Noel Joseph Edouard de Curieres de Castelnau was a French general in World War I. He represented the militant Catholic element in the French Army and headed the Féderation Nationale Catholique. Despite his significant achievements during the war, he was never named Marshal of France.
Background
Noel de Castelnau was born in Saint-Affrique,France on December 24, 1851. He was a member of a French aristocratic family distinguished by its production of a long line of military leaders. One general de Castelnau had fought under Napoleon I, another had accompanied Napoleon III into exile in 1870 after Sedan. The family was staunchly Roman Catholic and Castelnau's openly proclaimed religious convictions influenced his military career at several significant points.
Education
Castelnau graduated from St. Cyr in 1870 and fought during the Franco-Prussian War. After attending the War College, he divided his service between staff and line positions, acquiring a reputation as an expert staff officer.
Career
In 1900 he was one of three officers purged from the General Staff for antiDreyfusard opinions. By then a colonel, he took command of an infantry regiment at Nancy. Castelnau rose to a position of international significance in 1911 when he was chosen by General Joffre, the army's new chief of staff, to serve as first deputy chief of staff. Joffre, a stranger to the technical side of staff work, picked Castelnau as the army's acknowledged expert in the area. The parliamentary Left objected vigorously but unsuccessfully to the appointment of a general with such an aristocratic and clerical background.
As Joff re's chief assistant, Castelnau played a major role in France's preparation for the First World War. He participated in staff talks with the British from 1911 onward, during which he was accepted as Joffre's principal adviser on strategy, and he significantly influenced the drafting of France's war plan. Castelnau rejected any suggestion that France would benefit from a strategy of parrying and counterattacking a German offensive. Instead, he helped convince Joffre to take the offensive immediately into Lorraine.
The possibility of a German offensive via Belgium north of the Meuse he found unlikely. If the Germans should undertake such a move, Castelnau's estimates of their manpower indicated that they would thereby weaken the German defensive line in Lorraine, facilitating the French advance. Like most French planning for the initial stages of the war, such thinking by Castelnau erroneously predicted that the Germans, like the French, would not employ large reserve formations in combat. Thus, Germany's capability to launch an offensive would depend upon the strength of its standing army. To bolster the French standing army, Castelnau influenced Joffre to make a successful appeal in 1913 for a three-year term of service.
At the start of the war, Castelnau commanded the Second Army, with headquarters at Nancy. In accordance with the war plan he had advocated, he advanced on August 14 northeastward from the Grand Couronné, the hills east of Nancy, into German Lorraine. His immediate goal was the fortress of Morhange. An able tactician, Castelnau advanced carefully. On August 20 the Germans stopped their deliberately planned retreat, administered a bloody defeat to the attacking Second Army, and then began a counterattack. The German action was carried out prematurely, and Castelnau had a capable subor-dinate in the aggressive and optimistic General Foch, in command of the Twentieth Corps. Nonetheless, the Second Army was forced into a general retreat to the Grand Couronne, and Castelnau became the first French senior commander to experience the strength of the defensive in the First World War.
Castelnau's forces held tenaciously to Nancy and the line of the Moselle, as the Germans improvised a major attack on the French position in Lorraine. During the battle, Castelnau received word of the death of a son at Morhange; he lost two more sons later in the war. Dispirited by personal tragedy and the fierce German attacks, he considered a withdrawal from Nancy several times. His subordinate, Foch, persuaded him instead to counterattack an exposed German flank on August 23, and his superior, General Joffre, personally ordered the Second Army to hold in a meeting with Castelnau on September 6. Along with Sarrail at Verdun and Dubail in Alsace, Castelnau secured the eastern portion of France's defensive position and helped make the victory at the Marne possible.
During the remainder of 1914 and throughout 1915, Castelnau remained an advocate of large-scale offensives. In the aftermath of the battle of the Marne, he led five corps into the area northeast of Paris to outflank the new German defenses on the Aisne. These efforts and the German response led to the "race to the sea" and the extension of a solid defensive line from Switzerland to the North Sea. Castelnau was appointed commander of France's Center Group of Armies in June 1915. He conducted major offensive operations in Artois in the spring and Champagne in the fall. On both occasions, he clashed with his subordinate General Pétain, who argued the futility of prolonged infantry assaults without the systematic use of overpowering artillery preparations.
At the close of 1915 Castelnau returned to general headquarters to become Joffre's chief of staff. After a full year of unsuccessful offensive campaigns, Joffre s reputation among political leaders was waning, although his public popularity made it impossible to dismiss him. General Gallieni, the new war minister, placed Castelnau beside Joffre to aid the commander in chief but also to restrain him.
Castelnau left immediately to assert Joffre's authority as commander in chief of all French armies over the maverick General Sarrail in Salonika. In January 1916, Castelnau personally inspected the fortifications at Verdun. Alarmed at the weakened condition of the historic fortress, he ordered the construction of a new defensive line on the east bank of the Meuse. When the Germans began their major attack on Verdun in late February, Castelnau returned with plenipotentiary authority. It was he according to Horne who made the crucial decision to hold Verdun and to place Pétain in charge of the overall defense.
When Joffre fell from power in December 1916, Castelnau was considered to replace him. His ostentatious Catholicism and his long association with the discredited Joffre combined to disqualify him in favor of Nivelle. He traveled to Russia at the start of 1917, and, following Nivelle's fall, took over the Eastern Group of Armies under Pétain's command. He held this post until the close of the war, when he found himself planning a climactic offensive into Lorraine, the same area in which he had begun the war.
Castelnau entered politics in the postwar period, serving in the Chamber of Deputies from 1919 to 1924. He lived to the age of ninety-seven, one of the few senior French commanders of the war who left no written memoirs. His avowed clericalism prevented him from being named marshal of France, an honor conferred on most of his peers. He died in Montastruc-la-Conseillière on March 18, 1944.