Maxime Weygand was a French military commander in World War I and World War II.
Background
Weygand was born in Brussels of unknown parents. He was long suspected of being the illegitimate son of either Empress Carlota of Mexico (by General Alfred Van der Smissen); or of her brother Leopold II, King of the Belgians, and Leopold's Polish mistress. Van der Smissen always seemed a likely candidate for Weygand's father because of the striking resemblance between the two men. In 2003, the French journalist Dominique Paoli claimed to have found evidence that Weygand's father was indeed van der Smissen, but the mother was Mélanie Zichy-Metternich, lady-in-waiting to Carlota (and daughter of Prince Metternich, Austrian Chancellor). Paoli further claimed that Weygand had been born in mid-1865, not January 1867 as is generally claimed.
Education
He moved to Paris in 1873, entered St. Cyr as a foreigner with the special dispensation of the Ministry of War in 1885, and graduated in 1888 as a cavalry officer, having become a French citizen.
Career
Weygand rose steadily despite an official reprimand for his anti-Dreyfus opinions and statements. He distinguished himself as a cavalry instructor at Saumur and as a troop commander. General Joffre, hunting for talented younger officers, was impressed by Weygand's performance in the army's 1912 maneuvers and by the cavalryman's distinguished record in his studies at the Centre des hautes études militaires, newly established to train picked officers for senior commands in the future.
Weygand fought in 1914 in the battle of Morhange as a lieutenant colonel of Hussars in the Fourth Army. Joffre assigned him as chief of staff to General Foch, whose performance in the Lorraine campaign led to the command of the newly formed Ninth Army on the Marne. From that time forward, Weygand's career during the war was intertwined with that of Foch.
Weygand distinguished himself at the Marne when Foch placed him in direct charge of the crucial Fère-Champenoise sector. He followed Foch in the post of chief of staff from 1914 to the close of 1917: the winter campaigns of 1914 at Ypres and the Yser, the 1915 offensive in Artois, the Somme in 1916, and Foch's period of eclipse during most of 1917.
Foch and Weygand constituted a distinguished and smoothly functioning military team. Weygand could take Foch's compressed and often opaque orders and transform them into directives of perfect clarity. The precise boundaries of this symbiotic and effective relationship remain uncertain, but Weygand apparently stimulated and contributed to Foch's ideas as well as seeing to their execution.
In November 1917, the Allied powers took their first step toward a unified command with the formation of a Supreme War Council of political leaders and their permanent military representatives. Foch was initially named as the French representative but his simultaneous role as chief of staff of the French army led to Allied objections. Foch was replaced in December 1917 by Weygand, then a major general, who functioned as his alter ego. When Foch became supreme Allied commander in April 1918, Weygand returned to the role he had never really left, that of Foch's chief of staff and main military collaborator. Foch's skeleton staff, led by Weygand, was never adequate to give detailed direction to the Allied armies, and during the last six months of the war the Foch-Weygand team served mainly as coordinators and inspirers of the armies on the western front.
Weygand's service in the First World War was merely the start of an elaborate military career. He served as high commissioner in Syria in 1924, and during the early 1930s he was chief of staff and wartime commander designate of the French army. Weygand was the French military commander in the eastern Mediterranean during the first months of the Second World War. Recalled by Prime Minister Reynaud to command in France in May 1940, he found a situation he deemed hopeless and recommended French capitulation to the Germans. He was imprisoned by the Germans in 1942 and liberated in 1945; Weygand died in Paris on January 18, 1965.
Personality
In his memoirs he says little about his youth, devoting to it only 4 pages out of 651. He mentions the gouvernante and the aumônier of his college, who instilled in him a strong Roman Catholic faith. His memoirs essentially begin with his entry into the preparatory class of Saint-Cyr Military School in Paris, as if he had wished to disregard his connection with Mme. Saget and M. Cohen de Leon.