The Sleepwalkers (75 page)

De Robien already knew Ambassador Maurice Paléologue, a larger-than-life figure who had been in post since January and would dominate the life of the embassy until his departure three years later. Photographs from 1914 show a dapper man of medium height with a shaven head and ‘very brilliant eyes deeply lodged within their sockets'. Paléologue was a ‘romancer, rather than a diplomat', de Robien recalled. He viewed all events from their dramatic and literary angle. ‘Whenever he recounted an event or sought to retrace a conversation, he recreated them almost entirely in his imagination, endowing them with more vividness than truth.' Paléologue was extremely proud of his name, which he claimed (speciously) to have inherited from the emperors of ancient Byzantium. He compensated for his ‘exotic' ancestry (his father was a Greek political refugee and his mother a Belgian musician) with a passionate and demonstrative patriotism and a desire to project himself as the embodiment of French refinement and cultural superiority.

Once installed in St Petersburg, Paléologue, who had never held such a senior post before, soon filled out the dimensions of his new office. De Robien observed the ways in which the ambassador would make his importance felt to the representatives of ‘lesser' countries: when the secretary announced the arrival of the Belgian envoy Buisseret or his Dutch colleague Sweerts, it was Paléologue's habit to go out by the back door for a walk, in order to greet them in the anteroom an hour later with arms opened, saying ‘My dear fellow, I've had so much on today . . .' He displayed a taste for extravagance and ostentation that was exceptional, even in the world of the senior ambassadors. Much was made in St Petersburg society of the fact that embassy dinners were prepared by the chef Paléologue had brought with him from Paris. De Robien put all this down to Paléologue's ‘oriental' ancestry, adding archly that, as with many parvenus, Paléologue's love of magnificence had something affected and unnatural about it.
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Paléologue had a horror of the kind of detailed dispatches that were the bread and butter of workaday diplomacy, preferring to shape his impressions into lively scenes invigorated by dialogues in which catchy phrases replaced the long and often ambiguous verbal circumlocutions that were the day-to-day traffic of diplomats working in Russia. De Robien recalled one particular day on which the ambassador was scheduled to be received in audience by the Tsar for a conversation on an important military matter. Paléologue wished the dispatch to be sent as soon as he returned to the embassy, so that it would reach Paris at the time when it would ‘have the greatest effect'. In order to achieve this he composed the account of his meeting before he had even left the embassy to see the Russian sovereign. De Robien and his colleagues got busy encoding the detailed narative of a conversation that had never taken place. Amid all the faux-reportage, the count remembered one highly characteristic Paléologian phrase: ‘At this point, the interview reached a crucial turning point and the Emperor offered me a cigarette.'
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De Robien's comments on the ambassador, though hostile, were probably fair. Paléologue was one of the most iridescent personalities to hold ambassadorial office in the French service. For many years he had languished in the Parisian Centrale, condemned to tedious copying tasks. Later he was placed in charge of keeping the secret files, especially those relating to the Franco-Russian Alliance and liaison between foreign ministry and army intelligence services, work that he relished. His long years as the custodian of the ministry's accumulated understanding of the alliance and of the military threats facing it – he had access, for example, to French intelligence on Germany's two-pronged mobilization plan – imbued him with a view of French foreign relations that was tightly focused on the German threat and the paramount importance of allied cohesion.
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His historical writings convey a romantic conception of the great man as one who gives himself to moments of world-historical decision:

