The role of the military increased in late-nineteenth-century Europe as societies became more militarized. Military service, the greater emphasis on plans for war, such as the German Schlieffen Plan and the notorious French Plan XVII, and the need to mobilize rapidly in order to strike an immediate and decisive blow at the enemy demanded greater integration of the military in foreign policy making. Their expertise was called upon in the expanding areas of espionage, counter-espionage and intelligence assessments of potential enemies. In France, generals were made ambassadors to key posts: three were dispatched to Russia between 1871 and 1886. Nearly every embassy gained a military attache, sometimes two or three for the different services. Their reports, ranging from defence to economic, social and political issues, were passed to their service chiefs only after first being presented to the ambassador. During the inter-war years the role of the 26 military, 10 naval, and 11 airforce attaches (created in 1920) was most important (as was that of the financial attaches like Jacques Rueff in London). Officially they were not allowed to spy on the country to which they were accredited, but some did (Commandant Fustier was expelled from Brussels in 1939). Nevertheless, what this apparently positive picture hid was the poor liaison and coordination of diplomacy and defence in the policy-making process, which dogged France for at least half of the twentieth century.

Before the First World War the coordination of French strategy and foreign policy was fitful and inadequate. An attempt had been made in 1906 to bring the two together through the Conseil superieur de la defense nationale, a committee composed of defence chiefs, ministers and civil servants. However, in the eight years leading up to the war it met only 15 times and even then only really discussed the conduct of operations. It had no planning section until 1921. Lack of coordination between foreign and defence policy led to the Quai d’Orsay failing to inform the General Staff of the details of the 1902 Franco-Italian convention, which neutralized Italy’s position in the hostile Triple Alliance. As a consequence, for seven years two army corps were pointlessly stationed in the Alps.

Harmonization of defence and foreign policy making remained a problem during the inter-war years. A centralized structure existed for this purpose but, as was so often the case with French institutions, it was used erratically. Until 1936 the haul comite militaire and the conseil superieur de la guerre were supposed to coordinate defence policy, but their unwieldy size, sporadic meetings and a preference for unofficial channels of communication made this difficult. The haut comite militaire had been created in 1932 with a view to streamlining decision making by bringing together the Premier, service ministers, chiefs of staff, and vice-presidents of the supreme councils of the armed forces, but the Foreign Minister had the status only of an observer and only eight meetings had been held by January 1935. In 1936 Premier Leon Blum reformed it to produce the Comite permanent de la defense nationale, of which the Foreign Minister was a member, but it met a mere 13 times in the three years before the Second World War.

The consequence of defence and diplomatic lack of coordination was that in the inter-war years, according to Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France had strategies that were at odds with each other. The Quai d’Orsay’s was based on reliance on Britain and France’s East European allies, whom it would be necessary to defend in the event of attack. The military’s strategy by the 1930s was chiefly designed around a defensive posture and a fortress France protected by the Maginot Line. They had little faith in the military worth of their eastern allies, as Petain told Foreign Minister Pierre Laval in 1935, when the latter confessed to thinking they represented ‘something substantial’. 26 Moreover, with no offensive strategy, France was unable to come to the aid of its eastern allies when Germany began to pick them off. France could only huddle behind its fortifications and wait for the German attack. As Robert Young has put it: what ‘was needed was allies who would go to war for France but who would not make France go to war’. In that way, absence of coordination between diplomacy and defence contributed to the catastrophic defeat of 1940.

With that defeat firmly in mind, General de Gaulle, as head of the postwar provisional government of the Republic, passed the 1946 decree reorganizing French defence into a unified structure that dispensed with the separate service ministries and placed defence squarely in the hands of the Premier. Within a year of de Gaulle’s resignation in 1946, the new Fourth Republic, suspicious of centralized control and blessed from the outset with the imperfections of its predecessor, diffused and dispersed power to other ministers, to parliament and to the generals. The Defence Minister was denied control of the Indochina and Algerian Wars, which racked France from 1946, thereby undermining political control and coordination with French diplomacy until the demise of the regime. The interministerial Defence Committee descended into confusion and paralysis at the hands of quarrelling government coalition partners, leaving the way open for the military to take matters into their own hands, choosing which ministers to obey and finally refusing to obey at all. Absence of coordination, absence of organization and absence of order quickly succeeded each other, until in 1958 a military revolt brought the whole regime to its knees.

Under the Fifth Republic, coordination of defence and foreign policy was aided considerably by the vesting of responsibility for both in the hands of the President with his seven-year mandate. Apart from foreign policy being constitutionally the President’s domaine reserve, he also chairs the Defence Council and according to the decree of 18 July 1962 controls ‘the overall framework of national defence’. Though the same decree created the General Secretariat of National Defence (SGDN) nominally under the Prime Minister’s office, the fact that its main function was to service meetings of the Defence Council put it firmly in the grasp of the Elysee. The 14 January 1964 decree gave sole responsibility for firing France’s nuclear weapon to the President, while that of 10 December 1971 gave him authority over the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even when the President has been of a different political persuasion from his Prime Minister, under socalled cohabitation, as from 1986 to 1988, 1993 to 1995 and 1997 to 2002, presidential coordination and control of foreign and defence policy appear to have been maintained, though tested on occasions. This has much to do with the consensus reigning in French foreign and defence policy since at least the late 1970s. As Prime Minister Jacques Chirac told Le Monde on 8 July 1987 after a year of cohabitation with President Francois Mitterrand: ‘Since we are fortunate enough in France to have general agreement on these matters, there have been no difficulties between the President and the government.’