Fall of the Briand government

On the evening of Saturday 17 March 1917 the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, tendered the resignation of his government to President Raymond Poincaré. This brought down Briand’s sixth cabinet, formed only three months earlier. The immediate cause was the departure of the Minister of War, General Hubert Lyautey, who had resigned three days earlier after a stormy scene in the Chamber of Deputies. Formally the cabinet remained in office until 20 March, when its successors were appointed, which is why some sources give this date as the end of the government.

Three days of crisis

The council of ministers accepted Lyautey’s resignation on 15 March, and the Minister of Marine, Admiral Lucien Lacaze, temporarily took over the War Ministry. Briand tried to save the government by filling the gaps and reshaping it. According to reports from Paris he intended, among other things, to restore separate ministries that had been merged in December to make the cabinet smaller. The hardest task, however, proved to be finding a new Minister of War. The Annual Register wrote that the Prime Minister had been unable to reconstruct his cabinet, and the American New International Year Book added that Briand had failed to replace Lyautey and met with great difficulties in reshaping the government.

On the morning of 17 March the ministers met under Poincaré’s chairmanship, but decided nothing. In the evening they met again at the Élysée Palace. According to the official communiqué, the Prime Minister reported on his talks about completing the cabinet, after which the government decided that the circumstances obliged it to leave the President “complete freedom” to resolve the situation in the best interests of national defence. Briand tendered the resignation of the whole cabinet.

Briand’s record

Briand had headed the government since October 1915, almost a year and a half. Throughout this time he had also been Foreign Minister. His government had taken France through the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. Briand was one of the main advocates of the Salonika expedition and conducted a policy towards Greece that was criticised as too conciliatory towards King Constantine. In August 1916 Romania entered the war, and its rapid defeat in the autumn reflected badly on both the high command and the government.

The key to his fall, however, was the dispute with parliament over control of the conduct of the war. Deputies repeatedly demanded secret sessions at which they criticised the high command. In June 1916 Briand won a vote of confidence by 440 votes to 80, in December by only 344 to 160. He then reshaped the government, created a small war committee and replaced Joffre with Nivelle. At the turn of 1916 and 1917 France, together with its allies, rejected the German peace offer and replied to President Wilson’s peace note. As the British official history (Falls) notes, the fall of the cabinet did not prevent Nivelle’s plan from going ahead, but it deprived the commander-in-chief of the support of the Prime Minister who had chosen him for the post.

What came next

The crisis, as the New International Year Book wrote, was purely parliamentary and did not result from the pressure of public opinion. Nor did it change France’s fundamental policy. It came in the days when news of revolution and of the abdication of Nicholas II was arriving from Russia, and the United States was drawing closer to war with Germany. Poincaré began consultations with the presidents of both chambers of parliament. The President of the Chamber of Deputies, Paul Deschanel, declined the task of forming a government. The new cabinet was finally formed by the 75-year-old Minister of Finance, Alexandre Ribot. Briand did not accept the post of Foreign Minister in it. He did not, however, disappear from politics. In the 1920s he headed the government several more times, and in 1926 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.