Marshal Joffre

The Triumphs, Failures and Controversies of France's Commander-in-Chief in the Great War

André Bourachot, Andrew Uffindell

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473838260
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

A century ago General Joffre, as Chief of the French General Staff, led the armies that blocked the German invasion at the First Battle of the Marne. He saved Paris from occupation and France from probable defeat. His calm demeanour when faced with a disaster, his ruthless dismissal of incompetent subordinates, and his skilled redeployment of his forces contributed to a historic victory. At the time many saw him as the saviour of the nation, but what should we make of him now? For Joffre contributed to the failures of the French army and its strategy before the war and during the first battles of 1914. Also his conduct of the war after the Marne futile offensives that cost thousands of lives and gained no ground, followed by near defeat at Verdun - undermined his position and led to his dismissal.Although he remained immensely popular in France, his reputation has been under a cloud ever since, and he has been overshadowed by the French generals - Ptain and especially Foch - who commanded the French army at the time of the final victory over Germany.Andr Bourachot, in this lucid and highly readable study of Joffre's career, focuses on his performance during the opening phase of the Great War. He offers a fresh and carefully considered view of the man and the soldier.

Chapter 1

An Unconventional Choice

On 28 July 1911, the Journal officiel de la République française published a decree appointing a Chief of the General Staff. Practically nobody in France had heard of the appointee, except to a limited extent in the heart of the army. Général de division Joffre was young for the post, being 59 years of age. He was the replacement for General Michel, who had resigned from the Vice-Presidency of the Supreme War Council after finding himself completely isolated within the council over the question of how the reserve units should be used. Joffre immediately also became the Commander-in-Chief designate of the French armies, meaning that he would command in the event of war breaking out. Provided he retained the government’s favour, he could anticipate holding his post for five years until he reached the age-limit.

The sapper

The fact that the new appointee was a sapper came as a surprise. It was the first and last time that an engineer officer became the ‘boss’ of the French army. The twists and turns that accompanied his appointment are well known and we won’t go into them any more than is necessary to explain the ensuing events. But we should start by noting one point: we can bet that Joffre would never have been appointed if a credible fortune-teller had managed to persuade the French government – and its Minister of War, Adolphe Messimy, a dyed-in-the-wool Radical-Socialist – that the war would break out three years later almost to the day. In those circumstances, Joffre’s operational military experience would have appeared very thin (as we shall see in due course) and it is not even certain that he himself would have accepted the post.¹

Michel was perceived as a lukewarm Republican and it would have been impossible to replace him following his departure with a general who was labelled a reactionary. Joffre, on the other hand, fitted the bill. He was not only an affirmed Republican, but also a more-or-less lapsed Freemason and a rather unobtrusive figure with an irreproachable lifestyle. Ironically, he had a private life that was more in line with the Radical-Socialist ideal than did someone such as Jaurès (the Socialist leader).² Joffre’s political discretion made him what would nowadays be called a consensus candidate.

Politics, indeed, played a major role in the future marshal’s appointment. We have to remember that at the start of the twentieth century ‘fear of the military formed the basis of Republican wisdom’, in the words of a memorable saying attributed to Castelnau. Republicans could only hope that even if officers dedicated themselves to serving France rather than the Republic, they would at least obey the latter. These concerns did not prevent some men on the ‘Left’ from being infuriated by Joffre’s appointment. They accused the government of having chosen him merely to smooth the same path for Castelnau, the man who became a sort of deputy to him.³ For the odd thing was that Castelnau was a devout, militant Catholic and made no attempt to hide it.

One contemporary article examined what we might term the high command at the time of Joffre’s appointment in 1911 and identified twenty-three Republican generals and eleven reactionary ones. According to the same article, by 1913 there were twenty-eight generals described as reactionary and only six as Republican.⁴ The article’s writer saw this as proof that Joffre’s appointment was intended to conceal a vast and almost subversive venture controlled from afar by the Jesuits, the ultimate symbol and embodiment of clerical reactionaryism. The Jesuits have frequently been used as a pretext by regimes spanning the entire spectrum from republic to monarchy, and seem to have been an indispensable scapegoat.

