Background
Alexandre Millerand was bom in Paris, February 9, 1859. His father was a Catholic wine merchant; his mother came from the Jewish bourgeoisie, a shopkeeper's family originally settled in Alsace.
journalist lawyer politician prime minister
Alexandre Millerand was bom in Paris, February 9, 1859. His father was a Catholic wine merchant; his mother came from the Jewish bourgeoisie, a shopkeeper's family originally settled in Alsace.
Millerand studied at the law faculty of the University of Paris; a friend at school and during his early years of practice was Raymond Poincaré. The future war minister found his year of military service in 1879/1880 a pleasant and satisfying break from the law student's grind.
As a young attorney, Millerand defended striking miners and Socialists, was elected to the Paris Municipal Council in 1884, and reached the Chamber of Deputies at the age of twenty-six. Originally tied to the Radicals, he drifted to the Left, and was reelected in 1889 after running as an independent. Millerand was drawn to socialism in the early 1880s, but, as one historian, Philip M. Williams, has put it, he became "the pioneer on the well-travelled road to fame and power which winds its tortuous way from Left to Right." During the Dreyfus affair, he advised President Loubet to include a Socialist in the projected cabinet of republican concentration. Millerand offered the name of René Viviani, but he clearly knew himself to be the logical choice. His acceptance of the Ministry of Commerce in 1899 sparked a crisis that extended beyond French socialism to disrupt the entire Second International.
Millerand was an active and reforming minister of commerce, but he increasingly omitted the rhetoric of the class struggle cherished by Socialist militants and instead stressed the role of government activism on behalf of the working class. In 1903 he came out against international disarmament and further alienated his old comrades. Expelled from several French Socialist organizations in 1904, he was a man without a party. As minister of public works under Aristide Briand in 1909/1910, he opposed the premier's rough-and-ready device of conscripting railway workers into the army to halt their strike. Briand removed him from the government in 1910. That same year, he joined the loosely tied "Republican-Socialist" party in the Chamber of Deputies.
In 1912 Millerand entered Poincare's cabinet as minister of war, a post he occupied for over a year. His most recent biographer, Leslie Derfler, has held that "the year 1912 may be taken to mark his ideological passage into the nationalist camp." It clearly set the tenor for his wartime role in the Cabinet. Millerand placed full confidence in the military High Command to run its own affairs, and his first act was to destroy the political dossiers that previous war ministers had used to guide promotions. By abolishing the post of army chief of staff, he placed authority to run the military's daily affairs and to plan for future war in the hands of General Joffre, the recently appointed chief of the General Staff. Millerand supported Joffre's intention to limit the use of reservists in the early stages of a future war, and generally expressed satisfaction with the army's readiness for whatever external challenge France might face.
During 1913 Millerand strongly supported the three-year service law. With the outbreak of the war, his administrative talents and experience made him a logical candidate for a cabinet post. He joined the union sacrée government in late August in his old post of war minister, serving for over a year. Millerand differed from his several successors in making no substantial effort to enter the realm of military strategy and operations; he administered the civilian war effort and left the direction of the fighting to Joffre. The controversy that swirled around him in 1914/1915 had to do with his determination to shield Joffre from those who criticized him, to permit the High Command to function without close civilian control. Historians have been harsh on Millerand, who has been characterized as Joffre's "echo," "mouthpiece," and "sentry."
On August 30, 1914, Millerand urged the government to depart Paris for a safer location. This reflected Joffre's position, and thenceforth Millerand stood guard between Joffre and the government. Millerand refrained from passing to his cabinet colleagues the information he received from General
Gallieni during the battle of the Marne. At the dose of 1914 he stood against the return of the government to Paris. It was only a short drive from Paris to Joffre's headquarters; Millerand feared proximity meant a surge in civilian interference in the military conduct of the war. His major achievement in 1914 stemmed from the shell crisis. The French army was down to a scant one month reserve of artillery ammunition by mid-September. Millerand and leading manufacturers met at Bordeaux on September 20 to work out a new production system. A massive buying program abroad, largely in the United States, helped, and by December, the output of artillery shells had tripled.
The start of 1915 brought even greater strains between leaders in the National Assembly and the generals. Millerand again stood with the army. The claimed right of parliamentary committees to visit the combat zone stirred intense feeling in both camps. Millerand did his best to keep civilian leaders away from the War Ministry; Poincaré himself was rebuked for an unauthorized visit! Even Millerand had to bend under the predictable outcry on this issue and on the right of parliamentary committees to visit the factories that were producing military equipment.
Millerand parted company with Joffre on only one major issue the commander in chief bluntly refused to designate two of his divisions to serve in the eastern Mediterranean to support the planned naval attack on the Dardanelles. Millerand drew them in February from rear area depots and North African garrisons outside Joffre's jurisdiction. It was a significant step: major units of the French army were in the field but, for the first time, not under Joffre's control.
Millerand's fall nearly came in the summer of 1915. Angry at his position on parliamentary inspections of the combat zone, leaders in the National Assembly moved to dilute his power: allegedly to keep him from being overtaxed, they set up undersecretaries in the War Ministry who took over several of Millerand's functions. Prime Minister Viviani saw his position endangered by Millerand and considered firing him. The need to preserve the union sacrée helped protect Millerand; moreover, the army High Command made it clear it opposed such a change. Viviani vacillated, then subsided.
Millerand stood alone in the Cabinet in backing Joffre's ouster of General Sarrail, the darling of the Left, in July. As tempers rose in the Chamber of Deputies, the war minister strained to hasten Sarrail's departure for the Dardanelles. He was more successful in shielding Joffre's fall offensive in Champagne from moves to divert several divisions for Sarrail. The Left rejected the view Sarrail must wait for reinforcements. In a bitter Chamber debate in late August, Millerand alluded publicly to the Sarrail controversy. It was a serious breach of the civil military etiquette of the war, in which the Chamber avoided open references to differences on the conduct of the war. The government barely survived as Viviani begged for unity. In October Viviani gave way to Briand, and Millerand to Gallieni.
Millerand was appointed commissioner general for Alsace-Lorraine in 1919. He held the premiership briefly in 1920, then served as president of France, 1920-1924. After long service in the Senate, he died in Versailles, April 7, 1943.