A VERY FRENCH SCANDAL: THE CAILLAUX AFFAIRE AND THE ROAD TO WAR, 1914

Part 6 of a 30-part history of The Great War

                                                                                            

It’s one of the favourite ‘counterfactuals’, or What Ifs, for historians of the Great War. If  Gaston Calmette, the editor of the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro, had not been shot in March 1914 could the Great War have been averted?                    The shooting of Calmette was a very French scandal. On March 16 Henriette Caillaux, wife of the French Foreign Minister, Joseph Caillaux,  took a taxi to the HQ of Le Figaro in Rue Druot. After waiting for an hour to see  Calmette, she walked into his office, coolly extracted a  Browning pistol from her fur muff and fired away. Four of the bullets entered Calmette’s body. He died later that evening.                     Le Figaro was implacably opposed to the Radical, pacifist politics of Henriette’s husband. More to Henriette’s concern, Le Figaro was about to publish intimate letters written by her to Joseph Caillaux when she had been married to someone else.                   Henriette Caillaux made no attempt to flee, and a sensational trial took place, which utterly distracted France from the mushrooming crisis in the Balkans following the murder of  Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28^th, 1914.  To the French Right, as well as to Germany, the Caillaux scandal seemed to be an inevitable consequence of  France’s national pastime, the pursuit of pleasure. Had not the Caillaux pair, after all, put plaisir before propriety in their adulterous liaisons?                To the moralists and the Prussians, nowhere in France was more guilty of hedonism than Paris. On the eve of the Great War the French capital was at the zenith of that gilded age we now call La Belle Epoque. Paris was the ‘city of light’, beckoning everyone who wanted a good time.  Baedeker’s travel guide remarked about Paris in its 1910 edition: ‘The boulevards at night with their electric lights and brilliant illuminations, suggest a city of pleasure, always en-fete…the seductive capital, which no-one quits without regret.’                                                                        There were so many sins to be satisfied in Pairs. Paris virtually invented haute-cuisine, and no establishment cooked food better than The Ritz on the Place Vendome, where the celebrated chef Auguste Escoffier ruled the kitchens. Parisian sybaritic invention also extended to cabaret, seen at its raunchiest at the Moulin Rouge, home of the frilly ‘can-can’ dance; the nightclub’s excitements were depicted for perpetuity in the art of the ‘Bohemian’ painter Toulouse-Lautrec. Shopping? On the Boulevard Haussmann, Galeries Lafayette had constructed a flagship department store, where hosts of assistants - the midinettes – sold the latest couture to awed crowds.                                                                                                                      Paris was the pleasure-dome of the world. The American novelist Henry James amusingly pointed up the city’s gravitational pull in his novel The Ambassadors, in which Lambert Strether of Massachusetts is dispatched to the city on the Seine to rescue young Chad Newsome from lax living. Instead Strether himself falls in love with Paris. The German Kaiser lacked James’ subtlety. With characteristic delicacy, Wilhelm II called Paris ‘the whorehouse of the world’. Mind you, the French delight in delectation did seem to be enfeebling the nation. France’s desperately low birth rate had several causes, but the willingness of French couples to defer or even abandon having children because ‘les enfants’ would interfere with adult pleasures was large among them. Contraception was widely available and extensively practised in France. A memorandum prepared by the German General Staff triumphantly contrasted the Reich’s population growth since 1880 with France’s: Whereas the Reich had grown from 42 million to 62 million citizens, France had only managed an increase from 37 million to 39 million. Underpopulated France, the German military concluded, would ‘hardly be able to continue a long war’.                                                                                                  Due to ‘birth dearth’ France was forced to draft 85% of her young men in order to have an army matching that of her forbidding Teutonic neighbour. Many of the draftees caught in this wide-cast net were unfit; according to the US historian Jack Beatty some conscripts in the Third Republic weighed as little as 80 lbs. To fill out the ranks of its army, France imported soldiers from its overseas colonies. A cartoon in the Berlin satirical journal Kladderadatsch expressed everything about how Germany thought these black troops would perform as soldiers: They were depicted as apes in French uniform.                                                                           