Maurice Paléologue was a French diplomat, historian, and essayist. He played a major role in the French entry into the First World War, when he was the French ambassador to Russia and supported the Russian mobilization against Germany that led to world war.
Background
Paléologue was born in Paris as the son of Alexandru Paleologu, a Wallachian Romanian revolutionary who had fled to France after attempting to assassinate Prince Gheorghe Bibescu during the 1848 Wallachian revolution. Alexandru was one of three illegitimate children of Elisabeta Văcărescu of the Văcărescu family of boyars. He and his siblings were later adopted by Zoe Văcărescu, Elisabeta's mother, who gave the children her Greek maiden name Paleologu. The name became Paléologue in French language spellings. The family's relation to the Palaiologos Byzantine Imperial family is doubtful, though Alexandru's ancestors claimed it at the end of the 17th century.
Education
The young man abandoned an early interest in a scientific career to enter the French Foreign Office in 1880. Beginning in 1883 he spent four years in distant corners of the world from Tangiers to Korea. In 1887 he returned to Paris to spend two decades at the Quai d'Orsay, rising through the ranks of the French foreign-policy-making apparatus.
Career
In 1907 Paléologue was named minister to Bulgaria; he returned to Paris in 1912 to take over the post director of political affairs at the Foreign Office. By then, his career was advancing under the patronage of Raymond Poincaré, France's premier. Poincaré used Paléologue as a foreign policy adviser and more; in March 1913, for example, Poincaré, then president of France, called in Paléologue to pressure members of the Chamber of Deputies to pass the law establishing a three-year term of military service.
In January 1914, Paléologue accepted the post of ambassador to St. Petersburg. Reluctant at first to receive the appointment, Paléologue changed his mind at the urging of his old friend and sponsor. The new ambassador explained his mission as twofold: to restrain Russia in diplomatic affairs, and, perhaps more plausibly, to push St. Petersburg into the most active kind of military preparations. Whatever message he claimed to deliver, Paléologue found his known link with Poincaré lent special gravity to his words.
In early June 1914, Paléologue enraged leftists in the French Chamber of Deputies by refusing to return to Russia without assurances that the newly elected Chamber would maintain the three-year service law. This raised a variety of suspicions: Paléologue was perhaps intervening in French domestic affairs as the agent of the Russian government; or, conversely, Paléologue was helping President Poincaré to bend the French constitution to allow the head of state to guide the Chamber.
Controversial even before Sarajevo, Ambassador Paléologue stands at the center of the most bitter of historical controversies, the crisis of July 1914. Between July 23 and July 29 Premier René Viviani and President Poincaré were at sea, returning to France from a state visit to Russia.
Thus, during the escalation of the crisis, Paléologue had unusual freedom of action. Albertini has constructed a detailed brief that accuses Paléologue of a variety of misdeeds; taken together, they mark him as one of the godfathers of the Great War. Albertini sees Paléologue encouraging Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov to make broad pledges of support to Serbia on July 24, by making equally broad pledges that Russia could rely on French aid. Albertini finds Paléologue concealing from authorities in Paris the rapid escalation of the military crisis as Russia shifted from preparing for partial mobilization to adopting the dangerous general mobilization of July 30. Paléologue should have informed Paris by July 29, according to Albertini, and thus allowed French authorities to restrain the Russians. And most damning of all, Albertini accuses Paléologue of preventing his Russian counterparts from understanding the range and nature of the support that Viviani offered; specifically that Viviani pledged to back Russia if St. Petersburg chose to throw its influence behind a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Austria and Serbia.
The ultimate villain in this bill of particulars against Paléologue the warmonger is Poincaré. The close political association between the two is a matter of record. Albertini strongly suggests that Paléologue's "independent" actions were, in fact, under covert orders from Poincaré to press Russia forward toward war with the Central Powers.
Paléologue served in St. Petersburg, more or less uneventfully, until the March Revolution of 1917. Then he was replaced by the less patrician figure of Albert Thomas, Socialist and France's minister of munitions. Paléologue retired from the Foreign Office in 1921 to write his memoirs; these are widely considered to be sharply slanted away from any hint of Paléologue's culpability in the tragic days of late July 1914. A novelist, connoisseur of Chinese art, and literary critic, the ex-diplomat was named to the Académie française in 1928. He died in Paris, November 18, 1944.
Membership
Paléologue was elected a member of the Académie française in 1928.