French election, 1915
527 seats in the
Corps Legislatif
National Bloc (Poincare): 217 (-51)
Union of Socialist Reform (Briand): 95 (+95)
[1]
Action Francaise (Maurras): 73 (+2)
Radicals (Caillaux): 70 (+6)
SFIO (Jaures): 49 (+9)
Ligue des Patriotes (Barres)
: 9 (-53)
Independents of the Left (N/A): 8 (-)
Parti des Regions (Ribot): 5 (-2)
Independents of the Right: 1 (-3)
----
"...curious decisions in French political history. Under the legislative reforms of 1906
[2] an election was not due until late spring of 1916, and there were a great many allies of Poincaré, Paleologue and [
Andre] Tardieu chief among them, who would have preferred to wait an additional five or six months before calling France to the polls. There was no particular impetus for the early election call, not with the
Bloc National enjoying an outright absolute majority of its own and supermajority support when taking into account the oft-feuding but support AF and LdP. While economic statistics from the 1910s are by nature quite dodgy, scholarship today suggests that the French economy enjoyed one of her best half-year periods since the
Decade d'Or between when Frenchmen went to the polls in October 1915 and when they would have been due in early May of 1916, at the very beginning of the robust 1915-18 European economic boom - put more simply, Poincaré would have had a considerably stronger hand had he merely waited as he could have. In his diaries and correspondences to colleagues, Poincaré defended his unilateral suggestion to the Emperor that the
Corps legislatif be dissolved with his supposition that it would catch his rivals, particularly Briand, wrong-footed; it in the end left them more befuddled than caught off guard, particularly the canny Briand who had been preparing for an election since the first breaths taken by the URS the year before.
In practical terms, the elections of autumn 1915 did not change much. The Prime Minister was still, after all, responsible first and foremost to the Emperor, and as the
Bloc National remained the largest party in the
Corps legislatif by a broad margin and the choice in the end rested with Napoleon V, Poincaré found himself back at the Hotel Matignon, which in the previous six months he had formally established as the official residence of the Prime Minister. In symbolic and historical terms, however, it was a watershed election. France's legislature had always been a weak institution, dismissed by Napoleon IV as a rubber-stamp for his more popular ideas and ignored by a rotating cast of Prime Ministers dating back to MacMahon all the way through Boulanger who regarded it as "a debating society of great pretense and little import," too weak to even bother dissolving when bothersome. Poincaré had positioned himself as something different, though, as a Prime Minister who valued the role of the
Corps legislatif, a conservative but a democrat at heart who would make no moves without the confidence of the majority of the
voix populaire. When he had a clear majority thanks to his own party and a supermajority with the support of the right-wing cadres, that was a perfectly fine position to take that cost him nothing. But the
Bloc National had lost its narrow but absolute majority, shedding fifty seats and falling well shy of being able to do as it pleased. Of course, the
Bloc could rely upon the support of
Action Francaise, at least to block the opposition, as well as the increasingly conservative Regions Party of Alexandre Ribot, but the AF had shifted even further right in its total and complete contempt for democracy, arguing in favor of the elimination of Parliament altogether and proposing a state ruled exclusively by royal decree, a position that gained increasing traction amongst the ever-reactionary officer corps of the Empire. Democratic, mainstream moderate conservatives like Poincaré were now dependent on the goodwill of monarchist absolutists whose ideas would form the basis of integralist thinking in the decades to come, and the hard-nationalist
Ligue des Patriotes, without its north star in Boulanger, had been virtually wiped out in the same election, denying the
Bloc its critical outside support from a far-right faction that was not led by the genuinely troublesome figure of Maurras.
Of course, Poincaré had another option - to pivot to the increasingly resilient center and center-left, which had recovered from their nadirs of the 1890s and early 1900s to genuinely flex their muscles again. Had Poincaré been somewhat more astute of a domestic operator than he was, the ability to play the rival factions off each other tactically would have been clear to him. All three of the opposition parties had enough legislators now on their own to be able to carry in alliance with the
Bloc any element that Poincaré brought to the floor, even the SFIO, smallest and most radical (theoretically if not always in practice, at least) of the three. As this was also the case with the AF, this meant that Poincaré, had he seized the opportunity better, had a minority government that was strong enough to survive on its own feet and an opposition that could be triangulated transactionally and individually, thus always kept on their toes, and allowed the
Bloc not to have to form a permanent coalition with any other party but rather operate in temporary alliances of convenience.
While this came to be in practice how Poincaré addressed the circumstances of French politics over the next several years, it was a circumstance that he approached with improvisation rather than strategy, and frustration rather than the cunning and caution it required. The most immediate problem was that the elections of 1915 had elevated Aristide Briand from first among equals to the clear and most straightforward opponent of the Poincaré regime and indeed much of the increasingly clerical project of the monarchy as pushed by the Dowager Empress Eugenie. Briand was reconciled to the Empire but a staunch atheist and a socialist reformer, keen on using the power of municipalities rather than the entire state to bring about genuine and true improvements in the French standard of living as well as French education, sanitation and worker's rights. As such, while he was impressed and more than a little surprised by how well his URS did in the election, particularly its dominance in Paris and replacing the Radicals as the largest party there, he viewed the results more as a springboard to build his fledgling opposition party up across Paris, particularly in the industrial areas around Lille, Calais and Marseille, rather than doing battle with the hated conservatives as Caillaux and Jaures would have preferred.
What resulted was that Poincaré, always with a sense of embattlement and bitterness, came to perceive himself as ever-further under siege, despite French politics' remarkable placidity in the years that followed. In his worldview, there was always a knife being sharpened to be used on him, even by his erstwhile allies - Paleologue, Tardieu, Castelnau, it could have been any of them - and he was convinced that Briand, who had burst onto the scene as a bonafide new leader of oppositional forces from one member of the
Corps legislatif (himself) to nearly a hundred, was now as much a threat from the outside as conservatives questioning his judgement and rigor were from the inside. Dangerously, this sense of insecurity for Poincaré and new questions of stability within the monarchist-conservative alliance created a space in which politicians felt they needed to outdo one another in seeming the most nationalist (and, on occasion, the most pious), and of course the targets of French clerical-nationalist zeal were familiar names - Britain, but more realistically Germany and Italy, the
bete noires of Parisian foreign policy since the traumas of 1867..."
-
La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] Recall that Aristide Briand decided to position himself separately from the SFIO and the Radicals with this outfit in this update
here, a decision that most certainly worked out in his favor as you can see
[2] Not gonna go into details this is just a throwaway, presume that in all countries things get tinkered with periodically, got enough to cover in this sprawling mess as it is lol