Sex and high society...the decline and fall of Paris's elite #CarryGobySeanKellz #FutureGroupNG via @i_amreginaldjr

GOOD food, great wine and glamorous women, no wonder the French had better things to do with their lives than increase their population and build up their army, even though the German military triumphantly noted that their country’s growing population would be more than a match for their hedonistic neighbours, who preferred to make love and not war

Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings depicted the Paris in which Henriette Caillaux made front-page news [ALAMY]

As the French so appropriately say: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose." ("The more things change, the more they stay the same.")
Paris is currently agog over the affair between President Francois Hollande and the actress Julie Gayet; "Paree" a century ago, in spring 1914, was equally transfixed by a scandal involving a leading politician.
Whereas Hollande's peccadillo is likely only to lower his already abyss-scraping ratings, the shooting of the editor of Le Figaro by Henriette Caillaux possibly altered the course of history.
Madame Caillaux was the wife of the Finance Minister, Joseph.
The "affaire Caillaux" prevented Monsieur Caillaux from becoming prime minister; it also gave the Germans the distinct impression that France was fractious, frivolous and so morally corrupt that she was unlikely to put up much of a fight if attacked.
The Caillaux scandal, it might be said, positively encouraged the war lobby in Deutschland, which looked for weakness in rival nations like a shark sniffs for blood.
Of the tens of millions of bullets fired in 1914, few were quite so melodramatically delivered as the six from Henriette Caillaux's Browning automatic pistol.
She had taken a taxi to Le Figaro's HQ in Rue Druot on March 16, and after waiting an hour to see Gaston Calmette, the editor, she walked into his office, coolly extracted the Browning and fired away.
Four of the bullets hit Calmette. He died that evening.
Le Figaro was a conservative newspaper, implacably opposed to the radical, pacifist politics of Henriette's husband.
More to Henriette's concern, Le Figaro was about to publish intimate letters she had written to Joseph Caillaux when she was married to someone else.
Even by Gallic standards the letters were embarrassingly indiscreet.

The boulevards at night with their electric lights and brilliant illuminations, suggest a city of pleasure, always en-fête... the seductive capital, which no one quits without regret

Baedeker's 1910 travel guide

Henriette made no attempt to flee and a sensational trial took place, which utterly distracted France from the mushrooming crisis in the Balkans following the murder of the Austro-Hungarian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
To the French Right, as well as to Germany, the Caillaux scandal seemed to be an inevitable consequence of France's national pastime: the pursuit of pleasure.
Had not the Caillaux pair, after all, put plaisir before propriety in their adulterous liaisons?
To the moralists and the Prussians, nowhere in France was more guilty of hedonism than Paris.
On the eve of the Great War the French capital was at the zenith of that gilded age we now call La Belle Epoque.
Paris was the citélumiere, whose bright lights beckoned everyone wanting a good time.
Baedeker's 1910 travel guide remarked of the city: "The boulevards at night with their electric lights and brilliant illuminations, suggest a city of pleasure, always en-fête... the seductive capital, which no one quits without regret."
Ooh, la, la. There were so many sins to be satisfied in Paris. No establishment cooked food better than The Ritz on the Place Vend´me, where celebrated chef Auguste Escoffier ruled the kitchens.
Parisian sybaritic invention also extended to cabaret, seen at its raunchiest at the Moulin Rouge, home of the frilly "can-can" dance.
The nightclub's excitements were depicted for perpetuity in the art of the "bohemian" painter Toulouse-Lautrec.
Shopping? On the Boulevard Haussmann, Galéries Lafayette had constructed a flagship department store, where hosts of assistants, the midinettes, sold the latest couture to awed crowds.
Paris was the pleasuredome of the world. The American novelist Henry James amusingly wrote of the city's gravitational pull in his novel The Ambassadors, in which Lambert Strether of Massachusetts is dispatched to the city on the Seine to rescue young Chad Newsome from lax living.
Strether too falls in love: with Paris.
The German kaiser lacked James's subtlety. With characteristic delicacy, Wilhelm II called Paris "the whorehouse of the world".
Mind you, the French penchant for lotus-eating was enfeebling the nation.
France's desperately low birth rate had several causes but the willingness of French couples to defer or even abandon having children because "les enfants" would interfere with adult pleasures was large among them. 