The French army was Jacobin in tradition. Most of its officers had been freethinkers since the time of the Revolution and Empire and they were disgusted with the ‘homilies’ of some of the senior ranks. But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Church supposedly managed to regain a hold on the officer corps by using a very simple means, namely the tuition provided at an excellent school to prepare candidates for the entrance exam to Saint-Cyr, where cadets trained to be officers. The school in question was the Ecole Sainte-Geneviève, which was located at Versailles in a street called the rue des Postes and was often called simply the Ecole des Postes. It was alleged that the headmaster, Father du Lac, carefully pruned the promotion lists with the complicity of some senior generals, removing the ‘Republican’ officers in order to advance the interests of the Church. The Ecole des Postes, followed inevitably by part of the army, would become the ‘nest of Jesuits’ that so preoccupied Clemenceau. This conspiracy theory seems a bit overdone to be true and yet it was adopted to various degrees by several men on the Left, including Clemenceau and Jaurès.

Thus the French army was deeply divided. The Dreyfus Affair was still in the recent past. General André’s arrival at the Ministry of War had made it easier for officers to reach posts of responsibility if they were known to be of the correct political persuasion, for such information began to be secretly noted on their personal files.⁵ All officers, regardless of how long they had served, kept a beady, wary eye on each other and tried to ascertain the hidden motives behind the appointment of a particular person and work out his allegiances. The officer corps had been further perturbed by the Two-Year Law, which had been prepared by André and passed in 1905 after he had left his post. Some officers had found it difficult to understand what André had been trying to achieve with this law, for they could see the French army’s strength diminishing like snow melting in the sun, even as the German army grew ever stronger.

* * *

Joffre’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief designate was a different type of heresy. Although he was responsible for conducting operations in the event of war, he was neither an infantryman nor a cavalryman, nor even a gunner. On leaving the Ecole polytechique, he had become a soldier after finding (in common with many other graduates of the Ecole at this time) that a civil career was not open to him. The only choice he could make was between the artillery and the engineers. Had he opted for the artillery, no one would have objected to his subsequent appointment, for some of his predecessors had also been gunners.

The school at Saint-Cyr trained only those officers who were destined for the infantry and cavalry, in either the mainland army or the colonial army. The situation is different nowadays, although the changes did not happen until as late as 1945. In Joffre’s time, the officers of the so-called scientific arms – the engineers and artillery – did two years of specialist training at their own school at Fontainebleau after studying at the Ecole polytechnique.

Gaining admission to the Ecole polytechnique – which was commonly known as the X – was reckoned to be much more difficult than getting into Saint-Cyr. The Xs, as the pupils were known, tended to develop a superiority complex. The Saint-Cyr cadets claimed that many Xs became officers only because they were incapable of doing anything else, but such remarks were exaggerated.⁶ The reality was that the Ecole polytechnique did provide a route into the major State-run corps – such as the Corps of Bridges and Highroads, or the Corps of Mines – but pupils who wanted to enter these corps rather than become a military officer needed to be graded in ‘the boot’ at the end of their second year. This meant that they had to be ranked among the top few, depending on the precise number of positions that were made available in the State-run corps that year. Joffre admitted that he had been unable to opt for one of the State-run corps since he had not been a ‘booter’, but the number of civil positions available to those who left the Ecole polytechnique that year, in the immediate aftermath of the 1870 war, was lower than it had been for the previous classes.

At the time of 1875, the Joint School of Artillery and Military Engineering at Fontainebleau taught sappers about permanent fortification and everything related to it. There were lessons in construction, in earthworks and also in drawing, the legacy of which can be seen in the archives in the form of some magnificent wash drawings that are not just architectural drawings but real works of art.⁷ Fontainebleau transformed a man who had specialized almost wholly in pure mathematics into a public works engineer who could design practically any element of the infrastructure that was built at that time, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, public buildings, factories, weirs, railways and waterways. Joffre left Fontainebleau with an unexceptional ranking (thirteenth out of twenty-six), but he always remained conscious that it had given him a solid training as an engineer.

Joffre’s immediate future was that of any other young engineer officer. He supervised the construction and maintenance of forts in the area around Paris, in the Jura and even in the Pyrenees. He then went to the colonies, where his many tasks included the building of small forts, or bicoques as they were known. He served at Formosa, at Tonkin and, as a glorious culmination, at Madagascar under Galliéni’s orders. He subsequently became Director of Engineers – this was the logical result of an ascent within his arm that had seen him exercise responsibilities within the Railways Regiment and serve as Secretary of the Commission of Inventions. His final post before his appointment as potential Commander-in-Chief was Director designate of the Rear Zone. This made him a sort of logistics commander, in charge of all the supply services for the frontline armies.