In certain cases [Paléologue wrote in his biography of Count Cavour], the wise man leaves much to chance; reason prompts him to follow blindly after impulses or instincts beyond reason, that seem to be heaven-sent. No man can say when these should be dared or when deserted; nor book, nor rules, nor experience can teach him; a certain sense and a certain daring alone can inform him.
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Paléologue's pronounced and unwavering Germanophobia was coupled with a taste for catastrophic scenarios that many colleagues recognized as dangerous. During his stint in Sofia (1907–12), one of the few foreign posts he held before accepting the mission to St Petersburg, a colleague there reported that Paléologue's dispatches and conversation alike were full of wild talk of ‘horizons, of clouds and menacing storms'. Indeed it is hard to find any contemporary comment on the future ambassador that unequivocally praises him. There were simply too many bad reports, one senior foreign office functionary observed in May 1914, for there to be any question of ‘confidence' in the new ambassador.
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Izvolsky characterized him as a ‘phrase-maker, a fantasist and very smooth'. Even his British colleagues in Sofia described Paléologue in 1912 as ‘excitable', ‘inclined to spread sensational and alarmist rumours' and a ‘trafficker in tall tales'.
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Paléologue's appointment to the St Petersburg embassy, the most strategically sensitive and important posting in French diplomacy, might thus seem rather remarkable. He owed his rise through the service more to the prevalent political alignment than to the usual array of professional qualifications. Delcassé discovered Paléologue and energetically promoted him, mainly because they shared the same views on the German threat to France – in Paléologue, Delcassé found a subordinate who could echo and reinforce his own ideas. Paléologue's star waned after Delcassé's fall in 1905 and he wound up making do with various minor posts. It was Poincaré who rescued him; the two men had been intimate since the days when they were both pupils at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. Paléologue's ‘great gift', de Robien unkindly remarked, consisted in having been one of Poincaré's and Millerand's classmates at high school – ‘it was to their friendship that he owed his astonishing career'.
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As prime minister, Poincaré recalled Paléologue from Sofia in 1912 and appointed him political director at the Quai. This dramatic promotion – an amazing leap in seniority for such a quirky and controversial man – shocked many of the veteran ambassadors. The French ambassador to Madrid commented to Bertie that Paléologue was ‘not of the right stuff for the directorship', while the French ambassador to Japan described him as a ‘lamentable choice'.
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These were strong words, even by the standards of the diplomatic service, where the upwardly mobile often attract envious sniping. ‘We must hope,' Eyre Crowe noted in London, ‘that the atmosphere of Paris will have a sedative effect on M. Paléologue, but this is not usually the effect of Paris'.
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Poincaré was aware of Paléologue's reputation and did what he could to curb his excesses, but the two friends entered into a close working relationship based on a profound agreement on all key questions. Poincaré came to depend on Paléologue's judgement.
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Indeed, it was Paléologue who encouraged Poincaré to commit France more firmly in the Balkans. Paléologue did not believe that a reconciliation between Austrian and Russian interests in the region would be possible and his obsession with the nefarious designs of Berlin and Vienna made him blind to the machinations of Russian policy. He saw in the two Balkan Wars an opportunity for Russia to consolidate its position on the peninsula.
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The close link with Poincaré was one reason why Sazonov, although he knew of Paléologue's idiosyncrasies, welcomed the new ambassador's appointment to St Petersburg.
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Here was a man who could be trusted to take up in January 1914 where Delcassé had left off. In a conversation with a Russian diplomat who happened to be passing through Paris, Paléologue declared on the eve of his departure that he was taking the St Petersburg post so that he could put an end to the policy of concessions that had hitherto prevailed, and that ‘he would fight for a future hardline policy without compromise or vacillation'. ‘Enough of all this, we should show Germany our strength!'
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These were the convictions, attitudes and relationships that would guide the new ambassador during the summer crisis of 1914.

At 11.30 p.m. on Wednesday 15 July, the presidential train left the Gare du Nord in Paris for Dunkirk. On board were Raymond Poincaré, the new prime minister René Viviani and Paléologue's successor as political director at the Quai d'Orsay, Pierre de Margerie. Early the following morning, the three men joined the battleship
France
for the journey through the Baltic to Kronstadt and St Petersburg. Viviani was new in post – the former socialist had been prime minister for only four weeks and had no experience or knowledge whatsoever of external affairs. His principal utility to Poincaré consisted in the fact that he had recently converted to the cause of the Three Year Law, commanded a sizeable following in the chamber and was prepared to support Poincaré's views on defence. As the state visit to Russia unfolded, it would quickly become apparent that he was politically out of his depth. Pierre de Margerie, by contrast, was an experienced career diplomat who had been brought to Paris by Poincaré in the spring of 1912, at the age of fifty-one, to occupy the post of associate director at the Quai d'Orsay. Poincaré had created this watchdog post in the hope that de Margerie would keep an eye on Paléologue and check any major indiscretions. As it happened, this proved unnecessary. Paléologue performed to Poincaré's satisfaction, and when his reward came in the form of the posting to St Petersburg, de Margerie succeeded to the political directorship. In this role he proved himself efficient and – most importantly of all in the president's eyes – politically loyal.
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Neither Viviani nor de Margerie was capable of mounting an effective challenge to the president's control over policy.

Raymond Poincaré

René Viviani

Poincaré had much to think about as he boarded the
France
at Dunkirk at 5.00 a.m. on 16 July. First there was Charles Humbert's sensational indictment of the French military administration. In a speech before the Senate of 13 July to mark the submission of his report on the special budgetary vote for army matériel, Humbert, senator for the Meuse (a department on the border with Belgium), had delivered a swingeing attack on the French military administration. French forts, he claimed, were of poor quality, fortress guns lacked ammunition and the wireless installations for fort-to-fort communications were faulty. Whenever the German wireless installation at Metz was transmitting, Humbert claimed, the station at Verdun went on the blink. French artillery was quantatively inferior to the German, especially in heavy guns. One detail above all caught the attention of the French public, and particularly of the nation's mothers: the army was woefully short of boots; if war broke out, Humbert declared, French soldiers would have to take to the field with only one pair of boots, plus a single thirty-year-old reserve boot in their knapsacks. The speech triggered a political sensation. In his reply, Minister of War Adolphe Messimy did not deny the substance of the charges, but insisted that rapid progress was being made on all fronts.
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The deficiencies in artillery provision would be made good by 1917.

This was all the more annoying for the fact that the man at the forefront of the resulting parliamentary agitation was Poincaré's old enemy Georges Clemenceau, who was claiming that the incompetence revealed in the report justified withholding parliamentary support for the new military budget. It had only just been possible to resolve the issue and pass the new military budget in time to avoid a postponement of the president's departure. On the day they left for Dunkirk, Viviani seemed nervous and preoccupied by the thought of intrigues and conspiracies, despite Poincaré's efforts to calm him.
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