Raymond Poincaré is the only political figure to have exercised as decisive an influence on the first half of the Third Republic as the second. In a political career which ran from 1887 to 1929 he held most of the major offices of state both before and after the First World War. He played crucial roles in France's entry into the war, the organisation of the war effort, the peace settlement, the reparations question, the occupation of the Ruhr and the reorganisation of French finances in the 1920s. Yet as the novelist and essayist Emmanuel Berl wrote in his obituary in October 1934, ‘France never experienced for Poincaré either the flights of love it felt for Gambetta, for Jaurès, or the flights of admiration it felt for Clemenceau’. To this day he remains a controversial figure. As ‘Poincaré-la-guerre’ and ‘Poincaré-le-franc’ he has provoked opprobrium and praise. His role in the outbreak of the First World War and the sealing of ‘union sacrée’ has cast him alternately as warmonger and saviour; his management of the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 has been depicted as either a courageous effort to ensure German execution of the Versailles Treaty or as evidence of visceral Germanophobia; his role in bringing order to French finances in the 1920s has led him to be portrayed as an austere deflationist or as one of France's twentieth-century financial wizards.