Foch becomes Marshal of France

On 6 August 1918 the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, signed a decree by which General of Division Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in France, was raised to the dignity of Marshal of France. The proposal was made by the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Georges Clemenceau. Some works give the date as 7 August, probably following the day the decree was published in the official gazette, but the French legal database dates it to 6 August, and Foch’s baton was engraved: “FOCH Ferdinand, maréchal de France, 6 août 1918”. It was a reward for the Second Battle of the Marne, in which the counter-offensive prepared by Foch and General Philippe Pétain had driven the Germans out of the whole salient between Soissons and Reims. The same day Pétain, Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, received the Military Medal (Médaille militaire).

A dignity, not a rank

In the French army Marshal of France was not a military rank but a dignity of state, conferred on generals for outstanding services in war. The highest rank remained general of division, so Foch was not formally promoted, but he received a title that placed him above all French generals. For almost half a century the Third Republic had not used this dignity at all. It was revived in December 1916 for Joseph Joffre, but for him it was a consolation prize for the loss of his command. Foch was the second to become a marshal during this war and the only one to do so while in command, in the middle of a campaign, rather than after it ended or after leaving active service. The other great French commanders, Pétain, Joseph Gallieni, Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, Émile Fayolle, Hubert Lyautey and Michel Maunoury, received their batons after the war, Gallieni and Maunoury posthumously.

The Military Medal that Pétain received that day was a special decoration. Established in 1852, it was awarded to private soldiers and non-commissioned officers for bravery, and among officers only generals who had commanded an army in the face of the enemy received it. The citation said that Pétain, “a soldier at heart”, had constantly given proof of the purest sense of duty and great self-sacrifice, and had now “earned an imperishable right to the nation’s gratitude by breaking the German onslaught and victoriously repelling it”. According to his biographers, Pétain valued it more highly than his other decorations and liked to wear it on his uniform. He became a marshal in November 1918, after the armistice.

Foch’s road

Foch was 66. He was born in 1851 in Tarbes at the foot of the Pyrenees, as a young man lived through the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and before 1914 was one of France’s best-known military theorists and commandant of the École supérieure de guerre. At the start of the war he commanded XX Corps in Lorraine, and in September 1914 the newly formed Ninth Army, which in the Battle of the Marne held the centre of the French front by the marshes of Saint-Gond. From October 1914, as Joffre’s deputy, he coordinated the operations of the Allied forces in Flanders during the fighting at Ypres and on the Yser. In 1915–1916 he commanded the Northern Army Group in Artois and on the Somme. In December 1916, together with Joffre, he paid for the bloody and unproductive fighting on the Somme and was sidelined for several months.

In May 1917, when Pétain took command of the French Army, Foch became Chief of the General Staff and adviser to the government. After the Italian defeat at Caporetto he went to Italy and helped organise French aid there. In the spring of 1918, at the moment of greatest danger, the Allied governments entrusted him at Doullens with coordinating operations on the Western Front, and then with strategic direction. On 14 April he received the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in France. In May he was elected to the Académie française. His position was not unshakeable, however. After the German breakthrough on the Aisne at the end of May some politicians in Paris demanded the dismissal of the commanders, and Clemenceau had to defend them in parliament.

The turn in the summer of 1918

July brought the turn. Foch persuaded the British to send four divisions to the Marne despite the objections of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who feared an attack in Flanders, and he did not allow Pétain to postpone the counter-offensive when the Germans crossed the Marne on 15 July. The blow of 18 July against the western flank of the salient took the Germans by surprise. On 24 July, at his headquarters in the château of Bombon in the Seine-et-Marne department, Foch presented the British, French and American commanders-in-chief with a memorandum in which he stated that the Allied armies had reached the “turning point”, and that the time had come to abandon the defensive attitude imposed until then by German numerical superiority and to go over to the offensive. He proposed a series of blows in quick succession: clearing the Germans from the Paris–Avricourt railway on the Marne, freeing the Paris–Amiens railway by a joint British and French attack, and eliminating the Saint-Mihiel salient by the Americans. The first objective was achieved on 6 August, when the Germans stood behind the Vesle, Pétain halted the attacks and the Second Battle of the Marne came to an end. For the second objective the British and French were to strike at Amiens just two days later.

The appointment also had an Allied dimension. Foch directed armies whose commanders-in-chief were not formally his subordinates, and Haig had held the British rank of field marshal since 1 January 1917. As a Marshal of France the Allied commander no longer ranked below him in title.

The baton at Bombon

The ceremony took place a few weeks later. On 23 August, in front of the château at Bombon, President Poincaré, in the presence of Clemenceau and the ministers Georges Leygues and Louis Loucheur, presented the marshal with his baton. It was covered in blue velvet strewn with gold stars and finished with gold mounts. One of them bore the traditional motto of the marshals of France: Terror belli, decus pacis (Terror in war, ornament in peace). The offensive that had begun at Amiens on 8 August was by then under way along the whole front from the Somme to the Aisne. After the war Foch also received the dignity of British field marshal (1919) and Marshal of Poland (1923).