remember Agadir for that. The victims left no mark on history. The battle of Agadir was an episode in the campaign to crush resistance to the French protectorate over Morocco. France, Premier Raymond Poincaré insisted in the Chamber, must never “give the natives the impression of weakness or timidity.” They must be taught to fear the new “master of North Africa.”98
In his haunting novel Desert, J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, depicts the lesson the French imparted at Agadir through the eyes of
a young boy from the Smara, one of the last of the nomadic tribes pursued to their destruction by Colonel Mangin and the black soldiers of the Armée d’Afrique.99
“The soldiers of the Christians had slowly closed their wall around the free men of the desert.” Occupying their wells, harrying them from the rivers, the French drove the free men to the coast, where a warship was waiting to shell them: “When they heard the sound of cannons for the first time, the blue men and the warriors started running toward the hills, to look out on the sea … Alone, off the coast of Agadir, a large battleship, like a monstrous slow animal, was spitting out flashes … In a few minutes, the high walls of red stone were no more than a pile of rubble from which black smoke rose.” The inhabitants—men, women, children—poured out of the burning city, “bloody and screaming.”
Now it was the turn of the warriors from the mountains to die. Three thousand horsemen rode in a giant circle, “churning up a large whirling cloud, raising the red dust up into the sky.” They stopped to pray; then, shouting the names of their saints, they charged the position that the French infantry had prepared to trap them, counting on their impetuous zeal, after a long retreat, to fight. Waiting in the riverbed with four thousand riflemen and twenty machine guns, Mangin let the first spear-carrying riders through his lines, then lowered his arm, “and the steel barrels started firing their stream of bullets, six hundred a minute.” The bodies fell “as if a large invisible wave were mowing them down.”100
Mangin’s Senegalese soldiers, in their turn, suffered terribly fighting in the “icy sleet” during the ill-fated French attack on the Chemin des Dames in April 1917. Before the war, Mangin had recommended their deployment in Europe. “In future battles,” he argued in La Force Noire, “these primitives, for whom life counts so little and whose young blood flows so ardently, as if avid to be shed, will certainly attain the old ‘French fury,’ and will reinvigorate it if necessary.” Recruited primarily from the Wolof, Serer, and Bambara tribes in a manner “all too reminiscent of the repudiated era of the slave trade,” the 140,000 West Africans who fought on the Western Front were three times as likely to die in combat as their white infantry comrades, this because they were used as “shock troops,” a role for which Mangin believed the “warrior” nature manifest in their “savage impetuosity with the bayonet” fitted them. On the Chemin Des Dames, “their hands were too cold to fix bayonets,” a British military observer reported. “Paralyzed with cold, their chocolate faces tinged with grey, they reached the assault-trenches with the utmost difficulty. Most of them were too exhausted even to eat the rations they carried. They advanced when ordered to do so … They got quite a long way before the German machine-guns mowed them down.”101