France’s flat-lining population graph also caused ‘deficiency of aggregate demand’, or lack of domestic consumption in manufactured goods. The economy of Germany, populous and serious, was growing twice as fast as that of la République,                        When Madame Henriette Caillaux went on trial for the murder of Le Figaro’s editor, all the weakness of France and the loucheness of Paris were exposed. Her finance minister husband made a prime exhibit. Bald, middle-aged, with a squeaky voice, Joseph Caillaux was nonetheless effortlessly attractive to women, all of whom he flamboyantly squired around glittering Paris, haughtily regardless of opinion, utterly careless of his own marital status. He was also, it was alleged, on the take. But, then, who wasn’t accepting bribes in Paris? Le Figaro received bungs of roubles to promote Russian Tsarist interests. Witnesses in the trial came from the highest ranks of French life; even the president gave evidence. Caillaux bussed in toughs to intimidate critics.                                                                                                       France was riveted. So was tout le monde. The Caillaux affair did more than unveil the sexual and financial habits of the French elite, it provoked the sort of Left-Right clash which littered French history going back to the Revolution of 1789, via the anti-Semitic Dreyfus scandal, the Paris Commune, the 1848 uprising. Paris’ glorious boulevards were actually a testament in stone to the fractious nature of the French. Their generous width was intended to make the erecting of barricades by protestors difficult, and create a clear line of fire to the armed forces of the state.                        Politics in Belle Epoque France were poisonous. To French nationalists, the anti-militarist Joseph Caillaux was a ‘traitor’ because he had conducted, as prime minister, secret negotiations with Germany in 1911. He was successful in averting war, but at a cost: Morocco became a French protectorate but in return Paris gave Berlin a slice of the French Congo. The French Right did not want grants of land to Germany, they wanted the return of Alsace-Lorraine, ‘The Lost Provinces’, annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.                               Such bitter ideological division led ineluctably to regime churn. Between 1909 and 1914 France had 11 governments. The revolving doors at The Ritz went round less often.                               Fantastically, Madame Caillaux was found not-guilty of murder at the end of her trial. In a classic piece of male  chauvinism the jury decided that, overcome by ‘volatile emotions’ due to her feminine nature, Henriette Caillaux had committed a crime of passion. And she walked free.                                                                The ‘affaire Caillaux’ prevented Monsieur Caillaux from becoming prime minister; it also gave the Germans the distinct impression that France was fractious, frivolous, and so morally corrupted that she was unlikely to put up much of a fight if attacked. The Caillaux scandal, it might be said, positively encouraged the war lobby in Deutschland, which looked for weakness in rival nations like a shark sniffs for blood.                    Could a pacifist prime minister Caillaux have prevented the Great War happening, worked diplomatic magic as he had done in 1911?  Unlikely. The military clique around the German emperor was never going to pass over the golden pretext for war offered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. More plausible is a scenario whereby a peace-loving, Germanophile PM in France slowed the rush to war. Caillaux might conceivably have changed the timetable to Armageddon but not the destination In the event, France emerged blinking from the courtroom holding the Caillaux trial on 28 July 1914, to find that that Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. At this juncture, the French did not act out the script Germany hoped for, the script France feared. The citizens of France, far from abandoning La Belle France  in her hour of need, rallied enthusiastically to her side. Only 1% of conscripts failed to turn up at their regimental depots; French generals had pessimistically expected 15% of draftees to go awol. Why did France fight? Well, it was a good life. France had the highest living standards in Europe. L’amour, le vin, cordon bleu cooking were things worth defending. In the words of the great French writer Andre Maurois, the generation of 1914 went to war convinced that their civilisation ‘was one of the loveliest and happiest in the world’.  For La Belle Vie the French were prepared to die.