Raymond Poincaré
Raymond Poincaré was President of France throughout the First World War and later stabilised the franc. Born at Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine in 1860, he was ten when the region was overrun in the Franco-Prussian war and part of it annexed, and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine remained a fixed point for him. He was a cousin of the mathematician Henri Poincaré. He trained as a lawyer, entered parliament at twenty-seven, and held the education and finance portfolios young, building a reputation for meticulous preparation and personal austerity. He was prime minister and foreign minister in 1912-13, tightening the Russian alliance and extending military service to three years, and was elected president in 1913. He was in Russia on a state visit in July 1914 when the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia was delivered. He worked to hold the union sacrée together through the war, visited the front repeatedly, and in 1917 appointed Georges Clemenceau, whom he detested, because he judged him the man most likely to win. He opposed the Versailles terms as too lenient, arguing that they left Germany intact and capable of recovery. As prime minister again from 1922 he occupied the Ruhr in January 1923 when Germany defaulted on reparations coal deliveries. Passive resistance and the hyperinflation that followed made the occupation a political failure, and the franc fell sharply. He returned in 1926 at the head of a national union government and restored confidence by spending cuts and tax rises, stabilising the currency at about a fifth of its prewar value — the franc Poincaré. He resigned ill in 1929 and died in 1934.
- Lived: 1860 CE – 1934 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
