Poincaré, Raymond

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POINCARÉ, RAYMOND

POINCARÉ, RAYMOND (1860–1934), French politician.

Born in Bar-le-Duc (Meuse) in Lorraine on 20 August 1860, Raymond Poincaré occupied the highest offices of the French state, including president of the republic, in a political career that ran from 1886 to 1934. Longevity and achievement made him one of the foremost statesmen of the French Third Republic. He played crucial roles in France's entry into World War I, the organization of the war effort, the peace settlement, the reparations question, the occupation of the Ruhr, and the reorganization of French finances in the 1920s.

Born into a solidly middle-class family, the eldest son of an engineer, Poincaré was educated at the lycées of Bar-le-Duc and Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and graduated from the Sorbonne with an arts and a law degree. He was called to the Paris bar in 1882. At an early age he displayed the intelligence and enormous capacity for work that were hallmarks of his political career.

Poincaré began his life in politics in 1886 as a councilor for the Meuse, a position he would retain until his death on 15 October 1934. In 1887, he was elected a member of the lower house of parliament for Meuse and sat on the center-left of the Chamber with the Progressists. His reputation for efficient committee work on legal and financial matters saw him appointed minister of education and culture (April–November 1893) at only thirty-two years of age. The following year he was finance minister (May 1894–January 1895), then education minister again (January–October 1895).

Throughout his political career, Poincaré always steered a middle course. A champion of secularism, he was no anticlerical. Although opposed to the more left-leaning Radicals, he was no reactionary, and often included them in the governments he later formed. Disillusioned with the radical turn in French politics from 1901, he withdrew from ministerial office (apart from a brief interlude as finance minister in 1906) and concentrated on his extremely successful legal practice. Politics were not abandoned altogether, as he was elected vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies in 1895 and remained a member of the lower house of parliament until his election to the Senate in 1903. During those wilderness years he produced a number of books and articles on politics, which helped secure his election to the Académie Française in 1909. Those years also saw him promote ideas far less associated with his austere legalistic image. He championed animal rights and antivivisectionism and promoted women's rights from the freedom to practice law to the vote.

Following the 1911 Franco-German Agadir crisis in Morocco, Poincaré was recalled to office as premier and foreign minister on 12 January 1912. He set about ensuring that diplomatically and militarily France was prepared for any eventuality. Although he did so by tightening up France's alliance and entente with Russia and Britain, he was careful not to adopt an aggressive policy toward Germany. Even when in January 1913 he was elected president of the Republic, he saw to it that governments were put in place that would continue his firm policy. This, combined with his Lorraine origins—supposedly synonymous with revanche—has been interpreted as meaning that he sought war. However, his role in the circumstances that led up to the outbreak of war in August 1914 was far more blameless than the myth of Poincaré-laguerre would suggest. That myth was the result of postwar propaganda generated by Germany and Poincaré's political opponents at home. The former wished to contest the principle of German war guilt on which the payment of reparations was built by displacing some of the blame onto France; the latter were intent on blocking Poincaré's return to power in the 1920s. His greatest triumph was to ensure that the country entered the war united, symbolized by his famous union sacrée speech of 4 August 1914, following Germany's declaration of war on France the day before.

Poincaré and his policies have traditionally been associated with values that posterity has tended to view as unfashionable—order, stability, dignity, politeness, honesty, and thrift. His identification with the middle class, which claimed to incarnate those values and which historiography has not found exciting or treated kindly, has left Poincaré, if not one of the unsung heroes of modern French history, then one whose political stature has not received the recognition it deserves.

See alsoAlliance System; France.