Joseph Caillaux was a French Finance minister and husband of the murderess, Henriette Caillaux [GETTY]

Contraception was widely available and extensively practised.
A memorandum prepared by the German General Staff triumphantly contrasted the Reich's population growth since 1880 with France's.
Whereas the Reich had grown from 42,000,000 to 62,000,000, France had managed a rise of only 2,000,000 to 39,000,000.
Underpopulated France, the Germans concluded, would "hardly be able to continue a long war".
Due to "birth dearth" France was forced to draft 85 per cent of her young men in order to have an army matching that of her forbidding Teutonic neighbour.
Many of the draftees caught in this wide-cast net were unfit; according to the US historian Jack Beatty some conscripts in the Third Republic weighed as little as 80lbs.
To fill out the ranks of its army, France imported soldiers from its overseas colonies.
A cartoon in the Berlin satirical journal Kladderadatsch expressed everything about how Germany thought these black troops would perform as soldiers: They were depicted as apes in French uniform.
France's flat-lining population graph also caused "deficiency of aggregate demand", or lack of domestic consumption in manufactured goods.
The economy of Germany, populous and serious, was growing twice as fast as that of La République.
When Madame Henriette Caillaux went on trial for the murder of Le Figaro's editor, all the weakness of France and the loucheness of Paris was exposed.
Her finance minister husband made a prime exhibit.
Bald, middle-aged, with a squeaky voice, Joseph Caillaux was nonetheless effortlessly attractive to women, all of whom he flamboyantly squired around glittering Paris, haughtily regardless of opinion, utterly careless of his own marital status.
He was also, it was alleged, on the take but then, who wasn't accepting bribes in Paris? Le Figaro received bungs of roubles to promote Russian Tsarist interests. 

Witnesses in the trial came from the highest ranks of French life; even the president gave evidence.
Caillaux bused in toughs to intimidate critics.
France was riveted.
So was tout le monde.
Even the Daily Express installed a reporter in the courtroom.
The Caillaux affair did more than unveil the sexual and financial habits of the French elite, it provoked the sort of Left-Right clash which littered French history going back to the Revolution of 1789, via the anti-Semitic Dreyfus scandal to the Paris Commune and the 1848 uprising.
Paris's glorious boulevards were actually a testament in stone to the fractious nature of the French.
Their generous width was intended to make the erecting of barricades by protesters difficult.
Politics in Belle Epoque France were poisonous.
To French nationalists, the anti-militarist Joseph Caillaux was a "traitor" because he had conducted secret negotiations with Germany in 1911; France had gained control of Morocco but in return given Berlin a slice of the French Congo.
The French Right did not want grants of land to Germany, they wanted the return of Alsace-Lorraine, "The Lost Provinces", which had been annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.
Such bitter ideological division led ineluctably to regime churn. From 1909 to 1914 France had 11 governments. The Ritz's revolving doors turned less often.
Fantastically, Madame Caillaux was found not guilty of murder at her trial. 

 

In a classic piece of chauvinism the jury decided that, overcome by "volatile emotions" due to her feminine nature, Henriette had committed a crime of passion. She walked free.
THE CASE is a favourite "counterfactual", or What If, for historians.
Without the shooting of Calmette, Caillaux would probably have been prime minister in July 1914.
Could a pacifist prime minister Caillaux have prevented the Great War? Unlikely.
The military clique around the German emperor was never going to pass over the golden pretext for war offered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
More plausible is a scenario whereby a peace-loving, Germanophile PM in France slowed the rush to war.
Caillaux might have merely changed the timetable to Armageddon.
In the event, France emerged blinking from the Caillaux trial courtroom on July 28, 1914, to find that Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia.
At this juncture, the French did not act out the script Germany hoped for, the script France feared.
The citizens of France, far from abandoning la patrie in her hour of need, rallied enthusiastically to her side.
Only one per cent of conscripts failed to turn up at their regimental depots; French generals had pessimistically expected that figure to be 15 per cent.
Why did France fight? Well, it was a good life.
France had the highest living standards in Europe. L'amour, le vin, cordon bleu cooking were things worth defending.
In the words of the great French writer André Maurois, the generation of 1914 went to war convinced that their civilisation "was one of the loveliest and happiest in the world".
Honi soit qui mal y pense, as the French also say.