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Raymond Poincaré was promoted to the highest office in the state on January 17, 1913. But with that, the 52-year-old had only achieved the second most important goal of his life.

The decisive factor for him was not the role as president, but whether he could heal a humiliation he had suffered as a child.

Little Raymond was ten years old when the Lorraine town of Bar-le-Duc, his birthplace, was occupied by German troops in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

He developed a deep-seated hatred of the neighboring country and, for example, called his dog "Bismarck" to mock the German Chancellor.

Portrait of Poincaré (undated)

Source: picture-alliance / Mary Evans Pi

He quickly made a career in politics.

At the age of 36 he had already been Minister in Paris three times; in January 1912 he became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister for the first time;

his policy was aimed at close ties with Great Britain, strengthening the alliance with Russia and confronting Germany.

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There is much to suggest that Poincaré deliberately wanted to drive the “hereditary enemy” into a situation in which a strike against France in the West might appear to those responsible in Berlin as the only option for action - even if it inevitably had to lead to a world war that the German Empire could hardly win could.

An extremely dangerous game.

The prerequisite for the chess moves was the knowledge advantage of the government and military leadership in Paris.

In the spring of 1914, observers of European politics informed from generally accessible sources assumed a gradual but unstoppable loss of importance for France, which had nothing to counter the economic power of the continental power Germany.

Poincaré on his return to Paris from a state visit to St. Petersburg in July 1914

Source: picture alliance / United Archive

Poincaré, however, knew better.

He knew that since 1905 the German military leadership had increasingly committed itself to a single possible scenario.

The plan of the then Chief of Staff Alfred Graf Schlieffen provided for the supposedly inevitable struggle against Russia and France to be split up into two successive single-front wars.

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In view of this, Poincaré wanted to put the hated neighbor in a situation in which Berlin either gave in and suffered a serious political defeat - or a war of aggression began.

At the beginning of August 1914, Germany actually invaded neutral Belgium, bringing the coalition of three great powers together against them.

Postcard from the First World War: The Triple Entente from Poincaré, the British King George V and Tsar Nicholas II.

Source: picture alliance / Everett Colle

But the war, which Poincaré had at least accepted, was fought for the most part in north-eastern France (and in Belgium and on the other fronts) and resulted in immense devastation and terrible losses.

In 1918 Germany was defeated and the gap of 1870/71 thus eradicated, but the price was enormous.

Poincaré remained in politics, however, after the end of his seven-year term as President, he was again minister and even Prime Minister among his own successors.

He died in 1934 and was buried in Lorraine.

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