Moderation in all things
Douglas Johnson
RAYMOND POINCARE by J. F. V. Keiger CUP, f40, pp. 413 It was Edouard Herriot who was known as 'la Republique en personne.' But it should have been Raymond Poincare. It was he who followed the classical route: a legal training, personal assistant to a Minister, then conseiller-general in local government, then deputy, and then appointment as Minister. He became deputy for the Meuse department in 1887 when the Republic was well established, when the initial uncertainties of the regime no longer existed and when the founding fathers had mostly disappeared. The French Revolution had come into harbour and 14 July was accepted as the country's national day.
The great days and the great crises of the Third Republic lay ahead. The efforts of General Boulanger to seize power, the scandal of Panama when the political world was bribed in order to keep silent about the mismanagement of the company that was supposedly building the canal, the case of Captain Dreyfus who might not have been guilty of selling military secrets to the Ger- mans. These were the stuff of the Third Republic. Even more were the economic and social changes which affected the polit- ical attitudes of the masses, the hostility between clericals and anti-clericals which led to the separation of Church and State. The war of 1914 to 1918 was the greatest crisis that France had known. Its effects were to be felt long afterwards, especially in the search for security in Europe and the search for financial stability, two issues that dominated the period of the 1920s.
Poincare was present throughout these years. He was deputy, senator, Minister, Prime Minister on two occasions and President of the Republic from 1913 to 1920. He retired reluctantly because of ill- health in 1929, on the eve of his 69th birth- day. When he died in 1934, Le Temps, the newspaper that represented a moderate, conservative Republic, appeared edged in black.
He died after the events of 6 February 1934 which highlighted the bitter divisions of the Republic and after the assassination of his old friend Barthou, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was accompanying King Alexander of Yugolsavia, then on an official visit. The Third Republic was declining and Europe was moving towards the war that saw its abolition in 1940.
Professor Keiger is to be congratulated on publishing the first scholarly biography of Poincare to appear in English, and one incidentally which completely overshadows those which exist in French. He has used Poincare's private papers and has consult- ed a wealth of material. It is a considerable achievement and is well justified. Professor Keiger appears sensitive to the failure of Poincare to appeal to the French nation- al memory in the same way as contempo- raries such as Gambetta, Jaures or Clemenceau.
Undoubtedly he was a very reserved man, and Keiger describes him as having 'a temperamental caution'. On the occasion of his first election to the National Assem- bly the local paper Le Courier de Verdun described him as having shown 'a white paw to the conservatives and a red paw to the left wing of the radicals'. It is argued that his well-ordered legal brain equipped him to see both sides of every question, so that he weighed the pros and cons with a fastidious intensity which prevented him from committing himself wholly to one par- ticular side. He also belonged to a large group of politicians who were known as the Opportunists. That is to say that they were men who believed in the necessity of carry- ing out certain reforms, but who thought it essential to wait until it was opportune to enact them. He was moderate. He shunned emotional reactions. In a Republic where argument never ceased, he liked to remain silent (one of his contemporaries, Paul Doumer, who became President of the Republic in 1931 and who was assassinated in 1932, was said never to stop smiling and never to utter an opinion).
Naturally it was said that this reluctance to commit himself concealed a determina- tion to hold on to power. It was said that when people saw Poincare hurrying to the Assembly they said that he wanted to get there in time for a vote in order that he might abstain. Professor Keiger is not always convincing when he maintains that Poincares reservations were natural rather than calculated. Over the Dreyfus affair, for example, Poincare took a very long time to state his opinion, and admitted this when he eventually spoke on 28 November 1898, and even then his speech was guard- ed and consisted more of a self-justification than a defence of the unfortunate Dreyfus. Professor Keiger tells us that Poincare had made a private visit to the former War Minister, General Mercier, in 1898, when he learned of the existence of the secret file which supposedly contained conclusive evidence against Dreyfus.
This, apparently, made Poincare very suspicious. Unfortunately we are not told at what moment in 1898 he saw Mercier, but by the summer he was warning those concerned that there could be a false docu- ment in the secret file. Yet he said nothing. Keiger refers to the influence of Gambetta, who had said, in 1877, that one should not invest oneself totally in a question until one is certain of having the support of the majority. This approach, it is said, was con- sidered to be a quality when stated by Gambetta, but a failure when applied to Poincare. But he admits that Poincare was short of moral courage.
All students of modern history from the 1930s to the 1960s were forced to consider the causes of the 1914 war. And it became fashionable to suggest that Poincare had been a warmonger. Not only had he sought to transform the entente with Britain into a military alliance but, being in Russia when Austria-Hungary issued its ultimatum against Serbia, it was claimed that he had encouraged the Russian government to mobilise and to prepare for war. Keiger defends Poincare from these charges, as he had already done in an earlier book. Poincare has also been cast as a villain for his re-occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. This policy, which received the approval of the Daily Mail (`Hats off to France') has always been compared unfavourably to the more conciliatory policies of Aristide Briand. Keiger is less successful here in arguing that Poincare had really put France on the road to Locarno: the 1925 agreement which guaranteed the frontiers between Germany, France and Belgium. He might, for the sake of argument, have considered how a young Pierre Laval, who was elected a deputy in 1924, had despised the fiasco of the Ruhr.
Poincare was also a literary figure. He wrote on many aspects of French history and considered writing a biography of Adolphe Thiers. He also wrote novels, but unlike a more recent President of the Republic, the only one that he pub- lished appeared under a false name. This was an occasion when natural reserve was wise.
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