Joffre becomes commander-in-chief of the French armies

On 3 December 1915 France learned of a change at the top of its army. By a decree signed the previous day by President Raymond Poincaré, General Joseph Joffre became “commander-in-chief of the French armies”. Until then he had formally been only commander-in-chief of the armies of the North and North-East, that is, of the troops fighting in France and Belgium. Now all the land forces of the Republic were subordinated to him, including General Maurice Sarrail’s Army of the Orient in Macedonia and the French corps at the Dardanelles. Only the troops in the colonies and in North Africa and Morocco remained outside his authority.

The minister’s reasoning

The decree was issued on the proposal of the Minister of War, General Gallieni. In his report to the President the minister recalled that under the regulations of October 1913 it was the government, responsible for the vital interests of the country, that alone decided the policy of the war: it designated the principal enemy, against whom the bulk of the forces had to be directed, and distributed the means among the theatres of operations. The experience of a war waged on several fronts had shown, however, Gallieni wrote, that “the unity of direction indispensable in the conduct of the war can be ensured only by the presence at the head of all our armies of a single commander, responsible for the military operations proper”. According to the British official history, Joffre was at the same time given a separate staff for the “external theatres of operations”, which was to assist him in the general direction of the war. The Paris Le Temps wrote that the government, in agreement with Joffre, did not intend to appoint a new commander of the armies of the North and North-East, so the general would also keep direct command in France.

The British chronology of the war notes on this occasion that the post of Chief of the General Staff, which Joffre had held since 1911, ceased to exist. It was restored only in April 1917, for General Philippe Pétain.

Why now

In both countries the lack of unified direction of the Allied forces had long been criticised. The British Annual Register wrote that the advantage the Germans drew from the undivided authority of their General Staff was widely recognised. At the Paris conference of 17 November the British and French had adopted the principle of a joint body to coordinate the Allies’ efforts, and Joffre himself had called a military conference of all the Allies at his headquarters at Chantilly, postponed from 25 November to 6 December so that a Russian representative could attend. The British official history links the appointment with precisely this meeting: the French government wanted to strengthen Joffre’s position before he took the chair at the coalition’s conference. The French publicist Mermeix wrote after the war that the Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, wanted in this way gradually to accustom the Allies to the leading role of French headquarters.

Domestic politics also mattered. Briand was the most ardent supporter in France of the expedition to Salonika, while Joffre viewed it with reluctance, because every division sent to the Balkans was lost to the Western Front. Sarrail, a favourite of the left in parliament, had until then answered directly to the minister. The Russian ambassador in Paris, Alexander Izvolsky, reported on 12 December that according to the secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry, Jules Cambon, Briand expected that Joffre, with command of the Eastern front in his hands, would no longer block the reinforcement of the troops in Macedonia. Subordinating Sarrail to Chantilly also gave the commander-in-chief control over what happened in the Balkans.

The first days

The very next day, 4 December, the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Kitchener and Arthur Balfour met Briand, Gallieni and the Minister of Marine, Admiral Lacaze, at Calais to discuss the fate of Salonika. From 6 to 8 December at Chantilly Joffre presided over a conference of the commanders of France, Britain, Russia, Italy and Serbia, which agreed on the principle of simultaneous offensives on all the main fronts in 1916. A few days later the commander-in-chief also received a new chief of staff.

Wider authority did not, however, bring Joffre peace. After the heavy losses of 1915 and the surprise at Verdun in February 1916 his position weakened, and in December 1916 the government took away his real command and made him a Marshal of France.