The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (45 page)

“The heart of the matter,” it has been said, “was simply that Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one.”
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The desperate efforts to be strong on all fronts ran a serious risk of making the empire weak everywhere; at the very least, they placed superhuman demands upon the empire’s railway system, and upon the staff officers who would control it. More than that, these operational dilemmas confirmed what most observers in
Vienna had reluctantly accepted since 1870: that in the event of a Great Power war, Austria-Hungary needed German support. This would not be the case in a purely Austro-Italian war (although that, despite Conrad’s frequent fears, was the least likely contingency); but German military assistance certainly would be required if Austria-Hungary became embroiled in a war with Serbia, and the latter was then aided by Russia; hence the repeated attempts by Conrad prior to 1914 to secure Berlin’s assurances on this point. Finally, the baroque nature of this operational planning reflects once again what many contemporaries could see but some later historians have declined to admit:
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that if the nationalist explosions of discontent in the Balkans, and in the empire itself, continued to go off, the chances of preserving Kaiser Joseph’s unique but anachronistic inheritance were well-nigh impossible. And when that happened, the European equilibrium was bound to be undermined.

France in 1914 possessed considerable advantages over Austria-Hungary. Perhaps the most important was that it had only one enemy, Germany, against which its entire national resources could be concentrated. This had not been the case in the late 1880s, when France was challenging Britain in Egypt and West Africa and engaged in a determined naval race against the Royal Navy, quarreling with Italy almost to the point of blows, and girding itself for the
revanche
against Germany.
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Even when more cautious politicians drew the country back from the brink and then moved into the early stages of their alliance with Russia, the French strategical dilemma was still an acute one. Its most formidable foe, clearly, was the German Empire, now more powerful than ever. But the Italian naval and colonial challenge (as the French viewed it) was also disturbing, not only for its own sake, but because a war with Italy would almost certainly involve its German ally. For the army, this meant that a considerable number of divisions would have to be stationed in the southeast; for the navy, it exacerbated the age-old strategical problem of whether to concentrate the fleet in Mediterranean or Atlantic ports or to run the risk of dividing it into two smaller forces.
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All this was compounded by the swift deterioration in Anglo-French relations which followed the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. From 1884, the two countries were locked into an escalating naval race, which on the British side was associated with the possible loss of their Mediterranean line of communications and (occasionally) with fears of a French cross-Channel invasion.
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Even more persistent and threatening were the frequent Anglo-French colonial clashes. Britain and France had quarreled over the Congo in 1884–1885 and over West Africa throughout the entire 1880s and 1890s. In 1893 they seemed to
be on the brink of war over Siam. The greatest crisis of all came in 1898, when their sixteen-year rivalry over control of the Nile Valley climaxed in the confrontation between Kitchener’s army and Marchanda small expedition at Fashoda. Although the French backed down on that occasion, they were energetic and bold imperialists. Neither the inhabitants of Timbuktu nor those of Tonkin would have regarded France as a power in decline, far from it. Between 1871 and 1900, France had added 3.5 million square miles to its existing colonial territories, and it possessed indisputably the largest overseas empire after Britain’s. Although the commerce of those lands was not great, France had built up a considerable colonial army and an array of prime naval bases from Dakar to Saigon. Even in places which France had not colonized, such as the Levant and South China, its influence was large.
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France had been able to carry out such a dynamic colonial policy, it has been argued, because the structures of government had permitted a small group of bureaucrats, colonial governors, and
parti colonial
enthusiasts to effect “forward” strategies which the fast-changing ministries of the Third Republic had little chance to control.
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But if the volatile state of French parliamentary politics had inadvertently given a strength and consistency to its imperial policy—by placing it in the hands of permanent officials and their friends in the colonial “lobby”— it had a far less happy impact upon naval and military affairs. For example, the swift changes of regime brought with them new ministers of marine, some of whom were mere “placemen,” others of whom had strongly held (but always varying) opinions on naval strategy. In consequence, although large sums were allocated to the French navy in these decades, the money was not well spent: the building programs reflected the frequent changes from one administration’s preference for a
guerre de course
(commerce-raiding) strategy to another’s firm support for battleships, leaving the navy itself with a heterogeneous collection of ships which were no match for those of the British or, later, the Germans.
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But the impact of politics upon the French navy paled by comparison with the effect upon the army, where the strong dislike shown by the officer corps toward republican politicians and a whole host of civil-military clashes (of which the Dreyfus affair was merely the most notorious) weakened the fabric of France and placed in question both the loyalty and the efficiency of the army. Only with the remarkable post-1911 nationalist revival could these civil-military disputes be set aside in the common crusade against the German enemy; but there were many who wondered whether too heavy a dose of politics had not done irreparable damage to the French armed forces.
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The other obvious internal constraint upon French power was the state of its economy.
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The position here is a complex one, and has been
made the more so by economic historians’ predilections for different indices. On the positive side:

Until Henry Ford’s mass-production methods were developed, indeed, France was the leading automobile producer in the world. There was a further burst of railway-building in the 1880s, which together with improved telegraphs, postal systems, and inland waterways, increased the trend toward a national market. Agriculture had been protected by the Meline tariff of 1892, and there remained a focus upon producing high-quality goods, with a large per capita added value. Given these indices of absolute economic expansion and the small increase in the number of Frenchmen during these decades, measurement of output which are related to France’s population look impressive—e.g., per capita growth rates, per capita value of exports, etc.

