Lyautey resigns

On 14 March 1917 the French Minister of War, General Hubert Lyautey, resigned. He had headed the ministry for only three months. He left after a stormy scene in the Chamber of Deputies, in which the deputies did not let him finish his speech. The British chronology of the war, on which our timeline is based, records under 17 March the resignation of “General Roques, French Minister of War”. This is a mistake: General Pierre Roques, who in March 1916 had replaced Gallieni, lost the post in December 1916, and in March 1917 the minister was Lyautey. We therefore describe his resignation under the correct date.

A general among politicians

Lyautey, Resident-General in Morocco since 1912, joined the government of Aristide Briand in December 1916, when the Prime Minister reshaped his cabinet and gave command of the army to Nivelle. He was popular in the country as the builder of French Morocco, but the left did not trust him. Some deputies saw him as a general with political ambitions, capable even of a coup d’état. From the start his relations with parliament were difficult. Resistance in the Chamber was provoked by a bill he had prepared that required the re-examination by doctors of hundreds of thousands of men exempted from service and the drafting of priests into front-line units. According to The New York Times, Lyautey had wanted to resign over this a few weeks earlier.

He also had no faith in Nivelle’s plan. When at the Calais conference he saw the scheme for placing the British under Nivelle, he reportedly called it a plan worthy of The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, an operetta mocking the army. He considered recalling the commander-in-chief, but decided against it. From 11 March until the morning of 14 March he was in London, where at another conference Nivelle was reconciled with the British Field Marshal Douglas Haig. On the afternoon of that day he was already facing the Chamber.

Storm in the Chamber

That day the deputies took up military aviation. Critics accused the ministry of building aircraft too slowly and of meeting the newest designs with outright hostility in its offices. The Chamber decided to discuss the matter in closed session, the so-called secret committee (comité secret), from which no reports could be published. Lyautey considered even such a debate dangerous because, as he believed, its content quickly reached the Germans. He read out a statement prepared in advance. He began by saying that he had at first thought it better that the debate should not take place at all, and added that even in secret session giving such explanations exposed national defence to risk.

The left took these words as an insult to parliament. An uproar broke out which the parliamentary reporter of Le Petit Parisien called one of the most violent he had ever seen. The President of the Chamber, Paul Deschanel, rang his bell for order in vain. Lyautey tried to read on, but the noise grew, so he stepped down from the rostrum and left the chamber. He drove straight to the War Ministry, dealt with current business, and in the evening handed Briand his resignation, stressing that it was irrevocable. At midnight the Prime Minister informed President Raymond Poincaré. According to the general’s biographer André Maurois, Lyautey later said to one of his collaborators: “You were right, I never understood anything about that breed,” meaning the parliamentarians.

Aftermath

On the morning of 15 March the Council of Ministers, chaired by Poincaré, accepted the resignation, and the Minister of Marine, Admiral Lucien Lacaze, took over the War Ministry temporarily. The public was surprised and largely indignant with the deputies. The conservative press wrote that the Chamber had treated the minister too harshly, and that day the censors confiscated the edition of Le Figaro, which had sharply criticised the deputies’ conduct. For Briand it was a blow from which he did not recover. The British official history (Falls) wrote that with Lyautey’s departure the government was doomed, and it survived only three more days. The Prime Minister was unable to find a new Minister of War and reshape his cabinet, and on 17 March he resigned. Lyautey returned to his post in Morocco and headed the protectorate for another eight years. In 1921 he became a Marshal of France.