Charles Lanrezac was a French general, formerly a distinguished staff college lecturer, who commanded the French Fifth Army at the outbreak of the First World War.
Background
Charles Lanrezac was bom July 31, 1852, at Pointe-à-Pitre in the French colony of Guadeloupe. Lanrezac was a Marquis, but did not use his title. He was of swarthy appearance (he had a “a dark creole face” in Barbara Tuchman's description) and was a native of Guadeloupe.
Education
Lanrezac attended the military school at Saint-Cyr in 1869 but when the Franco-Prussian War started in 1870, he was sent to fight as a lieutenant.
Career
Recognized as a gifted military intellectual, a brilliant teacher, and a capable leader, Lanrezac rose steadily to senior rank. He was promoted a colonel in 1902, took the post of professor of history and tactics at the Supreme War College, and was made a brigadier general in 1906.
Lanrezac became a protégé of the new chief of staff, General Joffre, who considered Lanrezac a candidate for deputy chief of staff. Instead, Lanrezac received command of a division in 1911 and a corps command the following year. He reached the upper stratum of the peacetime officer corps in the spring of 1914 when he was selected for the Supreme War Council and made commander designate of the Fifth Army in the event of war. In May 1914, Lanrezac received the details of the Fifth Army's wartime mission under Plan XVII: to guard the northern sector of the French line against an anticipated weak German attack through southern Belgium, and to hit the northern flank of that German offensive forecast for the region of the Ardennes. Lanrezac immediately expressed concern about his dangerously isolated position in a war plan that discounted a major German attack across Belgium.
During the first week of August 1914, Lanrezac became increasingly alarmed about a sweeping German offensive through Belgium north of the Meuse, signalled by the strong German attack on Liège. After a week of pleading, he got permission from Joffre to deploy his army northwestward into the angle of the Sambre and the Meuse. He hoped this defensive position would secure the French left from a German outflanking maneuver. Lanrezac linked up with the British Expeditionary Force on his left on August 17, but his subsequent inability to cooperate with its commander, General Sir John French, endangered both armies.
The Fifth Army barely held the Germans on the Sambre at the battle of Charleroi on August 22/23, and on August 24 it began a retreat that pulled the entire French defensive line back to the Marne. With the Germans pressing him southward from the Sambre while they established bridgeheads across the Meuse in his rear, Lanrezac had no choice but to retreat, cutting loose from the British engaged at Mons. The accelerating speed of the retreat by Lanrezac and the British led Joffre to insist in increasingly strong terms on an offensive by the Fifth Army. On August 29, with Joffre present to supervise, Lanrezac achieved an important tactical success at Guise, striking northwest into the flank of the German First Army, then wheeling northward against the approaching German Second Army. The Germans recoiled and reacted to this show of French boldness with caution: they abandoned the wide sweeping movement planned to bring the German First Army west of Paris.
During the remainder of the retreat to the Marne, the exhausted Fifth Army began to disintegrate, its morale collapsing, and many of its leaders infected with Lanrezac's pessimistic conviction that Plan XVII had fatally compromised France's military position.
On September 5, as the French forces prepared to counterattack on the Marne, Joffre relieved Lanrezac, and replaced him with the Fifth Army's most colorful and aggressive corps commander, Franchet d'Esperey. Lanrezac joined the scores of senior French officers retired by Joffre for unsatisfactory performance to the quiet provincial city of Limoges. Joffre claimed his decision was based on Lanrezac's obvious exhaustion and pessimism, and, more important, his inability to deal productively with the British.
Lanrezac refused the offer of a new military post in 1917. In 1920 he published a scathing critique of Joffre's conduct during the August 1914 campaign. In 1924 Marshal Pétain decorated Lanrezac and in the eyes of many Frenchmen vindicated Lanrezac's conduct in the early months of the war.
Lanrezac remains one of the great enigmas of the war, painted by his friends as a capable and farsighted leader, victimized by blind and stubborn superiors; his detractors portray him as a fine peacetime leader, not up to the strain of real combat. In all, he can claim strategic gifts and foresight, and his conduct of the battle of Guise attests to his battlefield skill. In the day-to-day strain of controlling a shaken and retreating army and maintaining a working alliance with an untested ally, he was clearly inadequate. His contagious pessimism justified in the short run and invaluable in moving him to action in early Augustwas a serious liability by early September. He died in Paris on January 18, 1925.