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Raymond Poincaré (French pronunciation: ; 20 August 1860 – 15 October 1934) was a French statesman who served three times as Prime Minister of France, and as President of France from 1913 to 1920. He was a conservative leader, primarily committed to political and social stability.[1]
Trained in law, Poincaré was elected as a Deputy in 1887 and served in the cabinets of Dupuy and Ribot. In 1902, he co-founded the Democratic Republican Alliance, the most important center-right party under the Third Republic, becoming Prime Minister in 1912 and President in 1913. He was noted for his strongly anti-German attitudes, and twice visited Russia to maintain strategic ties. At the Paris Peace Conference, he favoured re-occupation of the Rhineland, which he was able to carry out in 1923 as Prime Minister.
Born in Bar-le-Duc, Meuse, France, Raymond Poincaré was the son of Nicolas Antonin Hélène Poincaré, a distinguished civil servant and meteorologist. Raymond was also the cousin of Henri Poincaré, the famous mathematician. Educated at the University of Paris, Raymond was called to the Paris bar, and was for some time law editor of the Voltaire.
As a lawyer, he successfully defended Jules Verne in a libel suit presented against the famous author by the chemist Eugène Turpin, inventor of the explosive melinite, who claimed that the "mad scientist" character in Verne's book Facing the Flag was based on him.[2]
Poincaré had served for over a year in the Department of Agriculture when in 1887 he was elected deputy for the Meuse département. He made a great reputation in the Chamber as an economist, and sat on the budget commissions of 1890–1891 and 1892. He was minister of education, fine arts and religion in the first cabinet (April – November 1893) of Charles Dupuy, and minister of finance in the second and third (May 1894 – January 1895).
In Alexandre Ribot's cabinet Poincaré became minister of public instruction. Although he was excluded from the Radical cabinet which followed, the revised scheme of death duties proposed by the new ministry was based upon his proposals of the previous year. He became vice-president of the chamber in the autumn of 1895, and in spite of the bitter hostility of the Radicals retained his position in 1896 and 1897.
Along with other followers of "Opportunist" Léon Gambetta, Poincaré founded the Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD) in 1902, which became the most important center-right party under the Third Republic. In 1906 he returned to the ministry of finance in the short-lived Sarrien ministry. Poincaré had retained his practice at the bar during his political career, and he published several volumes of essays on literary and political subjects.
"Poincarism" was a political movement, 1902–20. In 1902 it was used by Clemenceau to define a young generation of conservative politicians who had lost the idealism of the founders of the republic. After 1911 the term was used to mean "national renewal" when faced with the German threat. After the First World War, "Poincarism" refers to his support of business and financial interests.[1]
Poincaré became Prime Minister in January 1912, and began pursuing a hardline anti-German policy, noted for restoring close ties with France's ally Russia.
Poincaré won election as President of the Republic in 1913, in succession to Armand Fallières. He attempted to make that office into a site of power for the first time since MacMahon in the 1870s. He generally managed to continue to dominate foreign policy, in particular. He went to Russia, for the second time (but for the first time as president) to reinforce the Franco-Russian Alliance.
He became increasingly sidelined after the accession to power of Armistice happened too soon and that the French Army should have penetrated Germany far more.[3] At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, he wanted France to wrest the Rhineland from Germany to put it under Allied military control.[4] Poincaré wrote a memorandum for the conference, saying that after the Franco-Prussian War Germany occupied various French provinces and did not leave until it received all of the indemnity, whereas France wanted reparations for damage caused. He further claimed that if the Allies did not occupy the Rhineland and at a later date found that they would need to do so again, Germany would label them the aggressors:
And, further, shall we be sure of finding the left bank free from German troops? Germany is supposedly going to undertake to have neither troops nor fortresses on the left bank and within a zone extending 50 k.m. east of the Rhine. But the Treaty does not provide for any permanent supervision of troops and armaments on the left bank any more than elsewhere in Germany. In the absence of this permanent supervision, the clause stipulating that the League of Nations may order enquiries to be undertaken is in danger of being purely illusory. We can thus have no guarantee that after the expiry of the fifteen years and the evacuation of the left bank, the Germans will not filter troops by degrees into this district. Even supposing they have not previously done so, how can we prevent them doing it at the moment when we intend to re-occupy on account of their default? It will be simple for them to leap to the Rhine in a night and to seize this natural military frontier well ahead of us. The option to renew the occupation should not therefore from any point of view be substituted for occupation.[5]
Ferdinand Foch urged Poincaré to invoke his powers as laid down in the Constitution and take over the negotiations of the treaty due to worries that Clemenceau was not achieving France's aims.[6] He did not, and when the French Cabinet approved of the terms which Clemenceau obtained, Poincaré considered resigning, although again he refrained.[7]
In 1920, Poincaré's term as President came to an end, and two years later he returned to office as Prime Minister. Once again, his tenure was noted for its strong anti-German policies, with Poincaré justifying these by saying: "Germany's population was increasing, her industries were intact, she had no factories to reconstruct, she had no flooded mines. Her resources were intact, above and below ground... [i]n fifteen or twenty years Germany would be mistress of Europe. In front of her would be France with a population scarcely increased."[8]
Frustrated at Germany's unwillingness to pay reparations, Poincaré hoped for joint Anglo-French economic sanctions against Germany in 1922, opposing military action. In April 1922, Poincare was greatly alarmed by the
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His brother, Lucien Poincaré (1862–1920), a physicist, became inspector-general of public instruction in 1902. He is the author of La Physique moderne (1906) and L'Électricité (1907). Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), a much more distinguished physicist and mathematician, belonged to another branch of the same family.
