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Raymond Poincaré

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Raymond Poincaré, President of the French Republic during the Great War.
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Raymond Poincaré, President of the French Republic during the Great War.

Raymond Poincaré (August 20, 1860 – October 15, 1934) was a French conservative statesman who served as Prime Minister of France on five separate occasions and as President of France from 1913 to 1920.

Born in Bar-le-Duc, Département Meuse, France, the son of Nicolas Antoinin Hélène Poincaré, a distinguished civil servant and meteorologist. Educated at the university of Paris, Raymond was called to the Paris bar, and was for some time law editor of the Voltaire. He had served for over a year in the department of agriculture when in 1887 he was elected deputy for the Meuse. He made a great reputation in the Chamber as an economist, and sat on the budget commissions of 1890–1891 and 1892. He was minister of education, fine arts and religion in the first cabinet (April – November 1893) of Charles Dupuy, and minister of finance in the second and third (May 1894 – January 1895).

In Alexandre Ribot's cabinet Poincaré became minister of public instruction. Although he was excluded from the Radical cabinet which followed, the revised scheme of death duties proposed by the new ministry was based upon his proposals of the previous year. He became vice-president of the chamber in the autumn of 1895, and in spite of the bitter hostility of the Radicals retained his position in 1896 and 1897.

Along with other followers of "Opportunist" Léon Gambetta, Poincaré founded the Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD) in 1902, which became the most important center-right party under the Third Republic. In 1906 he returned to the ministry of finance in the short-lived Sarrien ministry. Poincaré had retained his practice at the bar during his political career, and he published several volumes of essays on literary and political subjects.

Poincaré became Prime Minister in January of 1912, and began to pursue a hard-line anti-German policy, noted for restoring close ties with France's Russian ally. He was elected President of the Republic in 1913, in succession to Armand Fallières and attempted to make that office into a site of power for the first time since MacMahon in the 1870s. He generally managed to continue to dominate foreign policy, in particular, and his anti-German sentiments were blamed by some for the outbreak of the First World War. He became increasingly sidelined after the accession to power of Georges Clemenceau as Prime Minister in 1917.

In 1920, Poincaré's term as President came to an end, and two years later he returned to office as Prime Minister. Once again, his tenure was noted for its strong anti-German policies, especially the Ruhr Occupation of 1923–1924, which was carried out in response to the Cuno government's failure to pay reparations. Eventually, the increasing cost of the occupation led to a defeat for Poincaré's conservative coalition in the 1924 parliamentary elections, and his government fell. Financial crisis, however, brought him back to power in 1926, and he once again became Prime Minister and Finance Minister until his retirement in 1929. He died in Paris in 1934.

His brother, Lucien Poincaré (b. 1862), famous as a physicist, became inspector-general of public instruction in 1902. He is the author of La Physique moderne (1906) and L'Electricité (1907). Jules Henri Poincaré (b. 1854), also a distinguished physicist and mathematician, belonged to another branch of the same family.

Contents

Poincaré's First Ministry, Changes

Poincaré's Second Ministry, Changes
  • 5 October 1922 - Maurice Colrat succeeds Barthou as Minister of Justice.

Poincaré's Third Ministry,

Poincaré's Fourth Ministry, Changes
  • 1 June 1928 - Louis Loucheur succeeds Fallières as Minister of Labour, Hygiene, Welfare Work, and Social Security Provisions
  • 14 September 1928 - Laurent Eynac enters the ministry as Minister of Air. Henry Chéron succeeds Bokanowski as Minister of Commerce and Industry, and also becomes Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.

Poincaré's Fifth Ministry,

|- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Preceded by:
Charles Dupuy

|width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Succeeded by:
Eugène Spuller |- |-

|- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Preceded by:
Georges Leygues

|width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Succeeded by:
Émile Combes |- |- |- style="text-align: center;" |width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Preceded by:
Charles Dupuy

|- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;" |width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Preceded by:
Aristide Briand

|width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Succeeded by:
Frédéric François-Marsal |- |-

|width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Succeeded by:
Edmond Lefebvre du Prey |- |- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;"

References

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