Rue Maréchal Foch

After a solid secondary education at the Lycée de Rodez and then at Saint-Etienne, Ferdinand Foch was sent to Metz to prepare for the Ecole Polytechnique. It was in this city that he was surprised by the war of 1870. The defeat of the French army at Sedan and the occupation of the city of Metz by the Prussians, which he witnessed, left a lasting impression on him. Foch decided to stay in the army, where he had joined in 1870 for the duration of the war, and chose the Artillery. A student at the Ecole de Guerre in 1885, he was a professor of strategy and tactics, and was then in charge of the school from 1908 to 1911. General since 1907, Foch commanded the 20th C.A. in August 1914, which played an important role in front of Nancy in the battle of the borders. On the 29th August 1914, he was given command of the IXth Army which blocked the furious German offensives at the Saint-Gond marshes, a capital operation on which the fate of the 1st battle of the Marne depended in part. Recalled as Chief of the General Staff of the Army, whose leader was now General Pétain, Foch was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the allied armies in April 1918. After containing the German offensives in the spring of 1918, he launched the decisive counter-attack on the 18th July. Raised to the dignity of Marshal of France on the 7th August 1918, he led the allied armies to victory, which was made concrete by the Armistice of the 11th November 1918, signed by Marshal Foch in the clearing at Rethondes. As military adviser to Clémenceau's government at the Peace Conference, which opened in Versailles on the 18th January 1919, Marshal Foch did not succeed in imposing his conception of a peace that required the Rhine as Germany's border. Despite the disappointment that the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles (28th June 1919) represented for him, Marshal Foch continued to defend his deepest convictions with perseverance, through his speeches and writings, until his death on 20th March 1929: a morally strong French nation, powerfully armed, was necessary to prevent the outbreak of war.

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