Roques replaces Gallieni

On 16 March 1916 France’s Minister of War, General Joseph Gallieni, wrote to Prime Minister Aristide Briand: “As I explained to you last week, my strength, used exclusively and without respite in the service of the country, is today failing.” His doctors had found that he was unable to carry out his duties with the necessary energy and that only complete rest and careful treatment would allow him one day to return to active service. He therefore asked for his resignation to be accepted. Briand replied that he could only take note of it, with great sadness shared by all the members of the government. That same day President Raymond Poincaré signed a decree appointing General Pierre Roques Minister of War “in place of Général de Division Gallieni, whose resignation is accepted”. On the morning of 17 March the decree was published in the official gazette.

Illness and dispute

The Paris daily “Le Temps” wrote that for about ten days illness had kept the minister from attending cabinet meetings and that Gallieni was leaving on the eve of an operation. The general had long suffered from prostate disease, and since taking office in October 1915 he had not had a single day’s rest. The press presented his departure as purely a matter of health. Behind the scenes, however, it was also about a dispute with the commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre.

Since the autumn Gallieni had been accusing the headquarters at Chantilly of running the army without any oversight. In December, when at the President’s request he asked Joffre about the state of the defences of Verdun, the commander-in-chief replied sharply and threatened to resign. After the German attack at Verdun on 21 February the minister concluded that he had been right. According to his friend and biographer Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi, on Tuesday 7 March Gallieni attended a cabinet meeting for the last time and presented a note on the high command that he had been preparing for three months. In it he wrote that for the high command neither the War Ministry nor even the government existed any longer, because “Chantilly orders, directs and administers as it pleases”. He demanded that headquarters be subordinated to the government and that those responsible for the surprise at Verdun be called to account. The French historian Pierre Renouvin dates this statement to 6 March.

The government did not follow the minister. Gallieni later said that only Poincaré had asked him for a copy of the note, and that the other ministers were afraid to touch it. Historians write that Briand feared that publishing such an accusation in the middle of the battle would undermine the army’s morale and bring down the government. According to Gheusi, that same afternoon Gallieni took his resignation to the President and the Prime Minister, but agreed to keep it secret for a few days and to remain in post until a successor was found. The dates given in the sources differ by a few days: the French list of members of the government gives Gallieni as minister until 14 March, some studies speak of a resignation forced on 10 March, and the British chronology of the war and the decree of appointment point to 16 March.

The new minister

Pierre Auguste Roques was 59. He was born on 28 December 1856 at Marseillan in the Hérault department, into a poor family, and thanks to a scholarship got into the École polytechnique, where, according to French biographers, he became friends with Joffre. He was an engineer officer. He served in Algeria, Tonkin and Dahomey, where he was wounded in the chest in 1892. In Madagascar, under Governor Gallieni, he directed work on the planned railway from Tamatave to Tananarive, and was later director of the engineering service there. In 1906 he succeeded Joffre as director of the engineering service at the War Ministry. At that time he also dealt with the fledgling aviation, and from 1910 to 1912 he was permanent inspector of military aviation. The French regard him as the chief organiser of their military aviation. The war found him at the head of XII Corps at Limoges, and from January 1915 he commanded the 1st Army.

“Le Temps” assured its readers that the choice would be well received in the army and the country, and stressed that, for a French general, the new minister was young. The American historian Robert Doughty notes that the government appointed him only after making sure that Joffre had no objection. The appointment of the commander-in-chief’s friend put an end, for a long time, to attempts to bring headquarters under the minister’s control. The tension between the government and Parliament did not go away. That same afternoon, in the Chamber of Deputies, the deputy Accambray attacked the high command so violently that the President of the Chamber, Paul Deschanel, had to suspend the sitting.

Gallieni went to Versailles, where he underwent two operations. He died on 27 May 1916, and in 1921 he was posthumously made a Marshal of France. Roques headed the ministry until December 1916, when in Briand’s new government he was replaced by General Hubert Lyautey.