Raymond Nicolas Landry Poincaré

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) was a French lawyer, academician, and statesman whose career spanned the Third Republic’s most severe trials. Born in Bar-le-Duc to a family of Lorraine roots and first cousin to the mathematician Henri Poincaré, he entered the Paris bar in 1882, won election as deputy in 1887, and rose quickly as a pragmatic, industrious minister. He served as Minister of Public Instruction and later Finance, earning a reputation for administrative rigor and constitutional probity; in 1909 he was elected to the Académie française.

In January 1912, Poincaré became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, advocating military preparedness and the three-year service law of 1913. Elected President of the Republic in 1913, he cultivated alliances—most notably with Russia, which he visited in July 1914—while attempting to uphold France’s defensive obligations amid rising European tensions on the eve of the Great War.

As President during World War I, Poincaré called for the Union sacrée, rallying political factions behind the national defense. Though the war’s conduct rested largely with the government and generals, he was an active head of state—touring the front, sustaining morale, and maintaining constitutional balance even as emergency measures expanded executive power. His multi-volume wartime diaries, Au service de la France, record the pressures of diplomacy, coalition politics, and command in total war.

After stepping down from the presidency in 1920, Poincaré returned as Prime Minister (1922–1924), adopting a firm stance on German reparations, culminating in the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 to enforce treaty obligations. Defeated by the Cartel des gauches in 1924, he came back once more (1926–1929) to stabilize France’s finances and currency. The so-called Poincaré franc—a return to a devalued gold standard—restored confidence through budgetary discipline, tax reform, and cautious monetary orthodoxy.

Measured, legalistic, and reserved, Poincaré embodied the conservative republican tradition: committed to parliamentary forms, wary of demagoguery, and convinced that France’s security depended on credible alliances and fiscal solidity. Though critics faulted his rigidity on reparations, later assessments credit his steadiness in war and his technocratic competence in peace. He died in Paris in 1934, leaving a record that bridged battlefield endurance and financial reconstruction.

What I Leave Behind

• Leadership of the French Republic through the First World War and the call for the Union sacrée.
• A decisive—if controversial—policy on reparations, including the 1923 Ruhr occupation.
• Stabilization of the currency (the "Poincaré franc") and restoration of fiscal credibility in the late 1920s.
• Extensive memoirs (Au service de la France) documenting high politics, diplomacy, and wartime governance.