Finally, there was the undeniable fact that France was immensely rich in terms of mobile capital, which could be (and systematically was) applied to serve the interests of the country’s diplomacy and strategy. The most impressive sign of this had been the very rapid paying off the German indemnity of 1871, which, in Bismarck’s erroneous calculation, was supposed to cripple France’s strength for many years to come. But in the period following, French capital was also poured out to various countries inside Europe and without. By 1914, France’s foreign investments totaled $9 billion, second only to Britain’s. While these investments had helped to industrialize considerable parts of Europe, including Spain and Italy, they had also brought large political and diplomatic benefits to France itself. The slow weaning of Italy away from the Triple Alliance at the turn of the century was attended, if not fully caused, by the Italian need for capital. Franco-Russian loans to China, in exchange for railway rights and other concessions, were nearly always raised in Paris and funneled through St. Petersburg. France’s massive investments in Turkey and the Balkans—which the frustrated Germans could never manage to match prior to 1914—gave it an edge, not only in politico-cultural terms, but
also in securing contracts for French rather than German armaments. Above all, the French poured money into the modernization of their Russian ally, from the floating of the first loan on the Paris market in October 1888 to the critical 1913 offer of lending 500 million francs—-on condition that the Russian strategic railway system in the Polish provinces be greatly extended, so that the “Russian steamroller” could be mobilized the faster to crush Germany.
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This was the clearest demonstration yet of France’s ability to use its financial muscle to bolster its own strategic power (although the irony was that the more efficient the Russian military machine became, the more the Germans had to prepare to strike quickly against France).

Yet once again, as soon as comparative economic data are used, this positive image of France’s growth fades away. While it was certainly a large-scale investor abroad, there is little evidence that this capital brought the country the optimal return, either in terms of interest earned
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or in a rise in foreign orders for French products: all too often, even in Russia, German merchants grabbed the lion’s share of the import trade. Germany’s proportion of exported European manufacturers had already overtaken France’s in the early 1880s; by 1911, it was almost twice as high. But this in turn reflected the awkward fact that whereas the French economy had suffered from vigorous British industrial competition a generation or two earlier, it was now being affected by the rise of the German industrial giant. With truly rare exceptions like the automobile industry, the comparative statistics time and time again measure this eclipse. By the eve of war, its total industrial potential was only about 40 percent of Germany’s, its steel production was little over one-sixth, its coal production hardly one-seventh. What coal, steel, and iron were produced was usually more expensive, coming from smaller plants and poorer mines. Similarly, for all the alleged advances of the French chemical industry, the country was massively dependent upon German imports. Given its small plants, out-of-date practices, and heavy reliance upon protected local markets, it is not surprising that France’s industrial growth in the nineteenth century had been coldly described as “arthritic … hesitant, spasmodic, and slow.”
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Nor were its bucolic charms any consolation, at least in terms of relative power and wealth. The blows dealt by disease to silk and wine production were never fully recovered from; and what the Meline tariff did, in its effort to protect farm incomes and preserve social stability, was to slow down the drift from the land and to support inefficient producers. With agriculture still accounting for 40 percent of the active population around 1910 and still overwhelmingly composed of smallholdings, this was an obvious drag upon both French productivity and overall wealth. Bairoch’s data show the French GNP in 1913 only 55 percent of Germany’s and its share of world manufacturing
production around 40 percent of Germany’s; Wright has its national income as being $6 billion in 1914 to Germany’s $12 billion.
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Another war with its eastern neighbor, should France stand alone, could only repeat the result of 1870–1871.

On many of these comparative indices, France had also slipped well behind the United States, Britain, and Russia as well as Germany, so that by the early twentieth century it was only the fifth among the Great Powers. Yet it was the erosion of French power vis-à-vis Germany which mattered, simply because of the bitter relations between the two countries. In this respect, the trends were ominous. Whereas Germany’s population rose by nearly eighteen million between 1890 and 1914, France’s increased by little over one million. This, together with Germany’s greater national wealth, meant that however much the French strained to keep up militarily, they were always outdistanced. By conscripting over 80 percent of its eligible youth, France had produced a staggeringly large army for its size, at least according to certain measurements: for instance, the eighty divisions it could mobilize from a population of 40 million compared favorably with the Austrians’ forty-eight divisions from a population of 52 million. But this was to little avail against imperial Germany. Not only could the Prussian general staff, employing its better-trained reserves, mobilize somewhat over one hundred divisions, but it had a vast manpower potential to draw upon—almost ten million men in the requisite age group, compared with France’s five million; and it possessed the fantastic figure of 112,000 well-trained NCOs—the key element in an expanding army—compared with France’s 48,000. Moreover, although Germany allocated a smaller proportion of its national income to military spending, it devoted much more in absolute terms. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s the French high command had struggled in vain against “a condition of unacceptable inferiority”;
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on the eve of the First World War, the confidential memoranda about the German material superiority were equally alarming: “4,500 machine guns to 2,500 in France, 6,000 77-millimeter cannon to 3,800 French 75s, and an almost total monopoly in heavy artillery.”
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The last aspect in particular showed French weaknesses at their worst.