Background
Theophile Delcasse was born in Pamiers in the foothills of the Pyrenees, March 1, 1857.
Théophile Delcassé
Theophile Delcasse was born in Pamiers in the foothills of the Pyrenees, March 1, 1857.
The son of a legal official, Delcassé studied at the University of Toulouse, then took up a career as a journalist.
In 1889 he entered the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the Radical party. He rose quickly. He became minister of colonies in 1894/1895, and he embarked on a triumphant seven-year term as minister of foreign affairs in 1898. By 1905 Delcassé could point with pride to strengthened diplomatic links with Russia; more important, he had restored friendly relations with two formerly hostile nations, first Italy, then (in 1904) with Great Britain. Delcassé stood as a firm supporter of French imperial expansion, in particular concerning tighter control over Morocco. That view, plus his widely recognized anti-German feelings, led to his fall in June 1905. The Berlin government challenged French designs in Morocco and made it clear they preferred to deal with a more sympathetic French foreign minister. A weak premier, Maurice Rouvier, pushed him from office.
Delcassé returned to center stage in July 1909. His criticism of gross inadequacies in the French navy shook the government of Georges Clemenceau to the ground. In March 1911, Delcassé got his own chance to guide French sea power as minister of the navy. Before he left the office in January 1913, the French government had signed naval conventions with Russia (July 1912) and Great Britain (October 1912). By shifting French naval strength to the Mediterranean, Delcassé anticipated the results of the agreement with Great Britain even before it had been signed. Thus the defense of the North Sea, and the implicit obligation to join France in a future war with Germany, was pushed toward British hands. In the touchy matter of defending France against a German offensive through Belgium, Delcassé was equally daring. In February 1912, he supported General Joseph Joffre in calling for a preemptive French ad-vance into the small neutral country; but Premier Raymond Poincaré turned the idea aside.
Delcassé became France's ambassador to Russia in February 1913, remaining until January 1914. With an eye to a coming war, he goaded the St. Petersburg government to improve the railroad system in the Russian Empire's western provinces, pledging French financial help to meet the costs. Delcassé's old friend Maurice Paléologue replaced him, permitting the diplomatic warhorse to return home to lead the successful fight to increase France's term of military service for its recruits to three years.
In August 1914, the war Delcassé had so long anticipated became a reality. Premier René Viviani called him in to take charge once again over the foreign ministry. But Delcassé could not match the great successes of his previous term in that post. In poor health, the new foreign minister carried the additional burden of knowing his son had been captured by the enemy within the first month of the war. Delcassé's straightforward policy of bolstering France's existing alliances and seeking new members for the Allied coalition aroused heated controversy.
The French foreign minister established a cordial working arrangement with Sergei Sazonov, his Russian counterpart and a strong supporter of the wartime alliance. As early as November 1914, Delcassé backed Sazonov's call for some form of Russian control over the Turkish Straits. The following spring, Delcassé placed France alongside Britain in promising Petrograd possession of the Dardanelles and adjacent territories when the war ended in victory. Such concessions to the Russians were perhaps inescapable: Sazonov threatened otherwise to resign and to let some pro-German diplomat take his place. But Delcassé found he had aroused the concern of everyone from French businessmen worried about their economic interests in Turkey to anti-Russian Socialists who opposed any territorial gain for the tsar.
Delcassé had a less controversial success in winning Italy to the Allied side in May 1915. But the effort to create a bloc of Balkan states to fight alongside the Entente failed catastrophically. To Delcassé, Bulgaria alone could form the mainstay of such a league. If the Sofia government moved alongside France and Britain, then Rumania and Greece would have to follow. To the end, Delcassé pressed France's ally Serbia as well as neutral Greece to make territorial concessions to the Bulgars. But the Central Powers seemed better able to give Bulgaria such coveted territory as Serbian Macedonia; in October 1915, Bulgaria entered the war on the side of France's opponents. To his growing chorus of critics in the National Assembly, Delcassé seemed mistaken at every turn: too conciliatory to the Russians, too gullible vis-à-vis the Bulgars, too unsympathetic to the Serbs. The final blow came in October 1915, when Delcassé stood alone in the cabinet against landing a large French expeditonary force in Salonika. He had previously favored an Allied landing, but only if Russian and Italian units played the main role. To drain French troops from the western front was, for him, intolerable. He resigned on October 12, 1915; before the month was out, Aristide Briand had replaced Viviani as premier and committed France to a Balkan front.
Delcassé sat out the rest of the war quietly on the back benches, but he came alive at the news of the Versailles settlement. He demanded the Rhine frontier and nothing less as a guarantee of French security. The old architect of the 1904 Entente with Britain now claimed that London had won far more safety than Paris from success in World War I, especially the destruction of the German fleet. Delcassé bitterly refused to vote for the peace treaty in 1919; that same year he retired from political office. He died in Nice, February 22,1923.