Background
Marie-Jean-Lucien Lacaze was born in Pierrefonds near Paris, June 22, 1860.
Marie-Jean-Lucien Lacaze was born in Pierrefonds near Paris, June 22, 1860.
He graduated from the Naval College in 1882 and saw extensive sea duty over the next two decades, serving in Tunisia, Madagascar, West Africa, and Indo-China.
In 1898 Lacaze returned to Paris as an assistant to the minister of marine. In 1906, by then a captain, he held the post of French naval attaché in Rome. In the years immediately preceding World War I, Lacaze served as a senior staff officer in the Mediterranean, then, in 1911/12, as chef de cabinet to Minister of Marine Théophile Delcassé.
The outbreak of war in 1914 found Rear Admiral Lacaze in command of a squadron of battleships in the Mediterranean. His criticism of Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère, the French naval commander in the Mediterranean, led to Lacaze's transfer to shore duty at Marseilles in early 1915.
In October 1915, Lacaze was named minister of marine in the new cabinet led by Aristide Briand. By this time, the German submarine campaign in the Mediterranean had become the main concern for the French navy. Lacaze met the new threat by drawing men and small vessels from France's northern ports. The crews of French battleships, huddled in ports like Malta and Bizerte, were tapped for duty with the antisubmarine forces. Lacaze also advocated, but could not yet establish, a convoy system to protect merchant traffic.
The establishment of an Allied base at Salonika (October 1915) sharpened divisions in Greek politics between factions led by King Constantine and former premier Eleutherios Venizelos. French naval forces in the seas near Greece were the handiest weapon with which to pressure the pro-German monarch. By June 1916, Lacaze was ordering his Mediterranean commander, Admiral Dartige du Fournet, to take a firm line against the Greek government. Lacaze's demands (October/November 1916) for securing firm guarantees from Athens to protect the Allied Army of the Orient helped precipitate the final split between Constantine and the Entente. When du Fournet's forces landed at Athens on December 1 only to be met by hostile gunfire, Lacaze stripped the admiral of his command.
The Greek king had by then become openly in favor of the Central Powers but it took until the summer of 1917 before he could be removed from the scene.
Lacaze meanwhile survived the fall of the Briand government (March 1917) and, serving under Premier Alexandre Ribot, continued to focus his energies on the escalating submarine threat. By summer Allied countermeasures (including convoys) were reducing the grim toll of lost merchant ships. Lacaze, however, had become a prime target for critics in the National Assembly. When Ribot refused to block a proposal to form a committee of inquiry on the antisubmarine effort, Lacaze abandoned his cabinet post in August 1917.
The following month, having been promoted vice admiral, Lacaze took command of the Toulon Naval District and remained there for the concluding year of the war. He retired from active duty in 1922 and died in Paris, March 23, 1955.