Foch’s Funeral

On the 29th of March 1929, days after discharging himself from the Hôpital Cochin, Eric Blair attended the funeral of Maréchal Foch. The former WWI Supreme Allied Commander was honoured with a full, state-funeral carriage procession that set out from the Arc de Triomphe and ended at the gold-domed Invalides where the French Maréchal was laid to rest opposite Napoleon. Foch, the man who had supposedly coined the phrase “They shall not pass”, was credited (within France at least) with having stopped the German advance, and on the 11th of November 1918 had accepted the surrender of the Central powers in the railway carriage in Compiegne forest.

Parisians, and citizens who’d come from all over France to honour him, lined the boulevards and avenues; many having slept overnight on the bridges in order to be assured a front-row place for the procession. Troops from Belgium, the USA, Morocco, Czechoslovakia and Serbia flanked the carriage as it made its way through the crowds described as waiting in a state of “Pious hush”. The Prince of Wales was in attendance as were the Princes of Monaco and Belgium. A high ranking Japanese officer was observed standing off to one side during the ceremony.

Once the procession had reached Les Invalides, Raymond Poincaré – prime minister in 1929 but President during WWI – made a short speech before the assembled dignitaries filed past Foch’s last resting place. Whether Eric Blair followed the funeral procession along its full route is unknown, but years later (and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight) he recalled seeing Maréchal Pétain walking behind the cortege with his “great sweeping white moustaches like the wings of a gull” and remembered feeling that “in spite of his considerable age, he might still have some kind of distinguished future ahead of him.”