Raymond Poincaré remained president of the Republic for the duration of the war. It is with the war that his name is the most closely associated: in a positive way, for his establishment of union sacrée, for his unbending commitment to its pursuit and for his careful management of the war effort; in a negative way as the subject of what would become a powerful myth in the post-war period – ‘Poincaré-la-guerre’. According to that myth, Poincaré actively sought war before 1914 in order to regain the lost provinces of Alsace–Lorraine. The idea gained currency at the end of the war as part of the ‘war guilt’ debate surrounding the war's origins and was then applied retrospectively to interpretations of Poincaré's and, by extension, France's responsibility in the outbreak of the war. Such teleology – already demonstrated in Poincaré's supposed pre-war Germanophobe policies and the supposed left-wing opposition to his foreign policy – was in part motivated by international politics and Germany's determination to shift more of the blame onto France, and in part by French domestic politics and the Left's desire in the post-war years to discredit Poincaré in the hope of thwarting his return to power. To get a clearer picture of Poincaré during the war years and subsequently, it is necessary to understand the nature of the Poincaré-la-guerre myth and its genesis.

The Poincaré-la-guerre myth

The Versailles Peace Treaty took the unprecedented step of including an article, 231, which lay sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war with Germany – the so-called ‘war guilt clause’.