Émile Driant

Émile Driant in uniform

Émile Auguste Cyprien Driant (born September 11, 1855 in Neufchâtel-sur-Aisne , † February 22, 1916 near Verdun ) was a French officer and nationalist politician. He fell at the beginning of the Battle of Verdun when he and his Jäger half-brigade delayed the German advance in the forest of Caures by almost two days.

Life

After graduating from high school, the son of a lawyer first studied humanities and law and from 1875 attended the Saint-Cyr military school , which he left in 1877 as the fourth best of his class. He served in the 54th Infantry Regiment in Compiègne and later in Saint Mihiel. In 1883 he became a lieutenant in the 43rd Infantry Regiment and went to Tunisia , where he became an orderly officer to the Governor General General Georges Boulanger . He married his daughter Marcelle. In 1886 he was promoted to captain and, after Boulanger's appointment, went to Minister of War and with him to Paris. After the scandal surrounding his father-in-law and his overthrow, he returned to Tunisia to serve in the 4th Zouave Regiment. After serving on the Algerian border, Driant was part of the circle of Cardinal Charles Martial Lavigerie , the primate of Africa in Tunis . Under the pseudonym Capitaine Danrit he wrote numerous adventure novels and was one of the main authors of the Journal des Voyages alongside Louis Boussenard and Paul d'Ivoi . His stories were based on Jules Verne's style and confidence in technical progress , but were dominated by a militaristic, colonialist and anti-parliamentary attitude.

In 1892 he became a trainer in Saint-Cyr, in 1894 he returned to the 4th Zouave Regiment, in December 1898 to become Chief de bataillon in the 69th Infantry Regiment in Nancy. The following year he was given command of the 1st Infantry Battalion on foot in Troyes. After the conspiracy of the Catholic-monarchist military circles against the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was discovered, the clericals in the army found themselves on the defensive. Driant, who ordered his non-Christian soldiers to attend a Catholic service, was sentenced to 14 days in prison. He then resigned in 1905 and went into politics to represent the interests of the army in parliament.

In the elections to the Chamber of Deputies in 1906, however, he initially lost in the Pontoise constituency against the liberal Ballu. As an employee of L'Eclair , he agitated against parliamentarism and toured Germany, where he observed the great maneuvers in Silesia. He processed the impressions into a book entitled Vers un nouveau Sedan (German for a new Sedan ! ) By urgently warning against a repetition of the defeat of 1870 . He then won the 1910 election for the Christian social Action Liberale in Nancy against the previous constituency member of the Gauche Radicale , Jean Grillon . As a very diligent member of parliament, he was close to Catholic social teaching , but also to the theses of Melchior de Vogüé and Ernest Lavisse . He understood the growing class antagonism primarily as a threat to the nation's readiness to defend and saw the solution to these problems in pre-fascist yellow socialism . In parliament he supported the loans for armament and the extension of compulsory military service to three years. He was enthusiastic about the new military aviation and fought passionately for the preservation of the border fortresses, of which he was able to save at least those of Lille in 1912 . Against the background of the looming upheavals in Russia , he understood the army primarily as a “school of the nation” and an internal instrument of power against a possible revolution. In 1914 he was re-elected.

After the outbreak of the First World War , Driant asked to be reactivated as an officer and was assigned to the staff of the Governor of Verdun, General Michel Coutanceau . His half-brigade consisted of the 56th and 59th battalions of foot hunters (56 ^e bataillon des chasseurs à pied and 59 ^e bataillon des chasseurs à pied) and was subordinate to the 72nd Infantry Division. Driant was considered a caring and understanding commander. His initially 2,200 hunters were reservists from the north and east of France, with them he fought in the Argonne and Woëvre and recaptured the village of Gercourt on the Meuse from the Germans. Weakened by the fighting, his half-brigade did not take part in the First Battle of the Marne , but took up a defensive position near Verdun in the Louvemont section . There they regained the forest of Caures and built a fortified position there. As a member of the Army Committee in Parliament, he brought the Croix de Guerre Foundation with him in 1915 . On August 22, 1915, he wrote a letter to the President of Parliament, Paul Deschanel, urgently warning against a German attack on Verdun and the inadequate French defense preparations. At the same time, he refused a retreat to the more easily defended ridges west of Verdun as defeatism. As a result, the front was neither straightened nor fortified there. When the Battle of Verdun began on February 21, 1916, Driant and his 1,200 hunters were in line with the intended German advance. They held the forest of Caures for almost two days, with constant artillery fire and great losses , until Driant ordered the retreat to Beaumont . He was hit in the temple and died like most of his hunters, of whom only between 110 and 160 survived.

The Germans buried him with full honors near the battlefield and forwarded his belongings to the widow via Switzerland. The French press celebrated his death as a national sacrifice and the memorial service, led by Cardinal Léon-Adolphe Amette , was held in Notre Dame . In October 1922, Driant's body was exhumed and transferred to a mausoleum , which is the scene of a memorial service for Driant and his hunters every February 21.

Works (selection)

• Towards a new sedan !, Oldenburg 1914
• In the airship to the North Pole , Kiel 1910
• The prisoners of the sea, six days in a sunken submarine , Kiel 1909

Web links

• Literature by and about Émile Driant in the catalog of the German National Library
• Émile Driant in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• Works by and about Émile Driant at Open Library
• Biography on Les Chemins de la Mémoire , the website of the French Ministry of Defense on military history (also main source)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ loi Barthou of August 7, 1913. Journal officiel of August 8, 1913, Bulletin des lois, n ° 110, p. 2077, also called loi des trois ans . It extended military service from two to three years.
2. ↑ the information varies depending on the source
3. ↑ verdun-meuse.fr: Le PC de Driant