THE POINCARE ERA
MRAYMOND POINCARE typified an era in • modern history—in the history of much more than France—and his death will be regarded in the public mind as registering the end of it. In actual fact the end came sooner, for the reparation settlement at Lausanne in 1932 and the installation of Herr Hitler as Reichskanzler in 1933 marked in the finanCial and the political field respectively the frustration of all the hopes the Poincare school in France had cherished. To that extent the Poincare era had ended before the life of M. Poincare himself. But the distinction is of no importance.
Before all things M. Poincare was a Frenchman and a lawyer. It was only incidentally that one thought of him as a human being. In his later years,. when the Poincare era was being shaped by Poincare himSelf, his personal life was something of small account, to which neither he nor anyone else paid regard. Whether his legal training shaped his character or simply reflected and emphasized that character's inherent traits is of little consequenc2. , Whichever it may have been, the result was that he approached every problem in the legalistic spirit. There were always facts to be followed in their implications, never situations to be changed by the exercise of a resolve prompted by imagination. For imagination had no place in Poincare's make-up. There was a war, a surrender and a treaty. The treaty was a legal document and like all legal documents it must be executed. If it provided for the exaction of a pound of flesh, then the pound of flesh must be exacted. With the consequences the executors of the treaty were not concerned. France mu:. t have from it her immediate due, no matter what ultimate retribution insistence on the letter of the bond might foreshadow. So the Ruhr was Occupied, the mark crashed, the franc soon followed it, and Poincare, repudiated by the electors in 1924, was brought back in 1926 to achieve his greatest work for France, the salvation of the franc.
Poincare was, like Clemenceau, a great Frenchman ; never, like Briand, a great European. That, with the inability to move outside a legal framework, or escape from the fetters of an insistent logic, was one of his limitations. He was profoundly concerned, like every Frenchman, for the security of France. Before the War he based all his hopes on military strength. He had seen German ;policy revealed in 1903 at Tangier and in 1911 at Agadir; and he set himself with that unswerving purpose characteristic of him to fortify France against an inevitable German attack. That his attitude might actually accentuate the antagonism did not occur to him. His policy made the cry, "Poincare; c'est la guerre," at the time of his election as President of the Republic in 1913, intelligible, if it did not make it just. And his first task- as President was to throw all his support behind his 'Prime Minister, M. Barthou- with whom he is associated again in every mind today by the community of death—in the determination to force into law the three-years military service bill. Both statesmen claimed that it was that measure which saved France from destruction in. time years immediately ahead. It may have been so. It may. be, on the other hand, that it warned Germany that the time had come to strike. But at least France was saved, and she owed that in part at least to another factor in whose creation Poincare played a leading. role, the consolidation of the alliance with Russia. For though_ the Russian forces crumbled long before an Allied victory was in sight, their co-operation in the first months of the War spared the French and British armies the Ordeal of a cumulative attack which at that epoch they could never have resisted.
For all Poincare did on the eve of war to strengthen both France's army and her alliances, and to harden her resolution through the four-years struggle, he merits to the full the -tribute his countrymen are paying him today. But the very qualities that enabled him to serve his country then equipped him ill to -nerve her in the months that followed the Armistice and the years that followed the Treaty of Versailles. What has been termed a Carthaginian peace is fitly associated with the name of a statesman .whose attitude towards Germany was always delenda est Carthago. In the peace discussions in Paris itself the visible representative of France and the audible voice of France was Clemenceau, but he had a staunch and indispensable supporter throughout at the Elysee. And after the Presidential term was over in 1920 Poincare descended once more into the arena he knew so well to insist on the punctual and detailed fulfilment of a treaty which discerning observers saw, before it was even signed, could never be fulfilled without the ruin both of those who enforced and those who submitted to it. President Wilson saw it, but he had cut the ground from beneath his feet by his political mistakes at home. Mr. Lloyd George saw it, but his hands were tied by the Parliamentary majority he had secured on an exaction-to-the-uttermost pro- gramme. M. • Poincare's hands were tied by nothing. He had only to apply his unvarying policy in whatever circumstances might arise. He resigned his chairman- ship of the Reparation Commission in 1920 rather than agree to alleviations of Germany's financial burden. As Prime Minister of France he insisted, in January, 1923, on the occupation of the Ruhr in face of the uncom- promising opposition of Great Britain and the opinion of the British Law Officers that the occupation was illegal. .
It is no coincidence, but the relentless play of cause and effect, that the same year, 1923, was the date of the Hitler putsch at Munich and the writing of Mein Kampf. Next to Horst Wessel, killed by Com- munists, the greatest Nazi hero is Schlageter, shot by the French in the Ruhr. Poincare took the French into the Ruhr in the face of Mr. Bonar Law. As soon as he fell his successor, M. Herriot, made agreements with Mr. MacDonald which brought them out of it. In one sense that ended the Poincare era; but in one sense only. German statesmen responded to Herriot's lead. Marx and Stresemann and Muller and Bruning strove sincerely to put a policy of fulfilment into operation. The Ruhr evacuation was followed by the evacuation of the first Rhineland . zone in 1925 and of the whole in 1930. But the mischief had been done already. The bitterness . implanted in the German soul by the folly of the Ruhr bore .its poisonous fruit. The Com- munism it engendered was answered by a rival progeny, and Hitlerism spread irresistibly through Germany till it finally placed its leader in power last year. The past is past. Deeds done and policies executed remain. But so do their consequences. And in any dispassionate survey of the history of Europe since 1920 the policy pursued by M. Poincare in the name of France must be held. responsible for no small part of Europe's ills. It was not the policy of all Frenchmen. It was not the policy of M. Herriot ; still less the policy Of Briand. It did not accord with the policy of Great Britain under Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Bonar Law or Mr. Baldwin. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But equally nil nisi verum. If a statesman's career is to be passed in review the survey must take account of both sides of the scale. France does well to honour M. Poincare's memory. He was a great Frenchman and his defects were due to the fact that his gaze was fixed too exclusively on France. But if the charge that he was the chief architect of Hitlerism is justified—and it is impossible to refute it—his responsibility in the eyes of posterity will not be light.
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