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| President Poincaré and Tsar Nicholas II in St. Peterburg |
On 20 July 1914 French Presided Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister/ Foreign Minister René Viviani arrived in St. Petersburg on the French Battleship France for a state visit and three days of consultation with Tsar Nicholas II and his government. The visit was aimed at reinforcing the Franco-Russian Alliance amid rising tensions in Europe following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. For over a century historians have disputed what degree of support the French delegation promised Russia in the evolving crisis before the departure. It had to have been made was the principals were together in Russia. The Austro-Hungarian government deliberately timed the delivery of the ultimatum to occur at 6:00 PM on 23 July 1914, specifically to ensure it happened after Poincaré and Viviani had departed St. Petersburg, limiting their immediate ability to coordinate a response with Russia. The battleship France would not arrive in its homeport, Dunkirk, until the 29th and given the state of communications in those days, there was little communications between the two governments as war broke out, when Austria-Hungary opened fire on Belgrade on 28 July.
The direction and degree to which the discussions conducted in St. Petersburg might have influenced Russian conduct during this period was addressed in a 2010 article published by the Jervis International Security Forum, “French Foreign Policy in the July Crisis, 1914: A Review Article”. Here are some of the major insights raised by its author, Professor Marc Trachtenberg of UCLA.
Stefan Schmidt’s new book on French foreign policy in the July Crisis is a good case in point.[1] He begins by arguing that the French government—and above all, Raymond Poincare, 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. . . “There is no evidence,” John Keiger [another respected student of the War's origins] said flatly, “that during his visit to Russia Poincare did anything other than reaffirm the Franco-Russian alliance. He did not offer carte blanche in the event of a Balkan war. . . French policy in the crisis, according to Keiger, was “predicated on the notion of restraining Russia to avoid giving Germany a pretext for war.”
Stefan Schmidt’s 2009 book France's Foreign Policy in the July Crisis of 1914: A Contribution to the History of the Outbreak of the First World War [takes a contrary positiong]. He begins by arguing that the French government—and above all, Raymond Poincare, 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.
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 Paleologue, 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.”
Schmidt shows, first of all, that Poincare 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 “demarche comminatoire,” to use Poincare’s own term at the time. This implied that in the St. Petersburg talks, Poincare 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 Paleologue pointed out in his 1936 letter to Renouvin: “‘war’ was certainly discussed in these talks, but only defensive war." M. Poincare, 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 ‘Poincare-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. . .
What to make of the assurances that Paleologue 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 Paleologue simply acting on his own? That was Keiger’s view: “it is clear that Paleologue was acting independently of Paris.”
. . . In fact it seems quite likely, given everything that Schmidt was able to show about Poincare and especially about the line he took in St. Petersburg, that Paleologue 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 Paleologue 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 Poincare—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 Poincare personally—did take a hard line in the crisis: Russia, in fact, had effectively been given a blank check. . .
It’s in that context that it makes sense to ask some basic questions about French policy in 1914—about whether the hardline policy pursued by Poincare 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. . .
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.
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