The first part of Joffre’s career, therefore, had been devoted to public works and he was frequently noted as being suitable for employment in ‘very large-scale construction projects’. Not until Tonkin, after fifteen or so years of service, was he recorded as being ‘a good engineer and equally good as a soldier’. When he was appointed Commander-in-Chief designate, he was received by the President of the Republic, Fallières, who told him: ‘I am pleased to see an engineer officer at the head of the army. War, in my view, has become the art of an engineer.’⁸ Joffre in relating this comment wrote: ‘I have often thought of these words and they are profoundly true.’ Fallières probably made the remark simply as something appropriate to say, but that did not stop Joffre from investing great importance in it. It does at least prove that the government knew full well what it was doing when it appointed an engineer.

On the other hand, Joffre did have the disadvantage of never having commanded an infantry section, nor a company, battalion or regiment. His only experience outside that pertaining exclusively to an engineer officer had been at Tonkin and also in the Sudan during his march to Timbuktu – a march he made in conjunction with his superior (Colonel Bonnier, who died in the venture), but by a separate route.⁹ This dramatic episode has been retold many times and it made Joffre’s reputation. Yet it was more in the nature of a prudent exploration by a Livingstone than a warlike raid into enemy territory. It was overrated, as indeed were all the ventures that occurred at that time.

Even so, Timbuktu remains important because of what it reveals about Joffre’s character. The engineer in him can be seen in the way he prepared and led the expedition. He was criticized for having dawdled and for having taken his time. If there is any truth to such criticisms, it was because Joffre was not a hothead liable to charge head down whenever he saw someone in an Arab cloak – and perhaps his prudence was something that Bonnier lacked. He did things logically, one after the other, and never took an uncalculated risk. Such a man, so calm and level-headed, could never have deliberately turned himself into a bloodthirsty firebrand twenty years later during the Great War, as one author would have us believe.¹⁰

Joffre knew nothing of infantry combat, for he lacked any personal experience of it. He had never given the order: ‘Fix bayonets!’ He had never led his troops to an assault. It is not even clear if he had ever fired a rifle shot anywhere other than on a firing range. Of course, a general who is Commander-in-Chief does not need the same skills as a newly-commissioned officer. Yet an officer grasps the realities of combat by being immersed in them at a young age. The first time he hears bullets whistling around him is a sort of initiation rite and it leaves its mark on him for life. By the time Joffre became Chief of the General Staff, he had long ceased to be in direct command of the soldiers within the units under his orders. If he had been ‘baptized’ at all, it could only have been at Tonkin or in the Sudan, and even that would have been relatively late in his career.¹¹

He was hardly exceptional in this respect. How many infantry, cavalry or artillery soldiers had ever previously been under fire when war broke out in 1914? Few officers and NCOs had served in the colonies and, even if they had, it was in a totally different environment from that of Western Europe. Similarly, few officers had the gut awareness that bullets killed and were becoming increasingly efficient in killing more and more men. But the survivors of the 1870 war, such as Pau, Galliéni, Castelnau, Lanrezac and Michel, knew what war was like. They had been very young officers in 1870 and all – or almost all – of them had been in the infantry or cavalry. They had been initiated and this initiation was a real blessing that Joffre the sapper had undergone only to a minor extent, if at all.¹² In 1870, he had still been a pupil at the Ecole polytechnique and had been attached to the artillery to help defend Bastion 39 between the Porte de Saint-Ouen and the Poterne de Montmartre.¹³ Yet neither did any of Joffre’s peers have experience of major operational commands in a war of the sort waged in the Western world, so in this respect he had no cause for any envy.

* * *

Joffre’s duties as Commander-in-Chief designate required much rational knowledge and intelligence and he constantly had to use his analytical skills to find the correct solution to a problem. He also had to draw on his stock of images, feelings and memories to fill any gaps that were left when pure reasoning was unable to provide the whole of the answer. Joffre certainly reasoned, but did he also have an intuition about people and, in particular, about situations?¹⁴ He had a geometric mind and perhaps a shrewd one. But if shrewdness is absent, it can not be compensated for by a personality d...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Preface to the English Edition
• Preface to the French Edition
• Chapter 1: An Unconventional Choice
• Chapter 2: The Offensive
• Chapter 3: Plans
• Chapter 4: Preparing for War
• Chapter 5: Battle of the Frontiers
• Chapter 6: Joffre and Galliéni
• Chapter 7: Gnawing Away
• Chapter 8: Verdun
• Chapter 9: Joffre and Politics
• Chapter 10: The Dismissals
• Appendix: List of French Governments, 1911–20
• Notes
• Select Bibliography