Barthou becomes foreign minister

On 23 October 1917 France changed its foreign minister. The 75-year-old Alexandre Ribot, who had directed French diplomacy since March, first as prime minister and from September as a minister in Painlevé’s cabinet, left the government of Paul Painlevé. His place was taken by Louis Barthou, a former prime minister who had until then sat in the government as a minister of state without portfolio. Sources give different dates for Ribot’s departure. According to the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica, he finally resigned as early as 16 October. The American monthly “Current History” wrote that on 22 October the whole cabinet offered its resignation to President Raymond Poincaré, but he did not accept it, because the Chamber of Deputies had recently given the government a vote of confidence. Painlevé then entrusted the ministry to Barthou. The appointment is dated 23 October, and this is also the date given by the British chronology of the war.

A trap or a chance of peace

Ribot had from the start been the weakest point of the cabinet. It was because of him that the socialists had refused to join the government, regarding him as the spokesman of annexationist war aims. The immediate cause of his fall, however, was a dispute over German peace feelers. In the summer of 1917 Baron Oskar von der Lancken, head of the political department of the German administration of occupied Belgium, let it be known through Belgian intermediaries that Germany was ready for talks. The threads led to the Belgian prime minister Charles de Broqueville, and the addressee was Aristide Briand, Ribot’s predecessor as prime minister. Lancken invited him to a meeting in Switzerland, set for 22 September. From the terms conveyed orally it appeared that Germany might even return Alsace-Lorraine to France. Ribot considered this a manoeuvre intended to split the coalition, consulted the allies, and the matter was closed. Briand did not go to Switzerland.

On 9 October the Secretary of State Richard von Kühlmann declared in the Reichstag that the only real obstacle to peace was the question of Alsace-Lorraine, and to the question whether Germany could give it up he answered with an emphatic “Never!”. A few days later Ribot replied to him in the Chamber of Deputies. He recalled that not long before the same Kühlmann had been hinting at something different and that proposals had been made to “a high political personality”, and he called the German offer a trap. According to Étienne de Nalèche, director of the “Journal des Débats”, this passage was later removed from the record in the official gazette, but it was already too late. Briand concluded that Ribot had suggested that he himself had been seeking a separate peace, and went round the lobbies with the letter he had written to Ribot when the German proposals reached him. The socialists and some deputies of the left and centre attacked Ribot. No one, they said, had the right to call a trap something that looked like a genuine offer of peace.

The Chamber discussed the matter in a secret session (comité secret). On 19 October the government survived the vote. According to Nalèche, the deputies were frightened by a rumour that if Painlevé fell, power would pass to Georges Clemenceau, who had been fiercely attacking the government for months. Ribot’s position, however, was untenable. As early as the council of ministers on 18 October his colleagues pressed him to go, and he clashed particularly sharply with the minister of state Henry Franklin-Bouillon, responsible for foreign missions, whose tasks constantly encroached on the competence of the Quai d’Orsay. For several days successive versions of a new cabinet circulated in Paris. At one moment Barthou was to become prime minister, at another René Viviani. In the end it came down to the replacement of a single minister.

The new minister

Louis Barthou was 55. He was born on 25 August 1862 in Oloron-Sainte-Marie at the foot of the Pyrenees, into a modest merchant family. He was a lawyer and journalist, and received his first ministerial portfolio in 1894, at the age of only 31. He later headed the ministries of public works, the interior and justice. From March to December 1913 he was prime minister and, with Poincaré’s support, carried through parliament the law extending military service to three years, which was regarded as one of the most important steps in France’s preparations for war. A few months after the war broke out he lost a son at the front. In September 1917 he entered Painlevé’s government as one of four ministers of state and a member of its war committee.

The change did not mean a new policy. Painlevé, to reassure the socialists, had spoken in his declaration of the “disannexation” of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany rather than of its annexation, whereas Barthou, according to “Current History”, at once declared himself unreservedly in favour of Ribot’s line on this question. The socialists, led by the French Section of the Workers’ International, continued to refuse the government their support.

Barthou held office for less than a month. On 13 November the Chamber of Deputies refused the government its confidence, by 277 votes to 186. Among the reasons for the cabinet’s fall “Current History” listed Barthou’s refusal to show the Senate foreign affairs committee a document containing the alleged German peace offer. On 16 November Clemenceau formed a new government, and Stéphen Pichon became foreign minister.