He died in Paris in 1934.
As early as 1915, Raymond Poincaré introduced a controversial denaturalization law which was applied to naturalized French citizens with "enemy origins" who had continued to maintain their original nationality. Through another law passed in 1927, the government could denaturalize any new citizen who committed acts contrary to French "national interest."
Financial crisis brought him back to power in 1926, and he once again became Prime Minister and Finance Minister until his retirement in 1929.
Hall argues that Poincaré was not a vindictive nationalist. Despite his disagreements with Britain, he desired to preserve the Anglo-French entente. When he ordered the French occupation of the Ruhr valley in 1923, his aims were moderate. He did not try to revive Rhenish separatism. His major goal was the winning of German compliance with the Versailles treaty. Though Poincaré's aims were moderate, his inflexible methods and authoritarian personality led to the failure of his diplomacy.[27]
[26] Poincaré lost the 1924 parliamentary election "more from the franc's collapse and the ensuing taxation than from diplomatic isolation."[25] Poincaré's conditions proved to be unacceptable to the Soviets.[25] Poincaré, despite his anti-communism, was interested in the Soviet offer, as it offered a way of perhaps severing the Soviet Union from Germany, but insisted that the Soviets would have to honor all of the Russian debts the Soviet government had repudiated in 1918, plus pay the interest on the debts that had been accumulated since 1918 and offer compensation to French businesses for all of their assets that the Soviet regime had nationalised.[24] Poincaré decided to
Judging others by themselves, the English, who are blinded by their loyalty, have always thought that the Germans did not abide by their pledges inscribed in the Versailles Treaty because they had not frankly agreed to them.... We, on the contrary, believe that if Germany, far from making the slightest effort to carry out the treaty of peace, has always tried to escape her obligations, it is because until now she has not been convinced of her defeat.... We are also certain that Germany, as a nation, resigns herself to keep her pledged word only under the impact of necessity.[21]
Poincaré for his part, while arguing that the French right to collect reparations was non-negotiable, did not want a break with Britain, and was prepared to compromise on German reparations, albeit highly reluctantly, if the British were willing to offer security guarantees and a reduction in French war debts.[11] Despite Poincaré's best efforts to work out an Anglo-French plan for Germany to pay reparations, the British continued to insist that the French lower their reparations demands on Germany, asking in July 1922 that the French accept a voluntary two-year moratorium on collecting reparations from Germany while at the same time insisting that they would accept no reduction in French war debts, even if the French were to reduce reparations on Germany.[18] By the summer of 1922, a vicious circle had been created: the more Germany defaulted on reparations, the more the British pressed for reductions in reparations, which in turn led to further defaults by the Germans out of the hope that reparations might be cancelled altogether.[19] Poincaré was greatly offended by the British demand that the French cancel all reparations for two years, which he saw as rewarding Germany for its repeated defaults and feared that once the reparations were stopped, they would never start again.[19] On 10 August 1922 Lloyd George told his cabinet that Britain should not "give in to the tender mercies of M. Poincaré and the French militarists," for that would mean that Britain had "yielded up control of Europe not to France, but to M. Poincaré and his chauvinistic friends."[20] It was British policy to encourage Germany to default on reparations out of the hope that this might force the French to occupy the Ruhr in response.[20] In November 1922, the British member of the reparations commission, Sir John Bradbury, told the American Colonel James Logan that the British government wanted "to let M. Poincaré try out his policy in the face of their sulky disapproval in the hope that, when M. Poincaré had gone a little way in his independent policy, the French people, feeling consequently the weakening of the franc, increased taxation, etc., would rise in their wrath and oust M. Poincaré before too much harm had been done."[20] By December 1922 he was faced with British-American-German hostility and saw coal for French steel production and money for reconstructing the devastated industrial areas draining away. Poincaré was exasperated with British failure to act, and wrote to the French ambassador in London:
Throughout the spring and summer of 1922, Poincaré grew more and annoyed that the British continued to spurn his offers of an alliance with Britain, a feeling further enhanced by the fact that the French had broken the British diplomatic codes and thus Poincaré could and did read the disparaging comments made about him by Lord Curzon.[10] British officials like Curzon took the view that with Germany defeated, the main danger to British interests was now France, and thus British foreign policy should tilt towards Germany to counterbalance French power.[16] The British strongly objected to Poincaré's plan to seize the Ruhr as a way of forcing reparations payments, arguing, says Maisel, that this "would only impair German recovery, topple the German government, [and] lead to internal anarchy and Bolshevism, without achieving the financial goals of the French."[17]
