France and the Triple Alliance in 1912

Abstract

In their original forms the alliance systems, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, were designed to be defensive. By 1912 members of each opposing camp would have contested that fact and were willing to go to great lengths to break down their opposite numbers’ block in order to ensure their own supremacy. Germany had consistently attempted to dislocate the Entente Cordiale and Triple Entente from their inception. Within the Triple Entente France was guilty of the same sin, though using less aggressive means — attempting to woo members of the Triple Alliance to the other side. It was a policy which, like so much of French diplomacy since 1905, had originated outside the Foreign Minister’s office, and which its instigators, Ambassadors Barrere in Rome and Philippe Crozier in Vienna, continued to pursue believing it to be in France’s interests regardless of Paris. Such policies were to a certain extent both a consequence and a cause of German foreign policy: German aggression invited attempts to parry it by weakening the Triplice, which in turn increased German fears of encirclement and finally completed the vicious circle with further German attempts to divide her opponents. Poincare fundamentally disagreed with such policies as examples of ambassadorial insubordination and as strategic miscalculations. His own philosophy, as he himself confessed, was perfectly encapsulated in Sir Edward Grey’s words: We wanted the Entente and Germany’s Triple Alliance to live side by side in amity. That was the best that was practicable. If we intrigued to break up the Triple Alliance, our contention that the Entente was defensive and was not directed against Germany would cease to be true. Disturbance and possible war, it was clear, would be the consequence.1