Poincaré is a statesman whose geographical family origins in Lorraine have been both a help and a hindrance. All of the character traits evoked when a crude geographical determinism is applied to that region have been attributed to Poincaré-le-Lorrain. For admirers, robust Lorraine characteristics of order, steadfastness and resolve destined him for high office; for critics, a native coldness instilled by the harsh climate of the eastern marches rendered him calculating and heartless. Even the uneffusive Waldeck-Rousseau was said to have remarked of him, ‘He has a stone for a heart’. More specifically, admirers have seen in his Lorraine origins a guarantee of patriotism following the German annexation of most of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, when he was ten years old. For his enemies, in France and abroad, the amputation of much of his homeland ingrained in him a rabid anti-Germanism, a ceaseless longing for ‘revanche’, an intemperate desire to restore the ‘lost provinces’ to France by any means, even war. Similarly his solidly middle-class background has cast him either as a symbol of the middle-class principles which established the greatness of at least the first half of the Third Republic or, as his critics would have it, the narrow-minded, priggish defender of privilege and the status quo. Myth and counter-myth have drawn on his origins for fuel, mining deeply differing preconceived perceptions of the man, when in reality those formative years were less clearly traced and far more ambiguous.