Keiger further argued that Poincaré was "a victim of his own success. In peacetime he had prepared relentlessly for any eventuality and worked for national unity," so when the war started in 1914 "the crisis had been well managed. Critics could not forgive a Lorrainer this coincidence."[15] The German and Soviet governments were united by a common opposition to the international order created by Versailles, and therefore attacking Versailles as founded upon the alleged Kriegsschuldlüge ("war guilt lie") was an excellent way of creating doubts about the moral validity of the Versailles treaty among people around the world. The fact that Poincaré happened to be an extremely strong proponent of upholding Versailles and an conservative anti-communist was an additional bonus from the German-Soviet viewpoint to attacking him as the alleged author of World War I. Finally during World War I, Vladimir Lenin had called for "revolutionary defeatism", namely for the Bolsheviks to work for defeat of Russia as the best way of bringing about a Communist revolution. The thesis of Poincaré-la-guerre with its claim that Nicholas II was waging a war of aggression on behalf of France would justify Lenin's arguably treasonous acts in the war in working with his country's enemies for the defeat of Russia as those of a Russian patriot trying to stop an unjust war; if one were to accept the counter-thesis of Germany as the aggressor in 1914, then Lenin's policy of working with the Germans for the defeat of Russia would have to be seen in a different light. Likewise, in Soviet history books Nicholas was always portrayed as "Bloody Nicholas", a man so monstrous that shooting him and his entire family down in cold-blood in 1918 was a justified act of retribution; the thesis of Poincaré-la-guerre was a point often used to demonstrate to the Soviet people just how awful "Bloody Nicholas" was.
France was an excellent scapegoat on to whom the blame could be shifted. Because in a war with Germany in 1870 she had lost the two provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, it was suggested that for virtually the next half-century she had prepared for a war of revanche against Germany to regain the lost territories. Because from 1912 France's new leader Raymond Poincaré, who was a Lorrainer in the bargain, was determined to apply resolute policies and to strengthen the links with France's allies, particularly with Russia, it was suggested that he had plotted a war of revanche against Germany.... Poincaré was charged with having encouraged Russia to begin the conflict. The idea of Poincaré-la-guerre gained currency. It was picked up and used to all ends. In France, it was put to political use when Poincaré's political opponents wished to stop him returning to power in 1926. In the end when the argument subsided, because facts had been manipulated and evidence distorted, inevitably confusion resulted and some of the mud had stuck.[13]
In the German-Soviet propaganda of the 1920s, the July Crisis of 1914 was portrayed as Poincaré-la-guerre (Poincaré's war), in which an insanely militaristic and revanchist Poincaré put into action the plans he had allegedly negotiated with Emperor Nicholas II in 1912 for the dismemberment of Germany.[13] The French Communist newspaper L'Humanité ran a front-page cover-story accusing Poincaré and Nicholas II of being the two men who plunged the world into war in 1914.[14] The Poincaré-la-guerre propaganda proved to be very effective in the 1920s, and to a certain extent Poincaré's reputation has still not recovered.[13] Keiger has also argued that
a lavishly funded propaganda campaign by Germany, but also the Soviet Union bent on discrediting its tsarist predecessors, which had a considerable effect on "Anglo-Saxon" and neutral countries, contributing in the postwar era to the image of France, and Poincaré in particular as Germanophobe, bellicose, militaristic and intent on restoring French hegemony to the European continent.[12]
Early in 1922 began what the British historian John Keiger called
[11] Further adding to Poincaré's fears of Germany was the world-wide propaganda campaign started by Germany in April 1922 to blame France for World War I as a means of disproving Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which would thereby undermine the French claim to reparations.[10] Poincaré came to believe by May 1922 that if Rapallo could not convince the British that Germany was out to undercut the Versailles system by whatever means necessary, then nothing would, in which case France would just have to act alone.[9]
United Kingdom, European Union, Italy, Canada, Spain
Raymond Poincaré, Édouard Herriot, Alexandre Ribot, Louis Barthou, René Viviani
Aristide Briand, France, Léon Bourgeois, Raymond Poincaré, Charles Dupuy
Charles de Gaulle, Alexandre Ribot, Jean Casimir-Perier, Félix Faure, Raymond Poincaré
France, Raymond Poincaré, Aristide Briand, Charles de Gaulle, World War I
Aristide Briand, France, Gaston Doumergue, Charles de Gaulle, Raymond Poincaré
Édouard Daladier, French Fourth Republic, France, French Third Republic, Vichy France