Marshal Joseph Joffre
Joseph Joffre saved France at the Marne and was removed after Verdun. Born in the Pyrenees in 1852, one of eleven children of a cooper, he entered the École Polytechnique and served as a very young officer in the defence of Paris in 1870. He spent most of his career as a colonial engineer — building railways and fortifications in Indochina, Sudan and Madagascar — and reached Timbuktu in 1894. He had never commanded an army in the field and was not a staff college graduate, and was appointed chief of the general staff in 1911 partly because he was a republican with no political enemies. He implemented Plan XVII, which committed France to an immediate offensive into Lorraine in August 1914. It failed with enormous casualties, and the German advance through Belgium came close to enveloping the whole French army. What he did next is why he is remembered. He remained entirely calm, dismissed some two hundred generals in a matter of weeks, disengaged, withdrew in good order for two hundred kilometres while keeping the army intact, and shifted forces west by rail and by Paris taxi. On 6 September he turned and attacked the gap between the German First and Second Armies at the Marne, and the invasion was stopped. The following two years were the offensives in Artois and Champagne, which gained little and cost enormously, and the German attack at Verdun in February 1916 found the fortress stripped of guns on his orders. He was promoted to Marshal in December 1916 and given no further command. He died in 1931.
- Lived: 1852 CE – 1931 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: field_marshal, commander_in_chief
