French Third Republic - First World War

First World War

France entered World War I in alliance with Russia to defend against German invasion. Germany sought to win a quick war in the west before Russia fully mobilized its armed forces. The French victory at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 ensured the failure of Germany's strategy to avoid a protracted war on two fronts.

Many French intellectuals welcomed the war to avenge the humiliation of defeat and loss of territory to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. At the grass roots, Paul Déroulède's Patriots League, a proto-fascist movement based in the lower middle class, had advocated a war of revenge since the 1880s. The strong Socialist movement had long opposed war and preparation for war. However when its leader Jean Jaurès, a pacifist, was assassinated at the start of the war, the French socialist movement abandoned its antimilitarist positions and joined the national war effort. Prime Minister Rene Viviani called for unity—for a "Union sacrée" ("Sacred Union")--and France had few dissenters.

As in other countries, a state of emergency was proclaimed and censorship imposed, leading to the creation in 1915 of the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné to bypass the censorship. The economy was hurt by the German invasion of major industrial areas in the northeast. While the occupied area in 1913 contained only 14% of France's industrial workers, it produced 58% of the steel, and 40% of the coal. In 1914 the government implemented a war economy with controls and rationing. By 1915 the war economy went into high gear, as millions of French women and colonial men replaced the civilian roles of many of the 3 million soldiers. Considerable assistance came with the influx of American food, money and raw materials in 1917. This war economy would have important reverberations after the war, as it would be a first breach of liberal theories of non-interventionism.

In order to uplift the French national spirit, many intellectuals began to fashion patriotic propaganda. The Union sacrée sought to draw the French people closer to the actual front and thus garner social, political, and economic support for the French Armed Forces.

The French army defended Paris in 1914 and stopped the German offensive; the war became one of trench warfare along the Western Front, with very high casualty rates and (until spring 1918), almost no gains or losses one way or the other. The morale of the Army weakened year by year, until defeatism and mutiny became a factor in 1917.