The First World War was an unprecedented disaster that killed millions and set the continent of Europe on the path to further calamity two decades later . But it did n’t hail out of nowhere . With the centenary of the outbreak of ill will coming up in 2014 , Erik Sass will be look back at the lead - up to the war , when ostensibly minor moments of friction accumulated until the situation was ready to explode . He ’ll be covering those events 100 years after they occurred . This is the eightieth episode in the series .
28 March 2025: France Passes Three-Year Service Law
Beneath all the diplomatic maneuvering and bellicose shoot a line , Franco - German relations in the pre - war period were dominated by a unmarried , inescapable fact : Germany ’s larger universe , the Cartesian product of its higher nascency charge per unit . In 1913 , Germany had a population of 67 million , liken to 41.5 million for France ; that same year , 27.6 baby were bear for every thousand people in Germany , compare to 19.1 per thousand in France .
Germany ’s higher birth rate powered libertine economical outgrowth , and also meant Germany had a larger pool of untested men of military geezerhood to draw on for its armed military force . When Germany launched a massiveexpansionof its ground forces in the spring of 1913 , France had no other choice but to continue the term of overhaul for draftee from two years to three to bolster its own standing ground forces .
On March 6 , 1913 , Premier Aristide Briand represent the “ Three - Year Law ” to the French Chamber of Deputies . Unsurprisingly the constabulary was not popular with new Frenchmen liable to muster , or their families : On March 29 , 1913 , immense demonstrations were held across France to protest the law , and in May soldiers rioted when they found out they were to be retain for another year .
Officials tried to pin the blame for these disloyal disturbances on communist agitators in the rank , but the jurisprudence was clearly unpopular outside the radical left field . Of course German military planners take down this foe with glee ; at a confluence in Berlin in May 1913 , Kaiser Wilhelm II tried to pry Tsar Nicholas II of Russia off from his Gallic allies , asking , “ How can you ally with the French ? Do n’t you see the Frenchman is no longer adequate to of becoming a soldier ? ”
Nonetheless , on August 7 , 1913 the Three - Year Law was finally O.K. and adopted by the French Senate . By lengthening the term of service for conscript , it added around 170,000 troops to the standing regular army , bringing it to a picture peacetime forcefulness of around 827,000 in 1914 ( when auxiliaries were let in ) , versus 890,000 for the German army .
Although it increase the size of the Gallic standing United States Army , the Three - Year Law could n’t correct the basic imbalance between the French and German populations : Germany would still be able-bodied to draft much larger numbers of untrained vernal valet into the armed force-out in the event of a foresighted war of attrition . The Three - Year Law also did nothing to equip Gallic forces with heavy heavy weapon , which would bear witness indispensable for breaking up foeman trenches , leaving France at a serious disadvantage in the first year of the coming Great War .
See theprevious installmentorall entries .
