Background
Jean Victor Augagneur was born at Lyons, May 16, 1855
Government and military official
Jean Victor Augagneur was born at Lyons, May 16, 1855
Mr. Augagneur received his degree as a physician in 1879 and earned an international reputation in medical research and education.
Politics soon became his second career. Augagneur entered the Lyons municipal council in 1888, rose to mayor of his native city in 1900, and won election as a Republican-Socialist to the Chamber of Deputies in 1904. Between 1905 and 1910 he filled still another role: governor general of Madagascar.
Augagneur returned to the National Assembly in 1910, receiving his first cabinet post in 1911 as minister of public works under Joseph Caillaux. He served as vice president of the Chamber of Deputies during the first half of 1914 and entered the government of René Viviani in June as minister of public instruction. The first days of World War I drove Armand Gauthier, Viviani's minister of marine, to the brink of emotional collapse and elevated Augagneur to his most important govern¬ment role. His record of success then came to an abrupt end.
Augagneur lacked any solid background for the post of navy minister. Placed at the top of a poorly defined chain of command and prone to act impulsively, he sometimes pointed the fleet in ap¬propriate directions but more often did not. Augagneur was justified in calling on the Mediterranean commander, Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère, to move energetically against the German battle cruiser Goeben in early August. But he had no success in subordinating Lapeyrère to his orders. Augagneur's subsequent demands for sorties into the confined waters of the Adriatic (to strike at the Austrian fleet but also to exert political pressure on Italy) threatened to expose France's battle fleet to mines, torpedo boats, and submarines. Lapeyrère resisted such pressure.
Augagneur has received scathing criticism from Cassar for his role in the Dardanelles operation. In mid-January 1915, he committed the French fleet to an unsupported naval assault on the Turkish Straits. This he did without seeing the precise battle plan, without informing the French naval commander in the Mediterranean, and without allowing word of the projected attack to reach the French war minister. According to Cassar, Augagneur was partly swayed by the glowing picture of easy success painted by his British counterpart, Winston Churchill; partly he was concerned to maintain France's political presence in the eastern Mediterranean. When the naval assault failed, Augagneur like Churchill drifted into a larger commitment. By late March he was under bitter assault by members of the National Assembly.
Pliable in the face of British demands, Augagneur responded differently to the Italians. Extensive negotiations took place during the spring of 1915 over a naval convention to accompany Italy's entry into the war. Augagneur flatly opposed Rome's call for an Italian commander in chief for the Allied fleet in the Adriatic. He claimed French public opinion would not tolerate such an arrangement. His own political prospects could hardly have survived it either.
By September 1915, German submarines in the Mediterranean were active from the coast of Algeria to the Dardanelles, and Augagneur found himself attacked by his own colleagues in the cabinet. With the fall of Viviani's government in October 1915, Augagneur gave way to Admiral Lacaze, a professional officer prepared to make the war against the submarine the center of French naval operations.
Augagneur returned to the less demanding role of ordinary deputy. Defeated for reelection in 1919, he resumed colonial service as governor general of French Equatorial Africa. He was reelected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1928. He died in Paris on April 23,1931.